originally published on blog.weareopen.coop
Recently some colleagues asked me to provide a few questions that would help an interview panel suss out whether or not their candidates were appropriate for a leadership position in a global open source project. They asked
“How exactly do we interrogate the “open-sourceyness” of a leader?”
There’s two things I would look for:
- open leadership personality qualities and
- an understanding of how the whole ecosystem of open source works.
Code contribution questions can reveal a lot more about both those things than you might think. Some questions I thought might help:
Q: What does an open source contribution look like?
A: It depends on the type of contribution. A code contribution will be submitted as a PR and a code review will be done. There will likely be requests for changes, especially if the contributor is new to the project. After a few back and forths, the contribution will pass code review and be pulled into the master code. Communication within the community is hugely important. Most people are aware of code contributions, but anyone with any sort of skill set can contribute. Look for an understanding of open source as a multi-faceted endeavor.
Q: Who does the code review?
A: This is where your candidates should likely talk a little bit about open source project governance. Do they know the difference between the project maintainers and contributors? Depending on a projects setup, code reviews might be done only by maintainers of a project, or there might be a rigorous peer review system set up. Your candidates should talk about how different open projects are setup differently because at the end of the day it’s members of the community who make decisions, instill guidelines and run the project in the open.
Q: What tools do you need?
A: This question is to probe their understanding of the open source ecosystem. Again, the community itself defines it’s ways of working, but there are some standard tools in FOSS projects (e.g. GitHub, wikis, mailing lists, documentation tools, roadmaps, blogs). It’s hard to be a participant in open source without the appropriate technical skills (not just coding!) that go along with digital literacy.
Q: What’s the most important thing a leader in open needs to do?
A: Leaders need to make potential and actual contributors feel informed, welcomed and part of the community. They need to be intentional about diversity and equanimity, and work to make their open project a social project, not just a technical one.