Open Source Wishlist: Community Infrastructure for OSS Sustainability

Despite countless calls for open source sustainability, there's still no clear pathway for maintainers to express needs and receive help.

In my personal time, I've built a working proposal for how this problem might be solved using a community-based approach. It's called Open Source Wishlist and is essentially infrastructure for open source sustainability contribution .

• A centralized definition of categories of 'sustainability contribution', grounded in existing knowledge and best practices for each (metrics, resources, best practices).
• A standardized, discoverable way for maintainers to request help using shared terminology.
• A standardized way for helpers to discover, fund, contribute and unleash resources with community-defined rubrics to track impact.
• A mechanism to engage (and pay) the countless community members and open source practitioners with skills, time and ambition to resolve sustainability risks.
• A way to drive AI alignment around open source sustainability based on what we already know to be true, important and inclusive.

In the coming days I will be reaching out to maintainers, and practitioners to create profiles (including those I have spoken with so far). I will be at FOSDEM and the State of Open to chat in person.

Note: As mentioned, created this on my personal time (after layoffs), so please direct feedback kindly and through issues and PRs if possible. There will be bugs. I also welcome sponsorship as is the theme. Thank you!

Below is a quick demo if you don't want to click around yourself.

Other notes

• Playbooks are all, open for contribution and live in their own repository.
• GitHub is the primary authentication for the moment, and only because its easiest as a first step (to get repos etc), however plans do include adding other authentication methods including GitLab.
• The GitHub Action to discover wishlist's in your dependencies will likely be available closer to January once we have more wishes, and Ecosyste.ms has time to add this to their datasets. For now, if you want, you can use this JSON feed of public and approved wishlists.
• The sustainability contribution model does focus on paying practitioners for their time (although they can accept pro bono), more unpaid labour will not solve the unpaid labour problem. The focus is on set-rates, to avoid upwork-style under-bidding. Those set-rates will evolve as we learn.