Collaborative Research: DASS: Transitioning open-source software projects to accountable community governance

Open-source software (OSS) underlies critical infrastructure around the US, and has a hand in every aspect of digital life. However, most OSS projects are run as “benevolent dictatorships” with no formal accountability to their community or society. Fortunately, increasing numbers of prominent OSS projects are voluntarily transitioning out of founder-ownership into democratic community ownership.

By understanding how these transitions proceed, and how often they succeed, critical OSS projects will face fewer risks as they navigate a dynamic policy landscape and shifting community needs. By addressing these challenges, this team can capture the institutional context of accountable OSS design, and develop general tools for transitioning software projects to accountable governance.

To leverage the social benefit of serving the OSS ecosystem, and improve its accountability to community members and other stakeholders, we will host workshops and publish a guide on how to transition OSS projects to community governance.

This research pursues three research questions. The first is using data science to explore the accountability systems that OSS communities define for themselves, and how they co-evolve with their code and contributor network. The second is using case studies to develop a deep understanding of the range of governance-transition processes.

The third is engineering software for helping OSS projects design their transition to community accountability. The work is providing the following main innovations: (1) advances in the computational representation of policy texts, (2) an extension of theories of governance dynamics into discontinuous governance transitions (i.e., transitions to community governance), (3) an extension of community governance processes to the OSS context, and (4) theoretically-informed governance design tools.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.