Invisible Labor in Open Source Software Ecosystems

Invisible labor is work that is either not fully visible or not appropriately compensated. In open source software (OSS) ecosystems, essential tasks that do not involve code (like content moderation) often become invisible to the detriment of individuals and organizations. However, invisible labor is sufficiently difficult to measure that we do not know how much of OSS activities are invisible.

Our study addresses this challenge, demonstrating that roughly half of OSS work is invisible. We do this by developing a cognitive anchoring survey technique that measures OSS developer self-assessments of labor visibility and attribution. Survey respondents (𝑛 = 142) reported that their work is more likely to be invisible (2 in 3 tasks) than visible, and that half (50.1%) is uncompensated.

Priming participants with the idea of visibility caused participants to think their work was more visible, and that visibility was less important, than those primed with invisibility. We also found evidence that tensions between attribution motivations probably increase how common invisible labor is. This suggests that advertising OSS activities as "open" may lead contributors to overestimate how visible their labor actually is. Our findings suggest benefits to working with varied stakeholders to make select, collectively valued activities visible, and increasing compensation in valued forms (like attribution, opportunities, or pay) when possible. This could improve fairness in software development while providing greater transparency into work designs that help organizations and communities achieve their goals.