About

James D. Herbsleb is a professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, working within the Software and Societal Systems Department. His research focuses on the socio-technical aspects of software development and coordination, emphasizing the importance of setting up socio-technical ecosystems that enable cooperation and competition among users, developers, and businesses to build systems that meet evolving and currently unknowable needs. His work explores how software shapes the digital environment and how designing for socio-technical coordination can address the limitations of traditional software development approaches. Herbsleb's research group is funded by prominent organizations including the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, and industry leaders such as Google, IBM, Siemens, and Bosch. He has delivered keynote addresses at major conferences like the ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering and the International Conference on Software Engineering, where he has discussed topics such as coordination, openness, transparency, and organizational knowledge in software ecosystems. His contributions have been recognized with awards such as the SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award and the Alan Newell Award for Research Excellence. His work emphasizes the importance of understanding social systems in the context of software engineering to improve productivity, quality, and organizational performance.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Ecology
• Knowledge management
• Public relations
• Engineering
• Data science

Selected publications

• In-person, Online and Back Again -- A Tale of Three Hybrid Hackathons

  ArXiv.org · 2025-08-10

  preprintOpen access

  Hybrid hackathons, which combine in-person and online participation, present unique challenges for organizers and participants. Although such events are increasingly conducted, research on them remains fragmented, with limited integration between hackathon studies and hybrid collaboration. Existing strategies for in-person or online-only events often fail to address the unique challenges of hybrid formats, such as managing communication across physical and virtual spaces. Our work addresses this gap by examining how hybrid hackathons function, analyzing how organizers structure these events and how participants navigate hybrid-specific challenges. Drawing on established theories of hybrid collaboration, we examine key dimensions - synchronicity, physical distribution, dynamic transitions, and technological infrastructure - that shape collaboration in hybrid events. Through an exploratory case study of three hackathon events, we analyze how these dimensions are implemented and their effects on participant experiences. Our findings reveal differing organizer considerations of the hybrid dimensions in the hackathon design, leading to distinct experiences for participants. Implementation styles - favoring in-person, online, or balanced participation - led to varied participant experiences, affecting access to resources, communication, and team coordination. Organizers in our study also relied on technology to bridge hybrid interactions, but overlooked critical aspects like time-zone management, dynamic transitions, and targeted support for hybrid teams. Additionally, participants in their teams responded to gaps in event scaffolding by adapting collaboration strategies, revealing gaps in organizers' preparedness for hybrid events. Learning from our findings, we offer practical recommendations when organizing hybrid hackathon events and recommendations to participants when attending them.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Drinking From a Firehose While Herding Cats: A Search for Accountability in the Rust Open Source Community

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2025-10-16

  articleOpen access

  Accountability promotes responsible behavior, particularly in fulfilling obligations, achieving planned outcomes, and serving the collective good. While systems of accountability are well-structured in corporate environments, their role in open-source communities remains less understood. Existing research has explored requirements-gathering processes and motivations for contributing to open source, focusing on individual benefits. However, there is limited research on how these motivations and processes translate into accountability that guides collective actions to meet the needs of diverse stakeholders. This study examines accountability within the Rust community, particularly during the transition from roadmap-based planning to a goal-oriented process with designated owners within various teams. We provide a rich description, based on meeting notes, project documents and blog posts, as well as 21 interviews with a variety of project participants, to draw lessons about accountability in open source. We found that the Rust roadmapping process facilitated various forms of accountability but lost its effectiveness because (a) unfinished work items on the yearly roadmaps were unavoidable and made the process feel disingenuous; (b) the community culture shifted and facilitated a gradual decline of the roadmapping process; (c) external factors such as the pandemic and layoffs at Mozilla led to changes in the community priorities. Our findings suggest that accountability in open source is an emergent phenomenon that arises from participatory work processes around community engagement and that moral accountability, rather than transactional accountability, is crucial to fostering these processes.

  PublisherDOI

• In-person, Online and Back Again - A Tale of Three Hybrid Hackathons

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2025-10-16

  articleOpen access

  Hybrid hackathons, which combine in-person and online participation, present unique challenges for organizers and participants. Although now widely practiced, research on them remains fragmented, with limited integration between hackathon studies and hybrid collaboration theories. Existing strategies for in-person or online-only events often fail to address hybrid-specific issues, such as managing communication across physical and virtual spaces and ensuring balanced participation. Our work examines hybrid hackathons through the lens of hybrid collaboration theories, focusing on how organizers structure these events and how participants navigate associated challenges. We frame our analysis using established theories of hybrid collaboration, focusing on four key dimensions - synchronicity, physical distribution, dynamic transitions, and technological infrastructure - that shape collaboration in hybrid events. Using an exploratory case study of three hybrid hackathons, involving observations and interviews with organizers and participants, we investigate how these dimensions are implemented and how they shape participant experiences. Our findings show differing organizer approaches to the hybrid dimensions, leading to varied participant experiences in access to resources, communication, and coordination. Implementation styles, favoring in-person, online, or balanced participation, produced disparities in engagement. Organizers often relied on technology to bridge physical and virtual spaces, but overlooked critical aspects such as time-zone management, dynamic transitions, and targeted hybrid team support. Participants, in turn, adapted collaboration tactics in response to gaps in event scaffolding, sometimes enabling collaboration, but at other times creating new challenges, underscoring that considerations for the hybrid format are still not fully integrated into hackathon planning. Learning from our findings, we offer practical recommendations for both organizers and participants to improve planning, participation, and collaboration in hybrid hackathon events.

  PublisherDOI

• Retrospective: An Empirical Study of Speed and Communication in Globally Distributed Software Development

  IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · 2025-01-27

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this retrospective, we reflect on the motivation, findings, and impact of our 2003 paper. We see evidence of influence in increasing the visibility of the topic of global software development (GSD), the use of version data for software engineering research, and using a mixed methods empirical approach. These topics have all continued to grow in importance in software engineering, as revealed by citation counts, but radical changes in business and technical environments have substantially changed how the challenges of GSD manifest. We see evidence of this in the paper’s “life cycle,” as citation counts grew for its first decade, and declined for its second. We consider this a marker of progress, and a very good thing for the field.

  PublisherDOI

• Novelty Begets Popularity, But Curbs Participation - A Macroscopic View of the Python Open-Source Ecosystem

  2024-02-06 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  Who creates the most innovative open-source software projects? And what fate do these projects tend to have? Building on a long history of research to understand innovation in business and other domains, as well as recent advances towards modeling innovation in scientific research from the science of science field, in this paper we adopt the analogy of innovation as emerging from the novel recombination of existing bits of knowledge. As such, we consider as innovative the software projects that recombine existing software libraries in novel ways, i.e., those built on top of atypical combinations of packages as extracted from import statements. We then report on a large-scale quantitative study of innovation in the Python open-source software ecosystem. Our results show that higher levels of innovativeness are statistically associated with higher GitHub star counts, i.e., novelty begets popularity. At the same time, we find that controlling for project size, the more innovative projects tend to involve smaller teams of contributors, as well as be at higher risk of becoming abandoned in the long term. We conclude that innovation and open source sustainability are closely related and, to some extent, antagonistic.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Power and Play: Investigating "License to Critique" in Teams' AI Ethics Discussions

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-03-27

  preprintOpen access

  Past work has sought to design AI ethics interventions--such as checklists or toolkits--to help practitioners design more ethical AI systems. However, other work demonstrates how these interventions may instead serve to limit critique to that addressed within the intervention, while rendering broader concerns illegitimate. In this paper, drawing on work examining how standards enact discursive closure and how power relations affect whether and how people raise critique, we recruit three corporate teams, and one activist team, each with prior context working with one another, to play a game designed to trigger broad discussion around AI ethics. We use this as a point of contrast to trigger reflection on their teams' past discussions, examining factors which may affect their "license to critique" in AI ethics discussions. We then report on how particular affordances of this game may influence discussion, and find that the hypothetical context created in the game is unlikely to be a viable mechanism for real world change. We discuss how power dynamics within a group and notions of "scope" affect whether people may be willing to raise critique in AI ethics discussions, and discuss our finding that games are unlikely to enable direct changes to products or practice, but may be more likely to allow members to find critically-aligned allies for future collective action.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Power and Play: Investigating "License to Critique" in Teams' AI Ethics Discussions

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2024-11-07 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access

  Past work has sought to design AI ethics interventions--such as checklists or toolkits--to help practitioners design more ethical AI systems. However, other work demonstrates how these interventions may instead serve to limit critique to that addressed within the intervention, while rendering broader concerns illegitimate. In this paper, drawing on work examining how standards enact discursive closure and how power relations affect whether and how people raise critique, we recruit three corporate teams, and one activist team, each with prior context working with one another, to play a game designed to trigger broad discussion around AI ethics. We use this as a point of contrast to trigger reflection on their teams' past discussions, examining factors which may affect their ''license to critique'' in AI ethics discussions. We then report on how particular affordances of this game may influence discussion, and find that the hypothetical context created in the game is unlikely to be a viable mechanism for real world change. We discuss how power dynamics within a group and notions of ''scope'' affect whether people may be willing to raise critique in AI ethics discussions, and discuss our finding that games are unlikely to enable direct changes to products or practice, but may be more likely to allow members to find critically-aligned allies for future collective action.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Strength of Weak Ties Between Open-Source Developers

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-11-08

  preprintOpen access

  In a real-world social network, weak ties (reflecting low-intensity, infrequent interactions) act as bridges and connect people to different social circles, giving them access to diverse information and opportunities that are not available within one's immediate, close-knit vicinity. Weak ties can be crucial for creativity and innovation, as they introduce ideas and approaches that people can then combine in novel ways, leading to innovative solutions. Do weak ties facilitate creativity in software in similar ways? This paper suggests that the answer is "yes." Concretely, we study the correlation between developers' knowledge acquisition through three distinct interaction networks on GitHub and the innovativeness of the projects they develop, across over 37,000 Python projects hosted on GitHub. Our findings suggest that the topical diversity of projects in which developers engage, rather than the volume, correlates positively with the innovativeness of their future code. Notably, exposure through weak interactions (e.g., starring) emerges as a stronger predictor of future novelty than via strong ones (e.g., committing)

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Matching Skills, Past Collaboration, and Limited Competition: Modeling When Open-Source Projects Attract Contributors

  2023-11-30 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  Attracting and retaining new developers is often at the heart of open-source project sustainability and success. Previous research found many intrinsic (or endogenous) project characteristics associated with the attractiveness of projects to new developers, but the impact of factors external to the project itself have largely been overlooked. In this work, we focus on one such external factor, a project's labor pool, which is defined as the set of contributors active in the overall open-source ecosystem that the project could plausibly attempt to recruit from at a given time. How are the size and characteristics of the labor pool associated with a project's attractiveness to new contributors? Through an empirical study of over 516,893 Python projects, we found that the size of the project's labor pool, the technical skill match, and the social connection between the project's labor pool and members of the focal project all significantly influence the number of new developers that the focal project attracts, with the competition between projects with overlapping labor pools also playing a role. Overall, the labor pool factors add considerable explanatory power compared to models with only project-level characteristics.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Understanding information diffusion about open-source projects on Twitter, HackerNews, and Reddit

  2023-05-01 · 4 citations

  articleSenior author

  The diffusion of information about open-source projects is a key factor influencing the adoption of projects and the allocation of developer efforts. Developers learn about new projects, and evaluate their quality and importance by accessing the related information. Social media is an important channel for information diffusion about open-source projects, with previous research suggesting the existence of a social media ecosystem that consists of multiple platforms and collectively supports information diffusion in open source.With different features supporting information diffusion, the same piece of information likely reaches different developer communities on different platforms, which attracts the attention and contribution of different developers and thus influences the success of open-source projects. Despite its importance, few works looked at the identity of the developer community that project-related information reaches on social media platforms and its associated impact on the discussed project.In this work, we track social media discussions on open-source projects on three different platforms: Twitter, HackerNews, and Reddit. We first describe the dynamics of project-related information diffusion across platforms, and we analyze the association between the number of posts on each platform, and the number of developers attracted to the discussed project from different communities. We find that posts about open-source projects first appear on Twitter and HackerNews, then move more towards Reddit. The number of project-related posts on Twitter mostly associate with the attracted developers from communities that are close to the project’s main contributor, while posts on other platforms associate more with the attention from remote communities.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Coordination, communication, and collaboration in open source software development

  NSF · $400k · 2005–2009

• The Scientific Software Network Map

  NSF · $542k · 2011–2015

• HCC: Medium: Personalized information access for online deliberation systems

  NSF · $1.2M · 2013–2018

• Socio-technical ecosystems for scientific software development

  NSF · $400k · 2009–2013

• HCC: Large: Collaborative Research: Large-Scale Human-Centered Coordination Systems to Support Interdependent Tasks in Context

  NSF · $742k · 2011–2014

Frequent coauthors

• Audris Mockus

  27 shared

• Alexander Nolte

  24 shared

• Marcelo Cataldo

  Auckland University of Technology

  23 shared

• Laura Dabbish

  Carnegie Mellon University

  16 shared

• Bogdan Vasilescu

  Google (United States)

  14 shared

• Tapajit Dey

  11 shared

• Kathleen M. Carley

  Carnegie Mellon University

  10 shared

• Anna Filippova

  Lomonosov Moscow State University

  10 shared

Labs

• James Herbsleb's LabPI

  Not provided

Awards & honors

• SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award (2016)
• Alan Newell Award for Research Excellence (2014)
• Distinguished Paper Award at ICSE 2011
• Most Influential Paper award at ICSE 2010
• Best Paper Award , Academy of Management (2010)