Principles of Authentic Participation

License: CC BY 4.0

This is the main page for the Principles of Authentic Participation. The purpose of these Principles are to define a core set of principles of what authentic participation means in multiple contexts (e.g. corporate, individual, humanitarian/NGO, etc.).

More information is available below. To find the Creative Commons-licensed source for these Principles, see the GitHub repo.

High-level recap

This discussion took place across two working sessions at Sustain 2020:

  • Models for corporate accountability as open source community members (a.k.a. what does it mean to be a corporate member of open source communities?)

  • Principles of Authentic Contribution (session notes)

Across the sessions, we talked about the following:

  1. Organizational accountability

  2. How to participate in open source transparency and authentically as an organization

  3. Desire to create an inter-organizational resource to take back to our orgs to help explain what authentic participating in open source actually looks like

  4. Explore ways to build social accountability into our workplaces

Themes from Sustain conversations

The session notes are annotated and color-coded according to the following themes:

  • Maintainer responsibility: Open-sourcing your own projects or participating in existing communities

  • Guiding hand: Navigating contribution intent with a hidden agenda that is not well-communicated

  • Participation: Making key decisions while involving a community

  • Equalizing knowledge: Understated value in documentation?

  • Undervaluation of open source: Communicating less obvious perks for engaging authentically

  • You and corporation: Relationship between individual contributors and the organization they represent in their contributions