[MUD-Dev] Re: DevCore Project Management

[Adam Wiggins <adam#angel,com>]

On Tue, 3 Nov 1998, Ola Fosheim [iso-8859-1] Grøstad wrote:
> First of all there are (at least) two ways to manage a project:
> 
> 1) a manager who gets to decide 
> 2) a coordinator who makes sure that questions get asked and decisions get
>    made(but doesn't neccessarily contribute to the decision)
> 
> General american business management seems to go with 1. Modern flat
> organizations seems to go with 2.  2 is judged to be the better approach
> with "smart" people for a number of obvious reasons I shall not get into. I
> assume 2 would work best with volunteers, and is what "project maintainer"
> indicates.

One problem with the second is that decisions get made much more slowly.
Eg, the US government is run this way, and it takes *forever* for anything
to get done.  The idea behind the benevolent dictator is that at some
point he or she can simply say, "Okay, we've discussed it to death - here's
how we're going to do it, end of discussion."  JC does this for mud-dev.
Linus does this for Linux.  It works well as long as people continue to
perceive them as benevolent.

> [snip lots of good stuff about project leaders]

All very much agreed here.  In the end, the coordinator needs to have a
strong streak of practicality that can override ambition, creative desires,
and general "but this is *cool*!" feelings, in order to get done what needs
to get done.

Adam W.