Open shaunagm opened 1 year ago
Hey Shauna! An idea for context building: Recording notes during meetings. I think this was especially helpful in larger projects where there were "working meetings". People would meet, discuss, debate, and try to improve proposals. Being the person that took notes gave me insight into:
I think the benefits are largely the same as Brett's anecdote about summarizing mailing list threads but with a bit more depth into a smaller portion of the whole project.
This is great, Toshio! I'm writing it up to add to the summary for the "Context-building tasks" resource. Do you mind sharing if there was a specific project you did this for? No worries if you'd prefer to keep that private.
Sure! I did this regularly when I was a member of the Fedora Packaging Committee.
I did it sometimes but not nearly as frequently for FESCo (Fedora engineering steering committee) and for ansible community meetings.
Message ID: @.*** .com>
Tell us about the governance challenge you're thinking of
Many projects have a sole maintainer model, not because that person wants to be the sole maintainer, but because cultivating additional leaders is hard work and they're not sure how to do it. Signs that a project is experiencing this challenge include:
My sense from my own experience and interviewing other project maintainers is that there are two big elements that are useful in cultivating leadership:
Over time, as community members gain a greater understanding of the project, they can tackle more complex tasks and be trusted to make more important decisions, until eventually they are essentially co-maintainers.
Potential Resources
Newcomer-Friendly, Context-Building Tasks
There are a surprising number of tasks that community members can perform which do not require too much familiarity with a project, but end up building familiarity (what I call "context") about the project. These include: