Funding is an important but not the only piece to sustaining open source. Let’s step back and ask maintainers: What do open source communities need to be sustainable? This talk will share what we learned from interviewing maintainers and the insights we published in our peer-reviewed academic study (Reference: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3674805.3686667).

Why this matters: It is difficult to know how to support the required maintenance labor for sustainable OSS. Microsoft recently expressed this idea, writing, “It would have been wonderful to see financial goals of maintainers on their sponsor's pages, as well as other types of sustainability ‘asks.’” They wanted this feedback to better assess who to give money to and how much.

As part of this talk, the audience will be invited into a conversation about the support that maintainers need. We want to encourage maintainers to articulate their needs and supporters to ask the right questions. We hope that this talk will contribute to sustainable open source by improving how we ask about project needs from a maintainer perspective.