Author: Ben Cotton

Ben is the Open Source Community Lead at Kusari. He formerly led open source messaging at Docker and was the Fedora Program Manager for five years. Ben is the author of Program Management for Open Source Projects. Ben is an Open Organization Ambassador and frequent conference speaker. His personal website is Funnel Fiasco.

Facilitating decisions is more important than making them

You cannot decide on behalf of the community. Facilitating decisions is how you build a community that wants to stick around.

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Helping your project survive the loss of core contributors

Only 27% of projects that lose their core developers survive, but you can take steps to give your project its best chance.

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Rules and policies are necessary to define good behavior

Think of it this way: having rules and policies for behavior in your community is like documenting the community’s API.

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Every project is a software project

It’s a good reminder that our audience is broader than we might think and we should act accordingly.

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Improvement requires context

If you swoop in uninformed, you might make some correct decisions, but you’ll probably make more wrong ones.

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Prioritizing your work with the Eisenhower Matrix

The Eisenhower Matrix is a simple framework for prioritizing your tasks by determining a task’s importance and urgency.

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Open source projects don’t exist separately from the outside world

You do your community a disservice when you treat open source as a noble pursuit that’s separate from the noise of daily life.

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CalVer is many schemes

You need to clearly indicate how you identify your releases. Simply saying “CalVer” does not set clear expectations for your users.

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Prioritizing work in the project with the MoSCoW method

The MoSCoW method is a simple, easy-to-use method for prioritizing work by putting into one of four categories.

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The “O” in “FOSS” does not stand for “obligation”

We need to motivate the behavior we want to see instead of being upset when it doesn’t happen.

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