Governance in Open Source Software Development Projects: A Comparative Multi-level Analysis
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As OSS projects grow in scale and complexity, informal governance arrangements often become insufficient for ensuring accountability, transparency, and continuity.
“As OSS projects grow in scale and complexity, empirical studies indicate that informal governance arrangements often become insufficient for ensuring accountability, transparency, and continuity [24, 56].”
From Governance in Practice: How Open Source Projects Define and Document Roles (2026) · cites this paper as [24]
Section 2 (page unavailable) says OSS participants can often suffice with lightweight governance forms adapted to their needs. The Conclusions (page unavailable) present self-governance as an alternative to the view that complex, reliable software requires explicit central management. The paper notes partially assigned accountability in NetBeans, but does not conclude that growing scale makes informal governance insufficient for accountability, transparency, or continuity. (LLM, conf=0.82)
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Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredExisting work has mostly characterized how contributors gain authority or how leadership structures evolve, but has rarely investigated the governance artifacts that define these arrangements.
“Existing work has mostly characterized how contributors gain authority or how leadership structures evolve, but has rarely investigated the governance artifacts that define these arrangements [24, 36].”
From Governance in Practice: How Open Source Projects Define and Document Roles (2026) · cites this paper as [24]
Section 2 describes research on recruitment and role migration, and Section 4 examines leadership and control, supporting this paper as an example of work on those topics. But Sections 2–3 also describe the paper's analysis of project artifacts as governance mechanisms. The paper does not establish the broader claim that existing work has rarely investigated governance artifacts. (LLM, conf=0.79)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredFew studies have examined governance as documented in project repositories.
“Despite the extensive body of research describing OSS roles, pathways, and collaboration practices, few studies have examined governance as it is documented in project repositories.”
From Governance in Practice: How Open Source Projects Define and Document Roles (2026) · cites this paper as [24]
Section 2 describes the authors’ analysis of project artifacts, and Section 6 discusses governance visible in defect reports and repositories. Neither passage says that few studies have examined repository-documented governance; searches for that research-gap claim and for 'few studies' found no such statement in our copy. Page numbers were not supplied. (LLM, conf=0.72)
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Cites
The Emergence of Governance in an Open Source Community
O'Mahony, S., & Ferraro, F. (2007) · Academy of Management Journal · doi:10.5465/amj.2007.27169153 · Cited by 899 · see citing works
Coordination mechanisms: Towards a conceptual foundation of CSCW systems design
Schmidt, K., & Simone, C. (1996) · Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) · doi:10.1007/bf00133655 · Cited by 822 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Research works printed but not linked: 20
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- Elliott, M., Ackerman, M., Scacchi, W.: Knowledge Work Artifacts: Kernel Cousins for Free/Open Source Software Development. In: Proc. ACM Conf. Support Group Work (Group 2007), Sanibel Island, FL, pp. 177-186 (2007)
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Sorted by citations
Work-to-rule: the emergence of algorithmic governance in Wikipedia
Müller-Birn, C., Dobusch, L., & Herbsleb, J. D. (2013) · Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Communities and Technologies · doi:10.1145/2482991.2482999 · Cited by 61 · see citing works
Automatic enforcement of constraints in real-time collaborative architectural decision making
Gaubatz, P., Lytra, I., & Zdun, U. (2015) · Journal of Systems and Software · doi:10.1016/j.jss.2015.01.056 · Cited by 11 · see citing works
Governance in Practice: How Open Source Projects Define and Document Roles
Oliveira, P., Conte, T., Gerosa, M., & Steinmacher, I. (2026) · Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering · doi:10.1145/3794860.3794911 · Cited by 2 · see citing works
- Authors
- Jensen, C., & Scacchi, W.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Irvine (US)
- ORCID
- Scacchi, Walt
- Venue
- IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology
- Publisher
- Springer Berlin Heidelberg
- Published
- 2010
- Volume
- AICT-319
- Pages
- 130-142
- ISSN
- 1571-5736 (ISSN-L)
- 1868-4238
- 1861-2288
- OpenAlex
- W1576396043
- Cited by
- 45
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 2 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 20 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 1 · 2015: 1 · 2013: 3 · 2012: 1
- FWCI
- 1.12
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- IFIP International Federation for Information Processing/IFIP (publishedVersion)
- HAL (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (0808783, 0534771)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Open Source Software Innovations
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies
- Keywords
- open source software, software governance, distributed coordination, edge organizations, multilevel analysis, large software systems
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