We create and sustain healthy, vibrant technological communities in specific geographic regions by turning developers into leaders, promoting local projects, and building connections.
Our primary focus is providing developers with the time and training needed to build successful open source software, which requires growing and maintaining a community of collaborators. These skills translate directly into team leadership in a corporate environment and indirectly into community leadership and thought leadership positions.
Our secondary focus is promoting local software projects, highlighting community members who are contributing, and building connections between regions. Open source software is both the outcome of a healthy technological community and the currency among its members, but fostering a healthy community requires deliberate focused attention on building up leadership and connections. We provide that.
We are launching a pilot project focusing on municipalities in Canada in 2018.
Healthy communities are robust, containing a large and diverse mix of individuals who between them have enough experience to handle any issues that arise.
Healthy communities are attractive, pulling in more people than are lost through attrition.
Healthy communities have good relationships with other communities, and strengthen those global relationships through regular interaction.
Healthy communities have support from their region, including both private sector and public sector at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels.
Healthy communities have a sense of pride, and regularly promote the accomplishments of their members.
We value community, and seek to support and extend the OSS community in Canada by building up leaders, strengenthing relationships and giving all developers access to high quality training material and curated projects ideally suited for contributions.
We value Canadian technical culture, and seek to improve it by mentoring local developers, promoting OSS projects from Canada, bringing external developers to Canada to work on OSS projects, and making Canadian cities destinations for doing technical work.
We value OSS development, and seek to provide developers with the funding, tools, training, experience, culture, and promotion necessary for running a successful OSS project.
We value openness, and seek to exemplify that quality through open decision making, financial transparency, and open sourcing the tools and processes we create so others can follow this model in their own countries.
We value sustainability, and seek to build a foundation that is fiscally sustainable in order to maximize our impact locally, regionally and globally.
InDevelopment is preparing for a first cohort of six developers, each maintaining a separate OSS project, chosen through our open application process, together in the same physical space for three months, with their cost of living covered for the duration.
The developer space will also host our mentors, facilitators, and teachers, who will guide the developers through the process of building a successful and sustainable OSS project using our OSS Leadership curriculum, and supplement any gaps in their knowledge.
For the first cohorts we are specifically seeking OSS projects with a single primary maintainer who is experiencing difficulty in managing the project, e.g. it needs more development time than the maintainer has available, or requires more promotion and community building, or it has a growing community with accompanying growing pains -- these are all places where we can provide a large amount of value in a relatively short time.
The alumni of the first cohort will be involved in the application, selection, and mentoring processes for the next cohort, adding to our organizational strength with each passing quarter.
- Khurram Virani: Founder Lighthouse Labs, DevHub, VelocityJS
- Julie Haché: CTO Bitmaker Labs, head of onboarding at Shopify
- Dann Toliver: Founder PrivacyShell, Gamma Space, Toronto JS
- Abigail Cabunoc Mayes: Mozilla Lead Developer in Open Source Engagement
- Richard Littauer: Founder Maintainer.io
- Developer advisory board: Leo Zovic, Dmitri Sotnikov, James MacAulay
Our immediate ask is for sponsoring a seat in the first cohort. The estimated cost of living is $4,000CAD per month in Toronto, which is $12,000 per developer for one three month cohort. We need an additional $6,000 per developer per cohort for operating costs, for a total of $18,000. We have space for six of these, and the first sponsors will earn a permanent place in our foundation’s history.
Additionally we are working on putting together a long-term basket of renewable sources of funding, including government grants, relationships with companies with continuing support for OSS tool development, building a hiring pipeline for companies that want to support our graduates in doing OSS development internally, OSS training sessions, and offering open source tools as services and products.
Funders benefit directly by being part of our growing community and by having the opportunity to interact with talented OSS developers. They benefit indirectly through the creation and maintenance of OSS tools and projects, the increased presence of Canadian cities on the global technical scene, and commensurate attractive power to technical workers.