Episode 4: Introduction to the Economic Pillar of Sustainability  ## Metadata - Author: [[Sustain WP]] - Full Title: Episode 4: Introduction to the Economic Pillar of Sustainability - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/138fe6f4-13d9-462f-86c6-d5eb7c9564ab ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Economic Sustainability Basics** - Economic sustainability involves fair living wages and sharing digital benefits. - Access to internet and digital skills are vital economic questions affecting sustainability. Transcript: Speaker 7 The social aspect. I think you're right, on the economic side there's a lot of check boxes there to go through. But really thinking about fair living wages, thinking about sharing the benefits of digital products and services, thinking about breaking down the digital divide between those Who have access to broadband and those who don't, those who have access to digital skills and those who don't. Those are all economic questions and organizations, nonprofits, government agencies and companies make decisions around that all the time. And so it's really important to start helping people understand that when they make choices around whether they do or do not share the economic benefits of their work for instance or Whether in the people that they hire if they're not paying them a living wage, those things also impact sustainability. ([Time 0:01:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/68eb620f-b150-4fbf-b6bb-365bd25efb66)) - **Resources Behind Economic Sustainability** - Economic sustainability requires resources to support ongoing work and projects. - It's closely linked to social sustainability but focuses on maintaining financial and resource backing. Transcript: Speaker 5 Finance or economy is a big part of the world that we live in and going by the same example, we only have limited resources to live in. So to ensure that we use the resources that we have in a way that supports or in a way that sustains the growth or in a way that keeps the world going, I think that's what economic sustainability Means. I think it's in a way very closely linked to social sustainability, but what differentiates it is that it ensures that the finances, and it's again not just about finances, finances Is just one part of it, but I think it's all about how really we have an economic support that keeps everything going. So because we live in a world where money is essential, the finances are essential. To use a different term, resources, we need all the resources that we could get to keep things going. So for me, economic sustainability is a situation where everybody who works on whatever they do. In our case, in this case, I work for the WordPress project. So for the WordPress project, ensuring that the project gets the necessary resources, be it in terms of supporting contributors or be it in terms of supporting the project itself. I mean, you can apply this to any situation, but making sure that any project or anything that happens around the world has all the necessary resources with the backing of the right finance To keep it going. ([Time 0:02:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/361034fd-9406-42af-85d2-5751b551d1ac)) - **Open Source Volunteering Burnout** - Juan Hernando shared how open source contributors often start volunteering small hours but may burn out with increasing responsibility. - Financial support is crucial as unpaid work becomes unsustainable for those dedicating many hours. Transcript: Speaker 3 In every open source project, you have many contributors that love what they are doing and they start working for free and they spend two hours a week, then it's four hours a week, then It's lots of hours a week, they have more responsibilities. Mostly, this will ends up with them burning out, disappearing or having mental health issues, which is cool that now it's something that we talk about, not in the past. Most of the time, it's because of the economic pillar here, because they are not supported. There are still people that think that if it's open and free, you have to work for free, because it's how it's always been done and then we go back to this, we need to change things. And I mean, I'm a contributor in the community team and I started with small contributions, almost local, and I really wanted to do more and they asked me, hey, you're doing it, well, Why don't you help here, on there? And at some point, I said, I can't, because I'm already spending like six hours a week. If I start doing more stuff, it's going to be 12 hours a week or 20 hours a week, because I really love helping. And you have to pay your bills, you have to eat every day, you have to pay rent, and that's not sustainable at all. Yep. So we really need to talk about this. It's very cool that there are companies that understand this and help people and hire people to do this kind of work, but also there is this big amount of freelancers that really love What they do as a freelancer, but also they want to help. ([Time 0:04:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/591eee08-8bcc-482b-bec4-1e3b0db69452)) - **Funding Challenges for Maintainers** - Many important open source maintainers lack proper funding, threatening project sustainability. - Supporting contributors not sponsored by companies remains an ongoing challenge. Transcript: Speaker 7 But you know, I am also interested in the personal sustainability part of it, because like, I think in general, an open source, this is a long term issue. Speaker 4 Not just in WordPress, but I've seen other projects, one recently that I can think of is the WAPLizer project, which I love, and the maintainer of that decided to make it closed source Recently because he wasn't getting enough support, essentially. All these people using his product, I think open source maintainers WordPress were fortunate to have many people contributing to the project. But you know, I do know of individuals who contribute a tremendous amount and aren't supported enough to make that viable for them long term. And I'm talking about critical people who maintain critical parts of our infrastructure. And nonetheless, we're sort of letting that situation flounder. So I think there's clear room for improvement there, figuring out, and we have, it's not that we're not trying, we haven't really figured it out, but we are trying to figure out, you know, How do you support contributors to an open source project who aren't sponsored by a big company, you know. I'm very fortunate in that I do have, you know, my employer does sponsor me for my time that I spend in court, although I also contribute a lot of my own personal time. So it's a balance, but there's a lot of people out there who are really important who don't have that kind of support and trying to figure out how they can manage to be maintainers of open Sources is really challenging. Yeah. So I'm definitely interested in that challenge as well. And it's personal for me too, because I do, like I said, I know people individually who have tried to be big contributors who are important contributors in WordPress, and nonetheless, Haven't found avenues to have adequate support for their work. ([Time 0:07:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/31f85abf-a173-44bc-959b-0856814bf9cf)) - **Economic Barriers Limit Inclusion** - Economic barriers exclude many voices from the open source community. - Lowering financial barriers allows broader participation and sustained community diversity. Transcript: Speaker 6 The economic pillar for me is the last one I began to talk about, because, yeah, I'm a person who has, who is lucky enough to don't have to worry about this. And I realize it's important because economic, yeah, financial topic is something, it's a barrier for many people. So if you have a room for people, you have many people that is not telling what they need, don't giving their point of view. So the original sustainability, if you cannot include everybody because you don't know how to be sustainable for everyone. I mean, so I realize the financial part is, yeah, that barrier that makes a lot of people, a huge amount of people being out of the party. So, yeah, we have to take into account the product we make, because if I make product that claims that wants to prove people life, but it's too expensive, you can only prove a few people Life, not everybody. ([Time 0:09:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a65ffa6b-9917-4117-8a77-ff33920101c1)) - **Engaging Companies in Open Source** - Open source projects struggle with funding maintainers, unequal funding, and governance issues. - To engage companies in supporting open source, focus on how their investment benefits their bottom line, not just visibility. Transcript: Speaker 1 It depends on who you're asking. So if you're asking me, I don't really know. Speaker 8 I mean, maybe it's capitalism, maybe it's that people don't really like each other very much. Speaker 1 But if you're asking someone else, right, like a maintainer, the main problem with maintainers is that they don't get funds to do their work, which is really important for them to continue Doing their work. The main problem for a community is that some people are funded and other people aren't funded. And it's very unclear how that works. And governance is always an issue where one person normally has more power, which maybe the funded person may not be. And other people have less power. And it's very difficult to equalize in a way that's healthy for the community. If you're asking someone who uses open source software, the loudest people who use open source software are corporations. And for them, the biggest issue is security. They don't want something to break. And so it's kind of depending on where you're framing that lens. Speaker 3 It's a good question. Speaker 2 I continue asking him about how we can get more companies to give back to the open source projects. Speaker 1 There's a lot of ways to manage that. It's a really difficult problem. And I think one of the most difficult problems is that if you're using open source, you've given away your product for free. It's been given away. It's just you can't charge people for it. And so this is a continual thing. I gave it away. Oh, maybe you should help me anyway. You can come back. But it doesn't really work that way. And so the number one thing you have to think about when you're talking to potential community members, whether they're corporate or whether they're particularly skilled individuals Is what's in it for them. And how can it benefit them to do this work? And you have to make sure that it affects their bottom line, that they have to do this work. I just saw the most amazing description of technical debt from a children's book by Richard Scary, which shows this guy named Hamish. And Hamish has a hole in his roof. Sorry, Haggis. Haggis has a hole in his roof. He doesn't fix it on days when it's wet, because it's too wet to work. And he doesn't fix it when it's sunny, because it doesn't need fixing when it's sunny. It's a nice hole. Speaker 8 Right. Speaker 1 And this is like all technical debt. But it also applies very well to open source projects. Why would I fix it when it's working? Oh, it's not working. Fix it now. But I can't fix it. You have to fix it. And so trying to explain to companies and to users of open source software, that investing in the long term maintenance of their technological stack in ways that are useful, if you can Track that easily, is really helpful to them. That's the problem you need to solve. It's not necessarily, we want you to give time away for free. That's never going to work. No, it has to be about incentives. Speaker 2 I ask him if visibility is one of the benefits that we could sell to companies. Speaker 1 I would say visibility is a proxy for something else. Companies don't actually care about visibility. They care about staff retention, and they care about selling their product. Speaker 8 Right. Speaker 1 And so they care about upskilling the people who are working with them so that they don't lose them, so that those people are able to do their work faster so that they save money. Or they care about using that visibility as a way to get more possible clients or to sell more products. Visibility is just a proxy for those things. And so instead of figuring out, okay, you'll be on the right for the future page, they don't care about that unless they're in business of, like literally unless they are fight for the Future as like a company, right. What they care about is, oh, it says something that where we have good developers on it, and that we like those developers and we have the smartest people here. Therefore, you want to come work here too. And you want to come work for wages that are lower than other people, but for higher skills, right? Like, again, it's a capitalistic issue. And so try to focus on, I would say, in my experience, instead of focusing on large scale, trying to gather attention, which is impossible in the intention economy, because we're all Burnt out and tired. Everything's over saturated. Instead, focus on, well, how does it matter? Like, why does it matter to that company that they're seen? And if you can answer that question, you're much better off. Again, I think this should be boring. The problem shouldn't be something that someone has to think about. It has to be a very simple, oh, yeah, no, we do that at my company. It's just like we have a janitor who cleans on Saturday. Speaker 8 We love that guy, right? Speaker 1 I don't know his name, but if he's not here, we notice real fast, but it's boring. We don't have to talk about janitors. We just have one. The same thing should happen with developers. Oh, yeah, on Fridays, they do their janitorial stuff. We don't like to talk about it, but because of that, they become better people. And because of that, we're able to retain them longer. So, yeah, why would we even, why are we still talking about this? Right? That's where we want to get to the level of. Okay. It's mere curial in Machiavellian and mean, but that's also what companies are, right? Like the entire point of a company is to have a group of people who work for less than their worth so that money goes to the top, so that the people at the top can make more money. Right. It's like, it's not hidden. It's right there in the system. We all know that's the case. I just think that asking like ship, I think that framing all of these sponsorship badges, framing things like events, hey, be a silver sponsor and have your logo here, kind of misses The point. It works at times, but it doesn't work at all in a declining economy. Right now, we're seeing a lot of projects just sluice off their open source program offices and really cut their budgets to open source ecosystems. And it's because they've figured out, well, it doesn't directly affect the bottom line. Speaker 8 We wouldn't, we know it will in the future, but it's not like immediate for us. Speaker 1 Yeah. And so the question for us isn't to, how do we repeat that and make it easier for them to have more visibility? It's to say, okay, why was that able to be cut in the first place? Because we know this is necessary as engineers. And so we're not selling it to management correctly. So we have to figure out how it's really important for them to have someone who understands how Redis works because they're one of the main maintainers or something similar, right? And that helps a lot. Does it help with small open source products that are made for arts that are really fun? No. Speaker 8 And that's what kind of sucks about work and labor. ([Time 0:11:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1b777a8a-93e6-41a7-b031-f6a2aca881f2)) - **Maintain Contributors and Diversity** - Retain maintainers as they hold critical project knowledge essential for longevity. - Invest in documentation and community management to foster diversity and prevent monocultures. Transcript: Speaker 1 I think one of the most important things to take into account when you think about longevity of an open source project is retention of the maintainers, people who have most of the knowledge. You have to make sure that the people who built the thing or the people who understand how it works stay there. Or you have to make sure that they're allocating your efforts towards future projects that will solve the problem in a better way, which also happens. Not every project needs to live forever. And most projects shouldn't live forever. I'm really glad we're not still coding in Cobol. Speaker 8 I think that's awesome. Right. Speaker 1 Like it's a great programming language. You know, it's great to have those things. But ES6 is better than ES5. And so I'm really glad that people worked on that. So retention is really important. Another thing that's really important is documentation and community management and facilitation because it's important to get diverse perspectives on your project. Otherwise, it ends up dying because people don't want to be in places that are monocultural because they turn into sinkholes of no fun. Right. And they want to be places where they're able to learn effectively and where multiple people are able to share their brilliance in ways that are easy. And if you're excluding the majority of the population because it's only, you know, middle class rich white American dudes like me, that's not helpful to the overall strength of the Community. Because we're not an important group. We're only important historically. Right. And so building good documentation, building welcoming practices helps lead to a more diverse user set in the long run. Speaker 9 One of the problems is that you have to focus on in the long run. Speaker 1 And capitalism always wants short returns. I want to say capitalism. I mean, a company. I'm not trying to be Marxist here. Speaker 8 I just I'm just speaking the language of what I know and what I've noticed. Speaker 1 So I think that's really important to think about. Another thing to think about is that we're talking about environmental sustainability, the third pillar. The long run is definitely part of the picture. But it's also part of the short run, right? A more diverse community leads to better code, better code runs faster. It takes less resources. That's great. And that affects the bottom line for some people. For a lot of open source and stuff that has to do with like, you know, mainframe usage or memory usage, reducing the runtime of programs is like, you've less bills than Heroku. Speaker 9 That's great. Let's do more of that. Speaker 1 So trying to bring those things together can be difficult. But that's another thing we're focusing effort really, really helps. And because it's a thorny problem, you might be able to bring people in who normally have bigger hats or sit in wider seats. And it's also good to have them involved. ([Time 0:18:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d9275536-a97c-425f-8c98-201b7f47c1ba))