Herding Cats: Understanding How To Manage Open Source Projects – Tuesday 10th September


PROMS-G (Project and Programme Management Specialist Group) are holding the above event on Tuesday 10th September at the BCS offices in Southampton Street.

The event is free of charge for members and non-members and tea, coffee & biscuits are served from 18:00.

For booking details click here. 

Subject:

Managing open source projects can sometimes be uncontrollable, chaotic and mystifying to supervisors and managers. Under the right circumstances successful projects attract new users and developers and then flourish in this environment. Successful projects are deployed by the military, in nuclear power plants and even on millions of cell phones.

 

In this talk Richard Hughes will explain the different management structures used in different projects as diverse as the Linux kernel and specialist compilers used only by a few dozen people. By explaining how the source code is managed, and the different personality types in each project hopefully the audience will start to understand how little projects can become great projects. The role of the “maintainer” will be explained and also the personality traits good maintainers just have to have.

 

 

Richard Hughes has over 10 years of experience developing open source software.

He is the maintainer of PackageKit, gnome-packagekit, gnome-power-manager, gnome-color-manager, colord, and UPower and also contributes to many other projects and opensource standards. Richard has three main areas of interest on the free desktop, color management, package management, and power management.

 

 

Richard graduated a few years ago from the University of Surrey with a Masters in Electronics Engineering. He now works for Red Hat in the desktop group, and also manages a company selling open source calibration equipment. Richard’s outside interests include taking photos and eating good food.

 

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