Mudslinging and Manners: Unpacking Conflict in Free and Open Source Software

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Citation: Anna Filippova, Hichang Cho (2015) Mudslinging and Manners: Unpacking Conflict in Free and Open Source Software. CSCW '15 Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (RSS)
DOI (original publisher): 10.1145/2675133.2675254
Semantic Scholar (metadata): 10.1145/2675133.2675254
Sci-Hub (fulltext): 10.1145/2675133.2675254
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Mudslinging and Manners: Unpacking Conflict in Free and Open Source Software
Tagged: open source (RSS), conflict (RSS)

Summary

Task, relationship, and process conflict exists in short- and long-lived teams. Long-lived teams such as occurs in FOSS may experience normative conflict, eg concerning project policy, direction, or ideology, emphasizing that FOSS projects are "recursive publics".

Authors conducted 16 semi-structured interviews with FOSS contributors exploring patterns of conflict. Interviewees included 4 women and 12 men from 7 countries with various levels and forms of participation in 14 projects.

Based on interviews authors discuss how in FOSS projects conflict:

  • manifests (RQ1: How do ongoing virtual teams such as FOSS development teams experience conflict?),
  • transforms (RQ2: Do conflict types transform over time in ongoing virtual teams such as FOSS development teams?), and
  • differs (RQ3: Do ongoing virtual teams such as FOSS development teams experience other sources of conflict beyond the traditional model?)

Findings:

  • conflicts arise from technical constraints and features such as differing time zones, multiple communications channels, and competing technologies/software versions
  • task and process conflicts can transform into relational and process conflicts; issues of authority/power contribute to such transformations
  • normative conflicts arise with dissonance between aims and practices such as free speech/banning a user, "best way" to write software/handling security issues, and can evolve from other conflict types


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