The Case for Developer Driven Open Source Governance

How does your organisation manage open source governance? Do you have a standard policy in place? Do you revisit it frequently? And, do you involve your developers in the development of your governance policy? In the research study Accenture completed last year, companies and organisations stated that building skills in open source products and technologies was a bigger challenge than open source governance. This was especially pronounced in public sector organisations.

I was surprised. Is governance really easier than skill building? Skill building takes time, people need hands-on experience and formal training to learn new things—and they need to be motivated to do it. Trying to make unmotivated people learn new things is not really “motivational work”. So, yes, in some cases, skill-building can be really hard.

On the other hand, governance (and in this case open source governance) can sometimes be seen simply as a bureaucratic exercise. Policy in place - check, legal people involved and the required approvals received - check, policy communicated to all relevant people - check, mandatory one hour training on the policy taken by all relevant people - check. How hard can it be?