[Themaintainers] Death of open projects and its rituals?

[Marlowe, Valerie]

Hi Jan,

One term that I like for this is the idea of “sunsetting” a project. So, the idea that this might be gradual, and not necessarily a permanent end feels really useful in cases like this.

Hope that’s helpful.

Thanks!
VGM

From: Themaintainers <themaintainers-bounces at lists.stevens.edu> On Behalf Of Jan Dittrich
Sent: Wednesday, March 5, 2025 9:36 AM
To: themaintainers at lists.stevens.edu
Subject: [Themaintainers] Death of open projects and its rituals?


Hello Maintainers,

I recently started thinking about rituals for and memories of the end ("death") of projects [1]. How to send-off that project or idea of a future?

This was based on some conversations with a colleague in academia as well as this call for papers [2]

In particular, I wondered about the end of "open" projects, i.e. ones that say that their essence is "the code" and/or "the data" like open source software or open knowledge projects. I notices that when these projects are often clearly not "alive" anymore (that is, there is no community around the project that keeps it running or that could be asked),  these projects are not really "dead" either, since they are culturally assumed that someone could just come and continue. Thus, there seems to be a great hesitation to actually declare such projects as ended. However, there imagined end is often used to call for action, both inside such communities ("this feature could be the end of...") and outside of them (like the implied danger to Wikipedia in Wikimedia’s donation banners)

I would be curious if you know
-  interesting alternatives to the metaphors of "alive", "dead" and "grief" in this context (or alternatively, ideas on these metaphors and how they apply!) [3]
-  texts about the rituals around ends of projects, particularly ones that have such a complicated relationship to a clear end as the mentioned ideas of open (data/software) projects.
-  texts about the rhetorical use of imagined ends of (open) projects [4]

Kind Regards,
 Jan



[1]: Or, instead of projects one could take a larger perspective and, a bit awkwardly say: "the not-happening of a future that seemed attainable by ones activity" (in contrast to "it would be great if things would just magically be so that...")

[2] In German: https://www.soziopolis.de/ausschreibungen/call/aufhoeren-beenden-und-schluss-machen-in-organisationen.html  ("Stopping, ending and breaking off in organizations")

[3] I have thought of ossification, glaciation, weathering and decomposition so far

[4] Might be connected to community appropriate "extreme case formulations" (A. Pomerantz, 1986) and/or my use of the concept in https://www.fordes.de/posts/disappointment_product_community.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.stevens.edu/pipermail/themaintainers/attachments/20250306/655d095c/attachment-0001.htm>