Governance in Practice: How Open Source Projects Define and Document Roles

TL;DR

This paper systematically analyzes how open source projects define and document governance roles, revealing inconsistencies and role drift that impact community sustainability and leadership distribution.

Contribution

It introduces a formal analysis of governance roles in OSS using Institutional Grammar, highlighting role inconsistencies and the Maintainer Paradox.

Findings

Identical titles often have different responsibilities.

Different labels describe similar functions, leading to role drift.

Some actors accumulate multiple duties, creating governance bottlenecks.

Abstract

Open source software (OSS) sustainability depends not only on code contributions but also on governance structures that define who decides, who acts, and how responsibility is distributed. We lack systematic empirical evidence of how projects formally codify roles and authority in written artifacts. This paper investigates how OSS projects define and structure governance through their GOVERNANCE.md files and related documents. We analyze governance as an institutional infrastructure, a set of explicit rules that shape participation, decision rights, and community memory. We used Institutional Grammar to extract and formalize role definitions from repositories hosted on GitHub. We decompose each role into scope, privileges, obligations, and life-cycle rules to compare role structures across communities. Our results show that although OSS projects use a stable set of titles, identical titles carry different responsibilities, and different labels describe similar functions, which we call role drift. Still, we observed that a few actors sometimes accumulate technical, managerial, and community duties. %This creates the Maintainer Paradox: those who enable broad participation simultaneously become governance bottlenecks. By understanding authority and responsibilities in OSS, our findings inform researchers and practitioners on the importance of designing clearer roles, distributing work, and reducing leadership overload to support healthier and more sustainable communities.