Empowering Diversity: Leveraging Cognitive Styles to Support Newcomers in Open Source Projects

Newcomers are vital for many Open Source Software (OSS) communities’ sustainability and development. However, newcomers face significant barriers, leading to a dropout rate as high as $\mathbf{8 2 \%}$. These barriers disproportionately affect underrepresented groups, heightening diversity imbalances in OSS projects. Research indicates that gender biases in OSS tools and infrastructure, originating from cognitive diversity, contribute to these barriers. In this paper, we propose to investigate the GitHub platform to enhance the tools and infrastructure by creating usable interfaces and empowering newcomers fairly and equitably, focusing on cognitive diversity to promote a more inclusive OSS community.