Conversational Bot for Newcomers Onboarding to Open Source Projects

Abstract

This paper targets the problems newcomers face when onboarding to open source projects and the low retention rate of newcomers. Open source software projects are becoming increasingly more popular. Many major companies have started building open source software. Unfortunately, many newcomers only commit once to an open source project before moving on to another project. Even worse, many novices struggle with joining open source communities and end up leaving quickly, sometimes before their first successful contribution. In this paper, we propose a conversational bot that would recommend projects to newcomers and assist in the onboarding to the open source community. The bot would be able to provide helpful resources, such as Stack Overflow related content. It would also be able to recommend human mentors. We believe that this bot would improve newcomers' experience by providing support not only during their first contribution, but by acting as an agent to engage them to the project.