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Business

Sustaining FOSS Projects By Democratizing The Sponsorship Process

Duane O'Brien   

Within a given company, there are typically only a few people involved in deciding which FOSS projects and initiatives to support financially. This year we decided to change all that and democratize the decision making process. We set up an internal FOSS Sustainability Fund, and invited everyone to participate in the process. This talk will examine how we got executive buy in for the fund, how the fund was set up, how we encouraged participation, and what the impact has been on our engineering culture. We will look at the most up to date results, including how we decided to measure success, and the metrics we implemented to help us learn. We will present real time data and a look back at 10 months worth of experimentation. We will close the talk by looking ahead to 2020, the next iteration of the initiative, and the CC-Licensed blueprint document that anyone can use to set up initiatives of their own.