Sustainability and social responsibility reporting in open source software

Abstract

Digital commons have held the interest of the research community in recent years. However, institutional recognition has not been fully awarded mainly due to the absence of a comprehensive reporting framework. The objective of our research is to identify indicators in order to measure open source projects performance. Motivation that led us to carry out this analysis was the fact that, despite the many benefits attributed to open sourcing, no information about it was disclosed on annual reports. We are based on previous literature about creating institutions to governing the commons. One of the key goals is institutional reporting to members of the community, so we believe that a reporting model based on social responsibility framework is clearly suitable for this purpose. Social responsibility and sustainability are about enabling organizations to incorporate creation of social, environmental and economic value into core strategy and operations; their reporting is key to create value for organizations, their stakeholders and society as a whole. To reach our goal, we asked a panel of open source experts their opinion about the key success factors and other relevant variables for the purpose of recommend a methodology to calculate specific indicators to be disclosed on social responsibility reports.