Charley Baker and I have decided on some changes in how we will be leading the Watir project. For many years, we have shared this responsibility and have shared the “Lead Developer” title. At my request, Charley has agreed to take over as Lead Developer. As such he will be responsible for the day-to-day technical decisions and managing the various contributions. He has actually already taken on most of the responsibility so this is really a reflection of reality.

As Lead Developer, he will make sure we are responding appropriately to Jira tickets and Github pull requests. As the project has had more users, more releases and more contributors these responsibilities have only grown. I know that Charley will welcome help with this. If you have the time to review new Jira tickets or pull requests, we would love it if you would comment with your opinions or observations.

I plan to continue to contribute as a developer to the project. For example, I need to finish my work on adding the option to use zero-indexing.

This change will also allow me to continue to comment on contributions but without my comments being interpreted as final. For example, I might complain that a contribution lacks unit tests, but Charley may decide (as I have decided before) that this is a risk that we can afford to take in a particular case. Indeed, my hope is to write more about the principles that have defined Watir.

But mostly, I am handing over the lead developer responsibilities to Charley so that I can focus on fund-raising.

I want to get non-profit status for the Watir project, lead fund-raising campaigns and use Convio software to collect donations. This will be a new role for me, but one which I expect to get a lot of help with from my colleagues at Convio, many of whom are experts in this kind of thing.

I will say more about that in a later post. By taking on the lead developer responsibilities, Charley is giving me a chance to lead the Watir project in this new way.