2025-03-10 –, Wintergarten
Think your project's technical direction just depends on code? Think again! How you structure your community shapes what you build - from KISS to corporate, from elite hackers to broad participation. See real-world patterns (linux distributions) of how governance creates technical culture, and learn to align your community with your goals.
Based on hands-on research and real-world case studies, this talk explores how the way we organize our open source communities directly impacts what we build and how we build it. Through practical examples, we'll see how different community structures create distinct "technical mindsets" that influence every aspect of a project.
Our research reveals three major patterns in how open source projects organize themselves and their technical culture:
1. Elite-driven minimalist approaches emphasizing KISS principles
2. Technical democracies prioritizing broad participation
3. Company-focused models balancing commercial and community interests
We'll examine how these organizational patterns influence crucial aspects of software development:
- What makes a "good" contribution
- How technical decisions get made
- Who can participate and how
- The balance between stability and new features
- How different technical approaches coexist (or clash)
The findings show that your community's structure does more than just organize people—it creates a specific technical culture that shows up in everything from UI decisions to API design. This understanding is crucial for project leaders who want to build communities that create technology matching their vision and values.
*Even more monolithic community structures need to take into account the risk of forks and
Through real-world examples, this talk offers practical insights for open source leaders to design community structures that support their project's goals, building thriving communities that develop software true to their intended purpose.
Keywords: open source governance, community management, technical culture, software development, project organization
Dr. Daniel Guagnin studied Sociology, Computer Science, and Financial Economics in Freiburg and has been researching the interactions between technology and society in the fields of data protection, IT security, and digitalization since 2010.
In his doctoral thesis (2014-2019), he investigated the interplay between community governance and the nature of collaborative products. Daniel has been a member of FIfF (Forum of Computer Scientists for Peace and Social Responsibility) since 2018.
Since 2022, he has been heading the "Networks and Society" division at the nexus Institute in Berlin. There, he leads research projects on the "ethical" development of AI, data protection, and participation projects such as the Dialogue for Cybersecurity of the German Federal Office for Information Security.