Open Source Project Management? Any tips?
mockturtle
at my university we started, a year ago, the development of a software
to be distributed with an open source license. The software is
getting ready for its first official release and we are planning for
its future development. We would like to create a community of
developers around our software, but since it is the first time that we
do something like this, we have few doubts. For example, how can we
be sure about the "quality" of a volunteer contributor? He/she does
not have to be the best programmer in the world, of course, but we
would like to avoid involving programmers that could bring more
problem than help. Again, how can we trust a volunteer that we know
only by e-mail? For example, he/she could try to insert some
malicious code or try to mess it up the sw repository. Again, how can
we take in account that if we assign a task to a contributor, he/she
will not be able to grant to finish the task within a given amount of
time? I expect that most of the contributors will have their own jobs
and lives, so it is reasonable to expect that they will handle their
task in a "best effort" way.
Did you have experience about managing "open source" style projects?
Do you have tips/best practices/experiences to share? Do you know
references (books, web sites, ...) about this?
Thank you in advance for your help
mockturtle
meantime, so that maybe it can be useful to someone else in the
future.
I found two brief articles here
Maybe this site has something more.
Moreover, I ordered (but not received yet) the book "Producing Open
Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project" by
Karl Fogel. The reviews I found around seem very positive, I'll let
you know more when I will have read it.
J. Greenlees
To start with, you do NOT give commit access to everyone. they have to
earn that privilege by providing good code.
They can download / check out the sources, naturally, and submit changes
that get vetted by known / trusted coders before the code is added to
the repository.
They can submit bug reports and patches, in the bug tracking system used.
but again, that is all checked by the trusted team members before it is
put into the repository.
once someone has been actively working with you and providing good code
regularly, then those with write access can decide if that person has
earned the privilege of having write access.
sourceforge.net has the systems all set up for open source project
management. as do a few other websites.
these free services have version control, bug tracking, mailing lists,
forums, blog engine [ news feeds for project updates ]
everything needed to get a project going and to help it be visible to
draw a community to it.
don't ignore the existing infrastructure of the open source community,
it will provide you with the tools and people your project needs to gain
a community of it's own.
Jaqui