(upbeat music)
- Hi, I'm Denae Ford Robinson.
I'm a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond
and I lead the Open Source for Social Good project.
The goal of the project is to be able to understand
how contributors identify opportunities,
how can we pair them with more opportunities,
and how do we dismantle the challenges
that they're facing?
Ultimately, we want to be able to optimize
their societal impacts or the goals
that align best with their interests.
Depending on your background,
when you first hear about Open Source software,
your mind will likely go directly to developers
building tools for other developers.
Although contributing to Open Source projects
like TensorFlow and React are very valuable
to the community, there are other
galvanizing projects with broader impacts
that inspire people to contribute to Open Source.
There are projects like Little Window,
which supports the victims of intimate partner violence
and provide resources to leave abusive relationships.
Think about it as a chatbot that directs women
to the information they are looking for
as quickly as possible.
The purpose is to dramatically reduce the time
it takes to search for information,
because this could save lives.
You could find out about this project,
which is in active development, on GitHub right now.
Another project is Restroom Refuge,
which identifies safe restrooms
for trans and gender non-conforming individuals.
You could think of this as a web app developed
to index and map safe restroom locations.
Users are able to search for a restroom
by proximity to them, a given location,
and new restroom listings,
as well as comment and rate existing listings.
You can look into the website, use the app on your phone,
and most importantly, you can go on GitHub
right now to contribute to this separate project.
These are only a couple of Social Good projects
that we identified,
although they may seem fewer in quantity,
they are for sure powerful in influence.
While all these projects seem to present
non-traditional software tenets,
the common property they share
is a goal to support a greater Social Good.
Although the term Social Good has been introduced
in other fields like sociology
and artificial intelligence,
it is still a new concept
for the Open Source Software community.
The four research questions we investigated
for the study are:
one, how do contributors define
Open Source for Social Good?
Two, what motivations do contributors have
to contribute to Open Source for Social Good?
Three, what factors do contributors consider
to select an Open Source for Social Good project?
And four, what are the current challenges
to working in Open Source for Social Good?
To answer our questions,
we took a mixed methods approach
of both qualitative and quantitative analysis
to understand Open Source for Social Good projects
from the contributor's perspective,
which is a perspective that has not been captured
as much to date.
You could consider these contributors
to be the code and non-code change makers
on the ground ensuring that these projects are successful.
Through the study, we identified 437
Open Source for Social Good projects
from third-party sites,
which we make publicly available.
We use insights from these Social Good projects,
21 Social Good contributor interviews,
and 517 analyzed survey responses from around the world
to answer our research questions.
For our first research question,
which is where we're trying to define
what Open Source for Social Good means,
we found that the study participants
defined these projects based on the groups of people
it will benefit or the groups of people
the project will benefit.
So the three main properties that help formulate
the definition that we're identifying here is,
were focused on whether the project aims
at solving societal issues
or provide some type of social benefit.
89% of our respondents
identified that this was a very important factor
for these types of projects.
77% of our respondents were interested
in how the project targets peoples
or communities that need help.
And around 35% of our respondents
were interested in whether or not the project
is focused on profit.
For our next research question,
we wanted to understand their motivations.
So to investigate if contributors
were actually motivated differently
across Open Source and Open Source for Social Good,
we asked them if there was a difference
between these types of projects,
and we wanted to compare the people
who thought there was a difference
to those who thought there wasn't.
So we found that compared to Open Source
versus Social Good projects
contributors found it significantly
less important to them
that their contribution benefits themselves
by learning or improving skills,
or building their portfolio
and helping their own work projects.
So, on the contrary,
Open Source for Social Good contributors
were significantly more motivated
to solve a societal issue,
or essentially, help someone else.
For our other research question,
research question three, we wanted to again,
get a better idea of what project selection
criteria they may have been using.
So for this question,
we separated responses again
based on Open Source versus Open Source for Social Good,
and we found that the Social Good contributors
leaned more towards caring less
about the project popularity,
such as the number of following stars
and more about who the owners of the project are,
who were the rule makers in this project,
who is gonna be the one to execute?
Likewise, we found that Open Source
for Social Good contributors prioritized projects
that met a global need, had long-term benefits,
and benefited their personal connection.
From our analysis of challenges,
which is our fourth research question,
we found that the lack of resources available
to find projects was quite a challenge
and it made it hard for people to figure out
which projects to contribute to.
Likewise, a restricted amount of funding,
different types of expertise
blending all into one project
kinda presented itself a whole new set
of collaboration challenges,
especially across global regions.
So though facing with similar challenges
as Open Source projects do,
it can be more of a challenge
for Open Source for Social Good contributors
to find a project to contribute to
based on the impact of the project.
So now that I've gone over what we found
it's important to talk about the design solutions
and innovative approaches to support Open Source
for Social Good contributors.
One challenge or, really, opportunity
that comes with reflecting on the fact
that contributors have a hard time
identifying projects is the opportunity
to identify societal impact.
So solutions that address this challenge
could be thinking about
having a Social Good project
highlight on their main page or their home page
when they were to advertise opportunities,
or even adding a social impact contributor badge
to highlight the next level
or the types of societal impact
that this project could have.
Being transparent and clear about
where and how this project impacts society
can really help gravitate or bring in new contributors.
Alternatively, there are also opportunities
in understanding what some of the trust and safety
challenge turned opportunities could be here.
So they're engaging in Open Source for Social Good projects.
They also have a high risk of contributor
safety that is a concern,
and you want to make sure your contributors feel safe
and supported when they're contributing to this project,
especially if others may not feel like
it's a project that's worth the resources.
So, in summary, we believe our results shed light
on the global impacts of Open Source software can have
and will lead to future research
and support for Open Source for Social Good,
including but not limited to providing help
and steering guidance for adopting
or adapting more Social Good projects to Open Source.
An excerpt from this work
was actually featured
in the 2020 GitHub Octoverse Community Report,
and in our future work, we plan to actualize
our findings and advise interventions
to support contributors identifying projects,
looking for projects, and also project owners
identifying contributors that they need to be successful.
Now that we have a broader understanding
of how people engage with Open Source
for Social Good projects,
we're taking this one step further.
Through a series of additional research projects
and experiments, I'm excited to announce
that we're exploring how to turn
the challenges of identifying projects
into a design opportunity.
We're specifically looking at opportunities
to help people interested in contributing
to find that greater good impact opportunity
they're looking for.
To learn more about our research project,
feel free to visit our research page
on Open Source software for Social Good.
You can also explore the GitHub Social Impact website
as well as the latest GitHub Octoverse Report.
We can't wait to see how you all contribute
to these projects.
Looking forward to see how you all plan to impact the world.
Cheers.
(gentle music)
- We'll have to actually rethink the entire AI stack.
- What is reinforcement learning?
Let's look at an interactive demo.
- [Instructor] All our code is now Open Source.
(upbeat music)