Deconstructing written rules and hierarchy in peer produced software communities

# Description

OSS projects are largely volunteer driven initiatives where fleeting developers join, cooperate or migrate between communities. Thus, communities are sustained and competitive products are built despite seemingly less bindings and contracts as compared to conventional software. Yet recently, OSS projects are being increasingly mentored and supported by OSS nonprofits, through outreach, licensing, infrastructure and other logistics. Such organizations, contrary to classical OSS organizing, operate through surprisingly traditional hierarchicies and management approaches. We employ recent advances in computational institutional analysis and NLP to investigate the systems of authority that are reflected in the written policy documents of the Apache Foundation’s OSS governance model.

# Findings

Our study to decipher the effective similarities or departures of the ASF model from conventional software companies reveals evidence of both flat and bureaucratic governance in a peer production set up, suggesting a complicated relationship between business-based theories of administrative hierarchy and foundational principles of the OSS movement.

# Paper

The paper can be found here.