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To survive and succeed, FLOSS projects need contributors able to accomplish critical project tasks. However, such tasks require extensive project experience of long term contributors (LTCs).

We measure, understand, and predict how the newcomers' involvement and environment in the issue tracking system (ITS) affect their odds of becoming an LTC.

ITS data of Mozilla and Gnome, literature, interviews, and online documents were used to design measures of involvement and environment. A logistic regression model was used to explain and predict contributor's odds of becoming an LTC. We also reproduced the results on new data provided by Mozilla.

We constructed nine measures of involvement and environment based on events recorded in an ITS. Macro-climate is the overall project environment while micro-climate is person-specific and varies among the participants …