Program Management for Open Source Projects

Do Everything

Problem: Important tasks are left undone because a contributor became unavailable at the last minute.

Your role as a program manager means you naturally end up with a basic level of skills across much of the program. This means you can step in and be a short-term stopgap when something important isn’t done. In most active open source communities, there’s always more work than people to do it. At the very least, the people aren’t evenly distributed across the work. Open source tends to be developer-heavy, so you might have plenty of coders and maybe even enough testers. But do you have enough people doing marketing, documentation, web design, and all of the other noncoding tasks? What’s currently not being done in your community? ...