Predicting open source contributor turnover from value-related discussions: An analysis of GitHub issues

Discussions about project values are important for engineering software that meets diverse human needs and positively impacts society. Because value-related discussions involve deeply held beliefs, they can lead to conflicts or other outcomes that may affect motivations to continue contributing to open source projects. However, it is unclear what kind of value-related discussions are associated with significant changes in turnover. We address this gap by identifying discussions related to important project values and investigating the extent to which those discussions predict project turnover in the following months. We collected logs of GitHub issues and commits from 52 projects that share similar ethical commitments and were identified as part of the DWeb (Decentralized Web) community. We identify issues related to DWeb's core values of respectfulness, freedom, broadmindedness, opposing centralized social power, equity & equality, and protecting the environment. We then use Granger causality analysis to examine how changes in the proportion of discussions related to those values might predict changes in incoming and outgoing turnover. We found multiple significant relationships between value-related discussions and turnover, including that discussions about respectfulness predict an increase in contributors leaving and a decrease in new contributors, while discussions about social power predicted better contributor retention. Understanding these antecedents of contributor turnover is important for managing open source projects that incorporate human-centric issues. Based on the results, we discuss implications for open source maintainers and for future research.