I hesitated to share this since I actually found most of it a bit bland and Pharo is already doing many of the suggestions quite well - but I had picked out the few interesting parts as a went along, so here they are. Many of the essays would apply more to the Pharo ecosystem of surrounding projects rather than Pharo itself - particularly those that end up abandoned. This 40 short essays [1] on "What we wish we had known when we started Free Software" [1] http://open-advice.org/Open-Advice.pdf <http://open-advice.org/> pdf p23-29 - Out of the Lab, into the Wild - Growing Open Source Communities around Academic Projects... pdf p43 - "when you lose interest in a program, your last duty is to hand it off to a competent successor" (or document well the transition to the replacement) pdf p44 - "As a new contributor to a project, you are an invaluable asset not for your knowledge, but for your ignorance" pdf p52 - "Potential contributors often think they are not allowed to contribute. The reasons for this [...] are all misconceptions" pdf p135 - "If you are a developer, it is particularly difficult for you to sit in the user's chair" pdf p186 - Planning pdf p270 - "it is far more important to have documentation of the things that will not work, so they can be avoided or worked around, than it is to know that some future version will behave much better. [...] Today's documented bug is, ironically, often preferable to tomorrow's fix with unforeseeable side effects." pdf p301-302 "the tension in Free Software did not lie in the introduction of increased commercial activity, in the increased participation of company employees in projects, or in change itself. The real problem lay in the gap between a dis- placed previous elite and their newer, occasionally very different, fellow stakeholders." regards, Ben