Facing with poisonous people in your open source project that distract the progress, emotionally drain the community, cause severe infighting, or person who are selfish, uncooperative, and disrespectful. Even too much perfectionist and insider who too obsessed with the project may cause problem within the project community and affect or delay the project’s progress from moving forward. All these people belongs to the group that aptly named “poisonous people” for these people can silently poison the atmosphere of a happy developer community. How to handle this specific group of poisonous people from creating trouble and affecting the fun or effort put into any project, not only the open source project, is important for the success of the task.

Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian W. Fitzpatrick shares their opinions and best practices on “How to Protect Your Open Source Project from Poisonous People” in a session of Google Tech Talks. They suggested to tackle the issue of poisonous people in the project in 4 stages of protection, which allows administrator or owner to identify trouble maker or poisonous people and peacefully de-fuse them before they derail the project.

The Four Stages of Protection

  1. Comprehension – Understand what, who and how is poisonous people.
  2. Fortification – Fortify and protect a project from poisonous people.
  3. Identification – Identify who is these people.
  4. Disinfection – If you’re so unlucky, here how’s you can ‘disinfect’ your project.

Watch the video of the Google Tech Talks session on “How to Protect Your Open Source Project from Poisonous People” with lots of (often amusing) real-life anecdotes and experiences.

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