Post
LLAMOSC governance paper accepted at the SocialAgent Workshop at NeurIPS 2026
A paper by Sarrah Bastawala, Himanshu Chougule, Jesse Parent, and Bradly Alicea on governance and contributor burnout in open-source communities will be presented as a poster at the SocialAgent Workshop at NeurIPS 2026 in Atlanta on December 13.
“Governance as a Safety Net: An LLM Agent-Based Study of Open-Source Community Sustainability” has been accepted as a poster at SocialAgent: Second Workshop on Large Language Models for Social Reasoning and Simulation, held at NeurIPS 2026 in Atlanta, Georgia, on December 13, 2026. The authors are Sarrah Bastawala, Himanshu Chougule, Jesse Parent, and Bradly Alicea.
The paper
The paper uses LLAMOSC, an LLM-powered agent-based framework led by Sarrah Bastawala, to ask how governance shapes the sustainability of open-source communities. LLAMOSC gives each simulated contributor a motivation state and has agents work on real software tasks through an AutoCodeRover execution layer, so allocation, code execution, and review all feed back into how contributors feel about the work.
The study compares two ways of assigning work: a maintainer who assigns tasks centrally, and a decentralized system in which contributors bid for tasks. Across 60 simulation runs in three development environments, decentralized peer-bidding cut severe simulated burnout from 31.3% of contributors to 18.7%, a relative reduction of about 40%. It also spread workload more evenly and held up better as tasks got harder. The authors read this as a “safety net” effect, in which decentralized allocation protects the contributors most at risk of dropping out.
The paper has its own publication page with the full abstract.
Background
LLAMOSC began in Google Summer of Code 2024 under the Orthogonal Research and Education Lab and INCF, and builds on GSoC work from 2022 and 2023 in OREL’s Open-source Sustainability project. See the LLAMOSC project page and the GSoC 2024 report for its history.