Closing Time

a one-day workshop on ending projects

This workshop is a short introduction to winding projects down, either deliberately or on short notice. It assumes that participants have some experience managing small projects but little or no formal training in how to end them. All of the material is available under an open license, and contributions through our repository are welcome. All participants are required to respect our Code of Conduct.

Learner Personas

There are important differences between shutting a project down of your own accord and on your own timeline, and shutting it down on short notice under difficult circumstances. This workshop therefore caters to two different learners:

• Vaida, 33, has a PhD in oceanography and works as a data analyst for the Ministry of the Environment. She has been collecting and publishing beach erosion data for six years and co-founded a volunteer group that teaches environmental science to high school students. She is relocating for a new job and wants to wind things down properly. She has two or three hours a week for the next couple of months.

• Liam, 41, is a software developer whose company was acquired sixteen months ago. After a change in leadership, management has decided to halt work on the open source tool he has built and focus their efforts on a closed-source alternative. He has been given until the end of the week to wind things down.

• Jun, 38, is a data scientist who released an open source project as part of her work at a tech company. After a reorg moved her to a different division, internal funding for the project dried up and she lost the time to maintain it. She wants to step back gracefully, keeping in mind that how she accomplishes this will reflect on her and on the compaany she works for. She would therefore like to leave the door open for a community member to take over if one wants to.

• Chetan, 47 has maintained a widely-used open source library for over a decade, with a global community of contributors and users across research, education, and industry. The project has never had a budget beyond occasional small grants, and shifts in the underlying technology mean that it would require a major rewrite to stay relevant. They want to wind things down with care and make space for successor projects rather than let it quietly decay.

Lessons

1. Introduction
2. Governance, Assets, and Permissions
3. Communicating During a Deliberate Shutdown
4. On Short Notice
5. Preserving Your Work
6. Preserving Your People
7. Legal and Administrative Matters
8. Conclusion

Appendices

1. License
2. Code of Conduct
3. Contributing
4. Miscellaneous
5. Firing and Being Fired
6. Handing Over
7. Bibliography
8. Glossary

Acknowledgments

Greg Wilson is a programmer, author, and educator based in Toronto. He was the co-founder and first Executive Director of Software Carpentry and received ACM SIGSOFT's Influential Educator Award in 2020.

Thanks to Emma Irwin and to everyone else who shared their stories or contributed to [Littauer2025].

start where you are · use what you have · help who you can