Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Today, most people understand the concept of Open Source – certainly we expect most
readers of this blog understand it. View the code, use the code, copy the code, change the
code, and, depending on the license, contribute back changes or not.
What many people don’t get, and something we here at Hyperledger and The Linux Foundation
pride ourselves on doing well, is Open Governance.
The Linux Foundation, and all of our 60+ open source projects, are not-for-pro ts building the
greatest shared R&D investment in history. Open Governance is central to this promise.
Open Governance means that technical decisions -– which features to add, how to add them
and when, among others – for a given Open Source project or projects are made by a group of
community-elected developers drawn from a pool of active participants. It is as close to the
ideal of pure technical meritocracy as one can get and we strive continuously to reach that
ideal.
Hyperledger recently concluded the 2017-2018 Technical Steering Committee (TSC) election,
and so we thought it an opportune time to explain the ABCs of Open Governance. Please note
that this is one Open Governance implementation and clearly not the only way to do it, but
rather one proven and effective way.
The TL;DR is that the TSC is the ultimate authority on technical decisions. This includes which
new projects are admitted to Hyperledger , which current projects graduate from Incubation to
https://www.hyperledger.org/blog/2017/09/06/abcs-of-open-governance 1/5
1/12/2018 ABCs of Open Governance – Hyperledger
Active , and the rules by which each Hyperledger project will operate.
As a developer or maintainer, this translates into one thing: trust. You know how decisions will
be made and the process by which people will be selected to make these decisions.
Hyperledger is vendor-neutral and technical contributions are based on meritocracy. We will
always remain immune to the commercial interests of any single company.
This year, 424 active contributors were identi ed as eligible to participate in the TSC election
process.
The Linux Foundation maintains an expert staff with decades of combined experience
managing the operations of large scale, Openly Governed Open Source projects.
For Hyperledger, the Sr. Program Manager Todd Benzies ensures the trains run on time.
This nominating process produced 32 candidates for the 11 TSC spots. These 32 come from
20 different organizations, across a spectrum of industries, from technology vendors to
foundations to end users from a variety of industries. They include people who work at
Hyperledger members and non-members and some are standing as individuals.
A policy whose importance is hard to overstate is that anyone elected to a seat on the TSC is
elected as a person unbound to the company for which they presently work. Should any TSC
member during their tenure leave an employer for another, this would have zero impact on
their standing as member of the Hyperledger TSC.
https://www.hyperledger.org/blog/2017/09/06/abcs-of-open-governance 3/5
1/12/2018 ABCs of Open Governance – Hyperledger
The arrow highlights one of the things that we’ve learned along the way as a trick to the trade
of running open governance well. The voting system has to be unquestionably secure and fair
(something by now truly everyone can relate to…).
We use the Condorcet Internet Voting System to safeguard the privacy of this election and
voting process. CIVS can only be accessed by authorized voters, who receive a unique URL
tied to their email address. Voters rank a set of possible choices and individual voter rankings
are combined into an anonymous overall ranking of the choices. One vote is allowed per IP
address.
Results
This process yields a fairly and openly-elected technical decision making body pulled from the
community that cares about Hyperledger. We know they care not because they said so, not
because the company they work for has joined Hyperledger, but because they invested their
time to make contributions to Hyperledger code bases. Or, as Hyperledger Executive Director
Brian Behlendorf says, “it’s a do -ocracy.”
Arnaud Le Hors
Baohua Yang
Binh Nguyen
Christopher Ferris
Dan Middleton
Greg Haskins
Hart Montgomery
Jonathan Levi (new)
Kelly Olson (new)
https://www.hyperledger.org/blog/2017/09/06/abcs-of-open-governance 4/5
1/12/2018 ABCs of Open Governance – Hyperledger
Mic Bowman
Nathan George (new)
If you’re interested in learning more about the Hyperledger TSC and its elected members, we’ll
be kicking off a “Meet the TSC” blog series in the coming weeks. Be sure to look out for it!
You can plug into the community at github , Rocket.Chat the wiki or our mailing list .
Copyright © 2017 The Linux Foundation®. All rights reserved. Hyperledger is a trademark of The Linux Foundation. Hyperledger has
registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of Hyperledger, please see our Trademark Usage page.
The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our
Trademark Usage page. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Privacy Policy and Terms of Use
https://www.hyperledger.org/blog/2017/09/06/abcs-of-open-governance 5/5