Nurturing sustainable FOSS communities

After volunteering for a year and being with the Foundation full-time for two years, I've come to understand that the principal components of FOSS United are Individuals, Communities, Organizations. In this talk, I will highlight how we are structuring the activities of the FOSS United Foundation to better align with these three principal components, and how we are shaping the messaging about what we do to ensure that the FOSS United Community understands us better.

• Nurture and support Individuals. We want to enable newcomers to find their place in the FOSS ecosystems and support existing individuals to continue their FOSS work

• We want to support FOSS Communities, primarily by helping them organize events that bring their community together and strengthen it

• We want to engage Organizations to adopt, acknowledge, contribute to, and create FOSS

Individuals, Communities, and Organizations are inextricably interlinked. For instance,

• Individuals find a home in FOSS Communities, and most Individuals already work at, or want to work at, Organizations that are pro-FOSS

• Communities need a constant influx of Individuals and they need a broad base of Organizations that adopt and support their FOSS work

• Organizations rely on Individuals with FOSS expertise to achieve their goals, and they engage with Communities to nurture existing employees and find new employees

The FOSS United Foundation needs to focus on both the principal components separately while also ensuring a cohesive message across the principal components.

I will outline how the specific activities of the Foundation, such as grants, foss communities, student clubs, public policy, and more, make sense within this framework. Finally, I will frame how we would like the foss communities to perceive themselves and the Foundation, to get the most out of our collective work!

The key takeaway from this talk is a mental model for community organizers and individuals to use