Tag Archives: governance

General

Governance Part 5: Overall Ownership of a Project

A bunch people's arms with hands in the center with sleeves of various colors..

This is the fifth blog post in a series about open source project governance, so while this one can be read on its own, you might still consider pausing and reading about why governance is important, defining governance, pathways to leadership, and creating intentional culture.

People sometimes think of open source project ownership as something a bit nebulous with projects owned by an undefined “community” of people; however, this is rarely the case from a legal standpoint. While there are a few exceptions, open source projects usually have an individual, company, or foundation controlling the trademarks, project infrastructure, and other assets. This overall ownership structure often impacts how the project is governed on a day to day basis and how the project is perceived by others. 

For projects owned by individuals, there are often concerns about succession planning and the impact on the project if something happened to that individual (see obligatory xkcd dependency comic about the one maintainer in Nebraska). This can result in concerns about the sustainability and risks associated with using projects owned by single individuals.

For company owned open source projects, if the project is truly open, the governance processes should specify how people can move into leadership positions with the assumption that you’ll eventually have maintainers from outside of your company. On the flip side, if you have no intention of allowing people from outside of your company to move into leadership positions or make decisions, then you should be clear about that and keep the project as owned by your company. While it’s not ideal, I have a lot more respect for companies who are honest about how others can participate than ones that claim to be open while still making all of the big decisions behind the closed doors of their company.

On the other hand, we have foundations for open source projects, which tend to be non-profit organizations that are focused on providing the resources and organizational structures that projects need to get funding and legal support for their work. Neutral foundations provide a level playing field where contributors can contribute as equals regardless of whether they are contributing on behalf of a company or as an individual. This structure allows companies to collaborate together in a neutral environment where no single company is in control of the project.

In many cases, projects end up in foundations because an individual or company decided to move the project into a foundation, so it’s also important to think about when your project might be ready to contribute to a neutral foundation. If your project is very immature, foundations are unlikely to be interested in your project, whereas a project with many users and good traction that just needs help moving to the next level would be much more likely to be accepted and successful under a foundation. For companies contributing projects, you’ll have a stronger case for moving it into a foundation if you have some contributors, and ideally at least one maintainer, from outside of your company. Contributors tend to be suspicious of company owned open source projects, especially ones requiring a Contributor License Agreement, given the recent rug pulls and relicensing behaviors from some companies over the past few years, so contributing a project to a foundation might make it easier to build a community around that project. 

The challenge with contributing open source projects to foundations is that as individuals and companies, you also give some of your control to the foundation. Typically, the project’s trademarks, repositories, websites, and other assets would be transferred to the foundation. Existing maintainers and leaders will usually keep their positions. However, neutral foundations (e.g., Apache, Eclipse, CNCF, Linux Foundation) often make sure that the governance is set up in a way that makes it easy for anyone to participate and eventually move into leadership positions, so as the contributing company or individual, you should expect for some leadership positions to transition to other people over the longer term. While this does mean giving up some control over the project, putting a project under a neutral foundation gives others more confidence that they can contribute as equals. 

You’ll still need to do the hard work of getting more contributors and building the community – you won’t automatically get this from the foundation. Most foundations have so many projects that putting a new project into a foundation may not get as much attention as you expect, and the foundation’s attention will be spread across all of those projects. The biggest misconception about putting a project under a foundation is that you’ll get immediate traction with more contributors and more adopters, but this still requires hard work from the people already participating in the project, so it’s important to set your expectations appropriately.  

One important note is that contributing a project to a foundation is almost always an ongoing commitment, not an exit strategy, so the contributing organization will likely be expected to provide staff and other support over both the short and long term. It’s also a permanent decision, and you aren’t likely to be able to take the project back after you’ve put it into a foundation, so it’s worth taking some extra time and doing some research to decide whether you should continue to own the project or whether it would be better to put it into a foundation.

Resources:

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General

Governance Part 4: Creating Intentional Culture

A row of adorable, fuzzy baby ducklings sitting on a log in the edge of a body of water.

This is the fourth blog post in a series about open source project governance, so you should consider pausing and reading the other posts about why governance is important, defining governance, and pathways to leadership before reading this one.

Defining your governance / decision-making processes along with pathways to leadership are key to creating an intentional culture for your project that encourages participation and contributions from others. Having a scope, vision, and values (sometimes called a charter) for your project can help people understand what is / is not in scope for your project to encourage people to work on contributions that are most likely to be accepted and avoid wasting time on contributions that aren’t aligned with the project. This also helps to avoid issues and misunderstandings later by helping align the expectations of all community members. By setting expectations and clearly documenting them, you set the stage for creating a healthy and sustainable project over time.

However, just documenting your governance process and setting expectations in writing isn’t enough. You should also be role modeling good behavior and helping others understand what behavior is appropriate within your project. It’s important to remember that tolerating bad behavior unwittingly sets the expectation that this behavior is acceptable in your project, which can drive new contributors away, so addressing concerns promptly before they can get out of control or become a crisis helps set an intentional culture and improve sustainability of your project. A code of conduct is a good starting point for these conversations, but it’s also important to think about how you plan to approach code of conduct issues and how things like remediation and education can be a first step to help people meet the expectations of your projects, instead of taking an enforcement first approach. 

Unfortunately, some projects eventually run into issues that can’t be resolved via remediation or education, and in these cases, it may be necessary to remove someone from your project. Your governance documents should have a provision for involuntarily removing someone from your project, even if that person is in a top leadership position. I watched a project struggle with bad behavior for months while waiting for a steering committee member’s term to end because they didn’t have a process for removing that person. We always hope that we never need to use the process to remove someone, but you’ll be glad that you put it in place now if you ever need it in the future.

Having your ducks in a row with robust governance documentation that incorporates your code of conduct, charter (or similar statement of mission, scope, and values), and includes clear processes for dealing with conflict can help make your project more sustainable over time. 

Resources:

Photo by Mike’s Birds on Flickr

General

Governance Part 3: New Contributors and Pathways to Leadership

Black ladder going through a slot in a canyon with reddish orange rock.

This is the third blog post in a series about open source project governance, so you might want to pause and read the first post about why governance is important and the second one about defining governance before continuing.

It can be difficult to get people to contribute to your open source project, and unfortunately, there is no magic or one size fits all solution. Many projects struggle to find people who will actively participate and continue to participate over the long term. If it was easy, you would already have all of the people you needed to maintain your project, and you wouldn’t be reading this blog post. But not all is lost, there are things you can do to increase the chances of growing your contributor base for your open source project.

Good contributor documentation, especially for new contributors, is the first step toward bringing new people into your project in a scalable way that requires less time from busy maintainers. If this is well documented, new contributors can get started with a minimal amount of help from existing maintainers, which can save you a lot of time in the long run and reduce frustration for maintainers who are answering the same questions over and over. At a minimum, you should have instructions for everything that is required to get your project up and running in a development environment along with the process and guidelines for submitting a new contribution.

Defining the roles and responsibilities for contributors, reviewers, and maintainers can help with recruiting new people into these roles. You can think of this as a ladder because contributors climb up to become reviewers and those reviewers can become maintainers. What’s important is to have some documentation so that people understand how they can climb the ladder and gain more responsibilities within the project.

A contributor ladder usually outlines the different contributor roles within the project, along with the responsibilities and privileges that come with them. Community members generally start at the first levels of the ladder and advance up it as their involvement in the project grows. This helps set expectations for the roles and encourages people to think about how they might take on increasing responsibility within the project. As you get more of the people moving into maintainer roles, you can reduce the workload for the existing maintainers.

As a maintainer, when you are reviewing contributions and engaging in the community, think about and notice when someone is making solid contributions, which can help you decide who you can encourage to contribute more or maybe find someone who could move into a maintainer or other leadership role. Reaching out to someone and acknowledging their work while encouraging them to do more can help quite a bit with growing your contributor base. Sometimes people just need a bit of encouragement, and you can ask them for specific things that you know they are good at. 

You should also be thinking about how you can move people into leadership positions to be responsible for activities beyond writing code, like documentation, community management, marketing, and other important roles. These activities take up valuable time from maintainers and someone with expertise in these roles can often do these activities more efficiently and with higher quality than a maintainer without that specific expertise. You can add these to your contributor ladder and promote people into maintainer roles to be responsible for things like community management, documentation, program or product management, marketing, and more as your project grows to need these roles. 

Maintaining an open source project is so much work, and many maintainers are overworked, exhausted, and burning out. The best way to address this challenge is by finding people who can reduce your workload, but it’s hard work, and it takes time away from the day to day activities now, which can be hard to justify when you feel like you’re barely keeping up as it is. In the longer term, spending at least a little time on things that can help you recruit and keep new contributors that can eventually become maintainers will be worth it. You don’t need to do everything at once, and many of the suggestions above can be taken in small steps, one at a time. Spending just a little time on something to grow your contributor base and recruit new reviewers and maintainers is a great way to start.

Additional Resources:

This is the third post in a series about governance, so stay tuned for more blog posts about creating intentional culture and project ownership.

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General

Governance Part 2: Defining Governance

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This is the second blog post in a series about open source project governance, so you might want to pause and read the first post about why governance is important before continuing with this one about defining governance.

In general, you should start with the simplest possible governance model and only move to something more elaborate when your project evolves to the point where the complexity is needed because otherwise you create more overhead and extra work when that time would be better spent on project development, rather than governance processes.

If you don’t already have your governance and decision-making processes documented, the best place to start is by documenting and formalizing what you are already doing when you make decisions for your project. Who currently makes decisions and approves contributions? Who provides input? How can this be improved? How can you include new people in this process over time? What works well already? What processes could you improve?

Most projects can start with what is often called the maintainer council model, which is the simplest form of governance. This is where your existing maintainers make the decisions in the project, often by consensus, but there is usually also a provision for calling for a vote in certain cases. Voting usually comes into play when there are disagreements that cannot be resolved via consensus, or for big decisions that impact the structure of the project, like changing the governance model or removing someone from the project.

Some key elements that should be included in your governance documents:

  • Leadership selection processes
  • Processes for removing people from the project (both voluntary and involuntary)
  • Link to your Code of Conduct
  • Voting – actions that require a vote, whether it requires a simple majority (>50%) or a supermajority (2/3), and who gets a vote.

Additional Resources:

This is the second post in a series about governance, so stay tuned for more blog posts about pathways to leadership, creating intentional culture, and project ownership.

Photo by Sarah Dorweiler on Unsplash

General

Governance Part 1: Why is it important?

Hand holding an old fashioned, silver pocket watch on a dark background

Sustaining projects over the long-term can be a challenge. Many maintainers and contributors are overworked and have a number of competing priorities, so they don’t always have the time to focus on ways to improve sustainability. Being proactive about governance and related topics before something escalates into a crisis can make your projects more sustainable and reliable. 

A lot of people think governance is just extra paperwork, but this isn’t true of good governance, which is really about defining your decision-making processes, setting expectations, and making it easier for people to contribute to your project. Ultimately the focus of open source project governance is on the people. The roles we play, our responsibilities, how we make decisions, and what we should expect from each other as part of participating in the community.

Having clear rules about how collaboration occurs, how decisions are made, and what types of contributions are in or out of scope helps community members make contributions that are likely to be accepted and embraced by the project. This facilitates the creation of an intentional culture, and helps avoid wasting maintainer’s time with contributions that aren’t aligned with the project. It also helps create pathways to leadership where other people can better understand the process for moving into leadership roles along with an intentional process for how the project promotes people into leadership.

The tricky thing about governance is that it needs to be proactive. The time to work on governance is at the start when things are going well. If you wait until there is a crisis of some sort within your community, you might not have the right processes for dealing with that crisis, and when a project is in crisis, it will be more difficult to come to an agreement about governance.

Here’s a short, 4 minute video introduction to open source project governance to get you started:

This is the first post in a series about governance, so stay tuned for more blog posts about defining governance, pathways to leadership, creating intentional culture, and project ownership.

Additional Resources:

Photo by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash