Based on a SustainOSS conversation at the SustainOSS Summit of March 13, 2025, there was a vibrant discussion of the challenges and opportunities that come from considering succession planning and mentorship of community members in open source communities. Born from experience within open source projects, and acknowledging the challenges of handing off responsibilities and delegation of tasking we talked through and around these topics in the context of open source projects. We found that each of us have rather high standards, which makes it particularly hard to delegate tasks to others. So we worked to develop some tips and tricks for helping ourselves to bring forth energy and contribution from others, and ways in which our high standards can be shared and grown in others in the context of project missions.
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Document Everything
Record your processes and maintenance work, create how-to guides, and maintain clear documentation. There are multiple ways to document. Do you hate the blank page and blinking cursor? Try Twitch streaming or sharing a video of you doing important work. Share it publicly, or privately with your community, but do share it. Whatever means you use to log your work, it aids to preserve knowledge and makes it easier for others to step into various roles. -
Build Self-Improvement Loops in your organization and people Encourage continuous learning and growth within your community and its members. Model this as a leader, build soft-expectations of this among your new community members. Develop ways in which you can support learning, and improvement in service of the organization's goals. Create structures that support self-improvement, such as peer learning groups and educational resources on developing open source skills.
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Identify and Nurture Potential Leaders
Keep an eye out for community members who are willing to lean in and "wash the dishes" – those who consistently show initiative and want to contribute to the mission. Give them responsibilities and support them as they learn about how those responsibilities map to the broader work of the organization. Sit with your feelings of high-expectations, and high-standards for their work, and find ways you can give feedback to help them grow to the standards you and the organization expect of them and their contributions. -
Create Mentorship Programs
Establish formal mentorship programs, including mentorship summits and mentor-mentee engagements where they can connect formally and informally. Support your mentors to learn how to support, give feedback, map interests to the organization's needs. Well-prepared mentors can help deepen new community member's engagements, and can level-set the kinds of standards and expectations the community has around its work and systems. -
Recognize and Appreciate Contributors
Build into your organization ways that you recognize and highlight the efforts of mentors, community members and contributors. Calling out and appreciating people can happen in a myriad of ways, in small groups, large groups, publicly, and privately. Finding ways that your organization has formality and structure around how it chooses to recognize contribution is an important activity to sustain contribution and participation long-term. -
Foster a Sense of Collective Ownership
Promote the idea that documentation and certain tasks and resources belong to the community as a whole, not to any one person. Do the work to find things that are single-owner and arrange for job-shadowing, live-streaming, recording or documentation sessions that capture how this work is done. Enable others to take ownership and responsibility, when someone is on vacation, a long leave, for any reason at all, let them own the process and bring their abilities to it. This helps distribute responsibility and prevents knowledge silos. -
Develop Clear Task Lists and Quality Standards
Create lists of starter tasks for newcomers and establish quality standards for various activities. New community members should not be asked to do the critical tasks that have legal or long-term implications. Ease them into non-critical tasks to start. As you mature as an organization, develop a rubric for how you invite contribution to tasks. With this rubric you can build confidence in community member's abilities to own more critical tasks, and give them constructive feedback, growing their abilities and the organization’s resilience. -
Embrace Delegation and "first cuts"
Much like in a room full of surgeons, somebody has to make the "first cut" in a surgery. Encourage experienced members to delegate tasks and enable community members to make and experience that "first cut" in your community’s work. Remember that perfection isn't always necessary, and mistakes are part of the learning process. Develop mechanisms for shared ownership / responsibility of tasks and ways in which feedback can help all contributors grow in their ability to lead and delegate. -
Be Open to Feedback
Implement systems for collecting and responding to feedback, developing feedback rubrics and map them to organizational expectations and objectives. This helps community members to build openness to feedback and to share with others feedback that can make the organization more robust and resilient. Feedback takes practice, both giving it well and receiving it take intention, care and practice. Open the conversation to build your community's culture around feedback. With a strong culture of feedback, high-expectations and quality standards can be shared and embraced collectively. -
Plan for Absences
Develop succession plans that ensure the project can continue smoothly in the absence of any single contributor. Develop scenario planning activities where you look at vulnerabilities, if someone was away for a family emergency, would things grind to a halt? When you identify these vulnerable areas, look to the other 9 rules for techniques to develop some resilience. This includes cross-training, documenting processes, and distributing knowledge across the community.