Let Me In: Guidelines for the Successful Onboarding of Newcomers to Open Source Projects
Open accessAbstract
Many community-based open source software (OSS) projects depend on a continuous influx of newcomers for their survival and continuity, yet newcomers face many barriers to contributing to a project. We provide guidelines based on our previous work for both OSS communities and newcomers to OSS projects.
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Governance structures influence contributor retention, diversity, and resilience.
“The governance structures influence contributor retention, diversity, and resilience [20, 50, 54].”
From Governance in Practice: How Open Source Projects Define and Document Roles (2026) · cites this paper as [50]
Cites
Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user acceptance of information technology
Davis, F. D. (1989) · MIS Quarterly · doi:10.2307/249008 · Cited by 68,483 · see citing works
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Committed to Trust: A Qualitative Study on Security & Trust in Open Source Software Projects
Wermke, D., Wöhler, N., Klemmer, J. H., Fourné, M., Acar, Y., & Fahl, S. (2022) · 2022 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP) · doi:10.1109/sp46214.2022.9833686 · Cited by 42 · see citing works
Governance in Practice: How Open Source Projects Define and Document Roles
Oliveira, P., Conte, T., Gerosa, M., & Steinmacher, I. (2026) · Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering · doi:10.1145/3794860.3794911 · Cited by 2 · see citing works
Self-citation
- Authors
- Steinmacher, I., Treude, C., & Gerosa, M. A.
- Affiliations
- Northern Arizona University (US)
- The University of Adelaide (AU)
- Northern Arizona University, United States
- Venue
- IEEE Software
- Published
- 2019-07
- Volume
- 36
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 41-49
- ISSN
- 0740-7459 (ISSN-L)
- 1937-4194
- OpenAlex
- W2783990487
- Cited by
- 94
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 25 · 2022: 13 · 2021: 16 · 2020: 9 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 4
- FWCI
- 10.03
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- Licence
- Locations
- IEEE Software (publishedVersion)
- Singapore Management University Institutional Knowledge (InK) (Singapore Management University) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Adelaide Research & Scholarship (AR&S) (University of Adelaide) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Open Source Software Innovations
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
- Keywords
- open source software, onboarding, newcomers, contributor recruitment, open source communities
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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