Open Source Summit North America 2018

Many Open Source projects bootstrap their governance by filling leadership positions with appointees from companies that provide financial support. As projects mature and individuals establish a history of contributions, the actual leaders of the community tend to become evident. To keep the project healthy and efficient, it becomes necessary to restructure governance in a way that enables community leaders to bubble up to positions they can most effectively fill.

OpenDaylight (www.opendaylight.org) & OPNFV (www.opnfv.org) faced this journey in the past few years. Both communities had months-long, extremely-active discussion to design an election system that met their requirements as both clarified their values and worked through corner cases.

We’d like to share our lessons-learned with other communities to help them move to governance systems that are efficient for them while avoiding some of our mistakes.