[BoF] How Do You Grow Your Own OSS Project? — Sustaining, Scaling, and Building Contributors

Today, anyone with a small idea can start their own open-source project. The rise of AI-assisted development and the growing population of engineers have made it easier than ever. Yet GitHub now holds a near-endless number of repositories, and the real challenge begins after the first commit:
how do you keep your project from being buried, attract users, grow a contributor base, and keep improving? For young engineers especially, this is a daily worry. Running a project demands far more than writing code — visibility, documentation, issue and PR handling, contributor onboarding, and sustaining your own motivation. These problems are rarely solved by technical skill alone, and the hard-won knowledge of those who came before is seldom shared openly. This Birds-of-a-Feather session brings together engineers who already maintain an OSS project, those who hope to start one, and those who want to contribute. Rather than a one-way talk, it is a place to bring our struggles and tactics and discuss them together. As a starting point, the facilitator will draw on personal experience leading a project under OpenSolaris and helping several other OSS communities, where many of these problems were faced firsthand. From there, we will dig into the difficulty of maintaining, expanding, and improving a project, and the particular challenge of attracting contributors across borders. To seed the discussion, we will explore questions such as how you won your first users and attention among countless projects, what works for growing contributors and making onboarding smooth, how you deal with critical or demanding participants and turn them into contributors, how you find collaborators globally across language, time-zone, and cultural barriers, and how you avoid burnout and keep a project alive over the long term. Young engineers are the primary audience, but experienced maintainers are warmly welcomed — their stories are exactly what makes this session valuable. No prior knowledge is required. Attendees will hear candid, real-world stories of how project owners hit walls and worked through them. You will see that your own struggles are not unique, gain concrete tactics you can try the next day, and leave with connections to peers who understand the work of running a project. The facilitator joins as a participant too, eager to learn from everyone's experiences. Whether you maintain a thriving project, a quiet one, or only a plan in your head, you will come away with a clearer sense of how to handle the non-code side of open source — and you will not feel alone in it.