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

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Chakraborti, Mahasweta, Atkisson, Curtis, Stănciulescu, Ştefan, Filkov, Vladimir, Frey, Seth·2024·Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
DOI 10.1145/3613904.3641980
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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 of the 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.

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  • OSS governance becomes institutionalized as communities formalize norms and practices into explicit structures like charters and artifacts to manage coordination challenges and sustain development.

    “This leads to the institutionalization of OSS governance, where communities formalize norms and practices into explicit structures like charters, and artifacts to manage coordination challenges and sustain development [7, 11, 15].”

    From Governance in Practice: How Open Source Projects Define and Document Roles (2026) · cites this paper as [7]

    The Introduction (p. 1) says written policies help coordinate OSS communities and that informal norms help sustain development; the Discussion (p. 14) describes foundations establishing formal policies and hierarchies. But the paper does not establish that formalizing norms into charters and artifacts sustains development: its Conclusion (p. 17) says governance around highly formalized concerns has little bearing on success or sustainability. A charter appears in an appendix list of graduation procedures, not as evidence for the claimed process. (LLM, conf=0.86)

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Authors
Chakraborti, M., Atkisson, C., Stănciulescu, Ş., Filkov, V., & Frey, S.
Affiliations
  • University of California, Davis (US)
  • University of Massachusetts Amherst (US)
  • Computer Science, University of California, Davis, United States
ORCID
Venue
Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Publisher
ACM
Published
2024-05-11
Pages
1-26
DOI
10.1145/3613904.3641980
OpenAlex
W4396833427
Cited by
7
References
3
Citations by year
2026: 3 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 2
FWCI
2.64
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
Funders
National Science Foundation (2020751)
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 › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
Keywords
open source communities, formal governance, Apache Software Foundation, governance policy, community governance, nonprofit foundations, project outcomes

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