HOWTO: Open Library Project Management

A 2022 Video of why we plan and how

Overview of Meetings

Weekly Calls

The internal staff ABC (Archive Book Catalog) Team call (1h, Monday @ 12pm PT) 2021
The public Open Library Community Call
M/W engineering standups at 11am (20min)
Weekly 1:1's (45min)

Yearly Planning

Open Library does planning on a yearly cadence and involved the community in its planning process. These yearly plans are distilled into executive summaries which are then vetted by the community and ultimately presented for management and the board for approval.

In November/December, the Open Library community works on its yearly Planning Document.

2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, and the rest here.

This gets turned into a yearly Executive Priorities Roadmap which gets submitted to the board

Monthly Milestone Planning

Each week (presently on Monday [2021]) the internal team has an ABC (Archive Book Catalog) call. On the last week of each month, during our weekly staff ABC calls, Open Library staff meets to plan the upcoming monthly Milestone. This process is informed by (a) the yearly Roadmap, (b) comments from stakeholders -- including management, community members, and partners -- and (c) high priority items on our issue tracker. During the milestone planning call, we calculate a summary/snapshot of how we performed, we renamed the current milestone to Sprint YYYY-MM and then close/archive it, and move all its remaining items to the rolling Next Proposed Milestone. We then create a new empty Milestone called "Active Milestone" for the upcoming sprint and go through Next Proposed to source issues. Each issue on the milestone must have an assignee and it must be clear to all parties what is expected/necessary in order for the issue to be resolved.

Quarterly Review

Every three months (before the end of the quarter) we use our ABC weekly staff meeting to review our yearly planning document. This includes evaluating our progress, blockers or circumstances which may merit a change of prioritization, and communication of changes to stakeholders.

Project-based Planning

When we have large/epic projects spanning multiple issues or individuals, we typically use a google doc to flesh out the initial idea, as well as a placeholder github issue with the epic label. The Book Sponsorship Program, our Migration to Python 3, the Canonical Books Page Re-Design, and Community Book Tags Project are four such examples. Once the proposal outline has been reviewed with stakeholders, we update the placeholder Epic issue to include sub-issues which may be added to upcoming milestones, as deemed appropriate. Each project of this size is assigned a team Lead who is responsible for overseeing its progress and coordinating with contributors. Leads are invited to use whatever project management works best for their style, though a popular approach is getting permission to registering a new Project Board.

Long Term Vision (5y)

In 2018, Mek, Drini Cami, and Charles Horn, went through the process of high-level, long-term strategic planning. Some internal documents are available, as well as copious internal notes. We also have years of notes from previous members of the Open Library team. At this point, they have not been compiled into a single publicly available 5-year proposal.

As it evolves, our 5-10yr vision will be documented here

Contributing

Our contributing guide offers many project management tips for those wishing to learn more about effectively contributing to the Open Library project: