10 years building an open source community in Asia

Sustainability is always a big question for many open source projects. Limited resources, undefined culture, lack of a common goal or vision, lack of maintainers, no backup, poor documentations, and internal conflicts are some of the challenges that prevent open source projects from growing. Hong Phuc Dang tells the story of how FOSSASIA's projects and community are grown and sustained.

Sustainability is always a big question for many open source projects. Limited resources, undefined culture, lack of a common goals or visions, lack of maintainers, no backup, poor documentation, politics, internal conflicts, external attackers or trolls, and unwillingness to collaborate with enterprises are challenges that prevent open source projects to grow. During the past 10 years, FOSSASIA managed to tackle these challenges and scale up its development continuously. With over 3,600 contributors across repositories, regular community meetups and events across Asia, online coding programs, and more, FOSSASIA plays an important role in the open source ecosystem in Asia. Hong Phuc Dang shares her story; the lessons she learned on how to get contributors from Asia, as well as their motivations and goals; how to sustain and scale open source projects with limited resources based on her experience at FOSSASIA; ideas to monetize an open source project in order to grow based on a real example of PSLab; how to build an inclusive community by applying the FOSSASIA principles; and best practices to push efficiency and productivity of distributed teams. Join in to see how she started her open source journey and how she hopes to inspire more women to join the community.