Exploring Governance Models in Open Science Community Projects: Building Governance in The Turing Way

Open Life Science (OLS) cohort 5 project title: Exploring “Governance Models” for Open Science community projects as per their maturity stage

"Governance is the framework of authority and accountability that defines and controls the outputs, outcomes and benefits from projects, programmes and portfolios” (reference: The APM Body of Knowledge 7th edition). In the context of open source, governance is considered an important aspect of managing contributions and access to resources openly and equitably. Governance in open source/science has been extensively described (see A guide to open source project governance models by RedHat) and practised differently in different projects (See “From benevolent dictatorships to meritocracy”, Ref: Governance models. 2015. http://oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/governancemodels).

In this project, we explore a democratic and trust-based model (that doesn’t solely focus on contributions) which builds on Elinor Ostrom’s “Governing the Commons” in the context of community-based Knowledge Commons, Digital Commons and open science. This project was brought into OLS to create accountability for integrating open science framework in our process and develop a roadmap for the project development and implementation. The ultimate goal is to develop a spectrum of ‘models’ or frameworks that apply to distributed/decentralised open science community projects, which can be selected and adopted by different projects based on their community needs.