Understanding community participation and engagement in open source software Projects: A systematic mapping study

In the Open Source Software (OSS) paradigm, developers along with users form a community for an OSS project as they share an interest in using/developing the project. Active community engagement is essential for an OSS project to succeed. OSS communities should strive for greater community participation and engagement through the use of tools, practices, and processes. The primary goal of this paper is to presents a review of studies on community participation and engagement in OSS projects based on systematic mapping study and snowballing technique. This study also provides an understanding about the research topics and gaps in the area, utilized research methods and publication venues. We have analyzed 67 research papers related to the study topic. The findings revealed that most of the studies used a combination of survey and questionnaire as a research methodology. We found that community participation and engagement research focuses on 5 main research topics joining process, contribution barriers, motivation, retention, and abandonment. The investigated studies provide more evidence on motivation and contribution barriers but less on the joining process and abandonment. The results presented in this paper will be helpful for researchers to understand the latest trends in this area and identifying the corresponding research gaps.(c) 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).