Possible Blog Article: Prioritization conflict in software projects

[markcmiller86]

• In a conversation with @epourmal, she mentioned that open source software projects which are managed by non-profit organizations have an additional wrinkle to contend with and that is how priorities and perspectives of the board align with (or perhaps fail to align with) the needs of the community of stakeholders actually using the software.
• Multi-organization projects (e.g. multiple DOE labs such as early DOE/NNSA efforts on common visualization tools and file formats) is a challenge due to each organization's possible unique needs and experience in terms of data management and software integration.
• General community based projects also need to adopt methods/processes for resolving conflicts in priorities
• The dreaded "fork" is sometimes a last resort for resolving priority conflicts.

[bernhold]

I think this kind of problem manifests in many different situations. Suppose you have a true community code with a sizable contributor base. Someone contributes a feature that isn't on the project roadmap as far as the maintainers are concerned. And maybe it looks like the contribution could be challenging to maintain...

The challenge I see w.r.t. a blog article is that AFAICT, the resolutions are likely to be very case-specific. We can highlight that these kinds of prioritization conflicts happen, but what advice can we really give for resolving them?