Birdaro is a new initiative supporting those in decision-making positions in open-source projects as they navigate growth, scaling, and sustainability of their projects
Birdaro is powered by the Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement (CSCCE) and funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
GOALS
Birdaro is taking an evidence-based approach to building a support network for leaders of open source projects.
This means:
- Developing a training program so that open-source leaders can upskill in core areas related to leadership and community engagement. We are currently exploring multiple possibilities to make this somewhat flexible and modular to meet the needs of busy participants. APPLY NOW
- Curating existing resources produced by others to create a knowledge hub that builds upon a range of expertise and contributions
- Collaboratively creating new/related resources that members can use to guide their work, including case studies that illustrate various pathways to sustainability
- Conducting research into the existing challenges faced by open-source leaders in a range of organizational settings and geographies
WHO WE ARE
Birdaro is being launched by staff at CSCCE, with the intention to identify future collaborations. At CSCCE, we’re primarily interested in the role of human infrastructure in successful STEM projects – and that includes considerations such as community-building, governance, power-sharing, leadership development, volunteer and member engagement, stakeholder management and burnout.
We’ve a proven track record of designing and delivering highly impactful trainings that both establish common language and shared mental models between learners and catalyze the peer-to-peer connections. We’ve been supporting open source projects and organizations since our inception – including working directly with open-source software and open data projects, collaborating to help describe the open hardware ecosystem, and designing the initial pilot sessions on community engagement for the NSF POSE training program.
We were seed-funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and are closely connected to other Sloan grantees in our ecosystem, including most recently collaborating with CURIOSS, the organization that connects academic open source program offices (OSPOs).
About our name
A “birdaro” is a flock of birds in the constructed international language of Esperanto. We were inspired by the murmurations of starlings – the swooping three-dimensional shapes of hundreds of birds working together. We see the work of empowering open-source leaders as similar, charting a path forward together, in community.
