Launch Open Source Pledge

[chadwhitacre]

We want to make it socially acceptable for companies to pay meaningful amounts of money to Open Source every year. We are soft-launched at 👉 opensourcepledge.com.

Launch Timeline

Date	Milestone
September 15	Last day to lock in billboard logo placement for launch
October 8	Big marketing campaign kicks off, SF billboards, etc.

(kick-off call meeting notes)

To Do

• pick a domain name
• Make a one-pager ~= landing page #9
• Make a deck #10
• Develop a brand identity #8
• Promote #7
• Make a website #6
• Host an ecosystem partners kick-off #37
• Recruit Members ahead of OOH launch #5
• Run promotional campaign #11

Inspo

1. https://pledge1percent.org/
2. https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2018/mar/9/one-percent-for-open-source/
3. https://givingpledge.org/about
4. https://www.theclimatepledge.com/
5. https://www.cos.io/initiatives/top-guidelines
6. https://uberpython.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/the-python-3-wall-of-shame/
7. https://sso.tax/
8. https://stripe.com/climate
9. https://fossunited.org/foss-pledge
10. https://www.fastly.com/fast-forward ← design inspo; also ... member?
11. https://wordpress.org/five-for-the-future/
12. https://esr.gitlab.io/loadsharers/
13. https://www.onepercentfortheplanet.org/
14. https://www.founderspledge.com/

[chadwhitacre]

Here are the things a company can do to support Open Source:

• pay cash
• dedicate employee time to upstream
• publish projects (~= employee time)
• give gifts-in-kind

What is in-scope for Pledge? Cash only or all or some or ... ? 🤔

[chadwhitacre]

What's the outcome we're trying to drive? Healthy Open Source (who didn't like "healthy"? I forget).

Balance user freedom and developer sustainability.
Balance innovation and stability.
Balance corporate and indie.

[chadwhitacre]

The Salesforce 1% model is time, product, and equity (financial resources).

[chadwhitacre]

[chadwhitacre]

Pledge 1% - The CEO Equity Playbook v_1.pdf

Pledge 1% - The Companion Guide to the CEO Equity Playbook v_1.pdf

[chadwhitacre]

Sigh. PDFs were gated. 😭

[chadwhitacre]

Note that we can only accept pledges from founders or executives who have the ability to make a decision on behalf of their company.

https://info.pledge1percent.org/pledgenow

[chadwhitacre]

Staff:

1. https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-lesnick-315910/ (CEO/President)
2. https://www.linkedin.com/in/michellefifis/ (Community Manager)
3. https://www.linkedin.com/in/lesliegildea/ (VP, Business Development)
4. https://www.linkedin.com/in/minyoo/ (Sr. Director of Marketing and Communications)
5. https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliciamschmidt/ (VP. Member Impact)
6. https://www.linkedin.com/in/juan-antonio-barroso-1ba387130/ (Chief of Staff to the CEO)
7. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ella-jennine-hart/ (Executive Assistant)
8. https://www.linkedin.com/in/alejandra-parra-74b75231/ (Operations Manager)
9. https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathrynsatcher/ (Director of Equity Operations )

Charity Navigator - "Not currently rated" shrug

[chadwhitacre]

Had an internal call, agreements:

1. Outcome is a dozen companies Sentry's size also giving $500k/year 18 months from now.
2. Name is Pledge. It fits from a marketing perspective, doesn't couple us to specific implementation.
3. Focus is cash to indie OSS. Other things (time, product) are fine but cash is core to this
4. Benchmark is $/dev. It's easy to reason about, and causes less friction for private companies who will be the bulk for the foreseeable future. Also builds on existing narrative.
5. Open, light-weight reporting. Accountability, yes, but no heavy auditing (no staff).

[chadwhitacre]

Moving to https://github.com/opensourcepledge/opensourcepledge.com/issues.

[chadwhitacre]

The heart of this is going to be light-weight reporting on a) number of devs and b) dollars given to Open Source, in some consistent format. I think my next step here is to go through this exercise for Sentry and use that to generate a specific proposal for a format to run by others listening in.

[LewisJEllis]

Some quick thoughts to share:

• I really like the lightweight simplified approach, $1k/dev/year rule of thumb is very straightforward
• As an IC who likes open source and would try to get the org I work for to Do The Thing, I could benefit from:
  • A "How To Convince Your Boss / Management" spiel - how can an org / company value it past "seems like the right thing to do"? branding, marketing, more appealing place to work, sustaining commons, etc
  • A walkthrough of what to do / how to actually do it - say I have approval to distribute a pile of cash, now what? thanks.dev, GitHub sponsors, etc
• I suspect a lot of startups might worry "are my investors gonna think I'm just lighting their money on fire?", and so would be happier/less hesitant to jump on this if they could see VCs saying "this is cool and we support it and you should do it"
  • I imagine VCs who invest in/adjacent to open source would be happy to help provide support / social proof here
• A "who's doing it and how much" page / leaderboard could also be great, as exposure / recognition for participating companies, and as social proof for companies considering it
  • This also pushes the "no excuses, put your money where your mouth is" etc angle that I've seen Cramer express

[chadwhitacre]

Thanks for jumping in @LewisJEllis.

• A "who's doing it and how much" page / leaderboard could also be great, as exposure / recognition for participating companies, and as social proof for companies considering it
  • This also pushes the "no excuses, put your money where your mouth is" etc angle that I've seen Cramer express

☝️ This right here is like the whole thing. It's all about trying to build social pressure / proof / validation, see how far we can get with it. We might need government to finish the job but we should be able to make a solid start with brand marketing value for early adopters.

[nehzatarmin]

Thanks for jumping in @LewisJEllis.

• A "who's doing it and how much" page / leaderboard could also be great, as exposure / recognition for participating companies, and as social proof for companies considering it

  • This also pushes the "no excuses, put your money where your mouth is" etc angle that I've seen Cramer express

☝️ This right here is like the whole thing. It's all about trying to build social pressure / proof / validation, see how far we can get with it. We might need government to finish the job but we should be able to make a solid start with brand marketing value for early adopters.

Let me know if we can help in any way @chadwhitacre this is something we'd love to promote...

[chadwhitacre]

Talked to Neon, idea from them to partner with SafeBase (e.g.) to deliver OS Pledge attestations alongside other things like SOC2.

[chadwhitacre]

Talked to Clerk, positive vibe, gonna circle back when we're closer.

[nehzatarmin]

@chadwhitacre not sure if you've seen this on HN but we gave you guys a little mention :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40905849

The positive feedback we're also getting for Sentry is consistent month on month as we get more maintainers come onboard

[chadwhitacre]

@selviano and I are on a call about this, we just signed for SF billboards in October(!), so we now have a deadline. I've split out three tickets for our high-level todo items (from the issue description):

• Make a website #6
• Recruit Members ahead of OOH launch #5
• Promote #7

[chadwhitacre]

Alright! @selviano and I met with design. I've added a few items to our todo.

[chadwhitacre]

We've spruced up the landing page a bit. Even though it's temporary, we wanted something a little less plain to aid with #5.

[stevekrouse]

This is awesome! I'm so in! I feel like we were all missing a reasonable, simple standard and this feels like it

[chadwhitacre]

Woo-hoo! Thanks for jumping in @stevekrouse!

For everyone on this thread: we are starting weekly calls to coordinate on recruiting and execution. Mondays at 10 AM US/Pacific. Drop me an email [email protected] or lmk here if you want in on the invite. Let's go! 🙌

[Delta456]

I don't have any company currently that can fund the initiative but I still want to help anyhow. I would love to get invited.

[chadwhitacre]

Thanks @Delta456! I've added you to the invite (grabbed your email from your GH profile). 👍

[jmduke]

lets gooooooooooo

[usmanmusa1920]

All your comments are good, may we see a potential progress.

[patrick91]

I'm in as well! [email protected]

[chadwhitacre]

Awesome, thanks Patrick! Added. 👍

[zanieb]

Just want to note that Astral is in on this initiative — we've just announced an open source fund at ~$3000 per developer.

[chadwhitacre]

Woo-hoo! Welcome aboard, @zanieb! Congrats on shipping the Astral OSS Fund! 😍

[anehzat]

Just want to note that Astral is in on this initiative — we've just announced an open source fund at ~$3000 per developer.

This is great to see @zanieb bravo to the Astral team for their leadership in this space

[chadwhitacre]

Okay! We had our community organizing kick-off call, here are the notes. @selviano Can you share the recording? I believe it went to your drive.

tl;dr is that we organized into four working groups:

• storytelling - @selviano
• member outreach - @vladh
• maintainer outreach - @Ethan-Arrowood
• design / build / specifics - @chadwhitacre

Get in touch with the people specified if you would like to help with that aspect. Each point person should run their own team. I'll set up a weekly recurring call with @selviano @vladh @Ethan-Arrowood for overall steering. Oh! We also started a Discord, thanks to @Delta456. 😎

Thanks to everyone who joined! Lot of energy, lets go! 👐 💃

[chadwhitacre]

Here's the recording of the kick-off call, for posterity. 😌

[Delta456]

Meet link for the next weekly community call, Monday at 1:30 PM US/Eastern.

https://discord.gg/3nf82CbF?event=1268553119717916776

[chadwhitacre]

Action items from weekly steering call:

• @vladh and @chadwhitacre to onboard early adopter cohort
• @selviano to firm up Nasdaq commitment
• @chadwhitacre and @Ethan-Arrowood to start planning an ecosystem partners kick-off event
• @stevenplewis to update design

Goal is next week to be ready to add a leaderboard to the homepage.

[pepicrft]

This is a fantastic idea.

[chadwhitacre]

I added "must have" and "nice to have" labels to our tickets and updated the ticket description here. I'm meeting tomorrow with the project manager for Sentry's design team to make sure we're in a good spot. My top priority is landing #45 to unblock #5.

[chadwhitacre]

We are four weeks out from our big campaign launch on October 8! We currently have ten companies onboarded. 🎉

From here on out all of our basic systems are in place, we just need to keep executing and building momentum.

Goals for this week:

• promotion - follow up with ecosystem partners with a partner enablement package
• promotion - publish some version of the partner package on the website for self-serve help
• recruiting - keep emailing and recruiting
• recruiting - publish some self-serve docs on the website for how to help

[chadwhitacre]

We are one week out from launch! 🙌

We just reached 20 companies onboarded!

We have a verbal commit from one foundation to publish with us on October 8!

Almost there!

[vladh]

We're launching the Pledge tomorrow at 9am Eastern!!! 🎉 😄

[chadwhitacre]

That's that, folks. Pledge is launched! I'm gonna close this out, I will likely try to collect some links in a roundup on the issue description, hopefully tomorrow.

Thank you everyone for your hard work to make this happen, especially @vladh who did so much coding and outreach and administration and community engagement and general cheerleading. From myself @dcramer @selviano @Ethan-Arrowood @Delta456 and the rest of the folks here in this project THANK YOU, Vlad, for all of your inspiring effort to launch the Open Source Pledge!! You win the MVP award, hands down. 🙇‍♂️ 🙏 💃

[vladh]

Thanks so much @chadwhitacre. 😭 ❤️

So excited to have the Pledge launched!!! For anyone who missed it:

[chadwhitacre]

We hit trending on X.