Richard, who hosted Friday’s session of Sustain Together, put out an open call for someone to volunteer to write the latest Sustain Together summary since Abby was unavailable for this one. So that means you get me!
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 Friday June 3 at 16:00 UTC (12pm ET / 5pm BST). Here is a summary of our May calls
May 5, 2022 (I was not there for this one)
Aviyel launched a new program to help improve the open source lifecycle for devs, contributors and businesses. This reminded us – and could be an interesting partnership – of Max Howell’s work with tea.xyz, using blockchain and web3 to benefit open source developers. Max also created brew, which has been hugely successful in no small part due to continued maintenance and leadership by Mike McQuaid. Mike shared some of the lessons he’s learned over the years on a recent Sustain podcast.
In a world with serial project creators, how can we help support more long term maintainers? One idea: Share some of Mike’s lessons in this summary! Here are a couple thoughts we found particularly helpful:
- Focus on the things only you can do. Instead of spending all your time welcoming newcomers, why not help existing community members take on this work?
- Do what you can to keep the work enjoyable (& therefore sustainable)! The BRAVING Inventory by Brené Brown helped Mike set boundaries and say no more often.
Also reading: AWS’s Open Source Problem, Hiring (and Retaining) a Diverse Engineering Team and The Nuxt big thing in web development?.
May 23, 2022
- PikaPods is a new webapp hosting service that offers the creators of the open source software being hosted a revenue sharing agreement just as a thank you for building and maintaining their app.
- Funding for open source was a theme, as we transitioned straight into the details of a new three point plan for new funding to secure open source, including 10 different funding streams. Jory Burson of the OpenSSF and OpenJS Fdn offered to answer questions in the Discourse forum.
- We also celebrated the announcement of the Sovereign Tech Fund’s funding announcement, and how this represents exciting developments outside of the United States’ sphere of influence.
- This was the perfect time to mention the organization efforts surrounding another Sustain satellite convention, SustainOSS India, suggested by Josh Poddoku earlier in the week. We considered other fora such as Twitter Spaces as means of finding new perspectives and new voices for sustaining open source.
- Auditing whose voices are being left out of the conversation became the focus of a survey on open source production and usage in Europe. Lawrence Hecht wanted to highlight that 30-40% of contributors are in Eastern Europe, about 7,200 of whom reported in from Ukraine last year.
Finally, Chihirumnaya Ibiam (@Ibiam) asked us to let you know that he’s seeking a new position as a Python Software Developer!
hope to see everyone on Friday