The Culture of Open Source Computing

While women's representation in computing is low, it is even lower in open source computing – only 1.5% of all Open Source Software (OSS) developers are women (Nafus, et al. 2006). OSS is collaboratively developed and maintained by volunteers and professionals who communicate primarily through web-based mailing lists and Internet Relay Chat. OSS is distinct from proprietary software because the software source code is available to the public, who may alter it for their personal use. Research suggests that barriers to women's participation may be deeply imbedded in the culture of OSS. As a first step toward learning more about OSS culture and women's participation in it, this annotated bibliography briefly describes current research organized into five Motivations & Intentions to Participate. This bibliography identifies pertinent articles and offers a brief summary of what are, in many cases, extensive research findings, only two of which focus on gender and OSS. The original publications should be consulted for full details. We will evaluate these materials and their implications for further research in a subsequent literature review. Google Scholar and Dissertation Abstract databases using the search phrases: " open source " + comput*, and more specifically, " open source " and ((software or computing) and (developers or programmers)). Abstracts were then consulted to determine whether the article was scholarly in nature and concerned with OSS developers, their community, and culture (as opposed to technical evaluations of OSS, or opinion pieces about the culture). References contained within each relevant article were also evaluated using the same criteria. Finally, using the Web of Science and GoogleScholar databases, articles citing those already selected were viewed and evaluated. These methods yielded the following 26 articles. Lin's encyclopedic article discusses issues of gender discrimination in Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development. Lin uses existing research, including her own previous work, to theorize about the reasons for the gender discrepancy in OSS computing. She posits that women are excluded implicitly and explicitly from becoming FLOSS developers, and that their needs as users are not addressed. Lin theorizes that the long hours necessary for coding, a lack of female role models and mentors, users' discriminatory language on and offline, the prevalence of text-based coding systems (as opposed to graphic coding environments), and the FLOSS community's male-centric competitive world-view are all factors hindering women's participation. Ghosh et al. conducted an extensive survey of 2784 OSS participants, which investigated " fundamental …