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