Governance in Practice wins ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at CHASE 2026

We are proud to share that our paper "Governance in Practice: How Open Source Projects Define and Document Roles" has received an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at CHASE 2026 🎉

Congratulations to Pedro Oliveira, the PhD student who led this study, and to the full team:

A collaborative work between RESHAPE Lab at NAU and USES — Grupo de Pesquisa em Usabilidade e Engenharia de Software.

This work investigates how open source projects formalize roles, responsibilities, and authority through governance documents. Our findings show that even when projects use similar role names, their responsibilities often differ significantly — revealing inconsistencies we call role drift. We also highlight how maintainers frequently accumulate technical, managerial, and community responsibilities, raising important implications for sustainability and burnout in OSS communities.

This recognition reflects the impact of studying not just code, but the human and organizational structures that sustain open source ecosystems.

Read the preprint

We look forward to presenting this work at CHASE 2026 in Rio de Janeiro.