OSC Program Updates
A lot has been happening at Open Source Collective lately!
FOSS Contributor Funds
The season brought much momentum for the implementation and extension of the FOSS Contributor Fund.
Funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, we've started work on the first ever academic Contributor Fund with John Hopkins! Our work will help build the people processes and engineering tooling to extend the impact of FOSS contributions to the university environment.
We've also been working with a number of company partners to extend the footprint of FOSS Contribution for business specific value and workflows. 80-90% of company products rely on open source. FOSS Contributor Funds is a funding model to sustain those projects with transparency and accountability.
And finally! We're working with GitCoin to extend the Contributor Fund model with new quadratic funding matching algorithm. Initially deployed in the web 3.0 space with stunning success, Quadratic Funding is a democratic model that's already made a difference in COVID-19 testing and we think will be a huge difference in surfacing and sustaining the best open source. Stay tuned for details on how to get involved!
Equitable Dependency Graphing
As technologists, we know there's a lot of open source, but we can't always see the supply chain of where it sits or its place in larger architectural stacks. There are now countless open source efforts to paint these graphs and support the open source dependencies underpinnings our tech stacks.
We're listened to this wave and evolved our Back Your Stack MVP to more broadly focus on the role of dependency graphing in the health of the ecosystem. This means collaborating with lead developers from the CHAOSS project, deps.cloud, Libraries.io, FLOSSbank, and OSI to align talents and build these supply chains of OS value.
We believe dependency graphing is an issue of business security but also human equity, especially for the marginalized communities invisible in the chain of technology value. We applied for a data.org Access to Capital grant to build the tooling to bring capital to open source entrepreneurs, especially in emerging economies. Unfortunately, it was a no-go, but you can read our proposal and if equitable dependency graphing matters to you, reach out! This is important stuff. Technology development cannot remain – or sustain – in the hands of the privileged and the few.
Sustain
So much is being sustained!! And we owe so much to the commitments and hard work of Richard Littauer and the Sustain Advisory Board for its continued success.
Since our January meeting, Sustain working groups have exploded! Clearly there's a lot to discuss and a lot to do. From Documentation Principles to Government Readiness, from Marketing Models to Digital Public Goods, sustaining open source is a universal topic that touches every bit of our lives. Come join the discussion, both working group and otherwise on our Discourse Channel!
In March, the Sustain working group of FOSS Responders came together to support open source communities impacted by the pandemic. In May FOSS Responders raised $105,000 to support 10 open source foundation, including Tor, Apache, GNOME and others. The UPLIFT! event was a beautiful celebration of our community and not the last time we will come together to lift one another during this difficult times.
Alyssa Wright
The future of the initiative is focused on becoming a "means for cross-foundational coordination and research into the flow of money in the open source ecosystem".