1  Introduction

Community engagement is essential for growing and sustaining healthy open source software projects. Astropy recently hired a community manager, Beryl Kanali, to improve the project’s community-building strategies and contracted with Organizational Mycology to help Beryl get started by conducting introspective research and developing survey instruments for monitoring community engagement. This report summarizes one component of that work, a community survey that interrogated how Astropy users, contributors, and developers interact with the project, their motivations for doing so, and the benefits and drawbacks of participation. The results of this survey can help to inform community management work at Astropy to foster healthy, sustained engagement as well as shape Astropy’s broader community strategy.

1.1 Research Questions

Our engagement with Astropy had four work streams:

  1. Supporting Beryl Kanali in her new role as the community manager of Astropy.
  2. Tracking the engagement of the community across various platforms,
  3. Conducting a community engagement survey of the community and
  4. Conducting a small number of interviews with community members who were willing to talk about how they experience DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) within the Astropy community.

The research questions for our work are:

  • What is the composition of Astropy community members?
  • How do community members participate in Astropy?
  • How can we streamline communication channels?
    • What are people using different communication channels for?
  • What avenues can we explore to increase/improve participation in the community?
  • Can we identify ways to improve diversity, equity and inclusion in the Astropy community?

This report will summarize answers to the first four research questions. The final research question will be summarized in a document that addresses the diversity, equity and inclusion needs of the community as it will include both answers from the community engagement survey and information from the interviews we conducted with community members on the topic.