Date: 2026-05-20
Time: 09:00–09:50
Room: Fletcher
Level: Beginner
How do we find and nurture the next generation of open source contributors? Unlike commercial companies, open source projects don’t have legions of recruiters to bring people into the fold—and yet our projects need a steady stream of new contributors. Or should open source projects assume that new contributors (and future committers) will continue to “self-select” onto the project?
The PostgreSQL open source project turns 30 in 2026: Happy Birthday! It has evolved from a small project that some referred to as “just a toy”—to today, where Postgres is thriving with an active community and a vast ecosystem of extensions and tooling. The project is clearly doing some things right. Postgres is hugely popular, with a healthy upstream open source community plus a host of companies and products built around Postgres itself.
But what happens when the current generation of Postgres committers step back or retire—where will the next generation of Postgres contributors come from?
This talk is a reprise of a talk given earlier this year on the Main Track at FOSDEM—with more time for audience Q&A, so we can discuss together how contributors find their way into Postgres: what is working, what did not, and where we’re still struggling.