Episode 140: Courtney Miller and Hongbo Fang on Toxicity and Information Flow in Open Source Communities

Guest Courtney Miller | Hongbo Fang Panelists Richard Littauer | Eriol Fox Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. We are super excited to talk to our guests today on the topic of toxicity in open source. Today, we have joining us, Courtney Miller and Hungbo Fang, who are both PhD students at Carnegie Mellon University. We asked them to come on because we were curious about their work, and they came highly recommended by Bogdan Vasilescu. We’ll hear more about Courtney’s talk and her paper on her award-winning work exploring toxicity in open source communities, and we’ll find out the work Hongbo has done focusing on information flow and where people talk about open source. Download this episode now to learn more! [00:02:49] Courtney tells us about the talk she gave at the Linux Open Source Summit on her work exploring toxicity in open source communities. [00:03:55] We find out if there was a data set that was used to find the information. [00:05:08] Hongbo focuses on information flow and where do people talk about open source, and he tells us what his involvement is with this work. [00:06:57] Courtney tells us what she saw within the hundred issues and how she broke them down and tagged them to get to the conclusions she had. [00:08:44] We hear how Courtney used the technical definition of toxicity introduced by Google’s Perspective API tool to inform the decisions of what toxicity means. [00:12:01] Eriol wants to know whether Courtney’s had thoughts or intentions of looking into the content moderation space to see if there’s any similarities between what’s happening there. [00:14:29] Richard wonders what we can do to improve the state of toxicity in open source and wonders if she has any future work that can make this better. [00:16:08] Hongbo shares his thoughts about the future and what we can do to solve this from a quantitative angle. [00:17:02] Based on Courtney’s work, we find out if she thinks AI has improved, if she has hope, a