Stakeholder Governance Policy

Data Classification: Public

What Stakeholder Governance Means at Posit

Most companies are legally organized to serve one primary constituency: their shareholders. Decisions get made through that lens, and other groups and subject matters, such as employees, communities, the environment, are considered only to the extent that ignoring them creates legal or reputational risk. Posit is organized differently.

As a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation, Posit's corporate charter requires our Board and management to balance the interests of shareholders with those of the people affected by our business and with our stated public benefit purpose: creating free and open-source software for data science, scientific research, and technical communication. This is a legal obligation, not an optional commitment we can set aside when it becomes inconvenient.

As a Certified B Corporation, we submit to independent, rigorous assessment of how we actually deliver on that obligation - measured across our impact on workers, customers, community, and environment. Our B Corp score is public. The accountability is real.

Stakeholder governance, in this context, means something specific: we identify the groups whose interests our decisions affect, we create the means to understand those interests, and we factor them into how we make decisions, at every level of the organization, not just at the Board. This policy describes how we do that.

Who Our Stakeholders Are

Posit’s stakeholder map is broader than most software companies of our size. This is partly a consequence of our business model - our open-source tools are used by millions of people who have never paid us a dollar - and partly a consequence of the choices we’ve made about what kind of company to be.

We identify stakeholders as any group that is meaningfully affected by our decisions, positively or negatively. The following are Posit’s primary stakeholders, along with a brief description of why each group is material to us:

Not all stakeholders have equal weight in every decision. When we make choices, we consider who is most affected, whether the impact is positive or negative, and whether anyone bears a risk they cannot adequately voice or protect against themselves. 

How Stakeholder Interests Shape Our Decisions

The goal of stakeholder governance is not to ensure that the people likely to be affected by a decision have been thought about carefully before the decision is made, and that their interests are not simply assumed away. 

At the Board Level

Posit’s Board of Directors is legally required under our PBC charter to consider the interests of all stakeholders in its decision-making. This is most consequential for major strategic decisions: capital allocation, acquisitions, product direction, executive compensation, and any decision that could affect our long-term independence or mission. The Board receives regular updates on our B Corp performance and public benefit metrics as part of its ordinary business. Any decision that would materially compromise our public benefit purpose requires Board deliberation that explicitly considers its stakeholder effects.

At the Management Level

Day-to-day stakeholder consideration happens through how we structure and run the business. Several specific practices embed stakeholder thinking into ordinary management:

• Product decisions are evaluated not only for commercial viability but for their effect on the open-source community and on the accessibility of our tools. The tension between open-source and commercial offerings is a recurring, deliberate conversation at Posit, not something we try to paper over.
• Pricing and access decisions for commercial products account for the diversity of our users: academic institutions, non-profits, and individual researchers are not treated the same as large enterprise customers.
• People Operations decisions on compensation, working conditions, career development, and benefits, are made with reference to our DEIA commitments and to our stated obligation to treat our employees as our most important stakeholders.
• Vendor and supplier selection considers human rights factors and ethical practices, consistent with our Human Rights Policy.
• Financial contributions to the open-source ecosystem, through the Open Source Pledge and direct grants to maintainers and foundations, are a standing management commitment, not a discretionary line item.

On Decisions with Significant Impact

When a decision is likely to have a significant positive or negative effect on a stakeholder group, we expect the person or team making the decision to:

• Identify which stakeholders are affected and how.
• Consider whether any affected group is underrepresented in the decision-making process and, if so, how to compensate for that.
• Document the stakeholder considerations that shaped the decision, particularly for decisions that involve a genuine tradeoff between stakeholder interests.
• Escalate to senior leadership or the Board where a decision involves a material tradeoff that is outside the normal scope of management authority.

This expectation applies across functions. It is not a Legal or People Ops responsibility alone; it is part of how we expect Posit leaders and managers to think about their work.

How We Deliver Value to Our Stakeholders

Stakeholder governance for us is about how we create value for the people and communities we serve, while minimizing any harm along the way. The following summarizes how Posit intentionally delivers value to each of its primary stakeholder groups:

• Employees & Contractors: Competitive compensation benchmarked to market, meaningful work connected to a mission most of our people find genuinely compelling, a remote-first culture that respects time zones and the right to disconnect, strong DEIA commitments, and an internal culture that values candor and psychological safety.
• Open-Source Community: Free, high-quality tools (RStudio IDE, Positron, Quarto, Shiny, the tidyverse, and more) maintained by a dedicated engineering team; financial support for the maintainers and foundations the community depends on; education resources including freely available books, workshops, and events; and posit::conf, our annual community conference.
• Commercial Customers: Professional-grade software that enables organizations to adopt open-source data science at scale, backed by enterprise support, security, and governance features they need to operate confidently. Our customers’ revenue makes the open-source mission possible; we try to make sure they understand and feel good about that relationship.
• Shareholders & Investors: Long-term, sustainable growth from a business model with structural differentiation, in a company whose mission and culture reduce certain categories of risk that pure commercial software companies face. Honest, transparent reporting on both financial and public benefit performance.
• Suppliers & Vendors: Fair dealing, clear contractual expectations, and relationships governed by the ethical standards in our Code of Conduct and Human Rights Policy.
• Science, Research & Education Communities: Tools designed for reproducibility, correctness, and transparency. Accessible pricing for academic and non-profit users. Active participation in the communities where this work happens.
• The Environment: Awareness of our operational footprint, preference for suppliers and infrastructure partners with credible environmental commitments, and inclusion of environmental impact in our B Corp assessment and public benefit reporting.

How We Engage With Our Stakeholders

Knowing who our stakeholders are is not the same as actually hearing from them. The following are the primary mechanisms through which Posit engages with each of its stakeholder groups, and how those engagement inputs reach the people who make decisions.

Employees & Contractors

• Regular all-hands and AMA meetings where leadership shares company direction, financial context, and invites and answers questions.
• Employee surveys conducted by People Operations to assess engagement, identify concerns, and track progress on DEIA and culture commitments.
• A DEIA Council, an Employee Experience Group and Employee Resource Groups that provide structured input on issues affecting specific employee communities.
• Direct access to People Operations and Legal through formal and informal channels, including an anonymous reporting tool that covers any conduct concern, including human rights issues.
• A management culture that explicitly values candor: our Code of Conduct describes speaking up with “care and candor” as an expected behavior, not a tolerated one.

Open-Source Community

• GitHub, where much of our development work is public and where issues, pull requests, and discussions bring community perspectives directly into product decisions.
• Community forums (including Posit Community) where users raise questions, identify problems, and suggest improvements.
• posit::conf, our annual conference, which brings together thousands of R and Python practitioners and creates significant qualitative input on where the community is going and what it needs from us.
• Data Science Hangouts, a recurring open event series for the broader data science community.
• Sponsorship of and participation in useR!, SciPy, and other community conferences, which keeps us connected to practitioners outside our immediate customer base.
• Our open-source team’s active participation in the communities around our tools, as contributors and collaborators.

Commercial Customers

• Account management and customer success relationships with commercial customers who provide regular feedback on product direction, support quality, and evolving needs.
• Customer advisory conversations, roadmap discussions, and user research conducted by product and engineering teams.
• Support channels that surface product issues, feature gaps, and customer experience concerns to product owners.
• Customer stories and case studies, which create structured opportunities to understand how customers are actually using our tools.

Shareholders & Investors

• Regular financial reporting and Board meetings that include public benefit performance alongside financial performance.
• The PBC Report, published on posit.co, which provides transparent, public disclosure of how we are fulfilling our public benefit purpose.
• Direct engagement between leadership and investors on significant strategic decisions.

Suppliers & Vendors

• Contractual frameworks that set out our expectations on ethical conduct, human rights, and data privacy, and that create mechanisms for raising concerns.
• Vendor due diligence processes that assess human rights and ethical practices as part of onboarding, consistent with our Human Rights Policy.

Open-Source Ecosystem Participants

• Direct financial support through the Open Source Pledge, grants, and membership dues to numerous foundations.
• Engineering contributions to projects outside our direct commercial interest.
• Participation in foundation governance where we hold membership.

Science, Research & Education Communities

• Posit Academy and educational resources that support data science training and literacy.
• Community sponsorship program, through which we support conferences, workshops, and events that serve the academic and research data science community.
• Accessible pricing and free tools designed to ensure that cost is not a barrier to participation.

The Environment

The environment cannot speak for itself, so we rely on scientific data, external expert guidance, and our B Corp assessment process to understand and account for our environmental impact. Our B Corp recertification is the primary mechanism for structured assessment. Between cycles, we include environmental considerations in our vendor and supplier decisions, and we report on relevant metrics in our PBC Report.

This policy is a living document and may be updated as our community and regulatory environment evolve.

Last Update: 2026