Hi all

I was wondering if anyone have some experience of managing risks in open source projects.

I'm doing some research on the topic and try to find information about how risk issues can be managed in a practical way within open source communities, that work on one or more projects.

An open source community differs very much from a traditional project team in a company and the question is if it is possible to counter for possible hazardous problems (risks) in a good way from a project managers point of view.

I know this might not be a common topic within a linuxforum, but Linux is open source and based on what I've seen on this forum so far, there must be many users with experience from projects using open source or developing open source software.

Thanks for any replies or links to journals, articles or other information covering the topic!

I guess I'd try to think of this in the opposite way.....Why wouldn't "traditional" project managment principles apply to open source projects? In any project, you have the usual 3 variables, time, cost and objectives. In an open source project your cost variable is kind of funky since the project members are donating time (although you could probably find a low, and VERY fixed cost to a project), but you can have solid time and objective goals that the project members agree upon. You should be doing the usual steps of creating a project charter, then gathering requirements and documenting everything. Probably the biggest challenge is going to be to get cooperation from project members since they are volunteers and may be more unwilling to go along with the overhead that project managment can bring. However, if you state your project managment principles up front, you may be able to recruit project memebers who are more willing to work within a project managment framework.


I guess I should have state up front that I don't have experience with project managment in open source projects, however I would be willing to bet that some of the most successful projects (like the kernel) would be good places to ask how they do (or do not do) project managment.

Thanks Hangdog42, I believe you're right about that.

The core team will probably be the ones who establish the principles up front and later members must agree to be able to join. If everyone agrees then the ongoing risk assessment could be handled by just reporting possible new threats as the projects move along. The core team could evaluate if the risk is relevant and work out a contingency plan to counter it (this is just one possibility I thought of myself and I haven't found anyone supporting it yet).

And yes it was I who started the thread, but after changing my mail information the account was deactivated (re-activation link was useless). Still waiting for reply from the webmasters, but until then I will have to use this account... They're probably as busy as me