Hello, OSC community! We're back with another monthly update, so without further ado...
📣 Announcements 📣
New Support Initiative
We’re excited to announce we've rolled out a new initiative: regularly scheduled update calls to support our collectives, starting with a few of the most active projects and funds. Each collective that we’ve identified will be assigned a dedicated contact at OSC to coordinate these calls.
With a small team supporting over 2,500 collectives, we can’t hold individual calls with everyone, but we’re always here to support our projects as needed! If you ever need or just want to chat, don’t hesitate to reach out – we’re always happy to connect!
Conference Support for Attendees and Organizers As a reminder, we offer assistance to open source maintainers in attending non-technical conferences! This is because we recognize the value of gaining leadership and project management skills beyond the technical sphere. For hosted collectives with limited budgets, we’re happy to help cover attendance costs to ensure maintainers have access to valuable growth opportunities.
Additionally, we’ve recently expanded our support to conference organizers. Our updated policy outlines how we can provide financial and promotional support for open source conferences. We prioritize smaller events that align with OSC’s mission of promoting sustainability, inclusivity, and education within open source. Event organizers interested in sponsorship or promotional support can reach out with event details and funding needs.
All Things Open Our Executive Director, Lauren Gardner, and some of our board members, including Samson Goddy, a co-founder of Open Source Community Africa (OSCA), recently attended the All Things Open conference. Edidiong Asikpo, a member of OSCA, gave an inspiring keynote highlighting the impact they have made in growing a strong open source community in the past five years. They shared this stat: of new contributions made to GitHub in the last year, Nigeria is the top country/region in percentage growth! Click here to watch Edidiong's talk: 'Navigating the Surge_the Growth & Impact of Open Source in Africa - ATO 2024'
Currency Display Update We're updating how collective balances are displayed on the Open Collective platform. Moving forward, all collectives will have their balance shown in USD. This change aligns with how donations are already converted and managed in USD by Open Source Collective behind the scenes, helping to avoid any confusion.
This change won't impact operations. You’ll continue to receive donations in multiple currencies and pay expenses in USD, Euro, GBP, and more. The only change is how your balance is displayed — it will now be shown in USD to align with how we manage funds on the backend.
If your collective currently shows your collective's balance in a currency other than USD, you'll have received an email from us.
✨ Community Highlights, Updates, and Announcements ✨
The Open Source Pledge Last month, we shared exciting news about the Open Source Pledge. Since then, the project has launched! Six organizations across the open source ecosystem, including two of our hosted projects and our own team, along with some other great nonprofits, have written about the pledge. At OSC, we've felt the momentum building around this initiative, and we're excited to see the impact it will have on the entire community!
Here are the six organizations that have shared their support, including Play Framework and the PHP Foundation, both part of the Open Source Collective community:
GitBook Plan for OS Projects + Fund GitBook recently announced a free Sponsored site plan for open source projects, allowing developers to create and host documentation at no cost while earning ad revenue for each view. This initiative includes full customization, data insights, and integrations, with all ad revenue going directly to the project. Learn more about it here: https://www.gitbook.com/blog/free-open-source-documentation
Gitbook also launched an open source fund, inspired by The Open Source Pledge, to further support projects integral to the ecosystem. You can read more about that here: https://www.gitbook.com/blog/the-gitbook-oss-fund
And congratulations to OSC hosted collectives for being recipients of Gitbook funding: Storybook, typescript-eslint, webpack, Vitest, core-js, libvips, Stylelint for being part of Gitbooks’ unified, Drizzle ORM, ESLint, CSS Tools, Prettier, Babel, Cheerio, date-fns, and Ajv!
Newly accepted collectives
In October, we approved 22 projects: A-Frame, Afrim Collective, AspirePress, Complex Data Collective, ET:Legacy, Exiftool, Free Explorers, Frontpage, Functionalscript, Gitoxide, Graffle, Leptos, Lunaria, p2pfl, Persona.fm, psake, RetroUI, Sablier, sched-ext, SkyLearn, stageX, and tox-dev! Welcome to the OSC community!
That’s all for this month! If you have any news or updates you’d like to share with the OSC community, please reach out to Grace at [email protected]
That Gitbook is just what I was looking for overall, though it fails big time to integrate with existing GitHub project wikis as the wiki is not quite part of the repo and GitHub no longer has a setting to include the info in the repo *sigh* Nothing is ever 1 click easy solution for me 🐻
So I have to nudge Gitbook devs and make them understand that they're missing on a lot of uses cases as they pretty much discarded the previous attempt someone did about this thing earlier this year.
Personally I don't really care about their ad solution, so I hope that it's fully optional. It's nice to have perhaps if you're developing big framework and have devs running around to the docs all the time, but for me, making a game project, most players won't bother with documentation at all, so any revenue will be cents, the ad will do more harm than good.
on
That Gitbook is just what I was looking for overall, though it fails big time to integrate with existing GitHub project wikis as the wiki is not quite part of the repo and GitHub no longer has a setting to include the info in the repo *sigh* Nothing is ever 1 click easy solution for me 🐻
So I have to nudge Gitbook devs and make them understand that they're missing on a lot of uses cases as they pretty much discarded the previous attempt someone did about this thing earlier this year.
Personally I don't really care about their ad solution, so I hope that it's fully optional. It's nice to have perhaps if you're developing big framework and have devs running around to the docs all the time, but for me, making a game project, most players won't bother with documentation at all, so any revenue will be cents, the ad will do more harm than good.
Keep up the good work!