Emma Irwin, who I overlapped with at my time at Mozilla, is onto something with this idea of a ‘standard’ way of making visible contributions to Open Source. If you, or someone you know, is in a position to support her to do this work, please do get in touch with her!
Evaluating open source contributions, especially at the organizational level,remains frustratingly opaque. Who’s actually investing in the projects we all depend on? Right now, there’s no reliable way to say definitively. That lack of transparency is a true barrier to sustainability efforts.
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Git…
Emma Irwin, who I overlapped with at my time at Mozilla, is onto something with this idea of a ‘standard’ way of making visible contributions to Open Source. If you, or someone you know, is in a position to support her to do this work, please do get in touch with her!
Evaluating open source contributions, especially at the organizational level,remains frustratingly opaque. Who’s actually investing in the projects we all depend on? Right now, there’s no reliable way to say definitively. That lack of transparency is a true barrier to sustainability efforts.
[…]
GitHub, GitLab and Codeberg contribution graphs are helpful as a snapshot, but you cannot tell if a customer paid for that work; if it relates to employed or personal time - it also doesn’t capture non-coding contribution, like event sponsorship, board membership, code of conduct committee membership and more - that really make up the big picture.
I no longer think this belongs in a single product’s workflow. Instead, I believe we need a standard something communities can adopt and adapt to their own values, implemented through CI/CD workflows.
Not unlike a Code of Conduct, really: a template that defines what contributions count, how value is measured, and how attribution flows. Each community decides what matters to them. And as communities learn, they contribute back to the evolution of that standard.
Source: Sunny Developer
Image: Luke Southern