Every time a person evaluates negatively another, there is the question: "was this fair?". Fairness theory says that when persons feel being treated unfairly, they are likely to stop contributing. Open source projects have been concerned with some issues related to fairness--encapsulated in code-of-conducts. However, there are many other aspects of fairness that they do not cover. I will describe the basics of fairness from organizational theory point of view, and how they can applied to an open source process, specifically code reviews. To show the usefulness of this approach, we conducted a survey of OpenStack patch contributors and reviewers. This survey demonstrated that fairness in code reviews is very nuanced and the issues mentioned in the survey can be mapped to the different types of fairness.
Research mentioned in this talk: https://goo.gl/b2uMwe and sample slides can be found: https://goo.gl/mTFTph
