It’s okay to be partial to your work
I often see leaders in open source projects not wanting to promote their own work in the interest of fairness. That’s a noble idea, but it’s unnecessary. It’s okay to be partial to — and promote — your own work, so long as you follow the community’s process.
Real world examples
What does this look like in practice? You may be a member of a steering committee that approves feature proposals. You didn’t earn that spot just because you’re good at meetings, you mostly likely earned it on sustained technical and interpersonal merit. This, in turn, means you’re probably still writing new feature proposals sometimes. That doesn’t mean you have to recuse yourself when it comes up for a vote. Everyone knows you wrote it, and you’re a member of the committee, not an independent judge presiding over a criminal trial.
Or you might be leading a project and have a tool that would help the project meet its goals. You can propose that the project adopt your tool. Again, it’s going to be clear that you wrote it, so go ahead and make the proposal.
The need for process
As I alluded to in the opening paragraph, your community needs a process for these sorts of proposals. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. Something simple as “a majority of the steering committee must approve of the proposal” counts as a process. Following the process is what keeps the decision fair, even when you have a predisposition to like what you’re proposing. If your proposal gets the same treatment as everyone else’s, that’s all that matters.
When to recuse yourself
Of course, there are times when it’s appropriate to recuse yourself. If your proposal is particularly contentious (let’s say a roughly 50-50 split, not a 75-25 split in favor), it’s best that you’re not the deciding vote. If you can’t amend your proposal in such a way that you win some more support, then it may be better to note vote.
If the community policy and processes require the author or a proposal to recuse themselves, then that’s obviously a good reason to do so. “But Ben said I shouldn’t!” won’t win you any points, even if the policy is misguided (and it may or may not be!).
Also, if the context is a pull request, you should not vote to approve it to get it over the approval requirement threshold. That is a separate case, and one that most forges will prohibit anyway.
This post’s featured photo by Piret Ilver on Unsplash.
