Papers › Influence of Roles in Decision-Making during OSS Development -- A Study of Python
Influence of Roles in Decision-Making during OSS Development -- A Study of Python
Pankajeshwara Nand Sharma, Bastin Tony Roy Savarimuthu, Nigel Stanger
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Governance has been highlighted as a key factor in the success of an Open Source Software (OSS) project. It is generally seen that in a mixed meritocracy and autocracy governance model, the decision-making (DM) responsibility regarding what features are included in the OSS is shared among members from select roles; prominently the project leader. However, less examination has been made whether members from these roles are also prominent in DM discussions and how decisions are made, to show they play an integral role in the success of the project. We believe that to establish their influence, it is necessary to examine not only discussions of proposals in which the project leader makes the decisions, but also those where others make the decisions. Therefore, in this study, we examine the prominence of members performing different roles in: (i) making decisions, (ii) performing certain social roles in DM discussions (e.g., discussion starters), (iii) contributing to the OSS development social network through DM discussions, and (iv) how decisions are made under both scenarios. We examine these aspects in the evolution of the well-known Python project. We carried out a data-driven longitudinal study of their email communication spanning 20 years, comprising about 1.5 million emails. These emails contain decisions for 466 Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs) that document the language's evolution. Our findings make the influence of different roles transparent to future (new) members, other stakeholders, and more broadly, to the OSS research community.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections