It can be helpful for communities to take stock of their existing governance now and again, especially if they're facing some kind of major challenge, opportunity, or transition.

This questionnaire helps identify people who hold power in your community. It's not designed to help you create governance, but to surface your existing governance. It will not capture people who should be included in governance but aren't (for that, try the Visibility Spectrum exercise).

The questionnaire is broken into three parts, which look at formal power, logistical power, and social/relational power.

Formal power represents existing governance structires. If the project is run by a company, for example, a manager might hold power over an employee. Or if the project already has roles like "lead maintainer" or "community manager".

Logistical power covers the practical, concrete powers that our tools give us. For example, somehow having merge rights on a Github repository, or access to a project's servers, is a form of logistical power.

Social/relational power refers to interpesonal power—the soft, messy, difficult to articulate yet vitally important impact of who likes and respects who.

The Questionnaire

Formal Power

• Are there any defined roles in your project, such as lead maintainer or community manager?
• Is your project owned or steered by an organization with its own defined roles? What are those roles?
• Are there other organizations that formally or informally partner with the project? What formal roles do they have within their own org?

Logistical Power

Repositories

• Who owns your repositories?
• Who has merge rights to them?
• Who can review pull requests?
• Who can triage issues?

Server

• Who owns the server (or account on the server)?
• Who has access to the server?

Communications

• Who owns the accounts for communications tools such as Slack, Discord, Zulip, Discourse, Matrix, etc.?
• Who are admins on those accounts?

All

• Do these permissions roughly reflect needs? Or are there people with permissions they don't use, and people without permissions they probably need?

Social/Relational Power

• Who tends to open issues and submit PRs? Do they tend to be core contributors, new contributors, users, strangers?
• Who is actually responding to issues and reviewing pull requests? Who frequently gets tagged in to issues or is asked to review PRs?
• Who is responsible for the project being "up"? When there's an urgent problem, who drops everything to fix it?
• Who drives conversation in communication channels?
• Who answers help requests?
• Who welcomes newcomers?
• Who proposes new ideas and initiatives? Who executes new ideas and initiatives?
• Who do people defer to? Who do they seem to trust?
• Who would be taken most seriously if they raised problems with the project?
• Who would people be most sad about if they left the project?