One discussion at the Accountability In Open Source workshop I attended this week was about when your village becomes a city. This was an analogy for when a small project, where everyone knows everone else (ie, a village) reaches that inflection point where that’s no longer the case.

Community norms, agreed upon by consensus and habit, need to be codified. Tasks that everyone knew how to do need to be documented, so that they can be delegated to people who weren’t there at the beginning. The purpose and mission of the project, which everyone knew because they were in the room where it happened, must be written down and explained to the people who came later.

The discussion covered a lot of ground, as one might expect, from reasons why projects don’t survive this transition (founders’ unwillingness to share control with a larger group; user demands outpacing developers’ bandwidth; company tries to capture more value from the growing audience and ends up alienating them; etc.) to specific things that a community should do to prepare for and succeed through this phase.

Projects tend to succeed when the participants have ownership. Project leaders should therefore be willing to share leadership, rather than clinging to it. At the same time, they should clearly document project goals, and non-goals, to stave off value drift and feature creep, which can be the death of a project.

A common theme with small projects which was addressed at some length was that they tend to be controlled by Large Personalities, rather than by a project mission. That can lead to power struggles, interpersonal squabbles, and decisions being about the who rather than about the ideas themselves. Project growth is an (often missed!) opportunity to move past that, and refocus on specific goals.

Projects should proactively create roles (and give them titles! that lets people know that their work is valued!) that community members can step into. This involves looking around and inentionally documenting the stuff that you just do and don’t think about. Write runbooks. Ask for a shaddow, and ask them to follow the runbook with your supervision. Incrementally improve it with the steps that you just automatically do and forgot to write down. Over time, relinquish control and let them just take it. Encourage them to identify the next person in the succession path.