1. Enabling the Definition and
Enforcement of Governance
Rules in Open Source Systems
Javier Cánovas, Jordi Cabot
ICSE – SEIS conference
May 2015

2. Governance
Making decisions
Flickr/MartisFich

3. Examples
Why?
io.js aims to provide faster and predictable release cycles. It currently
merges in the latest language, API and performance improvements to
V8 while also updating libuv and other base libraries.
This project aims to continue development of io.js under an "open
governance model" as opposed to corporate stewardship.
Source: https://iojs.org/en/faq.html

4. Examples
Source: https://commonspace.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/participationplan/
Mozilla needs a more creative and radical
approach to participation in order to succeed.
…What’s less clear: what practical steps do we
take to supercharge participation at Mozilla? …
…we’ve written a first draft Mozilla Participation
Plan. This plan is focused on increasing the impact
of participation efforts already underway across …

5. Examples
Source: http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2015/Feb/42
******

6. It’s not so strange …

7. It’s not so strange …

8. It’s not so strange …

9. It’s not so strange …
Tholman/elevator.js

10. Governance?
A governance model describes the roles that
project participants can take on and the process for
decision making within the project.
In addition, it describes the ground rules for
participation in the project and the processes
for communicating and sharing within the project
team and community.
In other words it is the governance model that
prevents an open source project from
descending into chaos.

11. Is it really necessary?

12. Our proposal
Defining and Enforcing Governance Rules
Flickr/WillScullin

13. What do we propose?

14. Defining Governance Rules

15. Defining Governance Rules
Project YOUR_PROJECT {
Roles: Leader, Contributors
Deadlines:
D1 : 7 days
Rules:
R1 : Majority {
applied to Task
when TaskReview
people Leader, Contributors
range Present
minVotes All
deadline D1
}
}
DSL
Verbalization
All proposals for bugs and feature requests will
be accepted or rejected in 7 days by the leader
and the contributors of the project according to a
majority voting process with a 50% of positive
votes. To calculate the ratio, only those votes
issued at the moment of applying the rule will be
counted.
Wizard

16. What do we propose?

17. What do we propose?

18. governance.md

19. governance.md

20. Conclusion
- Assessment of the need for mechanisms to facilitate the understanding of
governance in software projects
- Approach to define and enforce governance rules
- Proposal to bring the idea to life (governance.md)
Challenges and innovative aspects
Future vision
- Study usability aspects
- How to specify other rules (e.g., team organization)
- Support for privacy concerns
- Mining existing projects to infer/study their rules
- Empirical evaluation at mid/long term

21. Thanks!
Javier Luis Cánovas Izquierdo
javier.canovas@inria.fr
@jlcanovas
Jordi Cabot
jcabot@uoc.edu
@softmodeling