Introducing Sustain Weekly 🎉

📣 Sustainer Talk
1

The past few months, we’ve been testing out ways to better document, share, and respond to what’s happening in the world of open source sustainability. At the end of each week, some of us connect to review current news on sustainable open source, share our takeaways, and brainstorm next steps.

With the Sustain forum back in place, we want to share summaries from our initial conversations and invite all of you to contribute! How you can join in:

  • Share links: Keep sharing open source sustainability news in this forum, or drop them in the #sustain-links channel on the Open Collective slack
  • Add your thoughts: We’d love to hear your insights or takeaways! Have an idea or want to run with an idea that came up? Let us know in the comments.
  • Join us on Fridays: We meet every Friday at 12pm ET / 16:00 UTC Notes & Connection info

Here are summaries from our discussions in January. We’ll be sharing our February and March summaries in the coming days.

January 21st, 2022

The White House hosted a summit on open-source security. One question that keeps coming up: who gets invited to these events? Idea: Can Sustain make a directory of open source practitioners by domain (open source models, open source security, etc)? Then, the next time the White House is putting together an invite list, we can point to the domain-relevant list of open-source collectivists – practitioners who value a network-centric approach to this work.

Some personal news from an open source maintainer had us thinking: what happens when the BDFL of a popular open source project is gone? A foundation isn’t the right fit for all projects. Is there a lightweight way to ensure a project continues when the BDFL is gone? Idea: Could there be an “open source will” that bequeaths things like the domain name, ssl certs, twitter handle, trademarks to a beneficiary?

January 28th, 2022

In the wake of Log4j, we’re seeing big companies reaching out to maintainers and demanding answers. Dependency maps are becoming a liability. Who is grabbing the emails of maintainers?

Also reading: Acquia retrospective 2021 by Dries Buytaert

Contributors

Jan 21: Justin Dorfman, Allen Gunn, Abby Cabunoc Mayes. Jan 28: Justin Dorfman, Allen Gunn, Richard Littauer.

Opportunities

–

We hope you enjoyed this summary and can join the weekly discussion tomorrow. Keep an eye out for our February and March summaries coming soon!

5 Likes
2

There is a lot to unpack in this introductory post. Will there be a link for the weekly calls? I would like to put this on my calendar if it is going to be a free-for-all discussion of the week’s news.

1 Like
3

We’re still sorting out a couple details for the call, but we’ll be putting the connection info in the notes/agenda doc when we have it: Sustain Weekly Discussions - Google Docs

1 Like
4

UPDATE: Register here to get connection info for the call tomorrow: Meeting Registration - Zoom

We’re looking into using other platforms, but we’ll be on Zoom tomorrow. Please let us know if Zoom doesn’t work for you.

1 Like
5

I would love to join, unfortunately I actively boycott zoom (because it is proprietary software and also for ethical reasons). Would you consider hosting this meeting on a Free Software videoconferencing platform such as Jitsi or BBB? I’ve had good experiences with groups up to 25 people recently on https://meet.jit.si/ and https://meet.coop would probably agree to host a BBB room if that’s what people prefer.

What do you think?

3 Likes
6

Thanks @dachary! Yes, we plan to switch to BBB for future weeks. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to sort it out for today’s call.

Very excited to have you join us soon! In the meantime, you can still contribute your thoughts here or in our notes doc.

4 Likes
7

Thanks @abbycabs - just got word that we are set to go with BBB for this call. This link should work for today!

3 Likes
8

Ahhh, just realized I can’t uninvite people from Zoom for now. Should have followed Abby’s lead here. Sorry about this! Next week we’ll switch to BBB; for now, this week, I think it’s more fair for those who have already registered and have a Calendar invite from Zoom to use Zoom.

Register here.

1 Like
9

I see the description still has a link to Zoom. Will the switch to BBB happen this week or the week after? Very sorry to be such a burden: I’m a Free Software vegetarian in the sense that I won’t use proprietary software. Very much like a vegetarian won’t eat meat, no matter how good it tastes :blush:

1 Like
10

Zoom registration is removed from the notes! Thanks for flagging that we need to remove it from this thread, also. Will edit – thanks @dachary!

1 Like