Retaining contributors, extending trust, & more maintainer tips
Guides on open source project management, caregiving and persuasion, arguing responsibly, and asking more effective questions. And: celebrating Beautiful Soup's 20th anniversary.
Hi, newsletter subscribers! Thanks for being interested in Changeset Consulting and my open source project management work and writing.
Today I'll share some recent writing for maintainers and caregivers, a video and writeup from a play about arguing better, and news about Beautiful Soup.
(For hyperlinks, view as HTML or see the archived version on the web at https://buttondown.email/Changeset/archive/ .)
Tips for open source maintainers and other leaders
Retention: It's frustrating when a new open source contributor vanishes. You can reduce how frequently that happens:
- Understand why they ghost
- Articulate your vision
- Set expectations in the contributors' guide, & in auto-replies/boilerplate replies
- Prioritize quick first-level reviews
- Follow up with "resources if you're stuck" checkins
- Build safeguards against cookie-licking
Trust: What kind of trust does a project maintainer need to have in a new co-maintainer? To get better at open source sustainability, we need to improve at recruiting, training, & promoting new leaders. In "Whether And How To Trust A New Maintainer", I cover attributes to check for. I mine 4 comparable situations for assessment ideas, and explain how to reduce how much trust you need to give by promoting someone. And I offer 3 options if you're low on time.
Calm: Supporting users can frustrate maintainers. What are its causes, and how could we build the "infrastructure of equanimity" in open source? Some answers, and ideas for potential cross-project tools & practices. I discuss the inevitable side effects of successful outreach, mindset shifts we need to encourage, and collective supports that would help, especially:
- A shared blocklist, or at least a warning flag
- Boilerplate policies
- Flagging old resources as old
- Shared UX research efforts
Inclusion: Colleagues ask me for advice on diversifying their hiring pipelines, recruiting and retaining volunteer contributors, and addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in marketing to and taking care of their users. Here are a few tips I often share. Not comprehensive, aimed mostly at US technology managers and open source maintainers.
Managing: Going from proprietary to FLOSS product management? Your approach will differ based on what kind of project you're joining; consider these categorization systems, and example documents from established organizations.
Burnout: And I wrote about maintainer burnout and sustainability, covering:
- Noticing that you're burning out
- Work approaches that can help
- Succession
- Maintainer as parent
- Deprecating components, and closing a project
- Further resources
Reading this because someone forwarded or linked it? You can subscribe here.
How to argue responsibly
Last year, I co-wrote and performed in the play "Argument Clinic: What Healthy Professional Conflict Looks Like" with Jacob Kaplan-Moss, directed by Kyle R. Conway. Enjoy the video and our writeup of the seven key conflict resolution skills we illustrated in the play. (Still to come: behind-the-scenes notes, and publishing the script and slides so you can perform it yourself.)
Caregiving and persuasion
In the past year, I also wrote several other pieces you might find useful.
Care: My mother died in 2022, after a long decline in her health, and I was one of the main people who helped take care of her. While caring for her, preparing for her death, and handling logistics afterwards, I learned a lot from online resources, various professionals, and friends. So I'm trying to pass on some things I learned by sharing them in "Eldercare, Family Caretaking, and End-of-life Logistics: Stuff I Learned", with:
💔 You HAVE to take care of yourself
🗓 Changes to expect in the months/weeks/days before death
☑️ Checklists for before & just after death
📝 Wills, powers of attorney, & advance health care directives
🥔 Easy-to-eat food; letting your friends help you
🛐 Hospital chaplains can do a lot
🎯 Patient advocacy (catching mistakes)
📒 Medical notetaking at appointments and the bedside
🧪 Researching specific treatments & how to perform at-home procedures
🫀 Organ/body donation; donating unused medicine
🏥 Palliative care, hospice, insurance/Medicare, & hospice facility eligibility
😱 Delirium & persuasion
🎶 Music for comfort
📚 Books & blogs that helped me prepare for this
It's a long piece, but please skim it so you know what's in it, so you can refer to it when you need it.
Wording: Sometimes you take pains to ask doctors and other experts a specific, deliberately-worded question, and they don't really seem to listen. They answer a question different from the one you asked, maybe a more common one. They recommend xyz even though you said that won't work for you. Etc. Why does it happen? And how do I avoid it, or get less frustrated? I explained in "Nailing Down An Answer, Or At Least A Question".
Safety: I follow a few main principles to reduce my risk of catching COVID-19. In a long June 2023 post I detailed those principles as well as my specific protocols (masking, ventilation, self-testing, and so on), including links to examples and product vendors. I'll probably write a fresh one this year since we do have some more tools than we did then.
Categorizing: And I wrote about a difficult dynamic in activist groups. I believe that when we allow ourselves to be sloppy about labelling harmful actions, we make it harder to make the right decisions about how to deal with them. And that we need to notice when we're confusing spaces for refuge with spaces for coalition and advocacy.
Celebrate Beautiful Soup's 20th anniversary
For twenty years, Beautiful Soup, the popular Python screen-scraping library, has made it easier to get data out of HTML. If you've used it, contribute to this year's 20th anniversary celebration.
Thanks
Best wishes, as always.
I have some upcoming availability to give virtual talks (including stand-up comedy) and to coach open source maintainers, leads, and managers.
If you'd like to ask for my availability for your projects, or invite me to speak, please reply to this mail or contact me in the Fediverse -- I'm on Mastodon as @brainwane@social.coop.
-Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset Consulting