CMN Brownbag - Do We Run How We Say We Run? Formalization and Practice of Governance in OSS Communities

Kerr Hall 386, UC Davis

Do We Run How We Say We Run? Formalization and Practice of Governance in OSS Communities
Mahasweta Chakraborti

Abstract
Open Source Software (OSS) communities often resist regulation typical of traditional organizations. Yet formal governance systems are being increasingly adopted among communities, particularly through non-profit project-sponsoring foundations. Our study looks at the Apache Software Foundation Incubator program and 208 projects it has supported. We assemble a scalable, semantic pipeline to discover and analyze the governance behavior of projects from their mailing lists. We then investigate the relationship of such behavior to what the formal policies prescribe through their own governance priorities and how their members internalize them. Our findings indicate that a greater amount of policy over a governed topic doesn’t elicit more governed activity on that topic, but does predict greater internalization by community members. Moreover, alignment of community operations with foundation governance, be it dedicating their governance focus or adopting policy along topics seeing greater policy-making, has limited association with project outcomes.

 
[To appear in Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24)]
 

Bio
Mahasweta is a doctoral candidate in Computational Social Science at the Department of Communication, UC Davis. Her interests concern collectivism and self-governance among autonomous, online communities producing digital public goods (DPG). In particular, she studies decentralized Open Source software (OSS) projects to understand how they establish consensus, cooperate, and ensure productivity. Her current interests include OSS regulation over open AI artifacts/products as well as developer behaviors associated with the rising general-purpose usage of AI.

Zoom: https://ucdavis.zoom.us/s/97448077707

This series
The Department of Communication Brown Bag Series is a regular meeting for developments in Communication and related disciplines, hosted by the UC Davis Department of Communication. It is held at noon on most Thursdays during the academic year.