2025-10-01 –, OSPO, governance and business
Governance is a key aspect of software development, especially in Open-Source Software (OSS), where the collaborative nature of the process requires clear guidelines and policies to ensure effective decision-making and accountability. While some mature projects have established clear governance structures, many others rely on informal practices, which can lead to misunderstandings, conflicts, or lack of accountability. The rise of increasingly diverse contributors—including not only people from different backgrounds but also AI-powered agents—adds a new layer of complexity to governance. This raises important questions: Who gets to decide? How are rules enforced? And how do communities remain transparent and fair when the lines between human and non-human contributors blur? In this talk, we will explore the growing governance challenges facing OSS projects, why they matter for the sustainability of open collaboration, and potential pathways to making governance more explicit, transparent, and adaptable.
This talk addresses the growing challenges of governance in Open-Source Software (OSS) projects. While governance has always been a crucial factor in sustaining open collaboration, many projects still operate with informal or unclear practices, creating risks of conflict, exclusion, and lack of accountability. With the increasing diversity of contributors—ranging from individuals with different cultural and professional backgrounds to AI-powered agents participating in development—the need for transparent and adaptable governance structures has never been more pressing.
We will begin by reviewing the current state of governance in OSS, highlighting common practices and where they fall short. Building on this, we will present insights from a recent survey conducted with companies and practitioners, focusing on how they perceive governance today and how they anticipate the introduction of AI agents will affect decision-making, accountability, and trust in open collaboration. Finally, we will discuss our own proposal for addressing these challenges, aiming to make governance more explicit, transparent, and sustainable in the face of rapid technological and community changes.
The session is intended for both practitioners and researchers interested in the future of open collaboration, and it will provide both empirical observations and a vision for moving forward.
I'm a PhD student at the SnT-University of Luxembourg. Before, I was a research assistant for 3 years in Barcelona, Spain. I hold a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering (2021) and a Master's degree in Data Science (2023). My research interests are on providing modeling methodologies to the definition of LLM-agents systems, such as domain-specific languages. Furthermore, I collaborate in works of social analysis in Open-Source systems conducting empirical and mining software repositories (MSR) studies.