Open Source Spotlight: Open Source Wishlist

Open Source Collective is excited to kick off a new spotlight series designed to lift up the people and ideas shaping open source today, that may benefit OSC-hosted member projects along with the ecosystem more broadly.

We’ll be joined by Emma Irwin, who will introduce Open Source Wishlist, a community-driven project that helps surface and map the real infrastructure needs of open source communities. The goal is to make it easier for maintainers to articulate what support would truly matter and to make those needs, and their potential impact, more visible across the ecosystem. In this session, Emma will share an overview of the project, current progress, and ways to get involved.

Despite countless calls for open source sustainability, funding remains a black box. Funders can't see what projects actually need, money flows to the same visible few, while most critical projects go unsupported. When funding does arrive, maintainers feel additional work is required of them to solve even more problems related to sustainability (like security, governance, etc.); maintainers don't need more tasks. 

Open Source Wishlist is a new open source, community-driven initiative that standardizes areas of sustainability as 'services' to create visibility of need, reduce burden on maintainers, and track impact. It gives maintainers a structured way to publish specific needs in language funders understand, discoverable across their software supply chain, and connects them with trusted practitioners who execute the work. Openly licensed playbooks and rubrics measure what support actually achieved encouraging continual funding and investment. We believe this community infrastructure is the missing link, and can actually make sustainability something everyone (maintainers, communities, and funders) can see, act on, contribute-to and learn from.

Current goals:
OSS Wishlist is looking for:
-  maintainers interested in creating wishlists and giving feedback on that experience.
-  folks with experience in any of the service areas interested in signing up as a practitioners

The visibility of both wishes, and experts on the platform will give me a strong foundation to go out and advocate for those wishes to be funded (again, open source, open content, no one pays anything, and can contribute to evolution). 

Bio
Emma Irwin has worked on nearly every side of open source sustainability: leading dependency risk analysis at Microsoft, running Microsoft's FOSS Fund, serving on Mozilla's MOSS funding committee, and contributing to CHAOSS as co-chair of its AI Alignment Working Group. A longtime open source community member (Mozilla Rep, Drupal contributor), she built Open Source Wishlist independently to bridge the gap between maintainers and funders.

To attend:
Click 'rsvp' -> "your info' and you will be sent a meeting link. 

If you would like to receive a calendar invite, let us know at [email protected].