[Evergreen-governance-l] Simon Phipps article on assessing governance of open source projects

[Lori Bowen Ayre]

Dan,
I shared your link with the Koha mailing list and got this response from (as
you'll see) a Koha community member with strong feelings!:

The author's two most famous memberships are of OSI, which sort-of forked
from the well-governed SPI, failed in its primary aim and became an
unaccountable zombie for a while; and of Sun's workforce, who were so good
at embedding good governance that we now have to choose from a family of
MySQL children and from a family of OpenOffice branches(!) So I'm not
surprised that I feel Simon Phipps's beliefs are incorrect, especially
around who should be in charge.  The rules are fine, but
appear to almost completely ignore key topics like finance and trade which
are often the most divisive.
We could learn far more from general good governance from civil society and
charities than from reinventing the wheel.  Software development is not
*that* unique. If you're into books, I heartily recommend "Voluntary but not
amateur" (despite the dubious title) as a general background and a lot of
the recent "Simply ..."  guides from www.uk.coop like Simply
Governance... or online, some of them are linked from
http://www.uk.coop/tags/term/governance.


<http://www.uk.coop/tags/term/governance>Another suggestion for a
potentially interesting read was Images of Organisation by Morgan.

Lori

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 8:05 AM, Dan Scott <dan at coffeecode.net> wrote:

> I found this article by Simon Phipps (formerly responsible for Sun
> Microsystem's open source efforts, now a member of the board of
> directors for the Open Source Initiative) interesting to consider in
> light of our ongoing efforts to establish a governance model for
> Evergreen:
>
> http://webmink.com/essays/open-by-rule/
>
> In the article, Simon has tried to distill his experience with various
> open source projects into a rough governance benchmark based on the most
> effective communities (again, in his experience). His thoughts about
> establishing an "Open Meritocratic Oligarchy" could be timely in light
> of our recent discussions about who should serve on the bootstrap
> oversight board, and in what capacity. His assessment goes beyond mere
> governance models and also includes results (such as "does the project
> have contributors from more than one company", etc). It's a quick, light
> set of criteria without the overhead (and somewhat arbitrary) criteria
> associated with the Business Readiness Rating that I tried applying to
> the Evergreen project years ago, and the focus on governance was
> refreshing.
>
> Simon published an example of applying this benchmark at
> http://webmink.com/2011/02/11/is-libreoffice-open-by-rule/ and it might
> be an interesting exercise to try applying these criteria to Evergreen.
> Simon's opinions are just that - opinions - and there might be good
> reasons for deviating from what he thinks are best practices, but we
> should probably make that rationale explicit if we do decide to go down
> a different path.
>
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>



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Lori Bowen Ayre // Library Technology Consultant
The Galecia Group // www.galecia.com
(707) 763-6869 // Lori.Ayre at galecia.com

<Lori.Ayre at galecia.com>Specializing in open source ILS solutions, RFID,
filtering,
workflow optimization, and materials handling
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