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One facet of OSS sustainability that's often on my mind: how to cope with an endless stream of critiques, sometimes unstructured and underinformed. The problem comes in a few guises:
The best-case version goes like this. You make your project increasingly, truly open, giving opportunities for people to weigh in at every point in the development process. (With Rust, this is very explicitly a *Request* for Comments).
The better your project is on this front, the more commentary needs to be digested and responded to. And for those taking the initiative to Get Something Done, it can feel like running a gauntlet of criticism.
In this best-case world, this gauntlet improves quality, ensures that stakeholder constraints are met, and uncovers positive-sum solutions (see http://aturon.github.io/2018/06/02/listening-part-2/ …). But even so, even if everyone is polite and on point, the Critique Gauntlet is... exhausting.
A harder variant is Critique Groundhog Day, in which the same critiques are made over and over at each stage of the development process, sometimes even within the same (long) thread. Again, this can happen even if everyone is acting in good faith and doing their best.
Then there are critiques that aren't part of the development process, but rather "just" personal outcries. With OSS, though, these critiques can appear at random "in the workplace", within the forums where development usually takes place. Stochastic Critiques!
If you're doing Open well, there's a sense of co-ownership of the project shared by its entire community. And from that perspective, it's easy for an individual, even on the periphery, to believe that their critique needs to Be Heard.
So: a project trying to be truly open. Everyone playing their role in good faith and intent. But a result of a Critique Gauntlet, Groundhog Day, or Stochastic Criticism... all making it pretty hard to keep burnout at bay.
A question I've been grappling with in all this: how much of this experience is an inherent, even appropriate part of success or scale? We all consider it just fine to write hot takes about "Apple removes headphone jack", or to scathingly indict politicians. With great power...?
But I have a hunch that there's a different element at play: a distinct lack of boundaries. Anyone can be a stakeholder. Anyone can be a co-owner. And if your work is entirely "in the open", then you have to open to these critiques at all times; there's no safe space.
Maybe there's a way to add some structure, boundaries, and clear expectations about when and where debate happens in OSS. But doing so without losing that sense of co-ownership and the drive for quality... it's a tall order. Lots to think about for Rust's next chapter!
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