A influência do pagamento de bolsas de curto prazo na retenção de voluntários do Google Summer of Code

Abstract

The participation of volunteers is critical to the development of Free Software projects based on communities. Understanding the factors that motivate students to join and contribute to these projects is extremely important, given that the entry and retention of newcomers are of vital importance to the future of Free Software. In this sense, based on the global Google Summer of Code program (GSoC), which provides for the payment of scholarships for volunteers, we analyze the efficiency of financial motivation approach used by the GSoC with respect to increased beginners retention rate to the Free Software communities. Through the use of the software repositories mining techniques, we have accumulated data relevant to the analysis of volunteers’ participation rates and their evolution after the end of the project. The volunteers who contributed to the LibreOffice in 2013 GSoC, mined data from e-mail lists, functions manager, repository and code review (Git-SCM). Consider the periods of pre-registration, registration, during, and after the stage. Data analysis allowed us to observe that the project was satisfactory and fulfilled its role of encouraging the entry of new volunteers. While some students have a previous participation to the project, the figures indicate an increase in participation. However, only the payment of the training grant, as an initial incentive factor is not decisive for the retention of novice volunteers in the Free Software community. Probably other factors that are unknown to us and are beyond the scope of this research are influential and instrumental in a volunteer continue working. We believe that, with regard to LibreOffice, this research is a significant contribution to the study of the efficiency of financial incentives and also to the sustainability of Free Software projects.