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 project-sponsoring foundations. Our study looks at the Apache Software Foundation Incubator program and 208 of the projects it has supported. We assemble a scalable, semantic pipeline to discover and analyze the governance behavior of projects from their mailing lists. We then investigate the relationship of such behavior to what the formal policies prescribe, through their own governance priorities and how their members internalize them. Our findings indicate that a greater amount of policy over a governed topic doesn’t elicit more governed activity on that topic, but does predict greater internalization by community members. Moreover, alignment of community operations with foundation governance, be it dedicating their governance focus or adopting policy along topics seeing greater policy-making, has limited association with project outcomes.

Open-source Software (OSS) has become a valuable resource in both industry and academia over the last few decades. Despite the innovative structures they develop to support the projects, OSS projects and their communities have complex needs and face risks such as getting abandoned. To manage the internal social dynamics and community evolution, OSS developer communities have started relying on written governance documents that assign roles and responsibilities to different community actors.To facilitate the study of the impact and effectiveness of formal governance documents on OSS projects and communities, we present a longitudinal dataset of 710 GitHub-hosted OSS projects with GOVERNANCE.MD governance files. This dataset includes all commits made to the repository, all issues and comments created on GitHub, and all revisions made to the governance file. We hope its availability will foster more research interest in studying how OSS communities govern their projects and the impact of governance files on communities.

Building a successful community means governing active populations and limited resources. This challenge often requires communities to design formal governance systems from scratch. But the characteristics of successful institutional designs are unclear. Communities that are more mature and established may have more elaborate formal policy systems (as cause or effect of their success). Alternatively, they may require less formalization precisely because of their maturity: because they have more latitude and capacity to select and acculturate new members, or because their reputations encourage greater self-selection. Indeed, scholars often downplay the role that formal rules relative to unwritten rules, norms, and values. But in a community with formal rules, decisions are more consistent, transparent, and legitimate. To understand the relationship of formal institutions to community maturity and governance style, we conduct a large-scale quantitative analysis applying institutional analysis frameworks of self-governance scholar Elinor Ostrom to 80,000 communities across 3 platforms: the sandbox game Minecraft, the MMO game World of Warcraft, and Reddit. We classify communities' written rules according to several institutional taxonomies in order to test predictors of institutional formalization. From this analysis we extract two major findings. First, institutional formalization, the size and complexity of an online community's governance system, is generally positively associated with maturity, as measured by age, population size, or degree of user engagement. Second, we find that online communities employ similar governance styles across platforms, strongly favoring "weak" norms to "strong" requirements. These findings suggest that designers and founders of online communities converge, to some extent independently, on styles of governance practice that are correlated with successful self-governance. With deeper insights into the patterns of successful self-governance, we can help more communities overcome the challenges of self-governance and create for their members powerful experiences of shared meaning and collective empowerment.?

Sustainable Open Source Software (OSS) forms much of the fabric of our digital society, especially successful and sustainable ones. But many OSS projects do not become sustainable, resulting in abandonment and even risks for the world's digital infrastructure. Prior work has looked at the reasons for this mainly from two very different perspectives. In software engineering, the focus has been on understanding success and sustainability from the socio-technical perspective: the OSS programmers' day-to-day activities and the artifacts they create. In institutional analysis, on the other hand, emphasis has been on institutional designs (e.g., policies, rules, and norms) that structure project governance. Even though each is necessary for a comprehensive understanding of OSS projects, the connection and interaction between the two approaches have been barely explored. In this paper, we make the first effort toward understanding OSS project sustainability using a dual-view analysis, by combining institutional analysis with socio-technical systems analysis. In particular, we (i) use linguistic approaches to extract institutional rules and norms from OSS contributors' communications to represent the evolution of their governance systems, and (ii) construct socio-technical networks based on longitudinal collaboration records to represent each project's organizational structure. We combined the two methods and applied them to a dataset of developer digital traces from 253 nascent OSS projects within the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) incubator. We find that the socio-technical and institutional features relate to each other, and provide complimentary views into the progress of the ASF's OSS projects. Refining these combined analyses can help provide a more precise understanding of the synchronization between the evolution of institutional governance and organizational structure.

Governance in online communities is an increasingly high-stakes challenge, and yet many basic features of offline governance legacies-juries, political parties, term limits, and formal debates, to name a few-are not in the feature-sets of the software most community platforms use. Drawing on the paradigm of Institutional Analysis and Development, this paper proposes a strategy for addressing this lapse by specifying basic features of a generalizable paradigm for online governance called Modular Politics. Whereas classical governance typologies tend to present a choice among wholesale ideologies, such as democracy or oligarchy, Modular Politics would enable platform operators and their users to build bottom-up governance processes from computational components that are modular and composable, highly versatile in their expressiveness, portable from one context to another, and interoperable across platforms. This kind of approach could implement pre-digital governance systems as well as accelerate innovation in uniquely digital techniques. As diverse communities share and connect their components and data, governance could occur through a ubiquitous network layer. To that end, this paper proposes the development of an open standard for networked governance.

Whether we recognize it or not, the Internet is rife with exciting and original institutional forms that are transforming social organization on and offline. Governing these Internet platforms and other digital institutions has posed a challenge for engineers and managers, many of whom have little exposure to the relevant history or theory of institutional design. The dominant guiding practices for the design of digital institutions to date in human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, and the tech industry at large have been an incentive-focused behavioral engineering paradigm encompassing atheoretical approaches such as emulation, A/B-testing, engagement maximization, and piecemeal issue-driven engineering. One institutional analysis framework that has been useful in the study of traditional institutions comes from scholars of natural resource management, particularly that community of economists, anthropologists, and environmental and political scientists focused around the work of Elinor Ostrom, known collectively as the "Ostrom Workshop." A key finding from this community that has yet to be broadly incorporated into the design of many digital institutions is the importance of including participatory change mechanisms in what is called a "constitutional layer" of institutional design. The institutional rules that compose a constitutional layer facilitate stakeholder participation in the ongoing process of institutional design change. We explore to what extent consideration of constitutional layers is met or could be better met in three varied cases of digital institutions: cryptocurrencies, cannabis informatics, and amateur Minecraft server governance. Examining such highly varied cases allows us to demonstrate the broad relevance of constitutional layers in many different types of digital institutions.

We present HeapCraft: an open-source suite of interactive data exploration and visualization tools that allows researchers, server administrators and game designers to analyze and potentially influence player behavior in Minecraft. Our framework includes a telemetry system, several tools for visualizing and representing the collected data, and tools for modifying the game experience in controlled ways. Measures that we use to quantify and visualize player behavior and collaboration have been derived from a large data set containing 3451 player-hours from 908 players and 43 different servers. HeapCraft has been demonstrated on a variety of tasks including player behavior classification, as well as quantifying and improving collaboration of players on Minecraft servers. HeapCraft is freely available and serves to democratize game analytics for the Minecraft community at large.