Building the next generation of open source contributors – Lessons from 30 years of Postgres

<p>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? </p> <p>The <a href="https://www.postgresql.org/">PostgreSQL open source project</a> 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 has clearly done 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. </p> <p>And Postgres is owned by no one company; instead, a multitude of competing interests align as people from different countries and continents roll up their sleeves to get the work done. But what happens when the current generation of Postgres committers step back or retire—where will the next generation of Postgres contributors come from? </p> <p>Postgres isn’t special in needing new contributors. It just happens to be a 30-year-old project whose successes, experiments, and failures might apply to other communities too. In this talk, we’ll look at how contributors find their way into Postgres: what worked, what didn’t, and where we’re still struggling. And having the conversation at FOSDEM will help us think together about a challenge common to all of us—how successful open source projects need to evolve as they get older.</p>