Open Source Collective's Strategy '22-'25

[BenJam]

In January this year we shared our strategy for Open Source Collective for the foreseeable future:

An ecosystem-wide approach to supporting open source software

Open Collective has built a platform for communities to collectively gather and manage their money, but the ways in which financial contributors select projects to support have resulted in a huge discrepancy between marketable projects and those that lie deep inside the core of the open source sphere.

This has something to do with how commercial organizations justify their financial contributions, but it also has a lot to do with the technical challenges of understanding which projects we rely on and how we can best support them. This is as true for financial contributors as it is for the projects seeking to receive their support.

In the last year, we have seen companies and open source projects take the initiative, implementing their own takes on supporting their dependencies. We want to enable many more to do the same, so this year we will be making significant investments in technologies to distribute funds more broadly, and to support one another as a single, open source community.

Our objective is to reduce the Gini index in open source, to ensure adequate provision for projects at the core and the edges alike, in a graph defined by the explicit links between projects and their dependencies and the implicit links between software and the standards and protocols that they implement.

Enable projects to use their money as well as raise it

2021 was an incredible year for our projects, and we expect to see yet more major financial support for open source in 2022. Despite this, we still see communities struggling to overcome the understandable and relatable barriers to utilising money as a resource in their project.

This year, OSC will improve our documentation, co-creating guidance for projects to put in place the necessary governance to use money effectively. We'll also be providing opportunities for projects to utilize their money to build capacity, bringing in and developing new skills within the broader community.

Our objective is to increase the percentage of financial contributions that are being actively used by communities to build and maintain their projects, while increasing the skills and confidence of our community members in the area of spending funds.

Make financially contributing to open source not only a good business decision, but an easy one

Over the last five years, we have seen a huge increase in the number and value of financial contributions to open source by commercial organizations. Many of these companies rationalize their support against investments that could be made in marketing, recruitment and employee retention, or more recently, in supply-chain security.

This year, we’ll be working with Collectives and funders to bridge this divide, providing mechanisms for projects to describe the impact that financial support has had on their project in a way that makes sense at scale for large, corporate supporters. Rather than imposing ‘best practice’ measures and metrics and applying them across the ecosystem, our approach will begin with projects and work up, allowing organizations to align with their own goals

Our objective is to increase, on a company by company basis, the dollar value of financial contributions directed to open source projects.

We continue to evolve this strategy, and will share updates as we make it more practical and concrete.