Preamble: About these Principles - Each open source software project is unique, but many face common challenges. For open source communities to be both successful and sustainable, they need to make decisions about how they will work together.
For example, Nadia Eghbal observed this dilemma in Roads and Bridges (a report on challenges of open source infrastructure maintenance), “Fundamentally, digital infrastructure has a free rider problem. Resources are offered for free, and everybody (whether individual developer or large software company) uses them, so nobody is incentivized to contribute back, figuring that somebody else will step in. Left unchecked, this will lead to a tragedy of the commons.”
Fortunately, there is a vast body of knowledge about ways that communities can effectively steward resources while avoiding tragedies of the commons. This knowledge was most prominently synthesized by Elinor Ostrom in her seminal work, Governing the Commons, which offers a set of principles for “institutional analysis and design.”
Governing the Commons is a scientific and highly technical text about the governance of natural resource systems (like watersheds, woodsheds, fisheries, etc). Recent scholarship, such as Governing Knowledge Commons, has applied this analytical framework to digital resources like data and code. Meanwhile, commons scholar Silke Helfrich has helped translate Ostrom's ‘design principles’ into accessible language.
In the SustainOSS network, through a series of workshops and other dialogues, we translated Helfrich’s translation of Ostrom’s principles into language that is more directly applicable to open source communities — in hopes that this language may help such communities apply these principles.
We hope these Principles for Governing Open Source Commons can help open source software communities (as well as communities that produce other digital commons) to cope with the dilemmas that come with growth and other changes over time. These guidelines might be useful in the process of drafting community guidelines, facilitating the evolution of existing projects from one phase to another, informing the work of conflict resolution within communities — and even in guiding the decisions of funders, policymakers, and corporations whose resources and regulatory structures might support (or constrain) all of the above.
NOTE: this document weaves three sets of statements together:
This is a living document. We're eager to continue receiving feedback that can clarify these principles and elaborate on their potential usefulness. Please share your perspective!
Individuals who have rights to appropriate resources must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the resource itself.
As a commoner I clearly understand for which resources I need to care for and with whom I share this responsibility. Commons resources are those that we create together, that we maintain as gifts whose use has been guaranteed to everyone.
We clearly articulate the purpose of our project (i.e. our vision, mission, and scope) as well as our values and principles (i.e. the good we manifest in the world, and the way we do our work). We are guided by our purpose and principles in all that we do.
Rules are appropriately related to local conditions (including both regarding the appropriation of common resources — restricting time, place, technology, quantity, etc; and rules related to provision of resources — requiring labor, materials, money, etc.)
As a commoner I am satisfied that there is a fair relationship between my contributions and the benefits I receive.
We make agreements that establish fair relationships among contributors, users, our products, and the project itself. We assign licenses that align with our purpose and values. We set clear expectations for contributors regarding the nature of their contributions.
Collective-choice arrangements allow most resource appropriators to participate in the decision-making process.
We enter into or modify our own rules and commitments, and every commoner can participate in this process. Our commitments serve to create, maintain, and preserve the commons to satisfy our needs.
We make it clear who can participate in what kind of decision-making, under which circumstances. Our decision-making processes are transparent, and account for the diverse perspectives of our community.
Effective monitoring by monitors who are part of or accountable to the appropriators.
We monitor the respect of these commitments ourselves and sometimes we mandate others whom we trust to help reach this goal. We continually reassess whether our commitments still serve their purpose.
We monitor our adherence to our principles, values, and purpose. We engage in regular testing — of code as well as our assumptions. We share information about the status of our work with the community, and we are committed to improvement when we find it to be needed.
There is a scale of graduated sanctions for resource appropriators who violate community rules.
We work out appropriate rules for dealing with violations of our commitments. We determine whether and what kinds of sanctions shall be used, depending on the context and severity of a violation.
When people act in ways that are out of line with our project’s stated principles and purpose, we use a range of methods to encourage re-alignment — from gentle admonishment up to removal from the community of those who can’t or won’t abide by our stated expectations.
Mechanisms of conflict resolution are cheap and of easy access.
Every commoner can make use of a space and means for conflict resolution. We seek to resolve conflicts among us in an easily accessible and straightforward way.
We are committed to fair resolution of disagreements when they arise. The ability to resolve disagreements is distributed and accessible, so that all participants feel like they can participate in the process of resolving conflicts that they are a part of.
The rights of a community to devise and govern its own institutions is recognized by external authorities.
We regulate our own affairs, and external authorities respect that.
Our projects have autonomy to organize ourselves. We make decisions about how we structure our work and our communities as it is appropriate to our projects’ principles, values, and purpose.
Appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.
We realize that every commons is part of a larger whole. Therefore, different institutions working at different scales are needed to coordinate stewardship and to cooperate with each other.
We embrace the complexity of our projects, which involve multiple parties and various scales, and so we engage in decision-making at various scales with various parties. Modules exist within broader projects, which might exist within organizations, which might use one or more platforms, which themselves exist within technological ecosystems, such as the broader free/libre open source software community, and so on. Our governance systems coordinate and cooperate across these levels, and we assume that whenever feasible and appropriate, decisions should be made by people who are ‘closest’ to the matter at hand.
For the next iteration of this document, we aim to apply these principles in the form of questions that community leaders and participants might ask about how decisions are made in their community.
(This is inspired by both Fabriders’ QAF and the Governing Knowledge Commons’ research framework.)
For the next phase of this work, we may structure these questions in a matrix that applies each principle listed above to each the various layers of an open source community (as per this draft here).
Your feedback is welcome! Leave a comment here or join us here in the SustainOSS Discourse forum or the talk page.
Contributors: Richard Littauer, Ben Nickolls, Andrew Nesbitt, Denise Cooper, Michael Downey, Caroline Corsal, James Haydon, Karen Sandler, Software Freedom Conservancy, and quite a few others! Thanks to both the SustainOSS network and the Aspiration NPDev Summit.
| Authors | Richard Littauer, Ben Nickolls, Andrew Nesbitt, Denise Cooper, Michael Downey, Caroline Corsal, James Haydon, Karen Sandler, Greg Bloom |
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| License | CC-BY-SA-4.0 |
| Cite as | Richard Littauer, Ben Nickolls, Andrew Nesbitt, Denise Cooper, Michael Downey, Caroline Corsal, James Haydon, Karen Sandler, Greg Bloom (2025–2026). "The Principles of Governing Open Source Commons". Appropedia. Retrieved October 4, 2026. |