Every other Friday, we host a weekly call to document, share, and respond to current events in open source sustainability.
We hope you can join our next call on Friday, July 15th at 16:00 UTC (12pm ET / 5pm BST). Here is a summary of all our June calls.
June 3, 2022
The Sustain Africa Community Report was published following the first Sustain Africa event, written by the talented Bolaji. We rely on writeups since we don’t record Sustain events. How can we get reports like this for each Sustain event? We invited Bolaji to the podcast to find out. We also think there should be more Sustain chapters around the world! We’re currently discussing some Sustain India plans. Please reach out if you’re interested in running Sustain in your region! Some action items to help more chapters:
- Write a guide and provide resources to launch a regional Sustain community
- Podcast episode idea: How to launch Sustain in your region
The next question that came up in our discussions: How do we get corporations to invest in the digital infrastructure / open source we take for granted? Can we build awareness of the different business models that allow corporations to build open source software (where collaboration is often extractive)?
- Who is funding open source? Add to this spreadsheet!
Also reading: Comics for OSS! and Strengthening digital infrastructure: A policy agenda for free and open source software.
June 17, 2022
This post had us asking the big questions today! Can we get 10 companies to pledge giving 5% of their resources back to open source? See: Wordpress’s Five for the Future. Is 5% a reasonable amount? This brought up another question: How can projects better coordinate efforts such as funding your dependencies? There are some new patterns like user led consortia.
Project and product management in open source. From tasks like user research to prioritization, these PM roles are integral to open source sustainability. Some potential action items:
- Can we define the roles of [Product / Project / UX / etc] Manager in open source? Along with the different “types” of open source projects.
- Can we identify OS projects that need a PM? PMs often find it difficult to contribute their skills.
- Onboard PMs with a trusted maintainer “buddy”. PM roles need a lot of trust in the community.
- Are you a PM on an open source project? How do you define your role?
Also reading: Ecosyste.ms — Identify, Secure, and Sustain Critical, Open Source Components and How censoring China’s open-source coders might backfire.
Contributors
Jun 3: @abbycabs, @jdorfman, @brownie, @RichardLitt, Anatoli, @LawrenceHecht. Jun 17: @abbycabs, Django, @Anita_Ihuman, Ronen, @RichardLitt, @tobie, @Erioldoesdesign