Facilitating decisions is more important than making them
When asked about her leadership philosophy, Cate Huston came up with “My job is to make it easier for people to make good decision.” While that’s a great philosophy for leadership in a company, it’s even more critical in leading an open source community. Even with a “benevolent dictator for life” governance model, communities are largely self-directed. Contributors won’t just do whatever tasks they’re assigned, they’ll do the work that they find interesting.
Self-direction means that people will have different ideas. Sometimes those ideas will be at odds with each other. Sometimes they’ll be mostly complimentary with minor differences. Sometimes they’ll be entirely unrelated and the community will have to figure out which of the ideas to work on first.
You cannot decide on behalf of the community if you want to continue having a community. Your input is probably valuable, but it’s not the only valuable input. Helping the community come to its own decision is how you build a community that wants to stick around.
In chapter four of Program Management for Open Source Projects, I talk about how to guide your community’s decision-making process.
This post’s featured photo by Sophia Kunkel on Unsplash.
