Challenges of Economic Sustainability and Longevity in Open Source Projects

Welcome to Sustain WP, a limited podcast series about digital sustainability and WordPress. I'm your host Nahuai Badiola and in this episode I will be talking about the economic pillar of sustainability with 6 amazing guests.

In the previous episode we introduced the social pillar of sustainability from different points of view and we will do something similar for the economic part. 

As it was highlighted on the the previous episode the social and economic pillars are tightly intertwined so we will touch some common ground and but also add some new ideas.

All the guests were already introduced on previous episodes so I'll just mention their name. Remember that you can see more info about them below.

I start talking with Tim Frick who links the economic sustainability to having a fair living wages, sharing the benefits of digital products or having access to internet and how these things go hand by hand with the social aspect.

Hari Shanker also mentions how closely related are the economic and social pillars, highlights that we should keep in mind that there are limited resources and suggest to have an economic support that allows the things to keep going. 

After these more general views the nexts guests reflections are more focused the role of the economic part on Open Source projects. Juan Hernando mentions the importance of volunteer work and how the "work for free" it's not always sustainable, specially when the contribution goes above a significant number of hours.

Adam Silverstein also talks about Open Source maintainers and how some of them are not properly funded.

In other hand, Nora Ferreirós reflects on how she has been lucky enough so the economic pillar it's fairly new to her but she thinks it's important to lower the entrance barrier for other people so they can have a voice in the conversation. 

In the last part of the episode we will hear from Richard Littauer who it's  not part of WordPress community but he is in contact with other Open Source Software projects, so I think we can learn a lot from his experience.

I started asking about the main struggles for Open Source Software projects in his experience.

I continued asking him about how we can get more companies to give back to the WordPress project.

I ask if visibility it's one of the benefits we could "sell" to companies.

Lastly I asked Richard for things we should take into account if we want to ensure an Open Source project longevity.

That was pretty interesting, wasn't it?

Summary

Once again, the guests opinions were really interesting and covered several points so I'll try to summarize the main points.

We started talking about the basics of economic sustainability like promoting fair living wages, sharing the benefits or having access to internet to everyone.

Then we focused more specifically on Open Source projects. A common point mentioned by the guests was the importance of supporting economically contributors and maintainers. Which if you remember it's how the previous episode ended. That's because the social and economic pillars really go together in this case.

Also, removing (or lowering) the socio-economic barriers could allow more people to join Open Source projects which can be highly beneficial both for the individuals and for the project.   As we mentioned on the previous episode, having a diverse group of people contributing it's key for ensuring the longevity of WordPress project and any other Open Source project for that matter.

We also talked about how we could increase the involvement of companies. Some ideas went in a direction of changing a bit usual the narrative. Maybe we could change or complement the arguments of "giving back" or "having visibility" with others like "increase talent retainment" or "or increase the profit". In this last case, the argument would be that the project could gain market share thanks to a well economically maintained contributors.

We will talk more about closing the gap between contributors and WordPress centred companies in the next episode.

Resources

• CHAOSS community
• Five for the future initiative (WordPress)

Transcript

Nahuai Badiola I'm a WordPress developer, theme and plugin creator, I also write WP code tutorials and I'm passionate about web sustainability.

• WordPress
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• Mastodon

Guests