From 21d6e436f3ccfb4405470f5f6eb52a2fae5c363a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Randy Fay Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2025 16:58:17 -0600 Subject: [PATCH 1/6] blog: DDEV Sustainability --- src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md | 51 +++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 51 insertions(+) create mode 100644 src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md diff --git a/src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md b/src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..5f9b9bc2 --- /dev/null +++ b/src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md @@ -0,0 +1,51 @@ +--- +title: "Securing DDEV’s Future: Our Commitment to Financial & Community Sustainability" +pubDate: 2025-04-30 +#modifiedDate: 2025-02-06 +summary: How we’re building governance, financial, and community structures to ensure DDEV thrives beyond any single maintainer. +author: Randy Fay +#featureImage: +# src: /img/blog/2025/03/ddev-github-sponsors.png +# alt: Some of DDEV's sponsors via GitHub Sponsors +categories: + - Community +--- + +Over the last nine years DDEV has grown from a tiny side project to a development environment and ecosystem that serves [about 16,000 weekly developer-users](stats-on-ddev-usage-nov-2024.md) and is critical to so many developers' workflows. + +We love this amazing open-source world that we're a part of. It's astonishing when communities can [work together](open-source-for-the-win.md) and of course the fact that we all stand on the shoulders of such giants like Linux, Debian, and hundreds of other projects. + +## What Happens When a Community Loses its Maintainer? + +What happens when a great project loses a key maintainer? Recently the maintainer of the Vim editor, [Died](https://thenewstack.io/bram-moolenaar-author-of-the-open-source-vim-code-editor-has-died/). We will all die, and most of us will deal with other changes that cause us to change our focus without death. The [Vim community did step up successfully](https://thenewstack.io/vim-after-bram-a-core-maintainer-on-how-theyve-kept-it-going/), but that's not the only outcome possible for so many small projects. + +What can we learn from Vim's experience, and how is DDEV positioned in comparison? + +One thing that the Vim community discovered was that Bram's work was truly a full-time job, even with their incredible and active community. + +Many people may think that DDEV ias also a tiny project that could carry on without its maintainers, but that might not be true. Right now support, maintenance, and improvements for DDEV are completely using the time of two full-time maintainers. That's why you get the level of support and responsiveness you do. Both maintainers are currently paid, but perhaps not at a salary level that you would accept. + +## The Good + +* **Distributed controls**: DDEV has two main leaders, Randy Fay and Stas Zhuk, who both have full control of the GitHub `ddev` organization, and a couple of other people also have full administrative privileges. This is good; we're not dependent on one person. Both of us are fully trained and capable on all of the technologies and infrastructures used in DDEV's testing and release environments. (We would like to have more full-trained maintainers, unpaid or paid. If you love DDEV, come and join us and we'll train you.) +* **Financial Organization**: DDEV has its own fiscal organization, the DDEV Foundation, which is a US 501(c)(3) tax-exempt entity. The organization has its own bank account, and Randy and long-term collaborator [Mike Anello](https://www.drupaleasy.com/users/ultimike) are signers on the account, so it's not dependent on a single person. +* **Financial Reporting**: DDEV does track and provide [financial reports](https://github.com/orgs/ddev/discussions/categories/ddev-advisory-group) at each Advisory Group meeting. +* **Control of Communications**: Both maintainers have full control of our social media accounts and Discord. +* **Passwords and Other Secrets**: We use a group 1Password setup to manage all of our secrets, so they're not known to just one maintainer. + +Vim had serious challenges in all these areas, as there was only one "owner" of the GitHub project, and financial setups were very much ad-hoc. Bram was truly the "owner" of the whole project. + +## The Bad + +* **Governance**: From the beginning of DDEV, Randy has been the leader, acting as what's commonly called a "BDFL", or "Benevolent Dictator for Life". While that's a common model in open source, it's not a great model for overall sustainability. The BDFL model means that leadership can be concentrated in one person, preventing the development of community decisionmaking capabilities. One of our key goals for 2025 is to at least *start* moving past that model. + +## What Comes Next? + +* **Financial**: More than one person should know how to do (and have power to do) all the financial things, like paying contributors and other bills. +* **Governance**: Figure out how to move from BDFL to something that lasts beyond one person. + +## Your Ideas + +Do you have additional ideas, suggestions, or insight into how DDEV's future could be more sustainable? We would sure love to hear from you! Or get active and join our [DDEV Advisory Group](https://github.com/orgs/ddev/discussions/categories/ddev-advisory-group). + +Do you have questions or want to talk (about sponsoring or anything else)? [Contact us!](https://ddev.com/contact/) or join us in [Discord](/s/discord). From c08a4677bdb8c6075dd19646cd8a0cde6ba345d9 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Randy Fay Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2025 17:04:09 -0600 Subject: [PATCH 2/6] Pacify prettier --- src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md | 18 +++++++++--------- 1 file changed, 9 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-) diff --git a/src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md b/src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md index 5f9b9bc2..4d1e5afd 100644 --- a/src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md +++ b/src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md @@ -17,7 +17,7 @@ We love this amazing open-source world that we're a part of. It's astonishing wh ## What Happens When a Community Loses its Maintainer? -What happens when a great project loses a key maintainer? Recently the maintainer of the Vim editor, [Died](https://thenewstack.io/bram-moolenaar-author-of-the-open-source-vim-code-editor-has-died/). We will all die, and most of us will deal with other changes that cause us to change our focus without death. The [Vim community did step up successfully](https://thenewstack.io/vim-after-bram-a-core-maintainer-on-how-theyve-kept-it-going/), but that's not the only outcome possible for so many small projects. +What happens when a great project loses a key maintainer? Recently the maintainer of the Vim editor, [Died](https://thenewstack.io/bram-moolenaar-author-of-the-open-source-vim-code-editor-has-died/). We will all die, and most of us will deal with other changes that cause us to change our focus without death. The [Vim community did step up successfully](https://thenewstack.io/vim-after-bram-a-core-maintainer-on-how-theyve-kept-it-going/), but that's not the only outcome possible for so many small projects. What can we learn from Vim's experience, and how is DDEV positioned in comparison? @@ -27,22 +27,22 @@ Many people may think that DDEV ias also a tiny project that could carry on with ## The Good -* **Distributed controls**: DDEV has two main leaders, Randy Fay and Stas Zhuk, who both have full control of the GitHub `ddev` organization, and a couple of other people also have full administrative privileges. This is good; we're not dependent on one person. Both of us are fully trained and capable on all of the technologies and infrastructures used in DDEV's testing and release environments. (We would like to have more full-trained maintainers, unpaid or paid. If you love DDEV, come and join us and we'll train you.) -* **Financial Organization**: DDEV has its own fiscal organization, the DDEV Foundation, which is a US 501(c)(3) tax-exempt entity. The organization has its own bank account, and Randy and long-term collaborator [Mike Anello](https://www.drupaleasy.com/users/ultimike) are signers on the account, so it's not dependent on a single person. -* **Financial Reporting**: DDEV does track and provide [financial reports](https://github.com/orgs/ddev/discussions/categories/ddev-advisory-group) at each Advisory Group meeting. -* **Control of Communications**: Both maintainers have full control of our social media accounts and Discord. -* **Passwords and Other Secrets**: We use a group 1Password setup to manage all of our secrets, so they're not known to just one maintainer. +- **Distributed controls**: DDEV has two main leaders, Randy Fay and Stas Zhuk, who both have full control of the GitHub `ddev` organization, and a couple of other people also have full administrative privileges. This is good; we're not dependent on one person. Both of us are fully trained and capable on all of the technologies and infrastructures used in DDEV's testing and release environments. (We would like to have more full-trained maintainers, unpaid or paid. If you love DDEV, come and join us and we'll train you.) +- **Financial Organization**: DDEV has its own fiscal organization, the DDEV Foundation, which is a US 501(c)(3) tax-exempt entity. The organization has its own bank account, and Randy and long-term collaborator [Mike Anello](https://www.drupaleasy.com/users/ultimike) are signers on the account, so it's not dependent on a single person. +- **Financial Reporting**: DDEV does track and provide [financial reports](https://github.com/orgs/ddev/discussions/categories/ddev-advisory-group) at each Advisory Group meeting. +- **Control of Communications**: Both maintainers have full control of our social media accounts and Discord. +- **Passwords and Other Secrets**: We use a group 1Password setup to manage all of our secrets, so they're not known to just one maintainer. Vim had serious challenges in all these areas, as there was only one "owner" of the GitHub project, and financial setups were very much ad-hoc. Bram was truly the "owner" of the whole project. ## The Bad -* **Governance**: From the beginning of DDEV, Randy has been the leader, acting as what's commonly called a "BDFL", or "Benevolent Dictator for Life". While that's a common model in open source, it's not a great model for overall sustainability. The BDFL model means that leadership can be concentrated in one person, preventing the development of community decisionmaking capabilities. One of our key goals for 2025 is to at least *start* moving past that model. +- **Governance**: From the beginning of DDEV, Randy has been the leader, acting as what's commonly called a "BDFL", or "Benevolent Dictator for Life". While that's a common model in open source, it's not a great model for overall sustainability. The BDFL model means that leadership can be concentrated in one person, preventing the development of community decisionmaking capabilities. One of our key goals for 2025 is to at least _start_ moving past that model. ## What Comes Next? -* **Financial**: More than one person should know how to do (and have power to do) all the financial things, like paying contributors and other bills. -* **Governance**: Figure out how to move from BDFL to something that lasts beyond one person. +- **Financial**: More than one person should know how to do (and have power to do) all the financial things, like paying contributors and other bills. +- **Governance**: Figure out how to move from BDFL to something that lasts beyond one person. ## Your Ideas From a0efba7f158fb3865149709e636185a1617e52cc Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Randy Fay Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2025 17:10:29 -0600 Subject: [PATCH 3/6] First version probably good enough to think about for a while --- src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md | 10 +++++----- 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) diff --git a/src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md b/src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md index 4d1e5afd..5fa54dac 100644 --- a/src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md +++ b/src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md @@ -17,15 +17,15 @@ We love this amazing open-source world that we're a part of. It's astonishing wh ## What Happens When a Community Loses its Maintainer? -What happens when a great project loses a key maintainer? Recently the maintainer of the Vim editor, [Died](https://thenewstack.io/bram-moolenaar-author-of-the-open-source-vim-code-editor-has-died/). We will all die, and most of us will deal with other changes that cause us to change our focus without death. The [Vim community did step up successfully](https://thenewstack.io/vim-after-bram-a-core-maintainer-on-how-theyve-kept-it-going/), but that's not the only outcome possible for so many small projects. +What happens when a great project loses a key maintainer? A couple of years ago Bram Moolenaar, the maintainer of the Vim editor, [passed away unexpectedly](https://thenewstack.io/bram-moolenaar-author-of-the-open-source-vim-code-editor-has-died/). Every project faces unexpected transitions, whether a maintainer steps back, changes focus, or, as happened with Bram, passes away. The [Vim community did step up successfully](https://thenewstack.io/vim-after-bram-a-core-maintainer-on-how-theyve-kept-it-going/), but that's not the only outcome possible for so many small projects. What can we learn from Vim's experience, and how is DDEV positioned in comparison? One thing that the Vim community discovered was that Bram's work was truly a full-time job, even with their incredible and active community. -Many people may think that DDEV ias also a tiny project that could carry on without its maintainers, but that might not be true. Right now support, maintenance, and improvements for DDEV are completely using the time of two full-time maintainers. That's why you get the level of support and responsiveness you do. Both maintainers are currently paid, but perhaps not at a salary level that you would accept. +Many people may think that DDEV is just a tiny project that could carry on without its maintainers, but that might not be true. Right now support, maintenance, and improvements for DDEV use the full-time and consistent effort of two full-time maintainers. That's why you get the level of support and responsiveness you do. Both maintainers are currently paid, but perhaps not at a salary level that you would accept. -## The Good +## The Good Stuff - **Distributed controls**: DDEV has two main leaders, Randy Fay and Stas Zhuk, who both have full control of the GitHub `ddev` organization, and a couple of other people also have full administrative privileges. This is good; we're not dependent on one person. Both of us are fully trained and capable on all of the technologies and infrastructures used in DDEV's testing and release environments. (We would like to have more full-trained maintainers, unpaid or paid. If you love DDEV, come and join us and we'll train you.) - **Financial Organization**: DDEV has its own fiscal organization, the DDEV Foundation, which is a US 501(c)(3) tax-exempt entity. The organization has its own bank account, and Randy and long-term collaborator [Mike Anello](https://www.drupaleasy.com/users/ultimike) are signers on the account, so it's not dependent on a single person. @@ -35,7 +35,7 @@ Many people may think that DDEV ias also a tiny project that could carry on with Vim had serious challenges in all these areas, as there was only one "owner" of the GitHub project, and financial setups were very much ad-hoc. Bram was truly the "owner" of the whole project. -## The Bad +## Areas to Improve - **Governance**: From the beginning of DDEV, Randy has been the leader, acting as what's commonly called a "BDFL", or "Benevolent Dictator for Life". While that's a common model in open source, it's not a great model for overall sustainability. The BDFL model means that leadership can be concentrated in one person, preventing the development of community decisionmaking capabilities. One of our key goals for 2025 is to at least _start_ moving past that model. @@ -44,7 +44,7 @@ Vim had serious challenges in all these areas, as there was only one "owner" of - **Financial**: More than one person should know how to do (and have power to do) all the financial things, like paying contributors and other bills. - **Governance**: Figure out how to move from BDFL to something that lasts beyond one person. -## Your Ideas +## Share Your Thoughts! Do you have additional ideas, suggestions, or insight into how DDEV's future could be more sustainable? We would sure love to hear from you! Or get active and join our [DDEV Advisory Group](https://github.com/orgs/ddev/discussions/categories/ddev-advisory-group). From 044d996929d00947a058e2d5059bc01b728fc33b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Randy Fay Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2025 08:33:32 -0600 Subject: [PATCH 4/6] Add more details --- src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md | 9 ++++++++- 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md b/src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md index 5fa54dac..ef92b3d8 100644 --- a/src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md +++ b/src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md @@ -32,20 +32,27 @@ Many people may think that DDEV is just a tiny project that could carry on witho - **Financial Reporting**: DDEV does track and provide [financial reports](https://github.com/orgs/ddev/discussions/categories/ddev-advisory-group) at each Advisory Group meeting. - **Control of Communications**: Both maintainers have full control of our social media accounts and Discord. - **Passwords and Other Secrets**: We use a group 1Password setup to manage all of our secrets, so they're not known to just one maintainer. +- **Accounts management**: Thanks to great advice from Advisory Group member [Andrew Berry](https://www.drupal.org/u/deviantintegral) and thanks to having a free Google Workspace account (for nonprofits) we are able to use Google Groups for key email addresses, and current maintainers can be added to those groups. That way changes to maintainership don't result in loss of access to key external accounts. Vim had serious challenges in all these areas, as there was only one "owner" of the GitHub project, and financial setups were very much ad-hoc. Bram was truly the "owner" of the whole project. ## Areas to Improve +We work hard to identify areas that are dependent on a single maintainer, and to resolve those. But it's a perpetual process! + - **Governance**: From the beginning of DDEV, Randy has been the leader, acting as what's commonly called a "BDFL", or "Benevolent Dictator for Life". While that's a common model in open source, it's not a great model for overall sustainability. The BDFL model means that leadership can be concentrated in one person, preventing the development of community decisionmaking capabilities. One of our key goals for 2025 is to at least _start_ moving past that model. +- **Promotion/Marketing**: Randy seems to keep these roles year-in and year-out despite attempts to spread out the work +- **Sending Thank-you notes** +- **Test Runner Maintenance**: Although Stas knows everything and has full access to our extensive test runner infrastructure, many of the runners are in Randy's house, and when something has to be done physically to them, it becomes Randy's problem. ## What Comes Next? - **Financial**: More than one person should know how to do (and have power to do) all the financial things, like paying contributors and other bills. - **Governance**: Figure out how to move from BDFL to something that lasts beyond one person. +- **You**: DDEV is a collaborative open-source project. Are you interested in a role? ## Share Your Thoughts! -Do you have additional ideas, suggestions, or insight into how DDEV's future could be more sustainable? We would sure love to hear from you! Or get active and join our [DDEV Advisory Group](https://github.com/orgs/ddev/discussions/categories/ddev-advisory-group). +Do you have additional ideas, suggestions, or insight into how DDEV's future could be more sustainable? We would sure love to [hear from you](/contact)! Or get active and join our [DDEV Advisory Group](https://github.com/orgs/ddev/discussions/categories/ddev-advisory-group). Do you have questions or want to talk (about sponsoring or anything else)? [Contact us!](https://ddev.com/contact/) or join us in [Discord](/s/discord). From 63904cda5e669c325c47c07f0e3a01c3660af740 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Randy Fay Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2025 08:39:00 -0600 Subject: [PATCH 5/6] pacify prettier --- src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md b/src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md index ef92b3d8..c05506cc 100644 --- a/src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md +++ b/src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md @@ -43,7 +43,7 @@ We work hard to identify areas that are dependent on a single maintainer, and to - **Governance**: From the beginning of DDEV, Randy has been the leader, acting as what's commonly called a "BDFL", or "Benevolent Dictator for Life". While that's a common model in open source, it's not a great model for overall sustainability. The BDFL model means that leadership can be concentrated in one person, preventing the development of community decisionmaking capabilities. One of our key goals for 2025 is to at least _start_ moving past that model. - **Promotion/Marketing**: Randy seems to keep these roles year-in and year-out despite attempts to spread out the work - **Sending Thank-you notes** -- **Test Runner Maintenance**: Although Stas knows everything and has full access to our extensive test runner infrastructure, many of the runners are in Randy's house, and when something has to be done physically to them, it becomes Randy's problem. +- **Test Runner Maintenance**: Although Stas knows everything and has full access to our extensive test runner infrastructure, many of the runners are in Randy's house, and when something has to be done physically to them, it becomes Randy's problem. ## What Comes Next? From 4c358e1233922a092a5954eb1e17dbfdaae53f29 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Randy Fay Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2025 07:38:50 -0600 Subject: [PATCH 6/6] Add financial and regulatory tasks --- src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md | 4 +++- 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md b/src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md index c05506cc..d44c3900 100644 --- a/src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md +++ b/src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md @@ -41,14 +41,16 @@ Vim had serious challenges in all these areas, as there was only one "owner" of We work hard to identify areas that are dependent on a single maintainer, and to resolve those. But it's a perpetual process! - **Governance**: From the beginning of DDEV, Randy has been the leader, acting as what's commonly called a "BDFL", or "Benevolent Dictator for Life". While that's a common model in open source, it's not a great model for overall sustainability. The BDFL model means that leadership can be concentrated in one person, preventing the development of community decisionmaking capabilities. One of our key goals for 2025 is to at least _start_ moving past that model. +- **Regulatory**: Randy has dealt with Colorado and US regulatory requirements, including getting the 501(c)(3) tax-exempt designation, changing the name of the organization to "DDEV Foundation", filing annual reports. +- **Finance and Reporting**: Randy does the bimonthly financial reporting, tracks invoices, corresponds with donors, sends thank-you notes to donors, pays maintainers. - **Promotion/Marketing**: Randy seems to keep these roles year-in and year-out despite attempts to spread out the work -- **Sending Thank-you notes** - **Test Runner Maintenance**: Although Stas knows everything and has full access to our extensive test runner infrastructure, many of the runners are in Randy's house, and when something has to be done physically to them, it becomes Randy's problem. ## What Comes Next? - **Financial**: More than one person should know how to do (and have power to do) all the financial things, like paying contributors and other bills. - **Governance**: Figure out how to move from BDFL to something that lasts beyond one person. +- **Write up regulatory and financial tasks**: We have a good set of documents and a private repository that explain maintainer tasks. This all needs to be done for governance, regulatory, financial, and marketing tasks. - **You**: DDEV is a collaborative open-source project. Are you interested in a role? ## Share Your Thoughts!