Everything We've Learned From Three Years Of Funding Open Source

Since the beginning of 2019, Indeed's open source program has given over half a million dollars to individual open source projects, maintainers, and contributors. Our goal in doing so was simple - we want to play an active role in helping to sustain the open source we use. While our goal was simple, the reality is that giving money to open source projects is hard. Your organization probably relies on tens of thousands of dependencies, in addition to large infrastructure projects that are critical to the industry as a whole. Who do you fund? How much do you give them? How do you know if you're making a difference? This talk will focus on sharing what we've learned from running a FOSS Contributor Fund, paying maintainers through the GitHub Sponsors for Companies program, and directly funding interns through Outreachy and Major League Hacking. We will look at the outcomes of these initiatives through the lens of corporate sustainability, and focus on improvements that we can make together as a community and an industry.