Episode 159: Dawn Foster & Andrew Nesbitt at State of Open Con 2023

Guest Dawn Foster | Andrew Nesbitt Panelist Richard Littauer Show
Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about
sustaining open source for the long haul. Richard is at the State
of Open Con 2023 UK in London, which is a conference dedicated
towards open source. Today, he has two guests joining him in-person
and his first guest is Dawn Foster, who’s Director of Open Source
Community Strategy in VMware’s OSPO. We’ll hear about Dawn’s
responsibilities at VMWare, some highlights on what she talks about
at her talk, some great tools she uses, and the importance of
mentoring to grow the next wave of maintainers. Richard’s next
guest is Andrew Nesbitt, who’s a Software Engineer, Founder of
Libraries.io, and a new project he’s working on with Ben Nickolls
called, Ecosyste.ms. We’ll learn more about a project he did a
while ago called, 24 Pull Requests, and the newest project,
Ecosyste.ms, and how it's different from Libraries.io. Download
this episode now to hear much more! [00:00:48] We hear about Dawn’s
talk on leading in open source and taking a strategic approach and
she shares some bullet points from it. [00:03:33] Is there a way to
win an ROI argument with an argumentative manager and how can you
win those conversations? Dawn explains ways to justify it.
[00:06:54] Richard brings up how he thinks about open source as two
different buckets, one as developers, and the other as enterprise
corporate models, and wonders if they’re the same type of
community, and Dawn explains how they blend together. [00:08:13]
Dawn details her job and responsibilities at VMware. [00:10:15] We
heard Dawn mention she uses CHAOSS tools, but are there others she
uses to make it easier for her as a community strategy? She tells
us about a metrics model for the CHAOSS Project called, Starter
Project Health Metrics Model. [00:12:19] At VMware, their business
units operate independently, and Dawn tells us how they act in more
of a mentor capacity for the groups. [00:13:38] Dawn shares her
thoughts on how engineers are going to move forward in their career
from the project to have the skills necessary to do the same thing
at a new project. She tells about a talk she did geared towards
maintainers. [00:16:57] How does Dawn operationalize the off giving
of trust for maintainers? [00:18:42] Dawn shares how she’s looking
forward to a future with looking at things from a data based
approach, and where you can follow her on the internet. [00:20:17]
Andrew gives us the history of how he met Ben Nickolls, a project
he started a while ago called, 24 Pull Requests, and how
libraries.io started. [00:28:05] Has Andrew ever looked at projects
that are popular or that are infrastructure level which may be used
in closed source, but have licenses that discriminate against
closed source usage? [00:28:43] Andrew and Ben are working on a new
project called Ecosyste.ms. What’s the difference between that and
libraires.io? [00:33:50] If you’re looking to improve or understand
the stack of your dependencies, Andrew tells us what the most
interesting use case of Ecosyste.ms is for a maintainer or
community manager. [00:37:32] Find out where you can follow Andrew
on the web. Links SustainOSS (https://sustainoss.org/) SustainOSS
Twitter
(https://twitter.com/SustainOSS?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor)
SustainOSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/)
podcast@sustainoss.org (mailto:podcast@sustainoss.org) Richard
Littauer Twitter
(https://twitter.com/richlitt?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor)
Dawn Foster Twitter (https://twitter.com/geekygirldawn?lang=en)
Dawn Foster GitHub (https://github.com/geekygirldawn) Dawn Foster
Mastodon (https://hachyderm.io/@geekygirldawn) Dawn Foster Blog
(https://fastwonderblog.com/) CHAOSS (https://chaoss.community/)
Andrew Nesbitt Twitter (https://twitter.com/teabass) Andrew Nesbitt
Website (https://nesbitt.io/) Andrew Nesbitt GitHub
(https://github.com/andrew) Ben Nickolls Twitter
(https://twitter.com/BenJam) Libraries.io (https://libraries.io/)
24 Pull Requests-GitHub
(https://github.com/24pullrequests/24pullrequests)
Ecosyste.ms-GitHub (https://github.com/ecosyste-ms) Sustain
Podcast-Episode 70: Avi Press and Scarf
(https://podcast.sustainoss.org/guests/avi-press) Credits Produced
by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M.
Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show
notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound
(https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guests: Andrew Nesbitt
and Dawn Foster.