Purpose

This paper explores how task characteristics in terms of trigger type and task topic influence individual participation in community-based free/libre open source software (FLOSS) development by considering participation in individual tasks rather than entire projects.

Design/methodology/approach

A quantitative study was designed using choose tasks that were carried out via the email discourse on the developers' email fora in five FLOSS projects. Choice process episodes were selected as the unit of analysis and were coded for the task trigger and topic. The impact of these factors on participation (i.e. the numbers of participants and messages) was assessed by regression.

Findings

The results reveal differences in participation related to different task triggers and task topics. Further, the results suggest the mediating role of the number of participants in the relationships between task characteristics and the number of messages. The authors also speculate that project type serves as a boundary condition restricting the impacts of task characteristics on the number of participants and propose this relationship for future research.

Research limitations/implications

Empirical support was provided to the important effects of different task characteristics on individual participation behaviors in FLOSS development tasks.

Practical implications

The findings can help FLOSS participants understand participation patterns in different tasks and choose the types of tasks to attend to.

Originality/value

This research explores the impact of task characteristics on participation in FLOSS development at the task level, while prior research on participation in FLOSS development has focused mainly on factors at the individual and/or project levels.

中文翻译：

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参与基于社区的免费/自由开源软件开发任务：任务特性的影响

目的

本文通过考虑参与单个任务而不是整个项目，探讨触发器类型和任务主题方面的任务特征如何影响个人参与基于社区的自由/自由开源软件 (FLOSS) 开发。

设计/方法/方法

使用选择任务设计了一项定量研究，这些任务通过电子邮件话语在五个 FLOSS 项目中的开发人员电子邮件论坛上执行。选择过程片段被选为分析单元，并针对任务触发和主题进行编码。这些因素对参与（即参与者和消息的数量）的影响通过回归评估。

发现

结果揭示了与不同任务触发器和任务主题相关的参与差异。此外，结果表明参与者数量在任务特征和消息数量之间的关系中的中介作用。作者还推测，项目类型是限制任务特征对参与者数量影响的边界条件，并为未来的研究提出了这种关系。

研究限制/影响

对不同任务特征对 FLOSS 开发任务中个体参与行为的重要影响提供了实证支持。

实际影响

研究结果可以帮助 FLOSS 参与者了解不同任务的参与模式并选择要参与的任务类型。

原创性/价值

本研究在任务层面探讨了任务特征对参与 FLOSS 开发的影响，而先前关于参与 FLOSS 开发的研究主要集中在个人和/或项目层面的因素上。