does anyone have examples of medium-small software projects which aren't big enough to have a foundation but have still done some work to formalize their decision-making process? I'm thinking of projects with a small core team of 3-5 people describing how they make key decisions and how the core team is held accountable for the resources they control
many of us have seen software projects that started out as little fun experiments and then grew into systems that many people ended up relying on, and did not stop to consider questions of governance until much later than those questions were relevant, because they just wanted to keep doing what had worked at a small scale
large projects that are successful often end up with foundations supporting them, because you need structure like that in order to enact democratic governance
but that comes at a cost which doesn't make sense at small scales, so how do you avoid despotism when you're big enough to be more than one person but not big enough to have a foundation?
Oct 3, 2026, 10:52 PM@technomancy not sure if this exactly fits what you’re looking for but it feels similarly shaped - https://rfc.zeromq.org/spec/42/
@djsundog wow, this is very detailed
it's focused mostly on code contributions; I think it would be better to separate out the technical patch contribution flow from the concerns of governance, but this is still much better than 99% of projects
the "Project Administration" part at the end touches on what I had in mind; I'll think about this
thanks for sharing!
Oct 3, 2026, 11:50 PM@technomancy happy to pass it on - Pieter Hintjens was really thoughtful both about how software should be structured and how the social structures around software should also have structure, so I find myself revisiting his ideas pretty regularly.
@djsundog @technomancy his idea of "optimistic merge" has stuck with me. I've not done precisely this on any project but... Anyway here for "+1 on Hintjens' writing"
Not sure you'll like this one, but sqlite has a pretty small team, I think?
@technomancy My idea that I keep promoting is an association according to Swiss law. I know, FIFA is not a model org – but at least we know it can scale.
My current effort: https://wiki.grenzland.club/view/grenzland-association
@technomancy Django Commons has done something similar to this, though it might not be exactly what you’re looking for. You can check out the controls repo here https://github.com/django-commons/controls