Our proposal for improving the collaboration and governance of open source software projects

1. Collaboration and
Governance in OSS
projects
(Preliminary work)
Javier Cánovas, Jordi Cabot
jordi.cabot@inria.fr
http://modeling-languages.com

2. 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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3. Collaboro
DSL
Abstract
Syntax
Concepts &
relationships
Well-formed
rules
Concrete
Syntax
Textual Graphical
Semantics
Denotational Pragmatic Translational Operational

4. Collaboro
• Providing means to discuss about language
elements
• Overcoming technical barriers
Participation
• Facilitating voting and decision processes
• Keeping traceability
Collaboration

5. Representing collaborations

6. Collaboro process

7. 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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8. How? Existing tools only store facts

9. OSS development
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Each
phase
implies
decisions

10. 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,…)

11. 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

12. Governance metamodel
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13. Example
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Project myProject {
Roles: Committers
Deadlines:
myDeadline : 7 days
Rules:
myMajorityRule : Majority {
applied to Task
when TaskReview
people Committers
range Present
minVotes 0
deadline myDeadline
}
}

14. Enforcing the rules (Optional)
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15. Architecture
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16. 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???

17. 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