Spring Cleaning: What Community Gardening Has Taught Me About Open Source Maintainership

While on the surface these activities may seem to have nothing in common: gardening happens outside with sunshine and manual labor while writing open source software happens inside with florescent lighting and a lot of typing. In practice they are very similar: a group of people coming together to build something they are passionate about.

Suburban readers may be curious about what a community garden is. I live in New York City in an apartment building with no outdoor space. People across the city are in the same situation, and have taken over scraps of open space to form community gardens. These days (at least in NYC) the land is mostly owned by either the parks department or the land trust (you can think of these like open source foundations), and it’s mostly weird triangle lots and other hard-to-develop spaces in corners of our crowded city. Community gardens range from park-like manicured spaces to urban farms that grow food for the community. They are maintained by volunteers from the community with some resource support from the city.

I spent last weekend re-building gardening beds in my community garden to build up the usable soil and (hopefully) keep out the rats. But efforts like this don’t just happen, they are possible because of the hard work of lots of folks who:

• Organize: get deliveries of gravel, compost, and top soil, pick a day and time for volunteers to work together, direct volunteers to how they can help
• Build community: making people feel welcome so they come back week after week to help out
• Provide governance: make sure there are processes in place for when people break the norms of a free-to-join community
• Show up: harvesting vegetables is a lot of fun. What’s less fun is showing up every week to weed, water, and turn the compost

These are the same efforts that let open source projects thrive.

• Organizing: responding to Github issues and prs, creating tests, making roadmaps. These things make contributions by others possible.
• Community building: making people want to contribute code by holding community meetings, listening to point points, and making everyone feel included
• Governance: What do you do when a technical or personal dispute arises? Who makes the final decision?
• Showing up: All the volunteers who open issues and prs, contribute code, and share their experiences.

So really, both of these activities are about community: bringing together a group of people with a common goal, and setting up structures so that they not only can, but want to, contribute to a project. 

If you’ve been thinking about getting involved in a project, the process is fairly simple. Submit a PR, ask a question, propose a new feature. But becoming a maintainer takes effort over time. Not just reviewing and writing new features, but managing and supporting the community of people that make open source possible. Do this, and you can prepare your open source garden for a successful harvest.

So, go say thank you to a maintainer of your favorite open source project, and maybe get outside this spring!