I spent five years exploring the funding, governance, and social dynamics of open source software, with support from the Ford Foundation and Protocol Labs. I put those ideas into practice at GitHub, where I worked to improve the developer experience. I also published a book about open source developers, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software (Stripe Press), and a widely-cited report, Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure (Ford Foundation).
Below is a collection of these artifacts and more. If you’re new to the topic, I’ve starred (🌟) the pieces below that I think you’ll enjoy most.
This list is not exhaustive; there’s more floating around on Medium and previous posts.
Books
Podcasts
Guides and Collections
Data
Talks
- 🌟 Rebuilding the cathedral (slides, video) // Strange Loop, September 30, 2017
- 🌟 Consider the maintainer (slides, video) // LinuxConfAu, January 24, 2017
- Where money meets open source (slides, video) // JupyterCon, August 25, 2017
- Funding open source, the hard way (slides, video) // Django Under the Hood, November 4, 2016
- Emerging models for open source contributions (slides) // GitHub CodeConf, June 29, 2016
- Designing useful contributing guides (slides) // April 22, 2016
- How to be a good open source citizen (slides) // April 15, 2016
Blog Posts and Articles
- The Twitch argument for GitHub Sponsors // May 24, 2019
- 🌟 The rise of few-maintainer projects // Increment, May 2019 issue
- Making money with licenses // March 14, 2019
- Governance without foundations // October 31, 2018
- 🌟 Understanding user support systems in open source // September 27, 2018
- Decentralized funding? An analysis of three programs // August 15, 2018
- Methodologies for measuring project health // July 18, 2018
- An alternate ending to the tragedy of the commons // May 3, 2018
- The developer’s dilemma // February 8, 2018
- The problem with voting // January 11, 2018
- Funding digital infrastructure // July 15, 2016
- How to think about investing in open source // March 11, 2016
- What success really looks like in open source // February 5, 2016
- 🌟 We’re in a brave, new post open source world // January 28, 2016
- Open source was worth at least $143M of Instagram’s $1B acquisition // January 25, 2016
- Why can’t we just charge for open source infrastructure? // January 19, 2016
- Open source infrastructure: the Q&A // January 19, 2016
- 🌟 How I Stumbled Upon the Internet’s Biggest Blind Spot // January 13, 2016
- The Atlantic Was Wrong. Software Engineers Do Exist. // November 5, 2015