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Ayu is a tech blogger, open source contributor & maintainer, and tech community enthusiast based in the Netherlands. She loves photography and iced coffee!
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Hi friends 👋, I've been writing tech blog posts for a few years now. If you don't know me yet, English is my second language. My mother tongue is Indonesian, and I'm also surrounded by Dutch every da
I frequently receive messages from enthusiastic contributors who have completed 2 or 3 high-quality pull requests (PRs) in just 1 month. They’re proactive, their work is top-tier, and they’ve handled
A few months ago, I shared a story about building an automated open source portfolio using just my smartphone and an AI assistant while on vacation. My main goal was to stop the "spreadsheet struggle"
Recently, I read Bekah Hawrot Weigel’s blog post, "When 'Local' Went Global: The Pandemic Era of International Communities." As someone active in many online communities, I found it a bit sad, but I agree with her points and think they apply to open ...
Hacktoberfest is almost over. How has your contribution journey been so far? Are you confident about contributing to open source projects, or are you still struggling to find your way? If you're new to open source and still feel overwhelmed, that's c...
Have you ever faced a dilemma as a maintainer, wondering whether to tackle an issue yourself or create an issue for the community to solve?
Knowing when to delegate tasks and involve external contributors is crucial for empowering contributors, fostering a healthy community, and keeping your sanity intact. However, there are also tasks that only the core team may and can handle.
In this article, I will walk you through prioritizing issues wisely and deciding when to delegate or best handle them in-house.
Before deciding to delegate or tackle an issue, you must learn how to prioritize it. With a mountain of issues, effective prioritization is crucial. How do you know what to tackle first?
It would help if you considered these factors to prioritize issues:
Now, you know how to prioritize issues. Next, we will dive into which issues are best to delegate and which are best for you to work on yourself.
Most of the time, writing an issue is more challenging and time-consuming than working on it yourself. But if you handle everything alone, you will get burnt out quickly.
Remember, the key to open source is the community. Delegating issues to the contributors can bring fresh perspectives, lighten your workload, and foster a sense of ownership within the community.
Now, the question is: What kind of issues do you better delegate?
To manage these issues, you can label them with bug, feature, testing, help wanted, etc., depending on the issue type.
Always remember that contributors volunteer their time to help you maintain and enhance your project. So, when time is sensitive, consider handling them in-house rather than rushing contributors to finish the issue promptly.
Delegating issues is one of the ways to attract new contributors to your project and build your contributor pipeline. Contributors come and go; you want more contributors to stick around and contribute more after their first pull request for the sustainability of your project.
Delegating issues will help contributors understand your project and its codebase better, and it help you offload some of your work and build a vibrant community.
Even though delegation is important in open source, some issues need to be handled immediately and can be complex and too sensitive to be taken by external contributors.
There are three major factors that you need to consider when deciding to handle issues in-house:
"In-house" doesn't necessarily mean the tasks can only be tackled by the core team. You might have that one contributor who is a well-known community member because of their work and contributions. They regularly ship quality work, know the codebase and documentation inside out, and are familiar with your project's workflow. You know you can trust these types of contributors with the in-house tasks. However, when time is essential, you want to refrain from giving the task to them and let the core team do that instead.
Here are some types of issues that are best handled in-house:
Consider labeling these types of issues with core team work, critical or high priority to inform that these will be handled in-house.
Mastering issue management is a game-changer for open source maintainers, but it is also an ongoing process. Adapt your strategies as your project evolves, ask for community feedback, and don't be afraid to experiment to find the best approaches. By doing so, you can transform issue management into a powerful tool for community engagement and project success.
