CHAOSScast

Episode 48: Creating Appreciative Communities and Implicit Mentoring with Anita Sarma and Iftekhar Ahmed

Nov 19, 2021

48:48

Hello and welcome to CHAOSScast Community podcast, where we share use cases and experiences with measuring open source community health. Elevating conversations about metrics, analytics, and software from the Community Health Analytics Open Source Software, or short CHAOSS Project, to wherever you like to listen. Today, we are very excited to have two guests joining us, Anita Sarma and Iftekhar Ahmed. Anita is a Professor of Computer Science at Oregon State University and Iftekhar is an Assistant Professor at University of California, Irvine. They are here to talk about creating appreciative communities and implicit mentoring. We learn more about what socio-technical means, metrics to look at or use to understand if we’re on the right track, and some important things they learned from their research. Also, Anita and Iftekhar share their thoughts on how they see implicit mentoring and creating appreciative communities fitting together. Download this episode now to find out much more, and don’t forget to subscribe for free to this podcast on your favorite podcast app and share this podcast with your friends and colleagues!

[00:01:55] Anita and Iftekhar give us a brief introduction of who they are and their backgrounds.

[00:04:10] Georg speaks about the importance of creating quality software and how there’s more to it than testing the software and having reviews, and we learn more about what socio-technical means.

[00:10:27] We find out some important things from Anita what they’ve learned from their research.

[00:15:15] With open source growing so much over the past five to seven years, Sean asks Iftekhar how that has influenced this socio-technical system of testing and quality assurance in open source software.

[00:18:49] Iftekhar and Anita explain the phenomenon behind projects that achieve a certain level of success which leads to additional demands on it.

[00:22:25] We learn more about what implicit mentoring means.

[00:28:39] Anita tells more about the research they did with pull request comments and what they found out in their initial work with interviews.

[00:31:14] Anita shares what she’s learned about implicit mentoring and she gives advice on metrics we could use to look at or use to understand if we’re on the right track.

[00:34:44] Sean asks Anita if explicit mentoring is trying to help people be successful, and if it’s a perspective of helpfulness compared to a perspective of critique.

[00:37:26] Anita and Iftekhar share their thoughts on how they see implicit mentoring and creating appreciative communities fitting together.

[00:42:34] Find out where you can follow Anita and Iftekhar’s work online.

Value Adds (Picks) of the week:

[00:44:03] Georg’s pick is he’s going out of town with his family for a wedding and getting to explore Washington D.C.
[00:44:46] Anita’s pick is she is super excited to go on a sabbatical.
[00:45:34] Iftekhar’s pick is his three-month old son and the sounds he makes which is the highlight of his day.
[00:46:01] Sean’s pick is celebrating Thanksgiving and watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and football.

Quote:

[00:12:13] “You have to be participating if you need to get reviews back, and I don’t remember the exact statistic, but I think the largest proportion of people stop contributing because they did not get the feedback. The feedback was very delayed and by the time they got the feedback that issue or task was already done by someone else.”

Panelists: