Drinking From a Firehose While Herding Cats: A Search for Accountability in the Rust Open Source Community

Accountability promotes responsible behavior, particularly in fulfilling obligations, achieving planned outcomes, and serving the collective good. While systems of accountability are well-structured in corporate environments, their role in open-source communities remains less understood. Existing research has explored requirements-gathering processes and motivations for contributing to open source, focusing on individual benefits. However, there is limited research on how these motivations and processes translate into accountability that guides collective actions to meet the needs of diverse stakeholders. This study examines accountability within the Rust community, particularly during the transition from roadmap-based planning to a goal-oriented process with designated owners within various teams. We provide a rich description, based on meeting notes, project documents and blog posts, as well as 21 interviews with a variety of project participants, to draw lessons about accountability in open source. We found that the Rust roadmapping process facilitated various forms of accountability but lost its effectiveness because (a) unfinished work items on the yearly roadmaps were unavoidable and made the process feel disingenuous; (b) the community culture shifted and facilitated a gradual decline of the roadmapping process; (c) external factors such as the pandemic and layoffs at Mozilla led to changes in the community priorities. Our findings suggest that accountability in open source is an emergent phenomenon that arises from participatory work processes around community engagement and that moral accountability, rather than transactional accountability, is crucial to fostering these processes.