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> Somebody, or a group of people, needs to step up and spend lots of hours every week to make sure code actually gets pushed through the pipeline and issues are

> Somebody, or a group of people, needs to step up and spend lots of hours every week to make sure code actually gets pushed through the pipeline and issues are triaged. This article is describing a delegation problem. The project mentioned, prettier, is developer-oriented, but let's take this to a general level. You have to start recruiting your users to the various non-coding teams from day one. Then those users need to pick up the responsibility of recruiting. I have not contributed a single line of code to my project of choice, LibreOffice. Yet, over the past few years I have - triaged thousands of issues - done tech/process documentation in the wiki - done research on web applications + a little maintenance work on them - recruited people to the QA team - recruited people to the infra team - recruited people to the design team - mentored new developers (on the process, not code), even through submitting their first patch - offered guidance to new contributors in every team (who is who, how to start, what tasks are available etc.) - made sure information flows between the teams - given a bit of user support (some bugs are user errors..) There are innumerable ways non-coding users can help preserve the sanity of developers. You just have to let the users know. You have to spell it out for them, they do not know how important this simple stuff is. I did not know about it, when I started dabbling with bug testing - it was an accident!

vog 10y ago
This. Exactly this is the problem with semi-popular Free Software projects, and what annoys me most with almost-but-not-quite unmaintained projects. It is really no problem if somebody's time is limited. But it is a problem if they don't delegate properly, and thus make it very hard for volunteers to assist them, or to even take over when the time arrives. It's not so much about doing not enough work, it is about preventing others from coordinating their work on it. Unfortunately, many people don't notice that they are actually doing this. They try to review more and more contributions, work starts piling up, but they link their problem is missing time, while it really is missing trust. Also, this transition is much easier when you still have some time. When you arrive at a state where don't have any time at all, it is really hard to perform proper delegation, and one or two (hopefully not too much uncoordinated) forks are they only way for the community to reorganize.

vog 10y ago

This. Exactly this is the problem with semi-popular Free Software projects, and what annoys me most with almost-but-not-quite unmaintained projects. It is really no problem if somebody's time is limited. But it is a problem if they don't delegate properly, and thus make it very hard for volunteers to assist them, or to even take over when the time arrives. It's not so much about doing not enough work, it is about preventing others from coordinating their work on it. Unfortunately, many people don't notice that they are actually doing this. They try to review more and more contributions, work starts piling up, but they link their problem is missing time, while it really is missing trust. Also, this transition is much easier when you still have some time. When you arrive at a state where don't have any time at all, it is really hard to perform proper delegation, and one or two (hopefully not too much uncoordinated) forks are they only way for the community to reorganize.