# Patterns in the Transition From Founder-Leadership to Community Governance of Open Source

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16295 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16295/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 83 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Higher-order Coreference Resolution with Coarse-to-fine Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05392/) (2018)
- [On a generalization of the Jensen-Shannon divergence and the JS-symmetrization of distances relying on abstract means](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04017/) (2019)
- [PolicyKit: Building Governance in Online Communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04236/) (2020)
- [NLP4Gov: A Comprehensive Library for Computational Policy Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03206/) (2024)
- [Do We Run How We Say We Run? Formalization and Practice of Governance in OSS Communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14245/) (2023)
- [Sustainability Forecasting for Apache Incubator Projects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14252/) (2021)
- [Open Source Software Sustainability: Combining Institutional Analysis and Socio-Technical Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03144/) (2022)
- [The Evolution of Wikipedia's Norm Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.01725/) (2015)
- [Emergence of integrated institutions in a large population of self-governing communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10312/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Open digital public infrastructure needs community management to ensure accountability, sustainability, and robustness. Yet open-source projects often rely on centralized decision-making, and the determinants of successful community management remain unclear. We analyze 637 GitHub repositories to trace transitions from founder-led to shared governance. Specifically, we document trajectories to community governance by extracting institutional roles, actions, and deontic cues from version-controlled project constitutions GOVERNANCE .md. With a semantic parsing pipeline, we cluster elements into broader role and action types. We find roles and actions grow, and regulation becomes more balanced, reflecting increases in governance scope and differentiation over time. Rather than shifting tone, communities grow by layering and refining responsibilities. As transitions to community management mature, projects increasingly regulate ecosystem-level relationships and add definition to project oversight roles. Overall, this work offers a scalable pipeline for tracking the growth and development of community governance regimes from open-source software's familiar default of founder-ownership.