Managing an open source project
Workshop overview
Overview
An open source project starts with ideas and code, but it continues with people. We know that most open source projects rely on just one or two people for most of the work. And code is just a small part of these roles, which also include project management, conflict resolution, decision making in uncertain situations, building an inclusive community, and lots and lots of communication. Whether you’re just starting a project, interested in getting involved in open source, or already have a community of thousands, there are some tips, tricks and templates that you can use to make maintaining an open source project more manageable.
In this interactive 1-day workshop you’ll learn some key practices for effect open source project management. You’ll walk away with new approaches for making project decisions, better strategies to manage user and contributor interactions, and better ways to set boundaries. Different projects make different decisions based on their needs and in this workshop you’ll see what types of decisions are possible, and how you can make the ones appropriate for you. During the workshop, you’ll create useful documents for your repository and begin to outline some processes you can finalize later or with your team.
These materials are available in the GitHub repository https://github.com/tracykteal/managing-os-project-workshop and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This workshop is for you if you:
- are involved in maintaining an open source project and struggling to feel like it’s sustainable, or are looking for practice or guidance,
- are starting out or interested in being involved in maintaining an open source project, and want to learn how to set up the project for the most effective engagement from contributors and users, or
- are interested in learning more about the people side of open source project maintenance and connecting with other maintainers.
Workshop format
The workshop will include four modules:
- Setting project goals
- Managing expectations
- Decision making
- Surviving and thriving as an open source maintainer
Throughout each module we’ll have a general presentation and discussion of the topic, and then hands-on time for you to consider your own project, and to start to create some of the documentation or resources you need.
Prework
No pre-work is required for this workshop, but part of the workshop will be asking you to consider some questions for your own project. So, you should be familiar with at least one open source project, and have reviewed the types of non-code issues or challenges you’re seeing with the project currently.
You should plan to bring your laptop to the workshop, so you can review or look up things about your open source project. We will be writing some documentation, and a familiarity with GitHub and markdown syntax is assumed.
We will also be using pen and paper! These will be provided at the workshop, but if you have a favorite brainstorming pen or pencil, please bring it along.
Instructors
Instructor: Dr. Tracy Teal (she/her) was the Open Source Program Director at Posit. Previously, she was a co-founder of Data Carpentry and the Executive Director of The Carpentries. She developed open source bioinformatics software as an assistant professor at Michigan State University and holds a PhD in computation and neural systems from California Institute of Technology. Tracy is involved in the open source software and reproducible research communities, including serving on advisory committees for NumFOCUS, pyOpenSci, the R Consortium and carbonplan, and has been working with open source communities, developing curriculum, and teaching people how to work with data and code as a developer, instructor and project leader throughout her career.