Join us every third Thursday for Open Source Collective Community Calls. Next call 16th September @ 5pm UTC (Midday EST, 10am PST). Check https://opencollective.com/opensource/events to register.

Open Source Collective hosts nearly 3,000 projects on the Open Collective platform. We are one of the broadest, most successful communities building and maintaining free and open source software, and we are a vibrant community. But we have been doing too little to represent, support, and connect you as a community. 

Since becoming Open Source Collective’s Executive Director earlier this year, I’ve been eager to improve our connectedness and responsiveness to our hosted Collectives. 

We can do better, together. 

We want to host not just projects, but a community. We want to engage with issues that impact us all, to be the foundation on which we build a sustainable future for ourselves and our work. 

What does this mean in practice? 

We will be encouraging you to work with us more closely. We want to hear about the challenges you face, how you’re working to solve them, what you’ve learned, and how Open Source Collective can support you. 

We want to work with you to solve systemic challenges. How do we bring the benefits of open source to more people? How do we share opportunities and build a sustainable future for all of open source?

We know that most of you work on open source in your spare time, and are already dealing with a lot. For some projects, our basic fiscal hosting service—handling your finances, legal, and accounting—is enough. That’s fine! We’ll be here doing our thing. 

If you are interested in taking part, sharing your experiences and knowledge, and working to improve how OSC serves all its projects and the wider open source ecosystem, we would love to involve you. 

Here’s how:

We will host a virtual space on a monthly basis for community members to discuss issues, offer us feedback, and support one another. This space will evolve based on what participants need from it. Join us for an hour every third Thursday of the month at 5pm UTC (Midday EST, 10am PST). 

As we better understand an issue or want to explore a specific idea, we’ll host ad-hoc workshops. From these, we’ll build a roadmap, in collaboration with Open Collective as the builders of our software platform, and with our wider circle of friends, partners, and funders. 

We’re pleased to say we finally have our own docs. Open Source Collective’s documentation is designed as a starting point for community members to get to know who we are, what we offer, and how we work: https://docs.oscollective.org/ 

As always, we’re available to provide support to Collectives. Please contact [email protected] or jump into #opensource on our shared Discord chat https://discord.opencollective.com.

Thanks

Ben
—
Executive Director
Open Source Collective