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

TL;DR

This study examines how open source communities formalize governance, analyzing their adherence to policies and actual governance practices, revealing limited impact of formalization on project sustainability.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable semantic pipeline to analyze governance behavior from mailing lists and investigates the relationship between formal policies and community practices in OSS.

Findings

Communities follow formal policies as defined.

Governance focus often diverges from formal policies.

Formalization has limited effect on project sustainability.

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.