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.

2024-04-03

“Field of Dreams” is not a strategy for community growth

Growing an open source community requires individual connections. The mere act of existence is not enough to build a community.

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2024-03-29

Getting started is just the start

You’ll need to continually refine processes as you go. That’s easier if you think beyond just what you need at the start.

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2024-03-27

License changes are API changes

Making a license change affects how people interact with your project. You need to treat license changes as if they were changes to your API.

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2024-03-22

No task is too small to track if that’s what it takes to get it done

When in doubt, add the task. It’s better to track unnecessarily than to not track something important.

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2024-03-20

Roadmaps are valuable for open source projects

The moment you go from one contributor to two, you have to start coordinating. The project roadmap is an excellent tool for that.

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2024-03-15

Plan for what happens after your project is done

Your open source project will end one day. That’s okay. But you should think about what will happen with your project after it’s done.

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2024-03-13

Coopetition: open source projects working together

The Apereo Foundation invited me to speak at their Micro Conference Series. Abstract: Collaboration is a key part of open source projects, and that includes collaborating with other communities. Open source projects can work with their upstreams, downstreams, and even their competition. But how do you do it well? This presentation draws from the experiences of the Fedora and openSUSE...

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2024-03-13

Bug fixes only matter if they get to the user

Any bug that blocks a release from getting to users is worthy of an immediate fix release. This is true even if the bug is minor by itself.

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2024-03-08

Should you care about GitHub stars?

When I read Emily Omier’s post “I don’t care about your GitHub stars“, my first response was total agreement. Dopamine doesn’t show up on the balance sheet, after all. Of course, Emily is looking at it through a lens of building a company. It’s a perfectly valid perspective, but it’s not the only one. In (I think) a LinkedIn comment,...

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2024-03-06

Conway’s Law applies to your documentation, too

In order to keep your documentation from falling into the Conway trap, you have to actively curate it across the entire project.

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