Hierarchy in Meritocracy: Community building and code production in the ASF, EF, and PSF

by Oscar Castaneda for Google Open Source Programs Office

The ASF explains the success of its communities and the software they produce by claiming that meritocratic principles and organizational orientation to software engineering through community building, set them apart from other open source communities. The relevance of these claims, and therefore of institutions like Meritocracy, can be explained and better understood by analyzing them through an organizational model of open source.