Has anyone heard of this paper?
Institutional Parasitism in Open Technology Communities - March 2026 Draft
It is a study of what they call "institutional capture" in open-source projects, a phenomena where people subvert the governing structures of a project under the pretense of politics and ethics, to gain power for themselves. Focuses on things like 'Code of Conduct' agreements and how what amounts to drama have a negative impact on open source contribution.
This is an issue that crops up in tech sources now an then, with someone or other being cancelled for things unrelated to their contributions. I believe one of the worse examples of this was the villification of Richard Stallman for defending Minsky for alleged association with Epstein in the face of low information (I believe he was misguided but well-intentioned; then misinterpreted for ulterior purposes) , which lead to an attempt to completely replace all executives of the GNU project. To me, that action is a clear case of a selfish power grab. I was also concerned when Torvalds blocked Russian developers, which was not only a massive brain drain of talent, but shows a lack of confidence in the auditing process, and is very Slavophobic. Unfortunately, Internet drama is important when it disrupts projects that are the infrastructure of almost everything digital.
The paper does well in making it's main points steady and intellectually honest, though the language shows sympathy for the 'right-wing' perspective, and there was one place where there was cited a study about how 'right-leaning' people have more positive qualities than 'left-leaning' people, which was irrelevant, and creates a contentious point that can detract from discussion of the real problems therein. Though this is the present situation, it's possible that down the track things will be the same, but swapped around, leaving the core problem unsolved.
It engages with alternative hypotheses in the eighth chapter, explaining why they do not fit. Though these alternatives are dispensed with satisfactorily, a key one was unmentioned. It could be said that widespread adoption of Code of Conducts have made people more conscious of interpersonal problems, more willing to speak up about them, thus the CoC fulfils it's stated goal by making people feel more able to expose 'bad behavior' and facilitates remedial action. I don't believe that myself, yet this is a valid alternative explanation that ought to be dispensed with in the paper.
One of the best features of this paper are the extensive solutions suggested to prevent institutional capture of a project, though these seem targeted to newer projects than established ones that may be undergoing capture. It is straightforward enough to describe the current problems, but rarely does one take the effort to think of solutions: even the greatest thinkers have this issue. The authors did an excellent job outlining many solutions based on the qualities of projects that have not been overtaken and on the background theory, but it remains to be seen how they will work in practice.
Overall, though it is imperfect, this work is a step towards evaluating the impact of these issues, which are too easily dismissed as unimportant. Being given the ability to articulate what is happening as a systemic problem should improve the ability to actually talk about what is happening, and not be stamped out by people slinging around the word 'bigot'. I applaud the attempt to give solutions, and hope to see projects apply and improve upon these ideas. I hope by making this thread, I can circulate this paper more, as I luckily saved this link some time ago, and cannot find a good place to download it anywhere now.
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