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.

Focus release criteria on user-visible behavior

Focusing on user-visible behavior allows you distinguish between what you should fix and what you must fix.

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Understand your community’s scope

It’s hard to say “we want to be for everyone” and continue on to “who is also interested in this work.”

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It’s okay for your project to end

Open source projects don’t last forever, and that’s okay. The end of a project can be a sign of success, or at least partial success.

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Save 40% on Program Management for Open Source Projects (and other ebooks)!

Use promo code turkeysale2023 at pragprog.com, to save 40% on ebooks and audio books through November 29.

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Translations represent the hardest part of bootstrapping trust

The difficulty in reviewing translations is what makes those contributions so important. But how do you bootstrap trust for your translators?

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New project repo basics

Before you start writing any code, what do you fill a new repo with? I’ve created a sample repository with some really basic examples.

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Retaining your new Hacktoberfest contributors

Hacktoberfest is over and hopefully you had a bunch of new contributors to your project. So now how do you keep them around?

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Managing issue tracker labels

Labels are arbitrary tags that either apply to an issue or not. But how you use them in your project can get very complicated.

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Directing new contributors to areas of need

If you have a list of what your project needs & empower people to do them, you’ll find newcomers self-direct to the best contributions.

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Handling bug reports for upstream projects

When a user files a report for a bug that’s actually in an upstream project, how should you handle it?

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