Open Opportunities creates a network of people leading more effective, efficient, responsive communities by sharing skills and collaborating on projects that support their missions.
The software project is led by a Software Leader, guided by someone who represents the people who actively use the software (Network Leader) and managed by the community. That is, the community actively contributes to the day-to-day improvement and growth of the project, the Network Leader identifies key trends, metrics and use cases that need to be met, but the Software Leader is responsible for defining the strategy of how the software will evolve. In case of disagreement, the Software Leader has the last word. It is her job to resolve disputes within the design and development community and to ensure that the project is able to progress in a coordinated way. The Network Leader is responsible for identifying use cases and coordinating user research activities that will align active users and program leaders. In turn, it is the community’s job to guide the decisions of the leaders through active engagement and contribution.
The Network Leader defines the goals of the project and clearly communicates how it empowers the people it serves. She defines a roadmap in terms of the human needs of the people who use the software, identifying key metrics and specific use cases. She serves as administrator or community manager of an instance of the software, and also represents other community managers and the communities who use the platform.
The Software Leader sets the software roadmap and communicates these clearly to the community. She interprets how the human needs translate into software features that support them, keeping in mind the technical needs of the software, as well. Part of the responsibility is communicating to the Network Leader the technical limitations as well as technical and community opportunities which might not be apparent from the software human experience.
The Software Leader has the final word on decisions of what changes are made to the software. However, because the community always has the ability to fork, this person is fully answerable to the community, which includes end users and program leaders. The Software Leader must understand the community as a whole and strive to satisfy as many conflicting needs as possible, while ensuring that the project survives in the long term.
The traditional open source role of “benevolent dictator” is less about dictatorship and more about diplomacy. The key is to ensure that, as the project expands, the right people are given influence over it and the community rallies behind the vision of the leaders. The leaders take on the responsibility to ensure that the committers (see below) make the right decisions on behalf of the project. Generally speaking, as long as the committers are aligned with the project’s objectives and roadmap, the project lead will joyously support their leadership and contributions.
Core team members are contributors who have made several valuable contributions to the project, and move on to take on more responsibility. Contributions include a variety of activities that move the project forward:
- Opening well-crafted issues conforming with template
- Reproducing bug reports and adding to effective descriptions of issues
- Providing work-arounds, encouraging helpful comments
- Proposing solutions
- Visual design assets or mockups
- Contributing knowledge: usability testing reports, user research, case studies
- Improving the documentation
- Communication and outreach: give presentations, host a hack night, respond on the mailing list or slack channel, support new prospective contributors or end users
- Run an instance of the platform and/or be an active user and report on the experience (personal stories, quantitative and qualitative metrics)
Core team members will be given authorization to be leaders in their domain (for example, coder can write code directly to the repository, and be trusted to still submit pull requests and screen the contributions of others; designers will be able commit directly to the repository, outreach/communications people will have admin accounts on the mailing list, etc.).
Core team members have no authority over the overall direction of the project. However, they do have the ear of the both project leaders. It is a core team member’s job to ensure that the leaders are aware of the community’s needs and collective objectives, and to help develop or elicit appropriate contributions to the project. Often, core team members are given informal control over their specific areas of responsibility. Core team members are expected to have a moderate commitment to the project — they may be less active at times, since this is a volunteer role, but would respond to request for help from another core team member that needed help.
Contributors are community members who either have no desire to become core team members, or have not yet been given the opportunity by the team leaders. They make valuable contributions, such as those outlined in the list above, but generally do not have the authority to make direct changes to the project code. Contributors engage with the project through communication tools, such as email lists, and via reports and pull requests.
Anyone can become a contributor. There is no expectation of commitment to the project, no specific skill requirements and no selection process. To become a contributor, a community member simply has to perform one or more actions that are beneficial to the project.
As contributors gain experience and familiarity with the project, they may find that the project lead starts relying on them more and more. When this begins to happen, they can request to become a core team member by emailing the core team at [email protected]. The leaders will then review the history of contributions, solicit feedback from core team members and meet with the contributor. Provided that the contributor has a positive history of contributions, understands the goals of the project and commits to working within the community contribution guidelines and established processes, the contributor will then be given appropriate access that is needed for them to take on more responsibility, and they will be added to the core team mailing list.
Users are community members who have a need for the project. They are the most important members of the community: without them, the project would have no purpose. Anyone can be a user, by creating their own instance of the software or joining an existing community. Users who continue to engage with the project and its community will often find themselves becoming more and more involved. Such users may then go on to become contributors or core team members, as described above.
All participants in the community are encouraged to provide support for new people, ideally via open communication channels so future new people benefit from the same answers. This support is an important part of growing the community. Those seeking support should recognise that all support activity within the project is voluntary and is therefore provided as and when time allows. Someone who requires guaranteed response times or results should therefore seek to purchase a support contract from a vendor. (Of course, that vendor should be an active member of the community.) However, for those willing to engage with the project on its own terms, and willing to help support other people, the community support channels are ideal.
Anyone can contribute to the project, regardless of their skills, as there are many ways to contribute (see above). For details of the logistics, please see our Contribution Guide.
Benevolent Dictator Roles in open source Based on OSS-Watch's model