Showing papers by "James D. Herbsleb published in 2022"

Limits and Possibilities for “Ethical AI” in Open Source: A Study of Deepfakes

Abstract: Open source software communities are a significant site of AI development, but “Ethical AI” discourses largely focus on the problems that arise in software produced by private companies. Design, policy and tooling interventions to encourage “Ethical AI” based on studies in private companies risk being ill-suited for an open source context, which operates under radically different organizational structures, cultural norms, and incentives. In this paper, we show that significant and understudied harms and possibilities originate from differing practices of transparency and accountability in the open source community. We conducted an interview study of an AI-enabled open source Deepfake project to understand how members of that community reason about the ethics of their work. We found that notions of the “Freedom 0” to use code without any restriction, alongside beliefs about technology neutrality and technological inevitability, were central to how community members framed their responsibilities, and the actions they believed were and were not available to them. We propose a continuum between harms resulting from how a system is implemented versus how it is used, and show how commitments to radical transparency in open source allow great ethical scrutiny for harms wrought by implementation bugs, but allow harms through (mis)use to proliferate, requiring a deeper toolbox for disincentivizing harmful use. We discuss how an assumption of control over downstream uses is often implicit in discourses of “Ethical AI”, but outline alternative possibilities for action in cases such as open source where this assumption may not hold.

Gender and Participation in Open Source Software Development

Abstract: Open source software represents an important form of digital infrastructure as well as a pathway to technical careers for many developers, but women are drastically underrepresented in this setting. Although there is a good body of literature on open source participation, there is very little understanding of the participation trajectories and contribution experiences of women developers, and how they compare to those of men developers, in open source software projects. In order to understand their joining and participation trajectories, we conducted interviews with 23 developers (11 men and 12 women) who became core in an open source project. We identify differences in women and men's motivations for initial contributions and joining processes (e.g. women participating in projects that they have been invited to) and sustained involvement in a project. We also describe unique negative experiences faced by women contributors in this setting in each stage of participation. Our results have implications for diversifying participation in open source software and understanding open source as a pathway to technical careers.

“This Is Damn Slick!” Estimating the Impact of Tweets on Open Source Project Popularity and New Contributors

Abstract: Twitter is widely used by software developers. But how effective are tweets at promoting open source projects? How could one use Twitter to increase a project's popularity or attract new contributors? In this paper we report on a mixed-methods empirical study of 44,544 tweets containing links to 2,370 open-source GitHub repositories, looking for evidence of causal effects of these tweets on the projects attracting new GitHub stars and contributors, as well as characterizing the high-impact tweets, the people likely being attracted by them, and how they differ from contributors attracted otherwise. Among others, we find that tweets have a statistically significant and practically sizable effect on obtaining new stars and a small average effect on attracting new contributors. The popularity, content of the tweet, as well as the identity of tweet authors all affect the scale of the attraction effect. In addition, our qualitative analysis suggests that forming an active Twitter community for an open source project plays an important role in attracting new committers via tweets. We also report that developers who are new to GitHub or have a long history of Twitter usage but few tweets posted are most likely to be attracted as contributors to the repositories mentioned by tweets. Our work contributes to the literature on open source sustainability.

One-off events? An empirical study of hackathon code creation and reuse

Abstract: Abstract Context Hackathons have become popular events for teams to collaborate on projects and develop software prototypes. Most existing research focuses on activities during an event with limited attention to the evolution of the hackathon code. Objective We aim to understand the evolution of code used in and created during hackathon events, with a particular focus on the code blobs, specifically, how frequently hackathon teams reuse pre-existing code, how much new code they develop, if that code gets reused afterwards, and what factors affect reuse. Method We collected information about 22,183 hackathon projects from Devpost and obtained related code blobs, authors, project characteristics, original author, code creation time, language, and size information from World of Code. We tracked the reuse of code blobs by identifying all commits containing blobs created during hackathons and identifying all projects that contain those commits. We also conducted a series of surveys in order to gain a deeper understanding of hackathon code evolution that we sent out to hackathon participants whose code was reused, whose code was not reused, and developers who reused some hackathon code. Result 9.14% of the code blobs in hackathon repositories and 8% of the lines of code (LOC) are created during hackathons and around a third of the hackathon code gets reused in other projects by both blob count and LOC. The number of associated technologies and the number of participants in hackathons increase reuse probability. Conclusion The results of our study demonstrates hackathons are not always “one-off” events as the common knowledge dictates and it can serve as a starting point for further studies in this area.