Sustain Open Source With Us

Gratipay is co-organizing the first SustainOSS conference, to be held at GitHub in San Francisco on June 19. We’re aiming for “a one-day conversation for open source software sustainers,” a term coined recently by Justin Dorfman to describe people who care deeply about the health of the open source ecosystem.

The organizers want the event to be participatory without running afoul of the tyranny of structurelessness, so we invited a highly regarded facilitator, Allen “Gunner” Gunn, to guide us. Gunner has asked participants to start thinking about the narratives we see this event fitting within, and the outcomes we’d like to achieve.

For my part, I see two narrative arcs to locate this day within, two ongoing culture shifts:

1. Evolution of empathy in the firm. Open source projects create a value vacuum because they give the value first, and then accept payment. This is flipped from the dominant exchange model, where payment precedes value, but it differs from charity because there is a direct value exchange. Making this work requires us to evolve empathy in the firm. Fortunately, developing the capacity to properly value open source suppliers fits into a broader trend pointed to by certified B Corporations like Etsy, and Public Benefit Corporations (PBCs) like Kickstarter. Companies can value more than short-term profit.
2. Evolution of open organizations. When open source projects adopt an economic identity, they become open organizations. This merging of open source with business — not open source as a commons that other businesses harvest from, but open source projects as themselves a first-class economic entity — requires a new kind of leadership combining both open source and business/startup sensibilities. The Linux Foundation is leading the way among flagship projects, while Webpack shows promise for smaller projects. Platform cooperativism suggests some interesting directions here as well.

The immediate outcome I’d like to see from Sustain is a community and shared identity around the issue of open source sustainability. Docs geeks have Write the Docs. Maintainers have Maintainerati. Now sustainers will have Sustain. The larger outcome will be for this new-found community to keep evolving open organizations, and evolving empathy in closed ones.

Gratipay is excited to participate in Sustain, because these outcomes serve our own mission, to cultivate an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love. Register now to join us in June, and find us in #sustain on the Changelog Slack to collaborate in organizing the event.

Let’s sustain open source! 💸 💃