ZeroMQ

Burnout

The ØMQ community has been and still is heavily dependent on pro bono individual efforts. I’d like to think that everyone was compensated in some way for their contributions, and I believe that with ØMQ, contributing means gaining expertise in an extraordinarily valuable technology, which leads to improved professional options.

However, not all projects will be so lucky, and if you work with or in open source, you should understand the risk of burnout that volunteers face. This applies to all pro bono communities. In this section, I’ll explain what causes burnout, how to recognize it, how to prevent it, and (if it happens) how to try to treat it. Disclaimer: I’m not a psychiatrist and this section is based on my own experiences of working in pro bono contexts for the last 20 years, including on free software projects and NGOs such as the FFII.

In a pro bono context, we’re expected to work without direct or obvious economic incentive. That is, we sacrifice family life, professional advancement, free time, and health in order to accomplish some goal we have decided to accomplish. In any project, we need some kind of reward to make it worth continuing each day. In most pro bono projects the rewards are very indirect, superficially not economical at all. Mostly, we do things because people say, “Hey, great!” Karma is a powerful motivator.

However, we are economic beings, and sooner or later, if a project costs us a great deal and does not bring economic rewards of ...