Transitioning governance rights over an open source project to the community is not easy. The decision to start this process should be made in a thoughtful manner and implemented only when you and your community are ready. The E2C calculator is a tool to support current and future stewards of open source software projects to determine if and how ready they are to begin the transition.
This tool is built for open source projects that are either currently governed by their founder leaders or developed within a closed organization. Ideally, after using this tool you will have a clearer understanding of how ready your project is for community governance and which areas you could be working on more to improve your readiness.
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.
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. After 10 minutes, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 beta 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.
This is a research project collaboratively conducted by Tara Merk (CNRS, BlockchainGov and Metagov), Josh Tan (Metagov & Oxford University) and Seth Frey (UC Davis).
Our work is funded by the NSF and the Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund (Ford Foundation, Sloan Foundation, Omidyar Network, Open Society Foundations, Mozilla Foundation, and Open Collective)