An entire department, working in the open, focusing on other companies’ Open Source repositories… sounds like something unthinkable, right? Well… except is not, and I’m here to tell you the story of the OSPO team at Aiven, whose main mission is to contribute to and guarantee the sustainability of external OSS projects.

The most common and widespread way to support OSS communities takes the form of donations. Money donations are a good way to secure projects financially, however, you can rarely foresee their impact on the community. On top of that, in some cases, money is just a palliative, and will not prevent contributors with a day-to-day jobs from burning out. We think an alternative exists, where, instead of money, companies donate employees' time to directly work on existing critical OSS projects.

Learn from Aiven’s experience building their OSPO, and how it impacts mission, scope, hiring, team composition, and metrics definitions.

We will share the benefits that the company is experiencing as well as direct examples of how our OSPO is improving the sustainability of various OSS communities. But the roads of our project were seldom perfect, and we'll discuss pitfalls and areas to watch out for, so you know them in advance when building your own Outbound OSPO focusing on 3rd party OSS.

The audience will learn:

- An Innovative way of doing OSPOs

- When it’s good and when it’s not

- How it can improve the global OSS ecosystem

- How to measure success

- How recruiting changes

- How fragile OSS communities and projects can benefit from more companies adopting the new approach