OSS Sustainability Lab Asynchronous Curriculum

The core working thesis of the OSS Lab is that sustainability is the capacity for change. What does that mean? Many projects interested in their sustainability (who feel like their work is unsustainable) recognize there is a gap between where a team or a project is and where they want to be. The OSS Lab helps you articulate those two places (where you are now and where you want to be) and helps you understand how you behave in each.

Studying behavior is crucial to understanding where you are and where you want to be. You may be tempted to understand your projects as code, libraries, or repositories. In the OSS Lab, we work with you to understand your projects through activities and behaviors.

Articulating the values that underpin and drive activities and behaviors will help you understand how to organize, develop, and recruit others (community engagement) and help build the accountability structures (governance) to support others.

Work in the OSS Lab helps you see yourself (your team, your project) from the outside. This helps you identify the behaviors and activities that are keeping you where you are and help you practice new ways of working to get to where you want to be.

For example, in psychiatry, "insight" is the capacity to recognize and accept one is suffering from a disease. When we say "this work is unsustainable" we might mean: "I feel unwell doing it" but we often cannot see a bigger picture, a picture of what is making it feel so bad. We struggle to diagnose challenges, saying if we had more money, more people, it would be better. However, 'more' is not always a sustainable solution. More grants can mean more reporting, more staff/contractors to manage, and more project administrative work.

In the OSS Lab, we explore how comradery, connection, relationships, and trial and error can help identify what is "unsustainable" and direct resources and shift behaviors and activities accordingly. This is what building a capacity for change is; capacity to see and change your activities and behaviors, subsequently changing your project. Importantly, in the OSS Lab we identify that change might be additive but it also might be subtractive. Sustainability might mean stopping, shifting, changing, and ending aspects of what we're doing.

Very little about any of our work today is 'sustainable' (e.g., climate, care, and incentive structures). We don't have a fix for these. Instead, we pause to reflect on what needs to change in how we're building. When we focus on how, the what starts to change as well.

Join us in seven modules designed to help you develop insight, articulate your values, iterate on solutions, foster community, discover what you can stop, and become more sustainable.