I’m excited to be attending and presenting at my first ASF Community Over Code in October! It’s an event that I’ve always wanted to attend, but for whatever reason, I could never quite fit it into my schedule … until now. 

This seems like the perfect time and place to deliver a brand new talk about what we can do to fix the leadership gap threatening open source projects. Anyone who knows me, or who regularly reads this blog, has seen that open source sustainability is an important topic for me, and open source needs sustainable leadership. We’re in a situation now where current leaders are burning out, retiring, or otherwise becoming unable to continue, which is creating a leadership gap with not enough new people having the opportunities or skills needed to move up within a project. The talk focuses on three topics: inclusive leadership principles, recruiting leaders, and good governance with a final section summarizing the actions that we can all take as individuals to fix the leadership gap. This blog post provides a preview of the talk.

Inclusive Leadership Principles

It’s important to have a variety of leadership roles that can act as a stepping stone to allow people to lead in smaller areas before moving to whatever you have as a top level leadership position. This can take the form of someone becoming a committer or reviewer, and then becoming maintainer. It might mean managing a community, leading documentation, managing projects, or becoming a chair of a working group, and then later moving on to a board or steering committee.

We’ve all seen projects where the same people sit in the same leadership positions year after year without providing opportunities for other contributors to move up within the project. If leadership positions aren’t available on a regular basis, then it can be difficult or impossible to promote people into leadership, which is why terms for boards or steering committees are important. Contributors can become disillusioned and disengaged if they don’t feel like there are enough opportunities within a project.

New and existing contributors feel more included when they can see other people in leadership positions who are like them. Without diverse leadership, underrepresented groups may face challenges in participating in and contributing to projects, losing valuable talent and ideas. It’s also important for people in leadership roles to role model good behavior and help others understand what behavior is appropriate within your project. Tolerating bad behavior unwittingly sets the expectation that this behavior is acceptable in your project, which can drive new and existing contributors away. 

Recruiting Leaders

This is a hard problem to solve. Sometimes it can be really difficult to get people to contribute to your project, and unfortunately, there is no magic or one size fits all solution. Some people are contributing as part of their job while others might contribute to gain experience or learn something. Clear communication, working in the open, public roadmaps, having good onboarding documentation, and reducing friction are key to helping people stick around. Having good first issues or help wanted labels are excellent places to start because these help people find something that they can work on while they learn more about the project. But, good first issues and help wanted labels are passive requests for help, so I also encourage people to be proactive and specific about ways that people can help. Asking someone specific to review a PR or answer a question from a user demonstrates that you recognize their unique expertise and want their help. Knowing that we’re wanted and appreciated makes us feel good, which can be a strong motivator to contribute to an open source project or to continue contributing. 

Defining the roles and responsibilities for contributors, reviewers, and maintainers can help with recruiting into these roles. It can help to think about this as a ladder where contributors can climb up to become reviewers and those reviewers can become maintainers. What’s important is to document it and make sure that people understand how they can climb the ladder and gain more responsibilities within the project. Having a contributor ladder helps set expectations for the roles and encourages people to think about how they might take on areas of increasing responsibility within the project. As you get more of the humans moving into maintainer roles, you can reduce the load of the existing maintainers.

Good Governance

Projects can work toward more inclusive leadership practices where people feel welcome and included in project leadership, but you also need to have good governance practices and processes that make it possible for people to feel included and move up within the project. Good governance is a key element in fixing the open source leadership gap. I actually have a second talk on this topic in the Governance and Policy track at Community Over Code, and I’ve covered governance extensively here on this blog, so I’ll just share a few highlights as they relate to the leadership gap.

The tricky thing about governance is that it needs to be proactive. The time to work on governance is when things are going well. If you wait until there is a crisis within your community, you might not have the right processes for dealing with that crisis, and when a project is in crisis, it will be much more difficult to come to an agreement about governance.

Governance is one of those things that is never really finished. The governance processes that you need when you have only a couple of maintainers is likely to be insufficient if the project grows dramatically. As your projects evolve, your governance and your leadership should evolve along with them. But changing your governance processes to evolve with the changing needs of the project can be hard. People have feelings and any kind of change can be difficult, but this is especially true in many open source projects where people often become deeply and personally invested in their projects.

Take Action

Fixing the leadership gap in open source won’t just happen without all of us taking action. Here are a few suggestions for what you can do as an individual to help ensure that open source projects have the leadership to be sustained over time.

One of the things we can all do, but especially those of you working in companies, is to provide funding for open source, which can help to reduce the pressure on open source maintainers and projects. It can provide a way to pay more people to devote their time to an open source project. You can donate to individual projects via platforms like Open Collective or GitHub Sponsors. You can contribute to things like the Open Source Pledge. You can fund open source research via the Software Stewardship Lab. There are many ways to fund open source, and that’s something that we can all do.

Those of us who are established in our careers and in open source projects can use our influence and reputation in a project to help others gain visibility and opportunities that eventually result in someone new moving into leadership positions. We call this sponsorship, which is more than just mentoring, and can include things like inviting someone to co-present or join a panel at an event, providing opportunities to collaborate together on some aspect of a project, or other activities that give people new opportunities to learn and lead. 

I mentioned earlier that we’ve all seen projects where the same people sit in the same leadership positions year after year without providing opportunities for other contributors to move up within the project. If you’re one of those people, it might be time to take a hard look at whether you’re still providing the value to the project that you once did, or are you taking a space that could be offered to an up and coming person doing great work in the project?

This is something that I have personally been thinking hard about over the past several years, and I’ve started giving up leadership roles to allow other people to have the same opportunities I’ve had.

Summary

Fixing the leadership gap that is threatening open source project health and sustainability won’t just magically happen. It’s going to take work, and it’s going to require action from all of us, so take a hard look at the projects you’re involved in, and look critically at your own behavior. Think about how you can improve the governance for the projects you’re involved in and what you can do to improve inclusivity within those projects. Consider what you can do to help others move up within open source projects and how you can be a role model for leadership in open source. And most importantly, drive the change that you want to see.

If you want to attend this talk and other great talks on similar topics, I hope to see you at Community over Code in Glasgow October 11-14!

If you want feedback or help with sustainable leadership, governance, or related open source topics, I’m available for consulting engagements.

Additional Reading:

• Sustainable Open Source Leadership
• Open Source Software: A Path to Building Leadership Skills
• Good Governance for Open Source Projects
• Governance Part 3: New Contributors and Pathways to Leadership
• Governance Part 4: Creating Intentional Culture
• How OSPOs can Measure the Impact of OSS Funding
• Launching the Software Stewardship Lab
• CHAOSS Practitioner Guides
• Contributor Sustainability Impacts Risk and Adoption of OSS Projects
• CNCF Contributor Growth Framework

As with everything I write, this was written by a human without the use of LLMs or other AI assistance.