Consensus building in open source user interface design discussions

We report results of a study which examines consensus building in user interface design discussions in open source software communities. Our methodology consisted of conducting interviews with designers and developers from the Drupal and Ubuntu communities (N=17) and analyzing a large corpus of interaction data collected from Drupal. The interviews captured user perspectives on the challenges of reaching consensus, techniques employed for building consensus, and the consequences of not reaching consensus. We analyzed the interaction data to determine how different elements of the content, process, and user relationships in the design discussions affect consensus. Our main result shows that design discussions engaging participants with more experience and prior interaction history are more likely to reach consensus. Based on all of our results, we formulated design implications for promoting consensus in distributed discussions of user interface design issues.