Navigating the Challenges of Scaling Open Source Projects
The growth of an open source project is a testament to its value and relevance. But, growth brings its own set of challenges, especially when it comes to managing the influx of contributions, maintaining project health, and communicating with core members of your team. Finding the right approach to manage this growth can be as important as the development of the project.
“The problem facing maintainers today is not how to get more contributors by how to manage a high volume of frequent, low-touch interactions. These developers aren’t building communities; they’re directing air traffic.” Nadia Eghbal from Working in Public: the making and maintenance of open source software, p. 13
Open source teams are often working not in one repository, but in multiple or sometimes even organizations with different issues, contributors, and teams. Keeping track of GitHub notifications is hard enough on its own, but add to that building relationships with contributors, reviewing pull requests, updating documentation, and more, sometimes you lose sight of the ultimate goals of the project and forget to think about health and sustainability. On top of that, if you’re working on projects either in tandem or as part of your job, there’s often an element of needing to justify what you’re working on. The challenge of balancing code-centric and community-centric needs can be overwhelming.
So how do you cut through the noise and make sure that you have a good sense of direction and the value that your project is creating?
