blog: DDEV Sustainability, fixes #326

src/content/blog/sustainability-for-ddev.md

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+---
+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? 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 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 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.
+- **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.
+- **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
+- **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!
+
+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).