Combining Text-Based Institutional Network and Cost–Benefit Methods to Advance Policy Design Analysis: An Illustrative Application to Nonprofit Open-Source Software Incubation

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# Description

Institutional arrangements that steer collective action distribute benefits and burdens among collaborators, encouraging cooperation in some contexts while creating coordination dilemmas in others.

We advance public policy, administration, and nonprofit management research by integrating institutional network analysis with cost–benefit analysis in a single text-based framework. Institutional Grammar coding of policy documents reveals prescribed interactions among actors, which we model as Networks of Prescribed Interactions before examining how the same coded text informs assessments of benefit and burden distribution.

Applying the method to nonprofit open source software incubation programs at the Apache Software Foundation and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation shows that higher-risk settings emphasize bonding structures and reciprocity, whereas lower-risk contexts rely on bridging structures and brokerage efficiency. The cost–benefit analysis further uncovers how ASF policies balance costs and benefits between the foundation and projects, while OSGeo places both on participating projects, demonstrating the value of combining these analytical lenses.