I was a huge bottleneck on my first OSS project

I became a problematic bottleneck on my first OSS project. It didn’t start that way, but it definitely ended that way. And I’ve been thinking ever since about how I could’ve managed that better.

I started out as a network subject matter expert but wasn’t a bottleneck in that role. However, the next two functions I absorbed were the source of the problem.

The first additional role was in becoming the unofficial document librarian. Most of the documents coming into our organisation came through me. Being inquisitive, I’d review each document and try to apply it to what my colleagues and I were trying to achieve. When the team had an information void, they’d come to me with the problem and I’d not just point them to the relevant document/s but dive into helping to solve the problem.

The next role was assisting to model network data into the OSS database. This morphed into becoming responsible for all of the data in the database. In those days, I didn’t have a Minimum Viable Data (MVD) mindset. Instead it was an ingest-it-all-and-figure-out-how-to-use-it-later mentality. When the team had a data void, they’d come to me with the problem and I’d not just point them to the relevant data and what it meant but dive into helping to solve their problem/s.

You can see how this is leading to being a bottleneck can’t you?

I was effectively asking for all problems to be re-routed through me. Every person on the project (except possibly the project admins) relied on documentation and data. I averaged 85 hour weeks for about 2.5 years on that project, but still didn’t get close to servicing all the requests. Great as a learning exercise. Not great for the project.

Twenty years on, how would I do it better? Well, let me ask first, how would you do it better?

You possibly have many more ideas, but the two I’d like to leave you with are:

  • Figure out ways to make teaching more repeatable and self-learnt
  • Very closely aligned, and more importantly, is in asking leading questions that help others solve their own problems

It still feels like it’s less helpful to not dive into solving the problem, but it undoubtedly improves overall team efficiency and growth.

Oh, and by the way, if you’re just starting out in OSS and want to speed up your own development into becoming an OSS linchpin – find your way into the document librarian and/or data management roles. After all these years on OSS projects, I still think these are the best places to launch into the learning curve from.

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