Workshopping the SustainOSS Governance Guide

This is a sidenote, but:

I just found this matrix from the Ada Lovelace Institute, applying Ostrom’s commons governance framework to data stewardship in a somewhat similar way (more focused on research / empirical analysis): Exploring principles for data stewardship - a case study analysis - Google Sheets

1 Like

Welcoming @Dr-G to this thread, Gina has been developing a framework for assessing the maturity of an open source project – and associated governance concerns – that looks like it may align really well with the existing components of our governance guide.

See here, and looking forward to learn more!

2 Likes

:wave: happy to be here! hopefully I can contribute something of value.

1 Like

Hi Greg,

I collaborated with a few colleagues a while back, and we now have a chapter on project governance in The Open Source Way - I think it’s quite good! And like all materials in the guide, is free to use (with attribution), and collaboration on the guide is very welcome! The chapter is here in github and the whole v2 guide is rendered here (in its current state).

Thanks,
Dave.

1 Like

Dave - thanks for sharing, I just skimmed and it looks like a great resource.

One bit of feedback I have is that the chapter describes governance as the set of rules + roles (etc) – and I appreciate the straightforward explanation – though I’d also suggest that there’s another a critical level of governance that might be worth including in that definitiojn: governance also entails the system of rules + roles for making and changing rules + roles.

In other words: there’s rules for “who can play” and “how to play” (in the literature on governance, these are “operational rules”) and also past a certain scale threshold there should probably be clear rules for “who can decide who can play and how to play, and how they are empowered to make those decisions.” (in the literature these are called “collective choice rules”)

Going up a scale to a truly large project, communities will probably want a third level of rules – the literature calls these “constitutional rules” - which are: “who decides who decides who can play and how to play.”

To an extent your chapter does describe collective choice rules such as elections, etc. That may be sufficient for most purposes. That said, I’d be glad to think more about how to directly describe the idea of “systems of rule-making” as a critical design feature of governance at large scales.

And in any case, I wonder if these different resources might be aligned in some complementary way! Let me know if you think we might want to talk more.

~greg

2 Likes

Thanks for the feedback! I definitely do think about constitutional rules and operational rules differently (I don’t know if I would go to the level of granularity of differentiating constitutional and collective choice rules - to me the latter is a subset of the former, I think) but I appreciate the nuance.

If you feel like this could be a useful source of material, or inspiration, I’d love to see it used or integrated by the SustainOSS guide, and if you’re interested in doing something complementary that extends or differentiates from this, I bet Karsten Wade (who is coordinating the Open Source Way effort) would love to hear about your goals and collaborate!

Thanks,
Dave.