Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software

Given limited time and attention, solo maintainers need to balance reactive tasks (community interactions) with proactive ones (writing code).

These developers aren’t building communities; they’re directing air traffic.

these platforms also bear the responsibility of helping creators grow their reputations and capture the value of their efforts.

Maintainers frequently lack infrastructure to bring these contributors into a “contributor community”;

rely on platforms—namely, GitHub—and tools—such as bots that help with managing issues, notifications, and code quality—to keep up with their work.

how our economy might reorient itself around individual creators and the platforms upon which they build.

sifting through the noise of interactions, such as user questions, bug reports, and feature requests, which compete for their attention.

Increasingly, our online worlds are being built by individuals, not just communities.‡

they do not want to spend time familiarizing themselves with a project’s goals, roadmap, and contribution process. These developers primarily see themselves as users