Program Management for Open Source Projects

Manage Risks

Problem: You don’t know what will send your program offtrack.

To understand the risks that can derail your program, you have to identify, track, and respond to them. In most cases, open source communities don’t worry about risk at a fine level of detail. Perhaps this is because risk reflects uncertainty and with volunteer contributors, there’s an inherent fuzziness to plans. Or maybe the lack of a revenue impact means that the community doesn’t need to care as much. Whatever the reason, risk management tends to happen at a broader level. The risks are less about things that might delay the release for a week and more about the thing that might stop all progress.

Identify Risks

Problem: You don’t know what events pose a risk to the ...