3 Ways to Help Struggling Open Source Communities

Our tech communities are struggling. Meetups are disappearing. Community-run conferences are canceling. Open source projects are losing maintainers. Community organizers, the bedrock of our communities, are flaming out.

I know this space is usually filled with people talking about the latest and greatest tech or industry trends. And I certainly could discuss infrastructure tooling or choose some incendiary topic to get attention. However, instead, allow me to highlight a fundamental component of our industry that needs help.

Communities are the groups of people who gather to share knowledge. Without our communities, we can’t share what we’ve learned about new or newly rediscovered technology. We can’t recruit new people to the field or encourage those who may not have otherwise considered it. We need to come together to learn, inspire and build.

Consider this a call to action from a local meetup organizer, a community event organizer and an open source project member. Here are three concrete ways to help local tech communities.

1. Support Local Meetups

Meetups need a few environmental conditions to thrive. Foremost, they need a consistent flow of content, such as a lineup of speakers ready to share knowledge. Some companies run product-focused meetups, but most meetup communities are strong, independent, and product- and company-agnostic.

Meetups rely on a culture of knowledge sharing. So, if there is a meetup in your area, offer to speak! It’s a fantastic opportunity to test your speaking skills in front of a welcoming and understanding audience. If you want to test a conference talk, presenting it first at a meetup helps you understand how it will be received. While meetups usually discourage vendor pitches or talks about products that speakers have a financial interest in, you can dive into the problem space and discuss known solutions, including your own, in an unbiased manner. Or, if you’ve been toying with a startup idea, presenting at a meetup can be a great way to dip your toes in the water and mark the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey. And if you’re stuck on how to turn an idea into a talk, there’s a whole network of meetup organizers out there ready to lend a hand.

Meetups also rely on having a consistent venue and schedule. Can your office host a meetup after hours, even if it’s only a 20-person meeting room? Having provided meetup spaces, I’ve learned that it’s not much work, and the rewards far outweigh the effort!

If you can solicit volunteers to stay after hours (who may get free refreshments and a learning opportunity in return), coordinate access to the venue and perhaps arrange for a security presence, if necessary, you have everything necessary to provide space for a regular monthly event. In return, your company gets valuable exposure and signals to highly motivated and skilled potential hires that you’re seeking people with similar interests and skills. Moreover, hosting a meetup offers an opportunity to gain insight into industry trends ahead of your competitors.

Finally, meetups need sponsors to provide food and beverages each month. In exchange, sponsors typically get a brief pitch at the beginning of the event, when attendance is at its peak. Sponsors also benefit from exposure to a broader audience through the various marketing channels meetup organizers use. While these gatherings may be relatively small in scale, the sponsorship investment is proportionate to the size and characteristics of the audience. Word-of-mouth remains a highly effective means of reaching people, and meetup attendees are enthusiastic about sharing their newfound knowledge with others.

2. Help Local Organizers

Organizing a community can be a heavy burden. From keeping the pipeline of speakers going month after month to worrying over budget and debating the cost of a ticket, the mental and emotional toll on meetup organizers is high. And it doesn’t necessarily stop when they close their workstation for the day. This is why many organizers start to feel burned out after a year.

Offering to help your local organizers is genuinely appreciated. If you are great at reaching sponsors, offer to share a sponsor prospectus with your network or organize a sponsorship campaign. If you’re finance-minded, offer to help with the budget, even if it’s just giving an hour to advise an organizing team on ticket pricing. If you’re a great public speaker and can coach novice speakers, offer that. You’d be surprised how relatively small offers of help can boost an organizer’s ability to keep organizing the local community.

If you want to organize a meetup or community event, ask other organizers for advice. We’ve made so many mistakes along the way, and we want you to learn from us. If there’s no one in your area, search online for groups of community organizers. Many of us are more than willing to spend an hour to help get you started.

If your company is considering establishing meetups in multiple cities, I highly recommend providing talks to and sponsoring the local meetups instead. This approach alleviates your need to dedicate time and energy to maintaining a monthly cadence in each location and enables you to support the local communities. You can send talks or sponsorships their way and tap into new (to you) networks. Identify where local meetup communities organize their events — such as on platforms like Meetup.com, Eventbrite or Luma — to ascertain if a related community already exists. If so, contact the organizers. Collaborating with companies allows organizers to sustain our communities without having to compete for speakers and venues.

3. Contribute Regularly to a Project

You have something valuable to offer open source projects. There are numerous articles about contributing to open source projects, and I urge you to read them and reflect. While contributing a pull request or patch to fix a bug in an open source project is helpful, there are many other ways projects need help, such as code review, documentation, project management and marketing. More important than fixing a bug or submitting a pull request is consistent engagement over time. Even dedicating just 30 minutes a week to tasks like code review, issue organization or social promotion can make a significant difference.

Many open source projects struggle to attract contributors, so seek out opportunities to help. The Kubernetes project, for instance, offers an extensive contributor guide, while other Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects have working groups (WGs), special interest groups (SIGs) or technical advisory groups (TAGs) to help contributors find a role. When you find your project, offer concrete assistance rather than just ask how to help. It’s much easier for maintainers to respond to specific offers of help than spend resources to answer generic “how to help” questions.

Help Revitalize Our Communities

These suggestions are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how you can help revitalize and maintain our communities. Even attending or sending your teams to a meetup is a huge help. Running community events might not be exciting and flashy — in fact, community organizing is mostly hidden work. It takes a lot more time than people realize, and the emotional toll of trying to get a sponsor each month or boost slow event ticket sales can be surprising.

Maintaining an open source project often involves a lot of thankless tasks beyond product development. These include responding to numerous detailed critiques of project structure from people who won’t help, or trying to answer detailed vendor questionnaires from procurement groups who don’t know any better. But I ask you: If not you, then who? It’s much better if we all come forward together so no one is left bearing the burden on their own.

Frankly, it is not fun to be the person to turn off the lights when you flame out or can’t manage to maintain something. Let’s not wait until our communities have no one left to lead before you step up. And when you do, we organizers will be beside you every step of the way.