Skip to content
Duck Alignment Academy

Program management for open source projects

  • Home
  • About
  • Speaking
  • Resources
    • Program Management for Open Source Projects
    • Newsletter
    • AI policy resources
    • Writing advice
    • Other resources
  • Talks
  • Contact me!
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.

Categories Posts
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.

Categories Posts
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.

Categories Posts
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...

Categories Posts
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.

Categories Posts
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,...

Categories Posts
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.

Categories Posts
2024-03-01

Incentives power open source

A company making requests of a project has to explain the incentives in a way the project members will care, not in a way the company cares.

Categories Posts
2024-02-28

Grow by delegating

Don’t hoard responsibility. Give new contributors a sense of ownership so that they’ll stick around your community.

Categories Posts
2024-02-21

Semantic versioning in large projects

SemVer can work for large projects, but it’s not a fit for every case. Whatever you pick, document it clearly.

Categories Posts

Posts pagination

  • «
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • …
  • 16
  • 17
  • »

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

  • Use reserved domains and IPs in examples2025-05-07
  • Facilitating decisions is more important than making them2025-03-19
  • Helping your project survive the loss of core contributors2025-03-12
  • Rules and policies are necessary to define good behavior2025-03-05

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

Coldbox WordPress theme by mirucon.

  • Facebook
  • Linkedin
  • RSS Feed
Back To Top