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Duck Alignment Academy

Program management for open source projects

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2023-01-25

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.

Categories Posts
2023-01-18

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.

Categories Resources
2023-01-12

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.

Categories Posts
2023-01-04

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.

Categories Posts
2022-12-14

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.

Categories Talks
2022-12-07

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!

Categories Posts
2022-11-30

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.

Categories Posts
2022-11-25

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.”

Categories Talks
2022-11-23

Developer and user communication channels

As your project grows, the community has to decide whether or not to maintain unified channels or separate them. How do you decide?

Categories Posts
2022-11-22

Save 40% on the Program Management for Open Source Projects ebook!

You can save 40% on ebooks of Program Management for Open Source Projects when you use promo code turkeysale2022 at checkout.

Categories News

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About This Site

Learn how to get your ducks in a row, your cats herded, or any other animal metaphor you can think of.

2025 trends

Hand-drawn graphs on a sheet of white paper sitting on a desk.
Read my 2025 open source trends predictions.

Get the book

Cover of the book Program Management for Open Source Projects

Ebooks available from The Pragmatic Bookshelf. Print available from Bookshop and Amazon.

Newsletter

Subscribe to the free monthly newsletter to keep up on the latest news, events, and updates.

Upcoming talks

Want to book me for your project or company? See the Speaking page for details.

Latest posts

  • Your only obligations are the promises you make2025-06-25
  • The right tool is the one people can use2025-06-04
  • It’s okay to be partial to your work2025-05-28
  • Growing your project means doing less coding2025-05-21

Except where noted, all content © Ben Cotton and provided under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license except where noted. Logo design by alexlexi.

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