Author: Ben Cotton

Ben formerly led open source messaging at Docker and was the Fedora Program Manager. He 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.

Write standard operating procedures

When you document how to execute a process, that ensures you’ll do it right the next time. This helps your future self and your successors.

Posts

AIANYF: Acronyms & Initialisms Are Not Your Friends

Acronyms can be confusing when they’re unfamiliar to your reader. Err on the side of explaining, even if you don’t think you need to.

Resources

Perception matters — make people feel heard

Making someone feel heard doesn’t mean doing whatever they want; it means they feel like you’ve made a good faith effort to understand them.

Posts

Stop writing like an engineer

Put the important part at the beginning of your post or email. Don’t assume people will read the whole thing.

Resources

Why does this meeting exist?

If you can’t come up with a sentence or two that says why you scheduled the meeting, you should consider what that implies.

Posts

How open source projects collaborate

The idea of helping your competitors might be hard to accept, but when we work together, we all do better.

Posts

The flywheel theory of community engagement

The Flywheel Theory says that the long term sustainability of a community project depends on having someone who can keep the momentum going.

Talks

Manage your project deadlines

Deadlines are easy to set and hard to meet. So how do you set deadlines that aren’t hard to meet? It’s not hard!

Posts

Should you require a criterion when nominating a release-blocking bug?

The people discovering — and thus nominating — blocker candidates may not be intimately familiar with your project’s processes.

Posts

Your bug tracker and you (OLF Conference)

At the OLF Conference, I’ll delivered “Your bug tracker and you” and held a book signing for “Program Management for Open Source Projects.”

Talks