The city guide to open source – Devon Zuegel

Extending the metaphor of open source as infrastructure to look at how governing & maintaining a city works, and what lessons can be taken for oss maintainership.

“Tokens” appear here in the context of congestion pricing, but could also be a contributor currency:

What would congestion pricing look like in OSS? One idea would be to charge to open an issue or PR. It wouldn’t have to be expensive to have an effect—there is a big psychological difference between $1 and $0. Alternatively, community members could begin with a limited set of tokens that they could spend to open an issue or PR. They could also earn additional tokens as they made valuable contributions to the project and demonstrated longer-term investment. However it might be implemented, congestion pricing offers a compelling model for rebalancing the burden that unproductive interactions place on OSS maintainers.