collaboration and governance of open source projects

Collaboration and Governance in OSS

projects(Preliminary work)

Javier Cánovas, Jordi Cabotjordi.cabot@inria.fr

http://modeling-languages.com

Background We can all agree that development is a collaboration

process

We didn’t see this collaboration taking place in the development of MDE artefacts (not talking about synch development)

We built Collaboro, a tool to enable the collaboration of domain experts and technical people when building a DSL. See http://modeling-languages.com/enabling-the-collaborative-definition-of-dsls/

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Collaboro

DSL

Abstract Syntax

Concepts & relationship

s

Well-formed rules

Concrete Syntax

Textual Graphical

Semantics

Denotational Pragmatic Translationa

l Operational

Collaboro

• Providing means to discuss about language elements

• Overcoming technical barriers

Participation

• Facilitating voting and decision processes• Keeping traceability

Collaboration

Representing collaborations

Collaboro process

Effective Collaboration requires Governance

How does the community make a decision?– Majority? Unanimity? Dictatorship?– Minimal participation level?– Depending on the phase? (proposals,

comments, solution)

This is NOT a MDE problem – Switched to study OSS projects

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How? Existing tools only store facts

- No support for the decision process

- No traceability of the decisions

OSS development

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Each phase implies decisions

Is governance a real challenge in OSS

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In a survey among OSS contributors, they said:1. Understanding the governance model (e.g.

who/when/how decides to accept a patch) was very difficult (implicit, scattered,…)

2. A clear view of this model would attract more contributors

3. They believed it was feasible to define the governance model

A manual analysis of several well-known ones confirmed 1) and the extreme variability among them (also in terms of tools: forums, email,…)

Let’s help all OSS projects define their governance rules!

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By providing a DSL that facilitates the specification of governance rules in a “standard” format

And a decision engine able to interpret and apply these rules to evolve a project status

Relying on Collaboro to store the collaboration information

Governance metamodel

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Example

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Project myProject {Roles: CommittersDeadlines:

myDeadline : 7 daysRules:

myMajorityRule : Majority {applied to Taskwhen TaskReviewpeople Committersrange PresentminVotes 0deadline myDeadline

}}

Enforcing the rules (Optional)

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Architecture

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Mining governance models

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Taking OSS projects in GitHub

Goal: get an idea of the (often implicit) popular governance models adopted

Study possible correlations between the governance models and the “success” of a project– Is democracy better???

A word of caution

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Many OSS projects are “fake” /dead (i.e. they do not really want collaborators: backup, CV)

85% of projects have never been forked