[NEW CHALLENGE] Determining your existing governance

[shaunagm]

Tell us about the governance challenge you're thinking of

Many projects, including smaller and newer projects, do not have any sort of explicit, formal governance. This is not always a problem, but it can be confusing to newcomers or even existing community members. It can also be a barrier to collaboration with potential partners who want to understand who they're dealing with and assess if they're reliable.

Signs that a project is running into this problem include:

• the maintainer feels overloaded, because while other community members are willing to do things, no one knows to ask them
• the community wants to grow or transition, or tackle a big new project, but is confused about who decides what changes will happen
• the community wants to work with a partner or accept money from someone who requires them to have explicit governance

Potential Resources

Some resources that might help folks:

• Community Rule is a site for helping make governance rules explicit. They even have some guides including instructions for a workshop, although I think it might need to be modified/customized for use here.
• Resources that provide specific examples of existing governance structures in FOSS might be helpful as a reference point, although again I think they'd need adaptation for use in a live workshop setting and to tackle the specific challenge of "what is our governance". Maybe an exercise like "read these examples, what resonates with your project" Regardless two resources here are FOSS Governance Collection, which has a big list of governance documents, and PEP-8002 - the governance survey which has a detailed breakdown of a few key models.
• I'm not aware of any existing questionnaires that do this, but one way of inferring governance structure is by working backwards from who has access to which online accounts. Who has moderator/owner privileges/commit rights on github/gitlab, slack/discord/irc, etc.
• Power-mapping exercises might also be useful here, for eliciting an understanding of softer/less permission-focused kinds of power?
• There's something to be said for surveying the existing community about how they think things work. For larger projects, this might illuminate real ways that the community is functioning that a singular leader can't see. For smaller projects, it is more likely to illuminate misapprehensions or areas of ignorance in the community, as well as perhaps making clear the most visible and important parts of the governance.

[shaunagm]

Here's a stab at a questionnaire to elucidate existing governance:

Version Control

• Who owns your version control repository?
• Who has merge rights to key repositories?
• Who can review pull requests?
• Who can triage issues?
• Who is actually triaging issues and reviewing pull requests?
• Who seems to feel comfortable opening issues? Is it mostly maintainers, community members, users, strangers?

Server

• Who owns the server or server account?
• Who has access to the server?
• Who is responsible for the project being "up"? That is, when there's an urgent problem, who drops everything to fix it?

Communications

• Who owns the accounts for communications tools such as Slack, Discord, Zulip, Discourse, Matrix, etc.?
• Who are admins on those accounts?
• Who drives conversation in communication channels?
• Who welcomes newcomers?
• Who answers help requests?
• Who do people defer to? Who do they seem to trust?