Program Management for Open Source Projects

Why Bother?

Problem: You or your community don’t want to have meetings. You’d rather work completely asynchronously.

Maybe you don’t take “meetings are an inescapable part of life” as a given. Good for you. It’s certainly true some successful open source projects—even rather substantial ones—don’t have meetings. If it works for them, that’s terrific. I would hate if the only reason you held a meeting was “because Ben said I should in his book.”

You can get a lot of value from meetings, though. They give you the opportunity to have a more natural discussion of contentious, confusing, or complicated topics. They also serve as a good forcing function for getting work done. “I’ll get this task completed before the next meeting” is much more concrete—and ...