Leverage and contribute to the Open Website Alliance

[gusaus]

Edit: Updated to reflect the following https://www.drupal.org/association/blog/drupal-association-co-founds-the-open-website-alliance

About the Open Website Alliance

The international community organizations behind Drupal, Joomla, TYPO3, and WordPress join forces in a leadership-level alliance. The members of the Alliance are united in their shared values and their message to decision-makers to always choose open source software over proprietary systems.

The Alliance represents the content management systems (CMS) behind roughly 50% of all websites online today. The Open Website Alliance was founded to promote the choice of open-source software and facilitate collaboration between free and open-source web content management projects, furthering openness, trust, and quality. Other free and open-source CMS organizations are encouraged to apply for membership.

Collaboration on Leadership Level
The Alliance comes about as the result of the collaboration between the Drupal Association, Open Source Matters (Joomla), the TYPO3 Association, and the WordPress Project around an open letter to the European Union.

The Alliance uniquely connects its members on a leadership level. This means the organizations can more easily coordinate strategy and actions, fostering new cross-community collaboration projects and strengthening those that already exist.

Collaboration and contribution opportunities

This new alliance could help enable additional opportunities for these projects to collaborate, pool resources, grow and make meaningful change in the open source landscape.

• Refine and extend Five for the Future #39 - Collaborate with the Drupal Innovation team to incorporate crediting, governance, and sustainability tools referenced in Dries Buytaert’s post on Solving the Maker-Taker Problem. This includes the following components:
  • Contribute to/extend Contribution Health Dashboards #42 - Incorporate elements of the Drupal crediting system, Contribution Health Dashboards, and integrating funding tools like Open Collective.
  • Adopt and integrate Open Collective #24 - Use Open Collective's fiscal sponsorship service + open source tools to pool and distribute funds between priority projects and programs.
  • Refresh and revitalize the contributor and leadership pipelines #36 - Share ideas, open source tools, best practices, and other resources that will sustain and grow each project while creating new opportunities for contributors across all projects.
• Leverage and Extend the FundOSS fundraising format #22 - Coordinate and participate in Fundraising events to generate resources for current/future priorities and exposure for each project and community.
• more ideas to follow based on additional input and feedback...

Updates/next steps

• Nov 23 - @meeware reached out to Josepha to ask how the process had gone so far with the CRA legislation, and will be coming back to this issue with a clarified narrative on the process in this case, and additional feedback and potential actions for the team to undertake.
• Feb 24 - Open Website Alliance announced

Reference/resources

• Open Source participation in global legislation (Community Summit discussion)
• Drupal Association Co-Founds the Open Website Alliance (drupal.org)

[gusaus]

@meeware As the newest lead/admin of FundOSS (referenced in #15) I feel like we'll be able to follow though with this action item

Coordinate and participate in Fundraising events to generate resources and exposure for the legislation and projects involved.

Especially if Josepha and other community leaders are involved!

[nickchomey]

I strongly recommend the folks in the Open Website Alliance get in touch and collaborate with the folks at the other OWA - Open Web Advocacy. They have been instrumental in making the EU's DMA come into existence, and are leading the fight against Apple's various efforts to kill the Web entirely.

https://open-web-advocacy.org/apple-attempts-killing-webapps/

It would be great if the members of the OWAlliance can put their voice and weight behind the effort, in order to not just save the Web, but make it flourish once again.

[gusaus]

Not sure if folks behind the alliance have clarified how contributors/community members of participating projects can become involved. Looks like contributing to https://openwebsitealliance.org/ could be one way!

[gusaus]

Quick followup on related discussions we've been having during recent Mentorship Chats.

I'll answer @harishankerr's question in this comment as a jumping in point.

Do you have any specific ideas on how we can collaborate?

Considering most/all alliance members (see https://openwebsitealliance.org/) use the platform (and have contributors in their community), I think Open Collective could not only be an effective tool for raising and distributing funds but enabling collaboration.

We'd obviously need buy-in/involvement from leadership (I believe @josephahaden is representing WordPress), but if there's interest I could help set up a channel in Open Collective's new community space and onboard contributors/stakeholders.

[gusaus]

Circling back to mention that we've been evaluating the Open Website Alliance (OWA) as a potential platform to support and sustain the cross-CMS working group outlined in this proposal:

We propose forming a collaborative working group, primarily involving contributors from the WordPress Sustainability and Drupal Innovation teams, to address the Maker-Taker imbalance in open-source communities. This initiative aims to share ideas and implement steps inspired by Dries Buytaert's recommendations in Solving the Maker-Taker Problem. By enhancing contribution recognition and incentivization, this working group will support a sustainable model for open-source contributions across platforms.

While these goals seem well-aligned with the OWA’s mission of fostering sustainability and collaboration among open-source projects, recent leadership changes may impact how (and when) they could support this kind of initiative.

In the meantime, working group members are exploring alternative options to coordinate and sustain the initiative.