Good community governance | Invest in Open Infrastructure | August 2022

"At Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI), we believe that good governance is essential to living out the values of openness, transparency, and accountability, centring the interests of the community in the work of organizations acting on their behalf. As we prototype mechanisms to assess the governance of open infrastructure services and scrutinize and evolve our own governance structures and practices, we realize the need to bring additional clarity to this work, for ourselves and other organizations in the open research, scholarly communications, and nonprofit space by asking some essential questions about governance, including: what is good governance, and what is the evidence for why it is important? To address these questions and stimulate further conversations and reflections around current governance practices in this space, we reviewed literature and looked into governance models in two different but related contexts: scholarly communication and open research infrastructure; and nonprofit management. Primarily, we aimed to: define key terms and discussion of how governance is best understood; provide an overview of governance practices and models in the scholarly communication and nonprofit spaces; establish a working definition and a set of essential components for good governance and the benefits of having good governance in place; and investigate the consequences of having inadequate or incomplete governance structures in place...."