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Program management for open source projects

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2024-04-03

“Field of Dreams” is not a strategy for community growth

Growing an open source community requires individual connections. The mere act of existence is not enough to build a community.

Categories Posts
2024-03-29

Getting started is just the start

You’ll need to continually refine processes as you go. That’s easier if you think beyond just what you need at the start.

Categories Posts
2024-03-27

License changes are API changes

Making a license change affects how people interact with your project. You need to treat license changes as if they were changes to your API.

Categories Posts
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

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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.

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Cover of the book Program Management for Open Source Projects

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

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Upcoming talks

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Latest posts

  • It’s okay to be partial to your work2025-05-28
  • Growing your project means doing less coding2025-05-21
  • Adding pre-report bug discussion2025-05-14
  • Use reserved domains and IPs in examples2025-05-07

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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