Minimum Viable Governance lightweight community structure to grow your FOSS project - Justin Colannino

This resource first appeared in issue #88 on 20 Aug 2021 and has tags Technical Leadership: Open Source Management

Minimum Viable Governance: lightweight community structure to grow your FOSS project - Justin Colannino

Growing a community around an open source research software effort to the point that there are external maintainers is a sign of huge success - but it makes things way more complicated. It’s a pain to be the sole maintainer, but at least there’s clarity in decision making.

Here Colannino describes the “Minimum Viable Governance” (MVG) set of template documents for bootstrapping a real open source governance framework. Some areas - trademark, and antitrust policy(!) - matter less for research computing, but decision making, project charter, code of conduct, and guidelines for contributing are all very relevant. This is a good starting point as is, or for thinking through the issues.