We’ve recently announced Birdaro, a new project to support leaders of open-source projects as they consider whether to scale their projects and what sustainability pathways they might follow. Birdaro will be building on previous work CSCCE has carried out into the common human infrastructure challenges that can affect open-source projects – topics such as how a project can successfully engage a community, how and when to define clear roles and decision-making processes, and how to remain open to a range of contributions while striving to be inclusive and safe.
In this post, we’ll share some of our earlier work on the NSF Pathways to enable Open Source Ecosystems (POSE) program, from which we derived a working model of five key themes important to project scaling. We’re sharing the model as a way of grounding the focus of some of Birdaro’s future activities and as a starting point for conversations about how we might collaborate on addressing these topics.
It’s also worth noting that in sharing the background to this model (and other things we’ve published recently such as our CEF evaluation report) we’re also starting to make more visible some of the approaches that we take to curriculum development for our trainings. You can expect more on this topic in the future.
Continue reading “A new model describing the key areas that contribute to the sustainability and scaling of open source projects”