“Give me a task, and evaluate the way I do it . . . I am
Understanding Sustained Participation in Open Source Software Projects 35 Table 5. WithinGroup
Analysis of OSS Developers’ Participation Dynamics (
UNS
Group)
Name
Participation
behavior
Initial
access
Initial
motivation
LPP cycle
(situated learning
↔ identity construction
↔ sustained participation)
U1 Core Q1–Q3;
peripheral or
less thereafter
Core Use value:
“I’m the webmaster
of phpIndex, a french
site about PhP.”
Thanks to his strong background experience with php and previous contributions
to the tracker community, U1 was granted CVS access as recognition by the
administrators as soon as he rejoined the developer mailing list (Q1). He
communicated and cooperated heavily with other core members such as S4 and
S8 by providing valuable suggestions and comments, and his competency as an
advisor became widely recognized in the community (Q1–Q2). To acknowledge
his contribution, U1 was acknowledged as one of the authors in the 2001 release.
However, U1 failed to deliver as much as expected as a core developer with
CVS access, and in Q6, he suddenly left the project with no explanation. When
he returned in Q9, he had lost his CVS privileges due to his lack of continued
contribution to the code base. U1 participated for three more quarters, offering
opinions and advice (Q9–Q11), and at one point made a casual bid to regain CVS
privilege in