Mapping Open Source Governance Models

I already posted the Seven Lessons of Open Source Governance from my talk at FOSS Backstage. Another part of the talk was about a project to map open source governance models. The idea is to have a machine-readable collection of data about how different projects implement their governance and a web page showing that as an overview. This should help with learning from what others have done and provide a resource for further analysis. It's meant as a map, not a navigation system. You still will have to think about what is the right thing to do for your project.

The project is up on GitHub right now. For each project there is a YAML file collecting data such as project name, founding date, links to web sites, governance documents, statistics, or maintainer lists. It's interesting to look into the different implementations of governance there. There is a lot of good material, especially if you look at the mature and well-established foundations such as The Apache Foundation or the Eclipse Foundation. I'm also looking into syncing with some other sources which have similar data such as Choose A Foundation or Wikidata.

The web site is minimalistic now. We'll have to see for what proves to be useful and adapt it to serve these needs. Having access to the data of different projects is useful but maybe it also would be useful to have a list of code of conducts, a comparison of organisation types, or other overview pages.

If you would like to contribute some data about the governance on an open source project which is not listed there or you have more details about one which is already listed please don't hesitate to contribute. Create a pull request or an open an issue and I'll get the information added.

This is a nice small fun project. SUSE Hack Week gives me a bit of time to work on it. If you would like to join, please get in touch.