Merge pull request #92 from jrtechs/commarch

Commarch HFOSS assignment

blogContent/posts/open-source/community-architecture.md

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+This is my submission for RIT's
+[HFOSS](https://github.com/ritjoe/hfoss) Community architecture
+project. Due to the COVID situation, several changes have been made
+since I drafted the [project
+proposal](https://jrtechs.net/open-source/community-architecture-proposal).
+First, this is no-longer a group project. Second, this project is now
+more focused on comparing the project architectures of two communities
+rather than running analytics like git by a bus. 
+
+Exploring what works and what does not work for different projects can
+give us valuable insight into trying to create new communities. This
+is what is truly beautiful about open-source software in its openness
+giving us the ability to learn from it.  
+
+# Project Introduction
+
+This report covers two open-source projects: on-my-zsh and RITlug's
+website. 
+
+## Oh-my-zsh
+
+![on-my-zsh logo](media/arc/oh-logo.png)
+
+On-my-zsh is an open-source, community-driven framework for managing
+ZSH configurations. It includes many functions, helpers, plugins, and
+themes. 
+
+Oh-my-zsh was written almost entirely in a shell script which makes
+sense because it is a command-line utility. The primary audience of
+this project is ZSH enthusiasts. 
+
+![zsh theme ex](media/arc/zsh-theme.png)
+
+### Links
+
+- [github](https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh)
+- [website](https://ohmyz.sh/)
+- [wiki](https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/wiki)
+- [issue tracker](https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/issues)
+
+## Ritlug's Website
+
+![ritlug logo](media/arc/ritlug.png)
+
+The RIT Linux Users group (RITlug)  main website is an open-source
+project. RITlug is a student-led organization at RIT that aims to
+engage students in Linux and open source. The website is written using
+Jekyll which is a ruby project for static website generation. The
+website itself is hosted on [GitHub Pages](https://pages.github.com/)
+Jekyll is nice because it enables you to do templating and write
+content for the website in [markdown](https://www.markdownguide.org/).
+This is also the project that I chose to do my HFOSS [bug
+fix](https://jrtechs.net/open-source/ritlug-bugfix). 
+
+![RITlug website](media/arc/website.png)
+
+### Links
+
+- [github](https://github.com/RITlug/ritlug.github.io)
+- [website](https://ritlug.com/)
+- [issue tracker](https://github.com/RITlug/ritlug.github.io/issues)
+
+# Differences
+
+This section explores the differences between the two projects. It is
+important to note that there is not a once size fits all for
+open-source projects. Just because one project has more/less of
+something does not necessarily mean that one is better than the other.
+The beauty of open-source is the ability of a project to take many
+shapes/sizes/forms. 
+
+## Scope
+
+![on-my-zsh](media/arc/oh.png)
+
+There is no denying that on-my-zsh is a massive open-source project.
+On-my-zsh is highly praised and recommended by people wanting to
+"rice" their terminal setup. This project has 19k forks and 1.5k
+contributors... that is big. 
+
+Although there are a large number of contributors, most people don't
+have a huge role in the project. A lot of the contributors are adding
+themes to on-my-zsh and doing minor bug fixes. Dispute not holding big
+roles, the large number of contributors suggests that it is relatively
+easy to become a part of this community. On-my-zsh has received so
+many PR's for new themes that they asked people to [stop
+submitting](https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/wiki/External-themes)
+them and to create them as separate git repos with a specific naming
+convention so they are easy to search for. 
+
+
+![ritlug](media/arc/ritlug-git.png)
+
+In contrast on on-my-zsh, the RITlug website project is relatively
+small with 16 total contributors. The contributors are largely limited
+to members of RITlug's eboard (leadership board) with little activity
+from the community at large. Members through this project tend to
+cycle through every few years as they roll through RITlug's eboard. 
+
+## Maturity
+
+![oh-my-zsh timeline](media/arc/maturity-on.png)
+
+The on-my-zsh project is a decade old and still kicking strong! This
+project is well developed and has very robust documentation in  their
+wiki for people looking to contribute to this project and for those
+looking to use it. 
+
+![ritlug contribution timeline](media/arc/maturity-rit.png)
+
+RITlug's website project is relatively new at 4 years old, but, like
+oh-my-zsh has remained active for its entire duration. 
+
+## Governance
+
+### Leadership
+
+Determining the leadership is often hard for a project in the medium
+to small scale. The issue isn't that there is absolutely no
+leadership, the issue is that the leadership often isn't documented or
+is on such a small scale that it is trivial. Larger projects like
+Fedora and Ubuntu have well-defined roles, etc for their project.
+Smaller projects often don't have these levels of leadership and
+transparency. I fall victim to this for all my projects on GitHub, the
+leadership is quite literally "me" and I'm making all the calls and
+I'm just managing the dozen or so people that I manage to get to work
+on my project. Having this type of leadership is often bad because
+once the main contributor leaves, the project may die or fall apart. 
+
+
+As the current president of RITlug, I have particular insight into how
+RITlug operates its open-source project. The leadership of the project
+shifts every year after public (to RIT students) elections. There are
+typically between 4-6 eboard members per year. It requires two members
+of eboard to approve a pull request for the website. There is a
+special eboard role for managing projects, however, that role is often
+vacant and is just filled in my eboard members that have a familiarity
+for that project. If the project is large enough like
+[TeleIRC](https://github.com/RITlug/teleirc), we allow that one to
+manage itself as a "team" with loose oversight from the eboard. The
+RITlug website is solely maintained by the RITlug Eboard for
+administrative tasks such as weekly emails and posting talks. Although
+we don't ever explicitly document the leadership of the project, it
+would be possible to figure out by reading the RITlug
+[runbook](http://runbook.ritlug.com/). 
+
+Opposed to RITlug which has a quasi-public leadership board, the upper
+leaderships for on-my-zsh can be traced back to the company Planet
+Argon. This company is located in Portland and focuses on Ruby on
+Rails development as a consultant for commercial companies. Like many
+companies, this company has a large  footprint in [open-source
+projects](https://www.planetargon.com/open-source). From public
+documentation, it is not clear how the on-my-zsh project is run. Based
+on other projects, we can assume that the company appoints certain
+people to manage the project. 
+
+### License
+
+The code for both projects falls under the MIT license which is a
+permissive open source license. The RITlug website is more unique in
+that it has a creative commons license for  
+
+# Takeaways
+
+When it comes to projects, no one size fits all. In both projects that
+I looked at they had backing from a more established institution such
+as a student club or a company. Future research in community
+architecture could dive deeper into how most open source communities
+layout their upper leadership and who funds the projects. It is
+becoming more and more common to find open-source projects with large
+commercial backers.