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

Mahasweta Chakraborti, Curtis Atkisson, Stefan Stanciulescu, Vladimir Filkov, Seth Frey

TL;DR

This paper investigates how formal governance in OSS, exemplified by the Apache Software Foundation Incubator (ASFI), maps onto actual governance practices in mentored projects. It builds a scalable NLP pipeline using semantic role labeling, biencoder embeddings, BERTopic clustering, and cross-encoder similarity to extract and quantify governed activities and policy internalization from public mailing lists across 214 ASFI projects and 42 governance topics. Key findings show that the extent of formal policy does not predict the level of governed activity, but higher policy extent correlates with greater internalization in practice; moreover, internalization of a few topics (e.g., voting, project configuration) relates to higher graduation odds, while some highly regulated topics do not. The study highlights the need for pragmatic governance that respects organizational variability and uses ground-level contributor experiences to inform policy, providing a scalable method to analyze governance in peer-production communities at scale.

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 mentor foundations. Our study looks at the Apache Software Foundation Incubator program and 208 projects it supports. We assemble a scalable, semantic pipeline to discover and analyze the governance behavior of projects from their mailing lists. We then investigate the reception of formal policies among communities, through their own governance priorities and internalization of the policies. Our findings indicate that while communities observe formal requirements and policies as extensively as they are defined, their day-to-day governance focus does not dwell on topics that see most formal policy-making. Moreover formalization, be it dedicating governance focus or adopting policy, has limited association with project sustenance.

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

TL;DR

This paper investigates how formal governance in OSS, exemplified by the Apache Software Foundation Incubator (ASFI), maps onto actual governance practices in mentored projects. It builds a scalable NLP pipeline using semantic role labeling, biencoder embeddings, BERTopic clustering, and cross-encoder similarity to extract and quantify governed activities and policy internalization from public mailing lists across 214 ASFI projects and 42 governance topics. Key findings show that the extent of formal policy does not predict the level of governed activity, but higher policy extent correlates with greater internalization in practice; moreover, internalization of a few topics (e.g., voting, project configuration) relates to higher graduation odds, while some highly regulated topics do not. The study highlights the need for pragmatic governance that respects organizational variability and uses ground-level contributor experiences to inform policy, providing a scalable method to analyze governance in peer-production communities at scale.

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 mentor foundations. Our study looks at the Apache Software Foundation Incubator program and 208 projects it supports. We assemble a scalable, semantic pipeline to discover and analyze the governance behavior of projects from their mailing lists. We then investigate the reception of formal policies among communities, through their own governance priorities and internalization of the policies. Our findings indicate that while communities observe formal requirements and policies as extensively as they are defined, their day-to-day governance focus does not dwell on topics that see most formal policy-making. Moreover formalization, be it dedicating governance focus or adopting policy, has limited association with project sustenance.
Paper Structure (29 sections, 3 figures, 4 tables)

This paper contains 29 sections, 3 figures, 4 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Theoretical Motivation
  4. Institutional Theory
  5. Communities of Practice and Organizational Learning
  6. Research Questions
  7. Data and Methods
  8. Variables of Interest
  9. Governance Measures:
  10. Project membership and activity
  11. Datasets
  12. Measurements
  13. Extracting activities
  14. Governed Activities: Aggregating routines
  15. Topic modeling of governed activities
  16. ...and 14 more sections

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: Language modeling pipeline for extracting activities, aggregating routine governed behavior, and evaluating internalization.
  • Figure 2: Left: Distribution of ASFI policy extent across governance topics. Right: Distribution of governed activity of projects across different governance topics. Governed activity was not found to be significantly correlated to policy extent.
  • Figure 3: Left: Distribution of ASFI policy extent across governance topics. Right: Distribution of internalization scores within topics. Red and Green markers indicate the median and mean respectively. Internalization is observed to be higher in governance topics which are more regulated.