Taking a week off open-source support

Why I felt this was necessary

While writing my recent 10 year Q&A article, something I noticed about myself is the way I kept referring to WorldEdit as a community obligation. While I feel to an extent that’s a natural part of being a maintainer of a large open-source software project, I feel the dynamic has shifted when it came to the support side. I feel I also touched on this in my risks of modding series, where I focused mostly on the risks of the interpersonal labour side of software maintenance.

At some point, likely over a decade ago, checking support channels became reflexive. If I had spare time, I would check them. I would keep them open in the background whenever using my computer, dropping what I was doing if I saw someone sent a message. Checking if anyone needed help, and replying to anyone who’d sent unanswered questions overnight, became one of the first things I would do when waking up in the morning.

It’s also worth noting that out of all the time I spend on the open-source software projects I maintain, support has always made up the largest time commitment by far. While many people assume that maintaining an open-source project is about writing code, I feel the opposite is true. The vast majority of the time is spent on community management, governance, reviewing contributions, issue management, and support.

While I do and always will feel a need to help people having trouble with the software I work on, that desire to help had gradually become a deep sense of obligation. If someone needed help, I felt responsible for making sure they received it. If someone’s question remained unanswered, I would feel like I had not met my responsibility. I felt this “detox” was necessary to do because I should not feel solely responsible. WorldEdit has a large community, and other maintainers, who are all able to provide support too. By always being available, I feel I inadvertently trained myself to view the community’s collective responsibility as my personal responsibility.

The experiment

With the goal of breaking this habit, I decided to spend at least one week completely disengaged from the support side of things. Not reading or checking the support channels, fully muting them to not see the little “unread messages” indicator, and not keeping them open in the background. I wasn’t going to ignore people who personally asked me questions, or avoid fixing bugs reported through the GitHub, but I made sure to completely remove myself from the general support channels and spaces. While a week doesn’t sound like that big of a deal, given it was the first time in over fourteen years that I had stopped monitoring the channels, I felt it was important to start with something smaller.

I also sent a message beforehand in a private channel, to let other maintainers and contributors know what I was doing, in the hopes that it might lead to more community participation in the support channels overall. I didn’t want people who needed help to be affected by my absence, nor did I want the experiment to reinforce that I do have personal responsibility here. If people knew I usually answered questions between certain times, they might have held off answering themselves, which would’ve negatively influenced the outcome of the experiment. It allowed me to better judge whether my sense of responsibility matched reality.

What I learnt

The biggest thing I learnt from this experiment was that very little happened. Going into it, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Logically yes, I knew there were other maintainers and that support channels always had some degree of unanswered questions. It always happens anyway, some people slip through the cracks, others close their browser before they get an answer or never reply to follow up questions. At the same time however, that sense of responsibility that I’d built up over time left me feeling that my presence was important to ensure people got the help they needed.

When I came back, it turned out that support continued like it always had. Questions were answered, and various members of the community provided support. Some did slip through the cracks, perhaps slightly more than normal, but that’s natural in community support channels and something that happened beforehand too. To be perfectly honest, I doubt the average user asking for help would’ve been able to tell I was gone. Most people wouldn’t have known me by name in the first place, and it didn’t feel like someone was missing.

It felt like a community support channel providing community support.

In hindsight, this makes sense. WorldEdit does have a large community, and multiple maintainers and contributors. I feel, to an extent, I had come to view my own internal need to help people with an actual responsibility to do so. Knowing something, and truly emotionally believing it, can often be two separate things, however. I do find it ironic that what I’ve discovered here is also a key piece of advice that I tell others getting into open-source software development; I’d just decided over the years that it didn’t apply to me.

In terms of how it affected me, I was surprised how easily I was able to actually stop looking at the channels. I did have the channels muted and the whole category minimised in Discord which I feel gave me a reminder to not check them, but I don’t recall actually properly checking the channels once during the entire experiment. I definitely went to do it a few times but managed to remember and stop myself each time.

I’m not sure how I would describe the overall experience. It was freeing in one sense, but also anxiety-inducing. It was nice not to feel compelled to constantly monitor discussions and not immediately start my day with a feeling of obligation to help people. At the same time, there was a lingering uncertainty around what was happening in the channel. Less because I was worried about the projects themselves, but more because I didn’t know if someone was sitting there needing help. For the first time in 14 years, I had to accept not knowing what was going on.

Conclusion

I feel the true learning will be how I take this long-term. Currently, I still am probably checking the channels too much, but have significantly reduced how often I open them up first thing in the morning. I am happy with this for now, especially as I no longer feel quite as integral to the software support side of things. It may seem silly, but this process helped me recalibrate my own feelings of responsibility. If you’re a maintainer of open-source software facing a similar problem, I highly recommend giving this a go. It’s helped me more than I assumed it would.