Metagov Spotlight: Exit to Community Calculators
The E2C Calculator is an online tool that helps companies and BDFL governed communities decide if they’re ready to embark on a transition towards more community governance.
Welcome to another Metagov Project Spotlight. In today’s spotlight, we are excited to announce the release of the first public prototype of the Exit to Community (E2C) Calculators.
The project is led by Tara Merk, Josh Tan and Seth Frey. The team is looking for open source communities to get in touch to take part in an action research workshop to test the tool.
Please get in touch if:
You contribute to building an open source software project
Your project is thinking about changing its governance structure to include more stakeholders than before
You are still in the ideation stages of the transition
Why did we make this?
Open Source Software (OSS) has become a critical component of most apps and programs used by individuals and organizations today as well as underpinning much of our current critical digital infrastructure. However, many open source projects continue to be governed by their founder-leaders (referred to as Benevolent Dictators for Life aka BDFLs) others are dependent on a single organization. Given the criticality of OSS, there is a growing concern that centralized governance is a key risk to OSS security and sustainability. For example, the recent XZ hack shows how BDFLs can become bottlenecks or single points of failure.
To increase the resilience and robustness of OSS, especially when it is widely used, OSS projects need to transition towards well structured and transparent community governance.
However, any governance transition comes with its own risks. Periods of change interrupt tried and tested processes. For example, opening a code base to more contributors can come with unexpected security risks when quality checks are decentralized. Transitions can also increase the potential for conflict or lead to change-fatigue amongst contributors. Furthermore, creating well structured and resilient multi-stakeholder governance structures for a project may also require new legal arrangements or the involvement of external consultants.
In short: open source governance transitions are incredibly important for the sustainability of a project, but they’re hard and they can also be expensive.
The E2C Calculator is an online tool that helps companies and BDFL governed communities decide if they’re ready to embark on a transition towards more community governance.
How we envision the Calculator being used
We envision the tool to be used both by individuals, curious to understand their readiness to exit to community, as well as for stakeholder groups to come together to make a decision. The calculator can be used as a tool that helps to anchor the group’s conversation, focus attention where it matters and ultimately help all stakeholders come to a collective decision that everyone feels comfortable with.
We are particularly interested in experimenting with the E2C Calculator as a tool that anchors a conversation within a particular group and would like to optimize the tool for this use case. To support that vision, we are organizing pilot workshops to test the tool with interested communities.
Get in touch if:
You contribute to building an open source software project
Your project is thinking about changing its governance structure to include more stakeholders than before
You are still in the ideation stages of the transition
Note: Anyone can use our first iteration of the calculator. We offer the option for you to leave an email address and a member of our team may contact you to schedule a follow up conversation and user testing.
How it works
The calculator is ultimately a tool intended to help a group of people make the decision to transition their project to community governance. Consequently, we suggest you use the calculator in a group exercise where everyone required to make the decision to transition is seated around a (virtual) table and takes 10 minutes to click through the calculator adding their own subjective inputs. Then, it’s time for everyone to reveal their scores and the team to discuss where results diverge. These might be the areas where you need/ want to build more capacity before feeling fully confident to go ahead with the transition.
Select if you’re a community grown project with a centralized governance style or an open source project developed within a company
As you click through each section, answer each question from your own subjective opinion. Make sure that you’ve answered all the questions before you hit ‘next’.
Once you’re done, your results will be displayed in a radial chart with a percentage readiness score for each section.
Scroll down to learn more about your results and how to contextualize them. Now it’s time to bring it back to the group and discuss where you stand overall!
If you’re interested in giving feedback on your experience we’ve added a way for you to leave your email address at the end of the page. If not, no data will be collected or stored from you using the site.
How did we build it?
We started with the insight that OSS E2Cs are a subset of E2C, which itself is a specific type of exit strategy. As such, we started by extrapolating a general framework for E2C readiness from existing exit readiness criteria and then adapting it to the specificities of OSS.
We grounded our tool in the most common comparable tool that exists in industry today: IPO readiness assessment tools. Our template became Deloitte’s IPO Scanner, which guides companies through a questionnaire and issues results in terms of a ‘readiness score’ indicating how well prepared they are to begin filing for an IPO, the process by which privately held companies sell shares to the public market. Exit to Community and IPOs are similar in that IPOs expand governance to financial shareholders and E2C expands governance to contributors, users and stewards.
Because there are similarities, we were able to draw inspiration from some of the key assessment categories used by IPO readiness frameworks (a well understood industry, employing vast numbers of lawyers, bankers and consultants!) to inform our E2C calculator.
We started here because we believe that deciding to E2C should be a more widely available option for organizations seeking alternative business models, and be taken with as much consideration as deciding to IPO. Our calculator builds on the frameworks of IPO assessment to enable organizations to make this pathway more viable.
Sourcing questions iteratively
Our second step consisted of reviewing literature on cooperative conversions, steward ownership conversions and DAOfication in Web3, in order to discern more E2C specific criteria. Again, we grouped these and added them into our tool as questions.
Third, we reviewed criteria put forward by the open source community, such as the Apache Foundation Incubator graduation criteria and CHAOSS metrics to tailor our questions specifically to the maturity of open source software projects. From our large set of questions we began to iteratively filter out the most important ones.
Figuring out the importance of different questions
We began adding weightings to the importance of the answer to each question in order to begin understanding to what extent different aspects contribute towards the readiness of an organization to E2C. The initial weightings were determined through discussion between the three of us, drawing on prior knowledge and experience. We then ran a number of rounds of pairwise voting between different questions and opened up this voting mechanism to a number of OSS experts. If you want to contribute to update the weighting of each question, you can do so here.
Testing our calculator with communities & future outlook
Finally, we’re hoping to refine the framework with various communities who are currently in the process of doing an E2C to assess its usefulness in a given context - that’s what this public prototype is for! Please reach out if you think your community could benefit from one of our guided research workshops. In the next version, we would like to include more tradeoff calculations within the calculator to help projects make an informed decision as to whether the costs of transitioning are justified. Specifically, we are working towards incorporating a model that approximates the costs of a transition in a given context and plots them against the project’s valuation.
- Tara Merk
Acknowledgments
We are deeply grateful to Cent Hosten for helping us bring this first prototype to life and to Jenny Fan for her thoughtful review. We are grateful for the support of the National Science Foundation and the Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund (Ford Foundation, Sloan Foundation, Omidyar Network, Open Society Foundations, Mozilla Foundation, and Open Collective) for funding our work.