Resource List: Governance

Resources to inform your governance model development

• Good governance policies for non-profits
• Software outreach: Codes of conduct and friendliness
• Open Leadership Training Series and Framework collection of tutorials and resources to adopt a Code of Conduct, write Contribution Guidelines, create Roadmaps, Open Source Canvas, and more
• Beautiful Trouble collection of strategies, principles, organizing ideas for grassroots engagement and participation

Articles on Governance Models and Contribution Models

• Guide to Understanding governance for your growing project
• Governance Models and Contribution Models
• Open-source Governance (and loose notes)
• Community Governance Considerations of Open Source Projects

Open organization operations handbooks

• Enspiral
• Loomio Co-op Handbook
• Crisp DNA Consulting
• GitLab Team Handbook
• Gini Handbook
• Thoughtbot Playbook
• Valve for New Employees Handbook
• Basecamp Employee Handbook

Decision making frameworks

• Open Decision Framework
• ORID (4 types of questions), “a specific facilitation framework that enables a focused conversation with a group of people in order to reach some point of agreement or clarify differences.”
• Two case studies: Making Open Source Decisions, and a video of Red Hat reflecting on how this works for them
• Technical decisions: Rust Request for Comments (RFC)

Roles and responsibilities

• What are examples of formal roles used in open source projects?
• Roles, responsibilities, and skills in program management (PMI institute)

Links to personal stories about project governance

• Enspiral: Using Loomio to govern a self-organizing community, “example of Loomio being used in Enspiral, a community I’m part of, with more than 200 people distributed around the world. We’re a self-organizing network of self-organizing companies, so we have a lot of practice doing community governance online. We never have everyone in the same physical location, but we want to give everyone the right to participate in community governance. This is the challenge that we designed Loomio to solve: small scale democratic organising without all the meetings.”
• Loomio: How a Worker-Owned Tech Startup Found Investors—and Kept Its Values. “Loomio, as their creation is called, has already enabled thousands of groups to deliberate, debate, and make decisions online. It translates the jargon and hand signals of direct democracy into an intuitive pie chart of opinions and a comment thread. True to its democratic ideals, the company is a worker cooperative, owned by the people who develop the software.”
• Protozoa: Coop-source, building decentralized open source with my tech co-op. “protozoa is a tech coop, and we write open source code. This is a little bit about what that means, and how open source is the foundation on which we’re building an aspirational future.”