Building a sustainable pipeline of open source contributors

Learn from a panel of global leaders on what works in open source education.

With open source projects struggling to find enough contributors for long-term sustainability, a panel of global experts gathered at Open Source Summit EU to discuss how education and mentorship can grow the next generation of contributors.

I have several blog posts about contributor sustainability because there are so many open source projects and not enough contributors to sustain them all over the long term. With many open source projects desperate for contributors, how do we educate the next generation of open source contributors to grow the contributor base for all of us? This was the topic that Ruth Ikegah, Leslie Hawthorne, Stephen Walli, and I tackled as part of a panel at the recent Open Source Summit EU in Amsterdam.

Collectively, we have experience teaching open source to university students, creating and sustaining open source contribution programs for students in secondary school through to university, and building new open source communities in Africa. In this video, we talked about what we’ve learned, what’s worked, and provided tips for growing the next generation of contributors from within your local communities.

Additional resources

• CHAOSScon Africa and CHAOSS Africa Meetings
• CHAOSS Education
• Linux kernel Mentorship graduates blog about their journey
• Unlock growth and talent: why maintainers should mentor with CNCF
• Skilling African developers through All In Africa
• Open Source Community Africa Accelerator: IDB
• New Contributors and Pathways to Leadership
• From First PR To Lifelong Impact: Helping People Thrive in Open Source
• Contributor Sustainability Impacts Risk and Adoption of OSS Projects

More from We Love Open Source

• Using metrics to improve open source communities
• Get started in open source with the CHAOSS Education Project
• Measuring open source community health with Savannah

This article is adapted from “Educating the Next Generation of Open Source Project Contributors” by Dawn Foster, and is republished with permission from the author.