Purposeful Development: Being Ready When Your Project Moves From ‘Hobby’ to Mission Critical

Throughout the library community examples can be found of development projects evolving into mission critical components within an organization's workflow. How these projects make that move is unique and varied, but little discussion has been had about how these projects impact their developers and the project community. What responsibilities does a developer have to ensure the long-term viability of their project? Does simply freeing the code meet those long-term responsibilities, or is there an implied commitment to provide long-term "care and feeding" to project communities built up over time? Code4Lib represents a group of developers consistently looking to build the next big thing, I'd like to step back and look at some of my own experiences related to the long-term impacts that come with developing successful projects and communities, and try to provide library developers food for thought as they consider their own ongoing responsibilities to their projects and user communities.