Skills and Techniques

The OSS Management Skills Wheel describes 24 skills, divided into 4 core competencies, used by OSS community managers. It was initiated by Inessa Pawson and Sanket Verma during the 2023 Scientific Python Project Developer Summit (Seattle, WA).

Interpersonal

• Engagement

• Collaboration

• Moderation, mediation, and intervention

• Emotional integration

• Train and teach

• Mentoring

• Cultural competence

• Networking

Technical

• Git and GitHub

• Dev tools

• PR and issues

• Triage

OSS Management

• Growth and sustainability

• Governance

• Meeting facilitation

• Program design

• Change management

• Record keeping

• Event planning

• Recruiting

Communication

• Content creation and curation

• Speaking and presenting

• Advocacy

• Social media

Other useful skills

• Scaffolding

  • Removing barriers/making it easy for the new contributors to join - could like the scientific python guide here (https://learn.scientific-python.org/contributors/)

  • Removing barriers/making it easy for the maintainers to work

  • Removing barriers/making it easy for the users to discover the documentation/tutorials

  • And removing barriers and helping wherever necessary

• Dealing with conflicts in the community

  • Between developers/maintainers

  • CoC enforcing

• How to gracefully exit a project for a maintainer -

  • How a CM can help it onboarding the next maintainer