Open Source Software Community Inclusion Initiatives to Support Women Participation

Abstract

This paper focuses on the inclusion initiatives of Open Source Software (OSS) Communities to support women who participate in their online communities. In recent years, media and research has highlighted the negative experiences of women in OSS and we believe that could be detrimental to the women of OSS. Therefore, in this research, we built upon the research that demonstrates the value of Codes of Conduct for minorities in an online community. Additionally, we focus on women only spaces in OSS, because past research on women and IT shows that women perform better when they can build connections and mentoring networks with other women. We investigated 355 OSS websites for presence of women only spaces and searched for, collected and analyzed the Codes of Conduct on the websites of these OSS. Qualitative content analysis of the websites show that only 12 out of 355 websites have women only sections. Less than ten percent (28) of the analyzed websites had a code of conduct.