Contextualizing Toxicity in Open Source: A Qualitative Study

kaestner@cs.cmu.edu (S. Cohen)
Mon, 18 Oct 2021 08:37:56 GMT

Sophie Cohen. Contextualizing Toxicity in Open Source: A Qualitative Study. In Proceedings of the European Software Engineering Conference and ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE-SRC), pages 1669--1671, New York, NY: ACM Press, 2021. ESEC/FSE Student Research Competition.

In this paper, we study toxic online interactions in issue discussions of open-source communities. Our goal is to qualitatively understand how toxicity impacts an open-source community like GitHub. We are driven by users complaining about toxicity, which leads to burnout and disengagement from the site. We collect a substantial sample of toxic interactions and qualitatively analyze their characteristics to ground future discussions and intervention design.