About Sustain

It all started with a tweet in November 2016. Six months later, one hundred people gathered in San Francisco and created a cultural shift in how we think about the sustainability of open source software.

After the event, a report was written and a definition was born, "sustainer—the individual or organization who is concerned with the fragile state and future of highly-used and impactful open source projects". If that sounds like something you identify with, you should join us.

Sustain events are led by a facilitator. There are no keynotes, talks, or sponsor demos. Undivided attention is required. Phones and laptops are put away throughout the day.

What this means is that Sustain is a different sort of conference, and that participants are fully engaged. Since 2017, the Sustain community has held events around the globe. As well as events, Sustain also hosts a semi-weekly podcast, and facilitates working groups getting into the weeds of what sustainability means.

Join us!

Organizers

Sustain is open source, and anyone can join. However, there tends to be a core group involved in organizing the events and work. We operate through rough consensus. We prioritize delegating decision making to working groups and small groups in our community.

Past organizers include:

You may contact them if you have any questions or concerns. You can also join us on our forum or Twitter. Hashtag: #sustainoss.

Media and Logos

For links to all Sustain talks, videos, reports, podcasts and more, check out our Media page.

You can find all of our logo variations on Identihub.

Website

The website's design was made by Ura, turned into a website by @XhmikosR and tweaked by @RichardLitt.

Our tool stack includes:

Also, we are HTML5 valid and try to be WCAG2AA compliant.

As well, we keep a list of best practices for the organisation. Take a look!