Do We Run How We Say We Run? Formalization and Practice of Governance in OSS Communities

Open Source Software (OSS) communities often resist regulation typical of traditional organizations. Yet formal governance systems are being increasingly adopted among communities, particularly through non-profit project-sponsoring foundations. Our study looks at the Apache Software Foundation Incubator program and 208 of the projects it has supported. We assemble a scalable, semantic pipeline to discover and analyze the governance behavior of projects from their mailing lists. We then investigate the relationship of such behavior to what the formal policies prescribe, through their own governance priorities and how their members internalize them. Our findings indicate that a greater amount of policy over a governed topic doesn’t elicit more governed activity on that topic, but does predict greater internalization by community members. Moreover, alignment of community operations with foundation governance, be it dedicating their governance focus or adopting policy along topics seeing greater policy-making, has limited association with project outcomes.