Episode 137: A How-to Guide for Contributing to Open Source as an Employee, for Corporations

Panelists Richard Littauer | Deb Nicholson | Alyssa Wright | Josep Prat | Duane O’Brien Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. We have an exciting episode today because just like long haul truckers, open source maintainers are the people who are keeping the world alive with open source. What we’re excited about is a talk that we gave at OSPOCon in Austin. The talk was called, Panel Discussion: A How-to Guide for Contributing to Open Source as an Employee. This discussion was super important because employees do put a lot of work into open source code, and we wanted to talk about how to contribute to open source better. So, along with Richard, we have four other esteemed colleagues that were a part of this amazing talk, and we decided to put it on this podcast because it represents an initiative that is going to try to showcase to companies how to authentically participate in open source. The panelists joining us are Deb Nicholson from the Python Software Foundation, Alyssa Wright from Bloomberg, Josep Prat from Aiven, and Duane O’Brien from Indeed. Go ahead and download this episode now to find out more! [00:05:23] Duane starts us off by giving us a little history lesson on the Principles of Authentic Participation and how we got to where we are with the work today. [00:09:01] The panelists will go through and explain what they think it means to be an authentic participant in open source by going through the principles in order. Josep explains Principle 1: Starts Early. [00:10:24] Deb explains _Principle 2: Puts the Community First: the collective holds the timeline. _ [00:11:10] Alyssa explains Principle 3: Starts With Listening. [00:12:32] Duane explains Principle 4: Has Transparent Motivations. [00:13:45] Josep explains Principle 5: Enforces Respectful Behavior. [00:15:15] Richard explains Principle 6: Ends Gracefully. [00:16:05] The last one is a fun one which is _Principle 0: Don’t be a Jerk _;) [00:16:58] Duane talks about some o