The WG is planning for the following focus areas and activities.
You can find more detals about ongoing and past activities in our quarterly reports to the OpenSSF TAC.
This will be a monthly series of social media posts, in which we highlight a specific OpenSSF community member and a career or tech tip they would like to share with the OpenSSF and beyond.
Other OSS foundations or communities host monthly virtual onboarding meetings, in which new community members are given an overview of the ongoing OpenSSF initiatives and can learn about getting involved. We are considering to collaborate with other foundations on this.
Ahead of summer 2025, the WG is seeking collaboration with other OpenSSF TIs to enroll in the LFX mentorship program. This will expose new and future contributors to OpenSSF efforts while also advancing our efforts. As part of this activity, the WG will likely also apply for funds to sponsor these mentorships.
For starters, we imagine having mentorships ready for the summer, so we plan to start doing outreach to other TIs in the late Q1/early Q2 '25 timeframe. Looking at how other foundations do this, CNCF seems to have 3 mentorship cycles per year, which is something we can strive for once we have enough momentum during the summer.
There have been a few asks to the TAC regarding the attraction and retention of maintainers. Working together with other OpenSSF TIs, we aim to develop a small and approachable set of contributing guidelines that focus on clear directions for project newcomers and practices that facilitate different types of contributions. The end goal is for our software and spec TIs to adopt these guidelines as part of their lifecycle requirements.
These are our flagship monthly topic-centered panel discussions. In 2025, our theme will be "Safe spaces for community-focused discussions".
To continue raising awareness of different communities' needs and act as a welcoming gateway to getting involved in the OpenSSF community, we plan to collaborate with community members and other DEI groups to host panel discussions and talks at different industry conferences.
Possible 2025 topics include: Hiring practices, allyship and privilege, creating encouraging space for newcomers, and elevating different voices.
We also plan to coordinate with other DEI groups to organize meetups at conferences.
We will continue our efforts in easing our preparation, documentation and marketing workflows for our current and upcoming activities. This includes creating documentation templates, establishing standard operating practices (SOPs) and leveraging our existing docs and communication channels more effectively.