How are open source projects managed?

Open source projects, like businesses, typically begin with one or a small group of people doing a lot. As they grow in usage and visibility, they attract more contributors and higher-level contributors (known as maintainers and committers) who help scale the project.

In this section, we’ll cover the steps you’ll need to take to manage an open source project successfully. These include defining goals and organizational structure, creating documentation, facilitating communication, and building a community. Let’s get started!

Note: All open source projects are unique in how they are run and may not look identical to what is outlined in this guide. Trust your judgment when managing your own project!

Step 1: Establish a vision for your open source project

Before you can create a usable project and build a community around it, you need to establish a vision.

Vision is what rallies a community around a common goal. A vision tells your community what your project is and, perhaps more importantly, what it isn’t. Not only does this allow contributors to make more meaningful contributions, but it also allows users of your project to know when it's appropriate to fork it.

For your project, define:

• What key functionalities do you wish your project to achieve? What do you want the first few releases to look like?
• What key functionalities do you wish your project to achieve? What do you want the first few releases to look like?

Once you’ve answered these questions, place your ideas on a formalized roadmap. This will help keep things organized and easy to visualize.

In addition to defining a vision, define what success looks like for your project. Success goes beyond releases – it can mean a lot of things when you build an open-source project. Whether it’s a personal goal or a project-wide goal, here are some examples of goals you might have:

• Build a portfolio or establish yourself as a respected software developer
• Reach a certain number of users or contributors
• Reach a certain number of stars on GitHub
• Establish a well-known open-source brand (for this, you may use marketing KPIs like # of followers on Twitter, newsletter subscribers, event attendees, etc.)

The important thing is to answer the question: “What does success mean for my project?” If it has nothing to do with building a community and is solely release-based – that’s totally fine, but remember, you can get to where you want to go faster when you build a larger, more engaged community!

Step 2: Create transparency with documentation

The idea of transparency is deeply embedded in the concept of open source development. While publicly releasing software is transparent in and of itself, maintaining these projects requires continuous transparency on various levels to keep their communities productive.

There are many ways to create transparency. However, arguably the most important way is through documentation. Documentation allows for knowledge transfer of everything you know about what you’ve created so far so that others can build upon it.

Earlier, we discussed the importance of having a “vision” and road mapping that vision. Roadmaps are a form of documentation – a means of keeping your community informed and on the same page. In addition to roadmaps, many other documents will keep your members informed. Here are the most common:

The “READ ME” document

A “READ ME” is usually one of the first documents created for an open source project. It includes:

• A description of what the project is
• The project’s purpose and use cases for the open source code
• How to get started using the code
• Community guidelines (i.e. how to interact appropriately with others in the community)
• An open source license

The “contributing file”

A contributing file contains information about getting started contributing to a project. Some helpful information commonly held in the file includes:

• Project vision: This includes the scope of the project, links to the roadmap, and any other information that helps users understand the project's current direction. This will prevent users from suggesting unnecessary contributions and keep them on track.
• Types of contributions welcome: An important part of creating an inclusive community is letting users know where their unique expertise is needed most. Most open source projects cannot accept all types of contributions, so creating documentation that outlines the project's current needs and roles available gives all users a fair opportunity to contribute in a meaningful way. You may also wish to include links to epics or issues that require assistance.
• Approval process: In addition to being transparent about the types of contributions that are welcome, you should also outline the approval process for contributions, how often contributions are reviewed, and when it is appropriate to follow up with maintainers about a contribution. Don't leave users in the dark – contributing is a time investment, and everyone's work deserves acknowledgment, even if it doesn't make it to a release.
• When to expect commit access: Users who invest a lot of time into a project deserve special acknowledgment. In the open source world, commit access is that kind of acknowledgment. It's not always necessary to provide hard rules for when users can expect to receive commit access. Still, it may be encouraging for users who are often contributing to know they will be given access at some point. You can also set branch protection rules in GitHub, which allow maintainers to enforce regulations on when a collaborator can push changes to a branch in your repo.
• Rules for contributors: Outlining rules for contributors can keep your community a safe and positive place to collaborate. Rules for contributing may include a code of conduct, how often you are expected to contribute based on your role, how issues are to be filled out (you can include templates), and any other rules you may wish to have as part of your project management process.
• Additional supporting documentation: All projects are different and may require different types of documentation. Try and think like a contributor (both one who is new and familiar with your project) to understand what things you would like your maintainers to be transparent about. You might release a response to recent issues or questions about your project or a regular update about milestones. Remember that “documentation” is not necessarily a formal document. Other types of documentation may include social media posts, newsletters, email communications, press releases, videos, etc. At the end of the day, documentation is anything that keeps your community transparent and informed – feel free to get creative with it!

Step 3: Defining open source leadership roles

Leadership is an essential part of any community. Identifying key contributors that can take responsibility for overseeing the project, reviewing contributions, determining the roadmap, and ensuring the community is a positive, inclusive space is critical to the project’s success.

Once your project starts getting off the ground, you’ll want to start defining key roles that people within your community can play.

Roles within the committer and contributor levels
There are plenty of ways to contribute to open source projects, even beyond software development. Here are some of the ways you can add value to open source communities:

Coding: The most common way users can contribute to open source projects is by providing code that addresses software gaps or fixes software bugs.

Documentation writing & maintenance: Good documentation is a really important part of any software project. As a writer for the open source community, your tasks may be updating documentation, creating documentation that helps users understand how to use the software, or translating that documentation into other languages for a worldwide audience.

Marketing: In the open source industry, marketing is critical for ensuring that people know about the software, can easily understand how to use it, and contribute to it. It's about generating a project's visibility and resources to succeed, including users, maintainers, and sponsors. As a marketer, you may create how-to articles, produce videos and screencasts, promote the project on social media, write blogs and newsletters, issue press releases, and more.

Step 4: Build community

Community keeps users engaged, productive, and collaborative in the open source world. So far in this guide, we’ve covered a lot of things that make up a strong foundation for building a community, such as establishing a vision, creating transparency through documentation, and formalizing roles and responsibilities. Still, great open source communities have other elements that go beyond these foundational pieces.

Here are some other elements that make great open source communities:

Fairness and equality
Everyone should be subject to the same contributor rules and have the same opportunities to contribute and earn higher roles within the community based on their own merit.  This doesn’t mean anyone can contribute anything. This means that so far as contributors follow the rules, their opportunities are the same as anyone else.

Here are some tips for encouraging fairness and equality:

• Be transparent about rules for contribution
• Be transparent about how to earn higher roles within the community

Fostering diversity
Fostering diversity within your community means making sure you’re welcoming new perspectives and unique contributions. Sometimes open source projects become dominated by people from a single organization or by a smaller collective of people within the community. While initially, the dedication from these groups may seem helpful, it can alienate other members and prevent new ideas and perspectives from shaping your project.

Here are some tips for encouraging diversity:

• Do not give special privileges to specific organizations or parties of people.
• Provide resources to help less experienced contributors contribute meaningfully to your project, such as flagging certain issues as “for beginners.”
• Do not tolerate inappropriate behaviour or discrimination in your community (you can mention this in your community code of conduct).

Effective and open communication
Communities cannot be built in silos. Establishing open and effective communication habits within your community early on can prevent your team from becoming siloed, duplicating work, and not taking advantage of available resources and expertise.

Here are some tips for facilitating effective and open communication:

• As mentioned above, document everything. Any discussions done on or offline should be publicly visible somewhere.
• Reduce video or offline meetings – this will make it easier to keep all of the conversations you have with other members publicly visible. We recommend using tools such as planning poker for asynchronous story point estimation to reduce meetings.
• Keep roadmaps regularly updated – this will ensure all community members are always on the same page. To reduce the manual labor of updating roadmaps, try Zenhub’s real-time road mapping tool.