[PDX.pm] Rescue Your Doomed Project July 9, 2008

Wed. July 9th, 6:53pm at FreeGeek -- 1731 SE 10th Ave.

Speaker: chromatic
Topic: Rescue Your Doomed Project

Any large software project struggles with managing code, managing
people, and managing expectations. This is especially true for free
software projects developed mostly by volunteers. Your project will run
into one or more of them. Here’s what can possibly go wrong, how you
can make your problems worse… and how to fix them.

Topics include:

* how not to manage volunteers
* how not to promote your project to potential users
* how to avoid releasing software
* how to let bottlenecks derail your plans
* how to reduce the quality of your code
* how to chase away interested volunteers
* how to chase away core contributors
* how to render beautiful documentation useless
* how to ensure that carefully-devised technical plans will go largely
ignored
* how to hide important knowledge in inaccessible silos
* how to promote technical contributions over the polish that really
matters
* how to maintain features no one knows anything about

... and most importantly, how to identify stupidly simple ways to make
users and developers happy, productive, and successful.

As always, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the LuckyLab.

Official Website: http://pdx.pm.org/kwiki/index.cgi