Open Source Software, the backbone of today’s digital infrastructure, must be sustainable for the long-term. Qureshi and Fang (2011) find that motivating, engaging, and retaining new contributors is what makes open source projects sustainable.

Yet, as Steinmacher, et al. (2015) identifies, first-time open source contributors often lack timely answers to questions, newcomer orientation, mentors, and clear documentation. Moreover, since the term was first coined in 1998, open source lags far behind other technical domains in participant diversity. Trinkenreich, et al. (2022) reports that only about 5% of projects were reported to have women as core developers, and women authored less than 5% of pull requests, but had similar or even higher rates of pull request acceptances to men. So, how can we achieve more diversity in open source communities and projects?

Bloomberg’s Women in Technology (BWIT) community, Open Source Program Office (OSPO), and Corporate Philanthropy team collaborated with NumFOCUS to develop a volunteer incentive model that aligns business value, philanthropic impact, and individual technical growth. Through it, participating Bloomberg engineers were given the opportunity to convert their hours spent contributing to the pandas open source project into a charitable donation to a non-profit of their choice.

The presenters will discuss how we wove together differing viewpoints: non-profit foundation and for-profit corporation, corporate philanthropy and engineers, first-time contributors and core devs. They will showcase why and how we converted technical contributions into charitable dollars, the difference this community-building model had in terms of creating a diverse and sustained group of new open source contributors, and the viability of extending this to other open source projects and corporate partners to contribute to the long-term sustainability of open source—thereby demonstrating the true convergence of tech and social impact.

NOTE:
[1] Qureshi, I, and Fang, Y. "Socialization in open source software projects: A growth mixture modeling approach." 2011.
[2] Steinmacher, I., et al. "Social barriers faced by newcomers placing their first contribution in open source software projects." 2015.
[3] Trinkenreich, B., et al. "Women’s participation in open source software: A survey of the literature." 2022.