![]() * For example, imagine you want to make use of, contribute to, or even start your own open-source communities: What are the best ways to self-organize across GitHub? What are the characteristics of successful communities that belong to the Apache Software Foundation? What is the average participation ratio that you're expected to comply with in any top-level Apache Project? These and similar research questions refer to design characteristics and architectural properties often latent in a software forge. 1 However, the organizational and social characteristics reflecting this phenomenon are often left implicit in open-source forge support systems, or meta-forges, such as Apache Allura. Since its early inception, the open-source phenomenon has become an extremely efficient and effective example of global software engineering. At the same time, we conclude that a more active support for the governance is required to avoid the failure of the forge. Architecting a forge is a participatory process that requires active engagement, hence remarking the need for mechanisms enabling it. Our results and lessons learned allow us to provide recommendations for designing forges, like Github. Ultimately, however, the extensions we provided to Apache Allura were deactivated by its core developers because of performance overheads. We found that the extensions provided to Apache Allura formed the basis for community awareness by design, providing valuable and usable community characteristics. This article is an experience report on these results and the lessons we learned in obtaining them. In an effort to make such aspects explicit and supported by-design in open-source forges, we conducted empirical software engineering as follows: (a) Through online industrial surveying, we elicited organizational and social aspects relevant in open-source communities (b) through action research, we extended a widely known open-source support system and top-level Apache project Allura (c) through ethnography, we studied the Allura community, and learning from its social and organizational structure, (d) we elicited a metrics framework that support more explicit organizational and socio-technical design principles around open-source communities. However, such proportions may turn into a risk if the organizational and socio-technical aspects (e.g., the contribution and release schemes) behind open-source communities are not explicitly supported by open-source forges by-design. The open-source phenomenon has reached unimaginable proportions to a point in which it is virtually impossible to find large applications that do not rely on open-source as well.
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