Safe as Milk

Governance best practices

February 20, 2009 4:48 pm Dave Neary community, freesoftware, inkscape, maemo

Jono asked on the AOC blog for successful governance stories, and while I’m happy to comment on the blog, now that I’ve taken the time to write some down, I thought I might as well share them 🙂

Governance comes in many shapes & sizes of course. My favourite governance stories are about federating individuals, who manage to channel community efforts, maintain a meritocracy where code talks, and yet don’t come across as authoritarians.

Outside of Linus (who’s a good example), Ton Roosendaal of Blender has this kind of presence. Talking to Ton, it is easy to see that he cares about Blender and about the Blender Community. The care and attention that he brings to projects like “Elephants Dream” and “Big Buck Bunny”, or to the supporting documentation and conferences he organises for the community, illustrate the esteem in which he holds his users and his developer community. Even the way the Blender Foundation came into being was amazing.

One of my favourite communities is Inkscape. When they broke from Sodipodi, there was this acrimonious flame war, and something of a bitter taste in people’s mouth. So what Bryce Harrington, Nathan Hurst, MenTaLguY and Ted Gould did when they split was decide to throw open the doors, and accept code from all comers. They set a direction and some ambitious goals, but they were very clear from the start – come right in, you’re welcome. And this gave the project some great results, especially early on when it was still establishing itself. Bryce describes one of them in this article.

The success of the Inkscape project’s governance model is borne out by its ability to escape founder’s syndrome – Bryce, Nathan and Ted have now backed away from the project to some extent, they’re still there as wise heads, but they have passed off the direction of the project to other capable people.

I think the way that Drizzle was born bears some resemblance to this, and I really like the way they have consciously broken down the walls which were necessarily up around MySQL. Brian Aker’s been something of an inspiration on this. His mission statement at the announcement of the project was astounding.

Subversion‘s governance model is an exemplar of best practices too. Set a clear project scope (“Subversion is a compelling alternative to CVS”), clear goals, establish transparent and fair community processes, and open up the gates. Anything within the scope of the project is fair game. And once again, code talks. This story, from Karl Fogel’s “Producing OSS” illustrated the robustness of their governance, and the confidence the project’s leaders had in their ability to influence the project.

The Maemo Community Council has the potential to be a very good governance structure, I think.  The idea of a governing body of the community, by the community, for the community, whose goal is to canalise the efforts of a disparate group into something coherent, and to provide a legitimate point of contact for technical decision-makers in Nokia, is a novel one, and hasn’t been tried, as far as I can tell, by other companies.

Counter-examples of good governance are all around, I won’t name any in particular to protect the guilty. But many of them stem from a misguided belief in absolute free speech, to the detriment of the quality of discourse and code in the project (“we are all created equal”) which results in very chatty, but unproductive, individuals taking senior positions in the community, or a sort of shyness of the founder or leader, who doesn’t believe that it’s his place to set a direction and tone.In company-run projects, excessive control or influence is an equally toxic characteristic. Companies who retain a veto on community decisions are companies who do not trust their communities.