Closure

This workshop is a short introduction to handing projects over or winding them down, either deliberately or on short notice. All of the material is available under an open license, and contributions through our repository are welcome. All participants are required to respect our Code of Conduct.

Learner Personas

There are important differences between shutting a project down of your own accord and on your own timeline, and shutting it down on short notice under difficult circumstances. This workshop therefore caters to two learner personas.

Vaida

• Vaida, 33, has a PhD in oceanography and now works as a data analyst for the Ministry of the Environment.
• She has been collecting and publishing beach erosion data for the past six years. She also co-founded a volunteer group that teaches environmental science to high school students, and has been its leader for the past five years.
• Vaida is relocating to pursue a new career opportunity, so she wants to wind down her data collection project. She also wants the volunteer group to continue its work, but the only documentation of how it operates is one slide deck and a couple of out-of-date blog posts.
• Vaida is working hard to prepare for her new job, which means only has two or three hours a week for the next couple of months to put into tidying things up.

Liam

• Liam, 41, worked as a civil engineer for almost a decade before becoming a full-time software developer at a company that does contract work modeling slope stability for large construction projects.
• While Liam writes lots of tests and uses Git and GitHub to share work with his colleagues, very little of what he knows about OpenStabil (the company's open source software package) has ever been written down.
• Liam's group was acquired by another engineering firm sixteen months ago. After an abrupt change of leadership, the company has decided to merge parts of OpenStabil into a closed-source tool suite and to stop all further development of the open version. Liam has been told to make these changes immediately; after protest, he has been given until the end of the week.
• Liam is deeply invested in the small but tight-knit OpenStabil community, but has a young family at home and doesn't dare risk being unemployed.

Lessons

Appendices

Acknowledgments

• Greg Wilson is a programmer, author, and educator based in Toronto. He was the co-founder and first Executive Director of Software Carpentry and received ACM SIGSOFT's Influential Educator Award in 2020.

Many thanks to Yanina Bellini Saibene, Richard Littauer, and everyone who shared their stories.

start where you are · use what you have · help who you can