Documentation, such as README and CONTRIBUTING files, can serve as the first point of contact for potential contributors to free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) projects. Prominent open source software organizations such as Mozilla, GitHub, and the Linux Foundation advocate that projects provide community-focused and process-oriented documentation early on in order to foster contributor recruitment, expand the project's commons, and drive peer-production activity. In this paper, we investigate the introduction of README files and contributing guidelines in FLOSS projects, as well as whether early documentation conforms to these recommendations or explains subsequent activity in communities. We use a novel dataset of FLOSS projects packaged by the Debian GNU/Linux distribution and conduct a quantitative analysis to examine README (n=2280) and CONTRIBUTING (n=452) files when they are first published into projects' repositories. To analyze changes in project activity, we use random effects coefficients generated by longitudinal multilevel models fit to weekly project contribution data. We find that projects often publish READMEs ritualistically at the beginning of development yet introduce CONTRIBUTING files later in project lifecycles, following an influx of contributions. The initial versions of these files rarely focus on community development, and instead describe organizational processes and offer technical summaries. Our findings suggest that FLOSS projects do not create documentation with community-building in mind, but rather brevity, usage, technical features and processes. Our results raise broader questions of the disconnect between prevailing wisdom in FLOSS commons governance and in-the-wild project management.
