Speaker
Description
When a one-man show wants to retire, how do you keep the lights on?
When that one man worked as much as 30hrs/week for months on end, year after year, to make BSDCan happen, and no-one else is willing or able to do that much, how can the show go on?
The answer: A handful of people who really wanted the show to go on all stepped up to collectively replace Dan.
New roles and responsibilities, new delegations, new committees, rapid onboarding of new volunteers ("voluntolds"?), key people providing bootstrap financial support, and generally everyone figuring out new roles and new functions for the first time - even if they'd been involved in some capacity previously - was very much a crash course.
While Dan graciously let us use some of his existing infrastructure in 2024, much new infrastructure was required to support new processes and the new multipartite operating model, and some of this needed to exist before those new people could even work effectively.
The human and technical aspects will both be discussed, providing a lens into both the "How to be Dan 101" crash course and the infrastructure needed to let us all "Be Dan".
While we're certainly not done, and transition work - and, undoubtedly, unexpected problems - will continue well into 2025, I hope this can still provide insights for any other person, organization, project or initiative that runs into a similar situation.
| One-line summary | How BSDCan replaced one man with many, sustainably |
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