FOSDEM 2026 and more!

This winter, I presented my work on burnout in OSS at my first ever FOSDEM! You can watch my talk below. I walk through the causes of burnout among OSS developers, why we need collaborative solutions, and some lessons from psychology to bear in mind if you are working on implementing them.

For example, did you know that work that comes with lots of responsibility and little autonomy is more likely to lead to burnout? OSS maintenance can be a great deal of responsibility, so it is important that projects are governed and funded in such a way that maintainers retain freedom and control over how they work in order to lower their risk of burnout.

For more great work on burnout in OSS from FOSDEM 26, I highly recommend watching this talk by Marga Manterola. She discusses the link between a lack of funding and maintainer burnout. She then introduces the idea of an open source employment pledge, similar to the Open Source Pledge, but instead of pledging money, companies pledge a proportion of their employees' working hours to helping maintain the open source software from which they benefit.

To explore an under-appreciated topic in OSS community health, I also recommend this talk by Diana Todea on neurodiversity in OSS. A Stack Overflow survey found 2.6% of software developers reported being autistic—roughly twice the prevalence in the general population. Autism has a noted association with burnout, and after my talk, several developers came up to me to tell me about the additional sources of strain they experience as autistic people that put them at risk of burn out. There is lots of work to be done to better understand and accommodate neurodivergent people working in OSS, and it all starts with us talking about it!

Finally, to top off my first FOSDEM experience, I met Richard Littauer of the Sustain OSS Podcast. We went on to record an episode on altruism, its role in open source, and ways of navigating and mitigating burnout in OSS communities. You can listen to it here (or wherever you get your podcasts!)