Voting for Bugs in Firefox: A Voice for Mom and Dad?

Abstract

In this paper, we present preliminary evidence suggesting that the voting mechanism implemented by the open-source Firefox community is a means to provide a supplementary voice to mainstream users. This evidence is drawn from a sample of bug-reports and from information on voters both found within the bug-tracking system (Bugzilla) for Firefox. Although voting is known to be a relatively common feature within the governance structure of many open-source communities, our paper suggests that it also plays a role as a bridge between the mainstream users in the periphery of the community and developers at the core: voters who do not participate in other activities within the community, the more peripheral, tend to vote for the more user-oriented Firefox module; moreover, bugs declared and first patched by members of the periphery and bug rather solved in “I” mode tend to receive more votes; meanwhile, more votes are associated with an increased involvement of core members of the community in the provision of patches, quite possibly as a consequence of the increased efforts and attention that the highly voted bugs attract from the core.