How Should Open Source Communities Govern AI-Generated Code

Open-source communities have traditionally worked to attract more contributions. Agentic coding reverses that assumption: code, documentation, issues, pull requests, and even security reports can now be produced at a scale that volunteer reviewers were never designed to absorb.

When producing something that looks like a contribution becomes almost free, how should a community decide what deserves attention, who is accountable, and who earns trust? Should AI use be disclosed? Should the ASF define a common baseline, or should every project decide independently? Can an agent ever become a contributor in the community sense?

Moderated by Willem Jiang, this panel brings together Jarek Potiuk, Craig Russell, Zili Chen, and Justin McLean to debate AI-generated contributions from the perspectives of security, foundation governance, community consensus, and mentoring. The session will be conducted in English.

Speakers:

Willem Jiang: Independent Open Source and Agentic AI Consultant

Willem Jiang (Jiang Ning) is an independent open source and Agentic AI consultant and a maintainer of DeerFlow. He previously served as an Open Source Evangelist at ByteDance’s OSPO and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Apache Software Foundation. Willem has contributed to numerous Apache projects, including Apache Camel, CXF, ServiceMix, and ServiceComb. Before joining ByteDance, he spent six years at Huawei as an open source technical expert. Earlier in his career, he was a Principal Engineer at Red Hat, where he worked on Fuse ESB, and held engineering roles at FuseSource, IONA, and TravelSky.

Jarek Potiuk: Independent Open-Source Contributor and Advisor

Independent Open-Source Contributor and Advisor, Committer and PMC member of Apache Airflow, Member of the Apache Software Foundation

Jarek is an Engineer with a broad experience in many subjects - Open-Source, Cloud, Mobile, Robotics, AI, Backend, Developer Experience, but he also had a lot of non-engineering experience - running a company, being CTO, organizing big, international community events, technical sales support, pr and marketing advisory but also looking at legal aspect of licensing and building open-source communities are all under his belt.

With the experience in very small and very big companies and everything in-between, Jarek found his place in Open-Source world, where his internal individual-contributor drive can be used to the uttermost of the potential.

Craig Russell: ASF Member, Incubator PMC member, ASF Board Chair emeritus

I joined Apache as a committer on the incubating JDO project in 2005 and became an Apache Member in 2007. I was appointed Assistant Secretary in 2009 and Secretary in 2010, where I served until 2019. I was elected to the Board of Directors in 2019 and currently serve as a Director.

I was originally attracted to Apache by its approach to governance, where the people doing the work decide what direction to take the project. This is exactly the opposite of how most corporations work, where “the smartest people in the room (managers and executives)” make the decisions.

Once my own project was accepted into Apache, I looked around to see what else I could contribute to, and joined a number of projects where I could help. I also started looking at the intellectual property model of licensing of contributions and licensing of the end products. That led me to start contributing to the Secretary role, processing the “paperwork” granting IP rights to the Foundation.

Recently it has come to my attention that people feel that the Foundation has “too many rules” which go against the free expression that people look for. Looking deeper into this issue, I found that there are some common themes that, if understood better, can make the experience easier.

Justin Mclean: ASF Director, VP ASF Incubator, Datastrato Community Manager

Justin Mclean is a long-time contributor to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and currently serves as VP of the ASF Incubator and a member of the ASF Board of Directors. Over several years, he has contributed to evolving the Incubator’s governance, policies, and training programs, including documenting how projects operate in practice and analysing the Incubator’s history. Through this work, he has supported hundreds of open source projects in building sustainable and independent communities.

He has extensive experience guiding projects from early incubation through to successful graduation, and has reviewed over a thousand open source releases. His work focuses on open source governance, community health, and the design of systems that enable collaboration at scale.

Justin regularly speaks at international conferences on topics such as open source governance, licensing, and community building, sharing practical lessons drawn from real-world experience across a wide range of ASF projects and communities.

Zili Chen: Co-Founder, ScopeDB

Zili Chen (@tison) co-founded ScopeDB, a database built for semi-structured data with cloud services. He is a seasoned open-source advocate and ASF member with a wealth of experience. He has maintained several significant projects, including Apache Flink, Apache ZooKeeper, and Apache Pulsar.