A Human Behavioral Baseline for Collective Governance in Software Projects
This provides a baseline for evaluating AI-mediated workflows in software governance, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The study analyzed governance documents from 710 open source projects to understand how participation and control evolve, finding that projects define more roles and actions over time with increased evenness, while rule composition remains stable.
We study how open source communities describe participation and control through version controlled governance documents. Using a corpus of 710 projects with paired snapshots, we parse text into actors, rules, actions, and objects, then group them and measure change with entropy for evenness, richness for diversity, and Jensen Shannon divergence for drift. Projects define more roles and more actions over time, and these are distributed more evenly, while the composition of rules remains stable. These findings indicate that governance grows by expanding and balancing categories of participation without major shifts in prescriptive force. The analysis provides a reproducible baseline for evaluating whether future AI mediated workflows concentrate or redistribute authority.