JupyterCon 2023

Community-first open source: An action plan!
05-12, 14:30–15:00 (Europe/Paris), Louis Armand 1

The open source software ecosystem has multiple mature projects with thriving communities. These communities come many different flavors but there is always a common thread of promoting kindness in communication, improving the contributor and user experience, and working to make the project more inclusive, accessible, and sustainable.

We, the presenters, recently worked to transition a company-backed open source project, Nebari (https://nebari.dev/), to be more community-oriented in its development and governance. We focused on creating a community-first foundation that build on years of learning from other leading communities, including Jupyter, NumPy, Gatsby JS, and more. In this talk, we want to share our journey and the things we learned along the way.

We aim to provide a step-by-step guide for open source projects looking to adopt more community-driven practices. We will discuss everything from repository management, and contributor and maintainer pathways, to documentation and governance principles. This talk will be most helpful for projects in their formative stages and projects transitioning from company-backed models, however we feel everyone can learn something new to implement in their communities.

Pavithra is a Developer Advocate at Quansight, where she works to support the PyData community. She is also a part of the Bokeh core team and the Dask maintenance team. In her spare time, she enjoys a good book and hot coffee. :)

Tania is the Director of Quansight Labs, an organisation that builds and sustains community-driven open-source projects and initiatives.
She has been a long-term open-source user, contributor, advocate, and maintainer.