New Metric: open governance

[agallo70]

Having a true open governance is very important for a successfull open source project. If there are few gatekeepers who accept commits from a very small number of contributors, this is not really a true open source project, it is rather a (free) source code project. "Open governance" is an important "label" to stick to a project.

While it is hard to automatically determine if there is a true open governance or not from a git repository without human interpretation of the bylaws and how-to-contribute files, we can try and monitor the number of contributors whose patches get accepted.

As an example, please check the Zephyer RTOS vs FreeRTOS: the former is hosted by the Linux Foundation and has seen contributions from 300+ individuals in the last two years while the latter has always been driven by 2-3 people only and released under a dual license (open source with exception / commercial).

[germonprez]

Governance is a big issue and one that we should certainly attend to in the CHAOSS project. I think we definitely need to account for metrics around governance as I think they are directly tied to things like inclusion.

[GeorgLink]

Very interesting. Thanks @agallo70!

The theme in your issues appears to be labeling a project:

• Open Governance label (#95)
• Corporate Driven and Community Driven label (#94)

Labeling projects is something we have not pursued in CHAOSS to this point and if this is of interest, we can start discussing, how this can be done.

[sgoggins]

This one is GMD and Risk. We should talk with @kestewart about this and find out what is going on here.

[agallo70]

we can implement this via the Contributor Diversity metric as well as even counting how many submitters there are from each company, as a further degree of open or closed governance - eg Elephant Factor vs actually one or two gatekeepers.