Climate Coach: A Dashboard for Open-Source Maintainers to Overview Community Dynamics

Abstract

Open-source software projects have become an integral part of our daily life, supporting virtually every software we use today. Since open-source software forms the digital infrastructure, maintaining them is of utmost importance. We present Climate Coach, a dashboard that helps open-source project maintainers monitor the health of their community in terms of team climate and inclusion. Through a literature review and an exploratory survey (N=18), we identified important signals that can reflect a project’s health, and display them on a dashboard. We evaluated and refined our dashboard through two rounds of think-aloud studies (N=19). We then conducted a two-week longitudinal diary study (N=10) to test the usefulness of our dashboard. We found that displaying signals that are related to a project’s inclusion help improve maintainers’ management strategies.