Dr. Newton conducted an interdisciplinary, multi-method, multi-experiment examination of contextual and interactional factors affecting knowledge production in the very complex domain of “Free/Libre and Open Source Software” (FLOSS) ecosystems. The contextual factors included team diversity and the degree of corporate involvement in their work. She took a systems perspective to illuminate how these factors related to expertise and the production of knowledge in FLOSS. This topic unites important ideas that have both theoretical and practical value. From the practical or applied standpoint, Dr. Newton’s dissertation addresses a number of features associated with the future of work, a topic deemed to be one of the top scientific issues by the NSF. From the theoretical, or basic science perspective, she is examining this issue via an interdisciplinary integration of concepts cutting across disciplines.

Newton, O. B. & Fiore, S. M. (accepted). Leveraging corporate engagement for diversity in free/libre and open source software projects. The Fourth Workshop on Gender Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Software Engineering at the 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (GE@ICSE2023).

Newton, O. B., & Song, J. (2022). Modeling gender differences in membership change in open source software projects (arXiv:2206.08485). arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2206.08485

Newton, O. B., Fiore, S. M., & Song, J. (2019). Expertise and complexity as mediators of knowledge loss in open source software development. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 63(1). 1580–1584. https://doi.org/10.1177/1071181319631445