Spraying Contributor Repellent

Today’s quote is long but important (bold emphasis mine):

[You] will often find yourselves wanting to settle difficult questions by private communications among an inner circle. This is especially true in the early days of the project, when there are so many important decisions to make, and, usually, few volunteers qualified to make them. All the obvious disadvantages of public list discussions will loom palpably in front of you: the delay inherent in email conversations, the need to leave sufficient time for consensus to form, the hassle of dealing with naive volunteers who think they understand all the issues but actually don’t (every project has these; sometimes they’re next year’s star contributors, sometimes they stay naive forever), the person who can’t understand why you only want to solve problem X when it’s obviously a subset of larger problem Y, and so on. The temptation to make decisions behind closed doors and present them as faits accomplis, or at least as the firm recommendations of a united and influential voting block, will be great indeed.

Don’t do it.

As slow and cumbersome as public discussions can be, they’re almost always preferable in the long run. Making important decisions in private is like spraying contributor repellant on your project. No serious volunteer would stick around for long in an environment where a secret council makes all the big decisions.

Naturally, there are some discussions that must be had privately; throughout this book we’ll see examples of those. But the guiding principle should always be: If there’s no reason for it to be private, it should be public.

Making this happen requires action. It’s not enough merely to ensure that all your own posts go to the public list. You also have to nudge other people’s unnecessarily private conversations to the list too. If someone tries to start a private discussion, and there’s no reason for it to be private, then it is incumbent on you to open the appropriate meta-discussion immediately. Don’t even comment on the original topic until you’ve either successfully steered the conversation to a public place, or ascertained that privacy really was needed. If you do this consistently, people will catch on pretty quickly and start to use the public forums by default.

— Karl Fogel, Producing Open Source Software

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