OpenChaos: When Your Pull Requests Are Decided by Democracy
Ever wondered what would happen if your project's pull requests were decided by a community vote instead of a maintainer's merge button? It sounds like a recipe for chaos—or maybe a fascinating experiment in open-source governance. That's exactly what OpenChaos is: a live, running test of whether a project can be steered entirely by popular vote.
It’s a GitHub repo where there are no traditional maintainers with final say. Instead, every proposed change lives or dies by the votes of the community. It’s less about building a specific tool and more about exploring the dynamics of decentralized decision-making in real time.
What It Does
OpenChaos is an open-source project with one core rule: pull requests are merged or closed based on community vote. Anyone can submit a PR to change anything—code, docs, the README itself. Then, anyone with a GitHub account can vote by reacting to the PR with a thumbs-up 👍 (to merge) or thumbs-down 👎 (to close). After a set voting period, the PR’s fate is automatically decided by the tally.
A bot periodically counts the reactions, and the majority wins. It’s a continuous, automated experiment in collective ownership.
Why It’s Cool
The concept itself is the main attraction. It’s a hands-on look at direct democracy in a codebase. Will it lead to sensible, incremental improvements, or will it descend into anarchy with conflicting changes? The experiment runs in public, so you can watch it unfold.
Technically, it’s a clever, low-friction implementation. It uses GitHub’s built-in reaction system for voting, so there’s no extra accounts or complex UI. The automation (likely via GitHub Actions) handles the tallying and merging, keeping the process transparent and hands-off. It raises real questions about maintainability, consensus, and what “ownership” means in open source.
How to Try It
You don’t need to install anything. Just head over to the repository:
github.com/skridlevsky/openchaos
From there, you can:
- Vote on existing PRs: Use the 👍/👎 reactions on any open pull request.
- Submit your own PR: Change a typo, add a feature, or propose a wild idea—then see if the community backs you.
- Just watch: Observe the voting patterns and outcomes. It’s a live social coding experiment.
Final Thoughts
OpenChaos probably isn’t a model for your next production library. But it’s a genuinely interesting playground to think about community, governance, and the social layers of collaboration on platforms like GitHub. It makes you appreciate the role of maintainers while also questioning how much influence a community should have. Whether it ends in orderly progress or beautiful madness, it’s a fun experiment to participate in or just keep an eye on.
Check it out, cast a vote, and see where the chaos leads.
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Repository: https://github.com/skridlevsky/openchaos