#eureadit — Public Fediverse posts

@ethan256 In my case it depends a bit on how you define "team". I have been contributing to a few highly visible FLOSS projects where you could loosely describe the "team" as all people who ever contributed. Seen in that way, Backbone probably has the largest team I've been a part of, with 316 contributors so far.

https://github.com/jashkenas/backbone

I wouldn't be able to pick a most unforgettable thing, but I can think of three types of situations that keep recurring in these types of projects and that leave a lasting impression on me. Firstly, when I submit a pull request and nobody reviews it, or when I publish a new release and nobody seems to pay attention to it. Such moments feel very lonely. Secondly, when someone reports a vulnerability and I have to rush, either to prove the report wrong (which is the most common) or to confirm and patch it. Those situations feel stressful, but especially the true reports tend to be quite enlightening as well. Thirdly, when I add a cool new feature or some other major improvement, I write and publish about it, and personal expressions of appreciation start pouring in, often from people I didn't even know were interested in the project. Those are heart-warming.

The Backbone team is very large, but in this type of project, most contributors are only briefly involved and most never encounter each other. It doesn't actually *feel* like a big team. This brings me to the other way to define "team", and the other type of software project I've been involved in: research software.

Research software is usually FLOSS, too, but the character is still quite different from the mainstream, general purpose software like Backbone. These projects tend to be short-lived and intensive, because of the way research is funded. This often means that most team members are involved during most of the project and with some luck, most team members get to actually meet each other. This gives a stronger team-like feel, despite the fact that these teams tend to be much smaller.

I think that the largest project of this type that I was part of is READ-IT. If I'm not mistaken, it had more than 40 members, most of them researchers, spread over 10 different European institutions. 12 members, including myself, from 5 of those institutions were involved as developers.

https://readit-project.eu/

I was lucky to be able to physically meet most team members on multiple occasions. I loved making a connection with those people. If I have to pick a most unforgettable moment, I think it was co-designing the central user interface with the entire team. That was enjoyable, great fun, inspiring and a very good learning experience.

#BackboneJS #EUReadIT #codesign #humanConnection #researchSoftware #freeSoftware