Daily Arxiv

This page organizes papers related to artificial intelligence published around the world.
This page is summarized using Google Gemini and is operated on a non-profit basis.
The copyright of the paper belongs to the author and the relevant institution. When sharing, simply cite the source.

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

Open digital public infrastructure requires community governance to ensure accountability, sustainability, and robustness. However, open source projects often rely on centralized decision-making, and the determinants of successful community governance remain unclear. This study analyzes 637 GitHub repositories to trace the transition from founder-led to shared governance. Specifically, we extract institutional roles, actions, and accountability signals from versioned project charters (GOVERNANCE.md) to document the trajectory toward community governance. Using a semantic parsing pipeline, we categorize elements into broad role and action types. We find that roles and actions increase and regulation becomes more balanced, reflecting an increase in governance scope and differentiation over time. Communities grow by layering and improving accountability rather than changing tone. As the transition to community governance matures, projects further regulate ecosystem-level relationships and define project oversight roles. This study provides a scalable pipeline for tracking the growth and evolution of community governance systems from founder ownership, a fundamental tenet of open source software.

Takeaways, Limitations

Provides a scalable pipeline to track the transition to community governance.
Analyzes how community governance develops in open source projects.
Demonstrates community growth through increased roles and actions, balanced regulation, and hierarchization and improvement of responsibilities.
It emphasizes the importance of defining ecosystem-level relationship regulation and project oversight roles.
Limited to analysis of 637 GitHub repositories.
Because we rely on the GOVERNANCE.md document to extract governance information, the accuracy and completeness of the document are affected.
Further research is needed to determine the generalizability of these findings.
👍