We study how open source communities describe participation and control through version controlled governance documents. Using a corpus of 710 projects with paired snapshots, we parse text into actors, rules, actions, and objects, then group them and measure change with entropy for evenness, richness for diversity, and Jensen Shannon divergence for drift. Projects define more roles and more actions over time, and these are distributed more evenly, while the composition of rules remains stable. These findings indicate that governance grows by expanding and balancing categories of participation without major shifts in prescriptive force. The analysis provides a reproducible baseline for evaluating whether future AI mediated workflows concentrate or redistribute authority.

Open digital public infrastructure needs community management to ensure accountability, sustainability, and robustness. Yet open-source projects often rely on centralized decision-making, and the determinants of successful community management remain unclear. We analyze 637 GitHub repositories to trace transitions from founder-led to shared governance. Specifically, we document trajectories to community governance by extracting institutional roles, actions, and deontic cues from version-controlled project constitutions (GOVERNANCE.md). With a semantic parsing pipeline, we cluster elements into broader role and action types. We find roles and actions grow, and regulation becomes more balanced, reflecting increases in governance scope and differentiation over time. Rather than shifting tone, communities grow by layering and refining responsibilities. As transitions to community management mature, projects increasingly regulate ecosystem-level relationships and add definition to project oversight roles. Overall, this work offers a scalable pipeline for tracking the growth and development of community governance regimes from open-source software's familiar default of founder-ownership.

This article provides an overview of IG Parser, a software that facilitates qualitative content analysis of formal (e.g., legal) rules or informal (e.g., social) norms, and strategies (such as conventions) -- referred to as institutions -- that govern social systems and operate configurally to describe institutional systems. To this end, the IG Parser employs a distinctive syntax that ensures rigorous encoding of natural language, while automating the transformation into various formats that support the downstream analysis using diverse analytical techniques. The conceptual core of the IG Parser is an associated syntax, IG Script, that operationalizes the conceptual foundations of the Institutional Grammar, and more specifically the Institutional Grammar 2.0, an analytical paradigm for institutional analysis. This article presents the IG Parser, including its conceptual foundations, the syntax specification of IG Script, and its architectural principles. This overview is augmented with selective illustrative examples that highlight its use and the associated benefits.

An institutional statement describes expected actions for actors within the presence or absence of particular constraints, or parameterizes features of an institutional system. Institutional statements convey information that contextualizes their applicability. They vary in prescriptiveness and force, as reflected by the presence of information that more or less strongly compels behavior and by the presence of information that specifies payoffs for compliance, or noncompliance, with statements instructions. Varying in the inclusion of these various kinds of information, institutional statements typically take two functional forms: constitutive and regulative. Constitutive statements constitute features of a system (e.g., actor positions and roles, processes, venues, etc). Regulative statements describe actions linked to specific actors within certain contextual parameters. According to the IG 2.0, institutional statements are commonly comprised of a set of syntactic components, with individual components associating with unique information, and which combine to convey a statement's institutional meaning. Regulative statements are composed of some or all of the following components with the corresponding syntactic labels: (i) an Actor, referred to as an Attribute; (ii) action associated with actor, referred to as an Aim; (iii) action context, referred to as Context; (iv) a receiver of action, referred to as an Object; (v) a prescriptive operator that describes how strongly an action is compelled or restrained, referred to as a Deontic; and (vi) an incentive linked to action, referred to as an Or else. Constitutive statements are composed of some or all of the following components with the corresponding syntactic labels: (i) the entity that is being constituted within a statement, referred to as a Constituted Entity; (ii) an action that constitutes the Constituted Entity, called the Constitutive Function; (iii) the constitution context, referred to as Context; (iv) properties that serve as input to the Constitutive Function, called Constituting Properties; (iv) A prescriptive operator that defines to what extent the action of an institutional statement is compelled, restrained, or discretionary, referred to as a Deontic; and (vi) an incentive linked to action, referred to as an Or else.