One thing I have tried to advocate for no matter what project it is I’m contributing to is good process and transparency. You would think that things like good process and transparency come naturally to open source projects but the thing is, no matter how old or new the project is there are always people coming and going who have varying depths of experience in doing work in the open and as a result open is not always the default in open source projects.
Most recently, I have been pushing for more transparency in some programs at Mozilla and specifically in the area that deals with community and not product. You might have thought that teams doing work around community at Mozilla are already operating transparently while the reality is in practice open is hard.
One thing I am trying to convince folks though is that working in the open is not so hard that we ignore the principles of working in the open and avoid trying to build a good foundation of open processes. One thing I am finding when I have these discussions though is people do not always feel empowered to speak out about working in the open. Simply put teams and organizations will get in these status quos where they put off this hard work and nobody really comes around often to challenge the status quo because often the debates that pursue of working in the open are filled with disagreement.
Have you ever been outspoken in a open source project about working in the open?
I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments and this will probably be a series of blog posts I write over the coming months on working in the open.