This year, Sustain Summit will be hosted at the Pullman London St Pancras Hotel

Schedule

25th of October, Pullman St. Pancras Hotel London.

The following is the schedule for the Sustain Summit 2018.

The event will be structured as a day of collaborative working sessions, along with optional evening activities. Participants are encouraged to organize additional evening fun.

The agenda is being designed as a combination of planned sessions and participant-driven discussions, and specific topics will be placed into time slots based on input at the meeting from those who will be in attendance. Sessions will be dialog- and outcome-oriented rather than presentations or lecture format.

The program is envisioned to enable deeper collaborations and learnings across the global network of open source leaders and stakeholders in order to collectively improve our skills, strategies and impact in our respective sustainability efforts.

The following are some general guidelines regarding how we’ll run the event:

• The agenda is malleable. Sessions will be proposed and moved around to accommodate requests by both participants and facilitators. All break times are approximate.
• Many session topics and outcomes are being sourced from pre-event input from participants. We welcome additional session proposals, as long as they are not lecture or slideware-based and they focus on collaboration and sharing of experiences.
• If there is a listed session or discussion you would like to help facilitate, feel free to be in touch with the organizers in advance; we’d love to hear what you’re thinking. We will also be reaching out to participants based on their specific inputs and experiences, and inviting you to help out with particular sessions that have been proposed.
• Full participation in the program is expected; part-time participation will work against the overall event goals. In particular, we ask all participants to refrain from scheduling side meetings during scheduled agenda times. We ask that each participant utilize their seat at the meeting to the fullest for the benefit of all.
• This is a “devices at ease” event: use of laptops and cellphones during sessions is strongly discouraged unless you are a designated note taker. We encourage all participants to be fully present in sessions and discussions, rather than multitasking on email etc. We invite participants to use the morning and afternoon breaks, as well as the lunch hour, to check in with external realities.
• This is a “no pitches event”. We are here to talk about sustaining our community and not to recruit users or sell your project.
• Notes will be dynamically captured during sessions. We will be asking each participant to help capture notes in at least one session, so as to spread the work around evenly.

Sessions are designed to be highly interactive. This isn’t the place where you will see any panels and keynote speakers. Breakout sessions will be designed to spur discussion. Facilitators understand that their primary goal is to enable learning, address questions, and support peer sharing. Bring your questions, and your knowledge to share!

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Thursday 25 October

8:00 Breakfast begins

9:00 Opening Circle
The event will be called to order with a friendly and fast-paced kickoff that includes words of welcome from hosts and co-organizers, brief participant introductions, along with agenda, participation guidelines and logistics overviews.

9:30 Survey of Sustainability Models and Practices
In order to explore the question of what we mean by “sustainability”, participants will navigate through a series of sustainability case studies, in a fast-paced peer-learning format focused on distinct facets of sustainability in different open source contexts and business models, and associated best practices. Got a project or case study you want to share and explain? Talk to us, we’ll try to fit it in.

10:30 Break

10:45 Collaborative Working Sessions
These sessions allow participants to go further on a range of topics identified during pre-event engagement as well as during the first session. Session facilitators will explain briefly the course of each session, and participants elect to join the session of their choice. Report-backs will take place at the end of the session slot.

Anticipated session topics include:

• Licensing: Trends, challenges and open issues
• How do we share what works? Strategies for collaborating and sharing knowledge
• Financial Sustainability Models
• Governance Models (for decision making).
• Institutional design principles for open source resource management
• Community building / communication / growth
• How can companies contribute, and how do we align those interests?
• How to we assign value to contributions?
• Mapping best practices for hybrid paid/volunteer community models
• Cryptocurrency in OS: factoring benefit, utility and hype
• Governance & Institutional Design
• Maintainers Rehab: Taking care of ourselves, coping with burnout.
• Strategies for Sharing common resources (ie: project manager, legal, etc)
• Sustainability of open source research (OSR)
• Best practices for onboarding new contributors.
• Funding models: is financial sustainability possible without corporate sponsors?
• Working with corporate sponsors: how much influence should they have on development?
• Governments and data: impacts of GDPR and other regulation
• “Hired guns”: potential issues when core contributors are employees of businesses.
• So called “4th wave open source”: is FOSS losing its soul?
• OSS Metrics: what are more and less useful measures of success and impact?
• Models/Practices for supporting core users of mature projects
• Models of inclusion and best practices for supporting equitable and diverse communities

12:45 Lunch
Participants are encouraged to sit with those they have not yet met.

13:45 Collaborative Working Sessions
Strategic sessions continue.

15:15 Break

15:30 Peer Skillshare
Participants will be invited to share any skill or knowledge they consider relevant to the meeting scope. The session will be structured so as to minimize group size and maximize 1-on-1 sharing opportunities.

16:00 Mapping where from here
The group will pause before the final session to take stock of the progress made to this point in the week and to inventory action items, next steps and other bridges to post-event collaboration.

16:30 Closing Plenary
The closing session will invite participants to weigh in on what has been most useful during the course of the day, share appreciations and wrap up the day.

17:00 Adjourn

17:30 Happy Hour @ Google London HQ

Sponsors

Without these companies, Sustain Summit 2018 wouldn’t have been possible.