Hello, OSC community! Happy FOSS February!

Our team is calling 2025 the year of conversations. We're getting out into the community more -- both IRL and online -- and ramping up how we engage with our hosted Collectives. Below, you'll find updates on where we've been, where we're headed, and where we can connect. We're excited for more conversations in the months ahead!
 
📣 Announcements & Events 📣

 
FOSDEM recap: “Open source funding: you’re doing it wrong”
FOSDEM happened! As part of the event, OSC’s Ben and Ecosyste.ms’ Andrew delivered a talk titled "Open source funding: you’re doing it wrong." Their presentation argues that observable usage best defines which projects are 'critical' and that we need better, open data about the direct and indirect support for these projects in order to coordinate our efforts to sustain them.

Video, slides (and cute dogs) can be found here. 

Join us at FOSS Backstage March 10th-11th
Coming up in March is FOSS Backstage, a conference focused on the non-coding aspects of open source, and OSC is proud to support it once again. The conference takes place in Berlin and online, and this year, our entire team will be there in person. Be sure to stop by our booth to grab some goodies and say hello — we’d love to meet you and hear your thoughts on how OSC can support your projects in 2025.

Need help covering the ticket cost? If you're a maintainer and wants to attend (virtually or in-person), we may be able to help!

Sustain Virtual Forum on March 13th
It's happening again!

If you have interest, passion, or need around the diverse range of topics collectively described as “sustainability of free and open source software,” we invite you to join us for the SustainOSS Virtual Forum on Thursday, 13 March 2025.

At the SustainOSS Virtual Forum, we will survey the challenges, evolution, and surprises recurrently navigated but rarely documented or collectively validated in running open source projects, program offices, or policy networks populated by researchers, developers, and policymakers. Above all, we invite you to share your experiences, ideas, and concerns around sustainability across a range of scales, engage in respectful discussion, and envision goals and partnerships we can collectively embrace to sustain our open source ecosystems.

The interactive agenda will be co-designed in collaboration with confirmed participants in the time leading up to the event.

We encourage you to join us as we explore the who, the what, and the how of realizing a sustainable present and future for open source. And we thank you for helping us spread the word!

Register in the link below and please share with others: https://opencollective.com/sustainoss/events/sustainoss-virtual-forum-348aa185

Google Summer of Code 2025
GSoC is now accepting mentorship organization applications through February 11!

For students and open source beginners, contributor applications will be open from March 24 – April 8!

Learn more about participating here: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2025/01/google-summer-of-code-2025-is-here.html

Apereo's February MicroConference: "Unlocking Open Source Grant Funding Opportunities” on February 12th
Apereo's [1] February MicroConference will be "Unlocking Open Source Grant Funding Opportunities”. The speaker, Josh Baron [2], currently serves as Apereo's Development Officer and has a wealth of business development and fundraising experience including with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a Senior Program Officer.
 
Session highlights:
 

Date: Wednesday, February 12, 2025 Time: 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM Eastern US Time Location: Virtual (Big Blue Button link provided upon registration)
 
REGISTER HERE [3]
 

OSC's gone multiplatform
This year, we're stepping up our social media presence! Here's where you can find us:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/opensourcecollective/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/oscollective.org
Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@OpenSourceCollective

We're working on a way for Collectives to easily submit content for us to share on our social media. Until that’s ready, feel free to email us if there’s anything you’d like us to post on the channels above or include in this monthly update!

Sequelize is one of the most widely used ORMs for Node.js, helping developers interact with databases efficiently. They are preparing for a major new release but need help getting it across the finish line. In addition to working on a high-impact open-source project, they are offering a stipend for your contributions. Read more about it in their announcement here.

 

Welcome New Collectives!

In January, we welcomed 21 new collectives to the OSC community! A big welcome to: alist, bon-rs, BootstrapBlazor, Central Ohio Mesh, Fedify, gtk-kn, LangChain4j, Leaf, Lightbug, Lockdown Systems, OpenEuphoria, Pano MC, Phosphor Icons, Pion, PyLadies Vancouver, PyPodcasts, RIT Open Source Community, RxGo, The jank programming language, Tree-sitter, and Yuhaiin!

That’s all for now! As always, feel free to reach out to the OSC team directly at [email protected] or on Discord in the #open-source-collective channel: discord.opencollective.com