The DOI matches its Crossref record; 180 of the 180 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The Emergence of Governance in an Open Source Community
Abstract
Little is known about how communities producing collective goods govern themselves. In a multimethod study of one open source software community, we found that members developed a shared basis of formal authority but limited it with democratic mechanisms that enabled experimentation with shifting conceptions of authority over time. When members settled on a shared conception of authority, it was more expansive than their original design. A statistical test of the predictors of leadership reinforced this finding. By blending bureaucratic and democratic mechanisms, the governance system evolved with the community's changing conceptions of authority.
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“In fact, most open projects (like the Web, Wikipedia, P2P, FOSS) showed remarkable tendencies to centralization over time [59].”
From Tribal Governance: The Business of Blockchain Authentication (2018) · cites this paper as [59]
In the citing paper
“Likewise, engaging in collective action threats and expecting open source governance practices to remain unchanged is also risky as open source governance may be controlled by just a few people willing to make unilateral changes to offset collective action threats (O'Mahony and Ferraro 2007; Shaikh and Henfridsson 2017;Mindel et al. 2018).”
From Freeriding and Rebellion: An Investigation of Open Source Vendor Relicensing and Member Hard Forking Events (2026) · cites this paper as O'Mahony and Ferraro 2007
In the citing paper
“Unlike the democratically constrained positional authority observed by O'Mahony and Ferraro (2007), vendor authority in our cases lacked community engagement.”
From Freeriding and Rebellion: An Investigation of Open Source Vendor Relicensing and Member Hard Forking Events (2026) · cites this paper as O'Mahony and Ferraro (2007)
In the citing paper
“This configuration is consistent with Shaikh and Henfridsson's (2017) observation that open source projects can simultaneously incorporate meritocratic and autocratic modes of governance, and O'Mahony and Ferraro's (2007) observation that tensions can arise from how authority is allocated and exercised within an open source project.”
From Freeriding and Rebellion: An Investigation of Open Source Vendor Relicensing and Member Hard Forking Events (2026) · cites this paper as O'Mahony and Ferraro's (2007)
In the citing paper
“as O'Mahony and Ferraro (2007) suggest, governance structures emerge later in a project's lifecycle”
From The sustainability of open source commons (2023) · cites this paper as O'Mahony and Ferraro (2007)
In the citing paper
“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 [36]
In the citing paper
“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 [36]
Citations
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Metadata
- Authors
- O'Mahony, S., & Ferraro, F.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Davis
- Universidad de Navarra (ES)
- ORCID
- Ferraro, Fabrizio
- Venue
- Academy of Management Journal
- Publisher
- Academy of Management
- Published
- 2007-10
- Volume
- 50
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 1079-1106
- ISSN
- 0001-4273 (ISSN-L)
- 1948-0989
- OpenAlex
- W2102704527
- Cited by
- 909
- References
- 177
- Citations by year
- 2026: 60 · 2025: 38 · 2024: 42 · 2023: 32 · 2022: 48 · 2021: 48 · 2020: 59 · 2019: 50 · 2018: 46 · 2017: 49 · 2016: 60 · 2015: 50 · 2014: 57 · 2013: 76 · 2012: 47
- FWCI
- 80.26
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Academy of Management Journal (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Open Source Software Innovations
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Information Systems and Management › Knowledge Management and Sharing
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management › Management and Organizational Studies
- Keywords
- open source communities, community governance, authority, leadership, democratic mechanisms, public goods, governance evolution
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