[Themaintainers] Death of open projects and its rituals?

[Ross Spencer]

Hello Jan,

This sounds like a very interesting topic and the related
submission/edition for Zeitschrift sozialersinn sounds especially related
to this group.

In my experience, and possibly biased toward the English language[1], I
haven't seen a word for the end of a project as strong as "death". "Death"
might normally imply the ending of a project under extreme circumstances,
e.g. loss of personnel, unexpected loss of funding and so on. Otherwise, a
project is implied as short-term, or running for a short amount of time
where words such as discontinuity/discontinuation, wrap-up, ending might be
more idiomatic. Similarly, as a project is ending it might look for stable
revenue streams, continuity, or transition, e.g. into business as usual.

As for the artefacts of a project that does end, then I think that can get
a little messier without identifying an approach to archiving or transfer
of the records to a suitable custodian. For software, one probably does
need to identify a maintainer but it is complicated as open source software
might not even take-off so as to look "alive" or "maintained" but the code
might happily live on and work.

This is, however, only my experience and perception, and I will be very
interested to read other replies to this thread.

Thank you for the interesting prompt.
Kind regards,
Ross

[1] Living in Germany I am learning there are a lot of differences between
idioms.



On Thu, Mar 6, 2025 at 3:45 PM Jan Dittrich <dittrich.c.jan at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Themaintainers mailing list
> Themaintainers at lists.stevens.edu
> https://lists.stevens.edu/mailman/listinfo/themaintainers
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.stevens.edu/pipermail/themaintainers/attachments/20250307/098a00af/attachment-0001.htm>