Challenges of collaboration
Today the mechanics of collaborative software development are well-understood, settled and essentially standardized in software. Both open-source and enterprise use ticketing in combination with version control to capture the entire product development workflow.
On the other hand, the governance of collaboration is not aided by any software tool or known standard process.
Why the problem matters
Governance is the management of collaborators and their incentives within an enterprise.
In software product development, governance manifests in three day-to-day needs:
- Prioritization: Which issues are addressed first
- Decision-making: What code changes make it to the product
- Attribution: How are individual contributors (ICs) rewarded for their contributions relative to others
In businesses and institutions (startups, corporations, foundations) with rigid roles (leaders, managers, contributors), all three responsibilities of governance are performed by leaders and managers.
But in most non-institutional product collaboration — as well as in some collaboration layers within institutions (early startups, middle layer of enterprises) — clear roles are either absent or too inefficient to adopt. All of open-source falls within this category.
To put this differently, centralized collaborations (businesses, institutions) can implement roles, albeit at the cost of middle-management inefficiencies. Decentralized collaborations (organic open-source) have generally not been able to adopt rigid roles.
Lack of clear roles causes lack of clear responsibilities, lack of fair attribution and seniority, arbitration deadlocks, and ultimately low-velocity and low incentive to participate.
Approach: An open and fair algorithmic economy for peers
Gov4Git addresses the problem of governing initially-undifferentiated collaborators by engaging them in a community-scope market economy that enables and incentivizes individuals to maximize their stake by productive participation.
A community currency of “credits” quantifies the stake and influence of participants, and enables profitable behavior through productive contributions and peer-review.
Gov4Git equips all critical tasks in the product development cycle — regardless of their type (leadership, management, or contribution) with a market mechanism open to everyone, which arbitrates conflicts, rewards impactful participation retro-actively, and penalizes unproductive engagement of community attention.
Our market mechanisms integrate in the standard development cycle in the form of ticket (e.g. GitHub issue) prioritization and merge request (e.g. GitHub pull request) review and approval.
All collaborators can participate in all tasks. However, entering participation requires an investment, which can be profitable or unprofitable depending on its impact and alignment with the community’s opinions and peer-reviews.
Technology: Low-cost, decentralized, trusted computation
It is no insight that “trusted computation” — as embodied by all forms of Byzantine-fault Tolerant State Machine Replication, or alternatives such as blockchain smart contracts — is the highest form of credible and transparent algorithmic governance.
For the purposes of Gov4Git, we developed an architecture for decentralized trusted computation which is in stark contrast to blockchain-based solutions.
Our system can be deployed by any group of possibly non-technical end-user collaborators, who individually have access to git hosting — generally available to most open communities at zero cost (e.g. via GitHub, GitLab, and so on).
Users interact with Gov4Git through a desktop app, which manages their decentralized identity and safeguards the history of their interactions with the community governance.
Benefits of Gov4Git
Any git-based project can adopt Gov4Git governance, either from the start, or mid-journey. We see substantial benefits from adopting governance, and distributing your products along with their governance records.
- Sustainability: Fair quantification of individual collaborator’s contributions and stake in the community enable fair retro-active distribution of funding, charitable grants, or commercialization benefits — a mechanism that attracts and incentivizes collaborators to stay.
- Authenticity: Governance records attest to fair and inclusive practices, as well as establish alignment amongst participants.
- Velocity: Market-driven arbitration leaves no room for decision deadlocks.
- Supply Chain Security: Package managers that distribute software with governance records can mechanically verify that critical updates are approved by large numbers of stakeholders.