Open source culture is characterized by a DIY ethic of “do-ocracy:” things happen when self-directed people feel motivated to make them happen in accordance with their time and talents. However, open source communities also seem to struggle with common challenges of sustainability and decision-making; even successful open source projects face serious crises of maintenance and resource allocation that may be difficult to manage under either a “benevolent dictator for life” or ‘flat’ structurelessness. Fortunately, there are known methods of “institutional design” that can aid communities in developing systems of decision-making and accountability – which is to say, governance. In this session, members of the SustainOSS network will introduce the “Open Source Governance Guide,” modeled on Elinor Ostrom’s principles of Governing the Commons. We will collaboratively analyze this governance framework and develop “Questions to Ask Frequently” that can support communities in practicing successful governance.
Desired outcomes:
- Share what we have developed and get feedback
- Generate new 'guiding questions' for our 'governance guide'
- Recruit new participants who will contribute to the project
- Write a blog post to synthesize the discussion
We hope to synthesize outputs into a blog post about this work. We also hope to recruit participants who will contribute to the Governance Guide, and/or use it and share feedback from their projects.
How will you deal with varying numbers of participants in your session?:If it's a small number (~7 or less) we can all review the Governance principles and guide together. If it's a large number, we think we will poll the group to see what 'layers' of resources in an open source community (i.e. code v documentation v community listserv v brand, etc) that participants might be interested in diving deep on, and will facilitate breakouts for each respective group. We have at least three facilitators ready to help with these breakouts, tho may need additional help to facilitate the whole group process so that each of us can work those breakouts.
I lead the Open Referral Initiative: openreferral.org
Assistant Professor and Researcher at UOC - IN3, Barcelona, Spain. I love language engineering, Web APIs, Models and Collaboration
Richard Littauer is a community facilitator, open source strategist, Node developer, Latin teacher, avid birder, and a general, well, person.
Georg Link is an Open Source Strategist. His mission is to help open source projects, communities, and companies become more professional in their use of metrics and analytics.