A philosophy of project governance | Drew DeVault’s Blog

I’ve been in the maintainer role for dozens of projects for a while now, and have moderated my fair share of conflicts. I’ve also been on the other side, many times, as a minor contributor watching or participating in conflict within other projects. Over the years, I’ve developed an approach to project governance which I believe is lightweight, effective, and inclusive.

I hold the following axioms to be true:

• Computer projects are organized by humans, creating a social system.
• Social systems are fundamentally different from computer systems.
• Objective rules cannot be programmed into a social system.

And the following is true of individuals within those systems:

• Project leadership is in a position to do anything they want.
• Project leadership will ultimately do whatever they want, even if they have to come up with an interpretation of the rules which justifies it.
• Individual contributors who have a dissonant world-view from project leadership will never be welcome under those leaders.

Any effective project governance model has to acknowledge these truths. To this end, the simplest effective project governance model is a BDFL, which scales a lot further than people might expect.