Governance

What we have covered so far in Organizational Culture and Development Philosophy sections mostly answers an important question of “Why”. This section answers the question of “How” in a meta sense.

For most types of Community-Led Development, it boils down to who makes key decisions in a project by privileged members and how strongly community itself affects the decision-making process. So, what kind of criteria is used to select those members that would lead and make key decisions for a project to realize its vision?

Usually, project founders are the ones who initiate all types of open-source community-led projects out there. Their task is to lead the community in such a way so that project’s vision is implemented to fullest extent possible, as defined, implemented, and/or consulted with community.

Open-source is all about developing software for the most part. Obviously, there exist users and developers of that software, who are also users. People who want their changes to that software be incorporated into a project are usually called contributors. If there are no contributors, project founders are all on their own! Therefore, leadership may want or need to delegate the decision-making power to others at some point. Of course, depending on concrete project’s governance, leadership may be turned over.

During the decision-making process, you may encounter various problems:

• What if the interests of different people contradict each other?
• What if the desires of a large number of people differ from the vision of the leaders?
• How important is community discussion, and how important are leaders’ decisions?

Therefore, in order to minimize unnecessary contradictions and interpersonal issues between users, members, and leaders, it’s equally important to define project’s governance model, just as Development Philosophy previously covered.

According to classification by Red Hat, there exists several major types of governance models for open-source projects out there¹, such as:

• do-ocracy
• founder-leader
• self-appointing council or board
• electoral
• corporate-backed
• foundation-backed

However, due to the nature of open-source and the following topics that we’re going to cover, we’ll mostly focus on factors and aspects that are closer to human interactions here. Taking into account above classification, let’s classify major types of governance using “-cracy” terms²!

Types of governance

Democracy - everyone has a say in what gets done, and elected people get the job done. Closely corresponds to electoral model.

Meritocracy - the most qualified people for a job are selected for that job.

Do-ocracy - people choose roles and tasks for themselves and execute them. Whoever does the job gets it, no matter how well they’re qualified.

Trustocracy - people cannot choose tasks for themselves. Roles are assigned solely upon trust, regardless of qualification or the amount of work done by people. Closely corresponds to founder-leader model.

References