Principles of Authentic Participation

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Starts Early.

This came out of the discussions about organizations showing up with mature, fully baked contributions over which the community had no input.

Puts the Community First.

This reflected the general consensus that when an organization and the community want different things, the community needs to come first.

Starts With Listening.

This was Duane’s reflection of some comments about folks showing up to projects with no historical context and telling them everything they were doing wrong.

Has Transparent Motivations.

Without a shared understanding of the motivations, it’s impossible to resolve differences of opinion effectively. No hidden motives.

Enforces Respectful Behavior.

Participants agree to adhere to community-established codes of conduct. Organizations commit to holding their participants accountable for their behavior.

Ends Gracefully.

No sudden withdrawal of resources without notification and an exit plan. Clear documentation that would allow the community to pick up projects when a company decides to withdraw support.

Purpose

To define a core set of principles of what authentic participation means in multiple contexts (e.g. corporate, individual, humanitarian/NGO, etc.).

These principles can be used as a starting place for future work, such as a best practices document, a certification body, or other mediums. But before we get tactical, we need to be strategic about what principles are essential to authentic contribution.

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

Indices and tables