Daily Arxiv

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Patterns in the Transition From Founder-Leadership to Community Governance of Open Source

Created by
  • Haebom

Author

Mobina Noori, Mahasweta Chakraborti, Amy X Zhang, Seth Frey

Outline

This paper highlights the importance of community governance for ensuring the sustainability and robustness of open source projects. By analyzing 637 GitHub repositories, we trace the transition from founder-centric to shared governance. We analyze GOVERNANCE.md files to extract institutional roles, behaviors, and normative signals. Using a semantic analysis pipeline, we categorize these roles and behaviors into types, analyzing the growth in governance scope and differentiation over time. Our findings reveal that as the transition to community governance matures, projects tend to regulate ecosystem-level relationships and clearly define project oversight roles. This study provides a scalable pipeline for tracking the growth and evolution of community governance systems within the founder-centric framework of open source software.

Takeaways, Limitations

Takeaways:
We present a data-driven approach to highlighting the importance of community governance for the sustainability and robustness of open digital public infrastructure.
Provides insight into the community governance transition process for open source projects.
We present a scalable community governance growth tracking pipeline through analysis of GOVERNANCE.md files.
We identify how roles and responsibilities change as community governance matures.
Limitations:
The analysis is limited to GitHub repositories and may not reflect open source projects on other platforms.
The accuracy of the analysis results may be affected by the presence and quality of the GOVERNANCE.md file.
Due to limitations in the semantic analysis pipeline used for analysis, errors may occur.
Due to the nature of document-based analysis, there may be differences with actual community activity.
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