Learnings of Open-source maintainer - Delegation

Open-Source have been a successful software development process in past few decades. It is interesting to learn what goes on under the hood. A common role is a maintainer or a team of maintainers at the helm of a project shephard'ing the code contributions and guiding project evolution. A maintainer's role is intersection of technological prowess, leadership, mentor, manager, marketer, it requires some unique skills. I will talk about some of the critical skills in the series that follow.

Delegation:

Delegation is something that is not easy skill, it makes one vulnerable as the trust is delegated, authority is delegated, thereby your deliverables are not under your control anymore. A lot of maintainer's struggle with delegating because it is not an easy skill.

Delegation is in nature. Living organisms delegate all the time, a single celled organisms does everything by oneself, but multi-celled organisms have effective delegation mechanism Similarly, if a project has to grow and scale, the maintainer's have to device an effective delegation mechanism.

One size does not fit all. So the delegation methods will vary from project to project and maintainer to maintainer.