The CHAOSS project would like to take an opportunity to comment on recent events happening inside our community.
On Sunday, March 29, 2026, a co-founder of CHAOSS, Sean Goggins, removed Augur from the CHAOSS GitHub organization and moved it to a separate organization called AugurLabs. Additionally, Sean shared a message in which he expressed concerns with recent governance changes that he perceived threatened his ownership of the project and his ability to apply for grant funding for his University research. Sean did not involve any other Augur maintainers or contributors in this decision, nor did he share his intentions with anyone at CHAOSS prior to the move. In his message, Sean also resigned from the CHAOSS Board.
Sean announced this to the community in two ways: through a message in our #general channel on Slack, and via email to the members of our Slack (roughly 3,500 people). Sean used his personal Mailchimp account to send these emails, but purported it to be an official CHAOSS communication, which caused much confusion among our community members. On April 13, Sean used this list again to promote a new project that is a re-write of Augur. Neither of these were official CHAOSS communications.
At this time, the Augur project remains in the AugurLabs organization on GitHub, and all parties are hopeful that a path forward can be found, whether that means Augur stays with CHAOSS or continues development independently. A resolution is still being worked on by the CHAOSS Board and Sean, and he is still an active member and contributor to the CHAOSS project, and the Augur team.
While attempts to have a community conversation with Sean continue, we would like to publicly address the erosion of trust inside our community, as this is at the heart of this series of events. Sean has expressed a loss of trust in our governance, processes, and procedures. The Augur team lost trust in the collaborative environment we value and foster. The CHAOSS community has experienced diminished trust in some leaders’ ability to exercise power in ways that are transparent, accountable, and aligned with community values. There has been a breakdown of trust on every level of our community.
CHAOSS Governing Board and community leaders acknowledge that the rebuilding of trust within our community and leadership of the project is going to be a prioritized challenge that we all must face together. In the next few months, we will be prioritizing the following:
- Increasing transparency in leadership decisions that affect the Community
- Implementing stricter access safeguards to minimize the risk of abuse of power
- Clarifying shared ownership across the sub-projects inside CHAOSS to ensure decisions are made collaboratively
- Continuing to support and improve our Code of Conduct procedures, as any open source project should
This is a crucial and pivotal moment for the CHAOSS community that we will learn and heal from, and we acknowledge that trust is a cornerstone of open source community health. We are committed to using this opportunity to emerge as a stronger, healthier, and more transparent community, and to rebuild the trust with each other one step at a time.
Once a resolution is reached, we will update the community as soon as possible.
