When I was a first-year student, I joined a campus club after seeing a flyer in the hallway. I didn’t know much about it — only that my mom had been part of the same group when she was in university, and it had shaped her life. At the first meeting, I found instant community. Some of those people became lifelong friends. But they were also mostly in their third or fourth year.
The next year, most of them graduated and there was a huge leadership gap. I wasn’t ready, but I stepped up.
That experience taught me something I’ll never forget: If you don’t bring in new people early, your community won’t last.
Years later, I’m seeing the same pattern in open source. We talk a lot about burnout, bus factors, and maintainers leaving — but we don’t talk enough about how to bring in new contributors, or what it takes to help them grow into leaders.
The graying of Open Source
According to Tidelift’s 2024 maintainer survey, the percentage of maintainers aged 46–65 has doubled since 2021. Meanwhile, the share of contributors under 26 has dropped from 25% to just 10%.
This “grayingrdquo; isn’t inherently a problem. But the lack of succession is. If we don’t create pathways for younger contributors, we’re setting ourselves up for burnout, knowledge loss, and long-term fragility.
Enter Sam: A Gen Z persona
To explore what support might look like, I introduced a persona named “Samrdquo; in a recent talk at Open Source Summit North America:
- Name: Sam (they/them)
- Age: 23
- Location: Urban Canada, lives mostly online
- Sentiment: “I want to contribute to a climate tech project that actually matters — but I don’t know where to start. I taught myself to code on YouTube. I design and moderate online communities. But public repos feel intimidating. I want purpose, flexibility, and a place where people like me belong.”
Sam is our Gen Z persona. They want to contribute to something that matters. They’re self-taught, community-oriented, and motivated by purpose. But they’re also navigating financial pressures, unclear pathways, and they aren’t sure how leadership in open source actually works.
How do we help Sam thrive in open source?
The mountain of engagement
To support contributors like Sam, here’s a framework I’ve used for years in programs like Mozilla Open Leaders and GitHub’s Maintainer Programs: the Mountain of Engagement.
This model outlines a contributor’s journey in six steps:
- Discovery: How they first hear about the project.
- First contact: How they first engage with the project or their initial interaction.
- Participation: How they first participate or contribute.
- Sustained participation: How their contribution or involvement can continue.
- Networked participation: How they may invite and onboard others or networking within the community.
- Leadership: How they may take on some additional responsibility on the projec
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