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OSPO Notes: Open Source Governance — Who Decides, and How
Quoting: OSPO Notes: Open Source Governance — Who Decides, and How | Chris Short —
It’s tempting to treat governance as paperwork — something to sort out after the project gets big enough to need it. That’s backwards and doesn’t consider the here and now while risking the long-term health of a project. Governance is what enables a project to grow safely. Without it, the loudest voice wins every contested decision, and community trust erodes each time that happens. As the Open Organization Leaders Manual frames it: open leaders don’t hoard decision-making authority — they distribute it. That distribution, made explicit and predictable, is governance.
MkDocs provides us with a wonderful example of what happens to a project when governance models aren’t applied. The project has had many leaders, but no decision-making framework to support those leaders at any given moment. The project is pretty much completely stalled due to contention between prolific committers and the project’s creator.
Your job in the OSPO or as an open source leader isn’t to impose a model on every project you touch. It’s to understand which model, or combination of models, a project could use, and what that means for how you or your organization contributes, escalates, and builds relationships over time.
The projects that last are not usually the ones with the most committers or the most funding. They’re the ones with governance clear enough that contributors from all walks of life know how to participate, and community members know the outcome is fair even when they disagree with it. Clear governance is how open source projects outlive their founders, survive controversy, and continue to earn the trust of a world that depends on them.