Internet users have formed a wide array of online communities with diverse community goals and nuanced norms. However, most online platforms only offer a limited set of governance models in their software infrastructure and leave little room for customization. Consequently, technical proficiency becomes a prerequisite for online communities to build governance policies in code, excluding non-programmers from participation in designing community governance. In this paper, we present Pika, a system that empowers non-programmers to author a wide range of executable governance policies. At its core, Pika incorporates a declarative language that decomposes governance policies into modular components, thereby facilitating expressive policy authoring through a user-friendly, form-based web interface. Our user studies with 10 non-programmers and 7 programmers show that Pika can empower non-programmers to author policies approximately 2.5 times faster than programmers who author in code. We also provide insights about Pika's expressivity in supporting diverse policies online communities want.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642012
Open Source Software (OSS) communities often resist regulation typical of traditional organizations. Yet formal governance systems are being increasingly adopted among communities, particularly through non-profit project-sponsoring foundations. Our study looks at the Apache Software Foundation Incubator program and 208 of the projects it has supported. We assemble a scalable, semantic pipeline to discover and analyze the governance behavior of projects from their mailing lists. We then investigate the relationship of such behavior to what the formal policies prescribe, through their own governance priorities and how their members internalize them. Our findings indicate that a greater amount of policy over a governed topic doesn't elicit more governed activity on that topic, but does predict greater internalization by community members. Moreover, alignment of community operations with foundation governance, be it dedicating their governance focus or adopting policy along topics seeing greater policy-making, has limited association with project outcomes.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3641980
Community management is critical for stakeholders to collaboratively build and sustain communities with socio-technical support. However, most of the existing research has mainly focused on the community members and the platform, with little attention given to the developers who act as intermediaries between the platform and community members and develop tools to support community management. This study focuses on third-party developers (TPDs) for the live streaming platform Twitch and explores their tool development practices. Using a mixed method with in-depth qualitative analysis, we found that TPDs maintain complex relationships with different stakeholders (streamers, viewers, platform, professional developers), and the multi-layered policy restricts their agency regarding idea innovation and tool development. We argue that HCI research should shift its focus from tool users to tool developers with regard to community management. We propose designs to support closer collaboration between TPDS and the platform and professional developers and streamline TPDs' development process with unified toolkits and policy documentation.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642787
Assets-based approaches emphasize the importance of leveraging and building upon community strengths. We describe how a community-based digital capacity building program, Community Tech Workers (CTW), addresses the goals of assets-based development by hiring local residents and students to serve as tech support personnel for underserved minority small business owners in a Midwest city. Through interviews and observations, we examine how reciprocal relationships between tech workers and small business owners are critical to the success and sustainability of the program. We find that tech workers and business owners mutually benefit by 1) building confidence in technology together, 2) having business owners provide reciprocal guidance in professional development, and 3) fostering mutual appreciation and commitment to community development. We conclude by introducing the concept of reciprocal capacity building to HCI and discussing how it provides a potentially more equitable approach to community-based interventions.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642209
Technology plays a pivotal role in driving transformation through grassroots movements, which operate on a local scale while embracing a global perspective on sustainability. Consequently, research emerged within Sustainable HCI, aiming to derive design principles that can empower these movements to scale their impact. However, a notable gap exists in contributions when addressing scalability of large free and open-source software (FOSS) projects. This paper aims to present our endeavors as action-oriented researchers with the voluntary-driven Foodsharing.de movement, focusing on a local community, the open-source developers and their connections. Within a community of 585,000 users and only a few developers that is dedicated to save and share surplus food, we explore the concepts of ‘intermediary experience’. We also introduce the notion of ‘serendipitous connections’, highlighting the unintentional yet beneficial associations that can arise from the collaboration between developers and users.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642541