Duck Alignment Academy - Page 7 of 17 - Program management for open source projects

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,...

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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.

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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.

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Grow by delegating

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

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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.

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Keep your bug tracker unified

When your bug tracking is scattered across different platforms, you make it harder for your users to file reports.

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Fork yes: embrace forks of your project

If you’ve done what you can to make your community a great place to contribute, then you can feel free to embrace any forks that happen.

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Companies: fund work that isn’t new development

Failing to invest in your upstream projects presents a large business risk. Communities, like gardens, are more productive when tended to.

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Don’t try to be too formal in policy writing

Don’t emulate legal language when writing policies for your community. The simpler the language, the easier everyone will understand.

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Open source trends for 2024

With 2024 here, I take a look at a few trends I see in open source this year.

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