The major benefit of a foundation is that it promotes participatory governance, preventing any single company from monopolizing a collaborative project. Specifically, a foundation ensures:

• Community-driven Governance: Projects are managed by the community for the community, with contributions reviewed and accepted based on merit.

• Open Source: Contributors can use the project's resources without fearing sudden changes in licensing or direction.

• Impartiality: contributions to the content and direction are accepted based on their community value, regardless of their impact on any particular vendor.

This initiative stems from a shared passion for DevRel and the recognition that the profession faces persistent challenges, such as a lack of clarity and difficulty in measuring impact. Despite significant growth in resources and organizations addressing these issues, these resources are fragmented. Our goal is to create an inclusive, community-driven entity that formally defines DevRel practices, addresses common challenges with best-in-practice resources, and attracts both individuals and organizations’ decision-makers. A foundation aims to be a trusted, credible, and expert resource, similar to professional bodies in other fields, providing training, certification, continuing education, and advocacy.

This collaborative project has been hosted as a community project, with no funding involved. This means taking advantage of the governance structure, project management staff, and back-end resources that the Linux Foundation (LF) provides to all hosted projects under an unfunded model, to ensure long-term sustainability. Developer Relations Foundation is part of the LF project series, as a non-profit 501(c)(6). Examples of these projects include SPDX (SBOM Standard), FOSSology, and CHAOSS.

The major benefit of hosting with the LF is that it offers recognized global credibility. Specifically, the LF ensures:

• DevRel value outside DevRel: Being part of a renowned and large open source foundation like the Linux Foundation enhances the project's credibility within the DevRel community and among external stakeholders and decision-makers. This recognition elevates DevRel's visibility and perceived value as a profession, demonstrating its importance and impact beyond industry peers.

• Level Playing Field: Ensuring that no single company in the ecosystem can exert undue control over the project by owning the trademark.

• Licensing Integrity: Protecting the licensing integrity of the collaborative project, as detailed in this LF blog post.

The LF allows individual contributors to retain copyright ownership of their contributions while providing an open source license, reflected through the Developer Certificate of Origin sign-off process.

We also chose the LF to avoid reinventing the wheel. Creating something new requires tools, infrastructure, and, ideally, a lightweight process to get started and make the initiative resilient.

No, there are no sponsors.

A sponsor organization provides financial support or funding to the initiative. This collaborative project operates under a non-funded model which means there are no sponsor organizations involved. Instead, the project is supported by community individuals and supporter organizations, contributing to its success through content, guidance, and expertise. Unlike sponsors, supporters do not make financial commitments.

The Steering Committee provides oversight for the entire open collaborative project as defined in the Developer Relations Foundation Charter (first version). Currently, a group of volunteers has helped establish initial lightweight processes to support community-driven initiatives. These initiatives, still to be fully defined, aim to shape the day-to-day work within the Developer Relations Foundation. Leadership roles inside these initiatives will be responsible for coordinating these daily activities and may also have the responsibility to appoint other roles. These leadership roles, as well as how these initiatives will be grouped and formed, are yet to be defined by the community.

While our profession is relatively small, it is big enough that there are many really good people who can do this work. And we hope they want to! We had the initiative and time to do this, and so we feel it’s reasonable for us, just like anyone else, to take the first steps forward on building something

Our aim has always been to thread the needle on process and progress - we wanted to get enough done that we, as a professional collective, had a base and some scaffolding from which to build, but not too much progress that folks felt we had prematurely made decisions.

To date we have accomplished the following:

• Formed an initial Steering Committee of tenured DevRel professionals with the shared goal of solving critical DevRel problems through the formation of a Foundation

• Secured support from the Linux Foundation to have the DevRel Foundation hosted by them

• Drafted a lightweight charter and took a first pass at organizational structure to provide the broader DevRel community with a starting point from which to work

• Identified tools and lightweight processes get work done: Discord, GitHub, gitvote, and groups.io

• Scheduled and facilitated open bi-weekly sessions to listen and learn (alternating APAC/EMEA and AMER)

This is still a WIP answer and needs further discussion in the community calls and async

As we explored how best to address the persistent challenges faced by the practice of DevRel, the first thing we did as an interim steering committee was a survey of the existing communities and organizations, including the Developer Marketing Alliance, DevRelX(*), marketingto.dev, Devrellers and Developer Evangelists (LinkedIn groups), the DevRel Collective, DevRelCon, developerrelations.com, flyless.dev, and DevRel con Ñ.

We found that these groups in aggregate, provide exceptional breadth and depth of resources, expertise, and community. However, whether through incentives (ex: revenue-focused) or inclusivity (ex: DevMarketing not included) none felt centralizing enough to be the hub for this initiative, which strives to be open and inclusive, as well as more than just a resource repository.

We also know that we cannot succeed without the support, involvement, and partnership of the ecosystem of DevRel initiatives, which is why we hope that folks will feel inspired to help build a foundation that codifies the definition and best practices of DevRel; that brings together best-in-class frameworks, training, and resources in a single place; and that attracts individuals and organizations through trust, credibility, and collaboration.

(*) The DevRelX Community sunset on October 11, but the free resources they shared with the industry remain available. A massive thank you to their community members.

Please complete this form by November 14, 2024.

We plan to notify individuals by 14 November 2024, using the email shared in the sign up form. You can anticipate an email from [email protected].

We are forming groups based on expressed interest, and a willingness to commit to the DevRel Foundation Code of Conduct. In addition, there will be additional screening for working group managers for demonstrated program and/or team management experience.

The manager (or managers) of each working group will set the meeting times/dates, the agendas, facilitate the conversations, and be the contacts with the Founding Steering Committee. The participant (or participants) will play an active role in accomplishing the group tasks, including attending and engaging in meetings, contributing to ideas and recommendations, and taking on ownership of action items identified in the meetings.

We anticipate that, between meetings and asynchronous work, that the working group commitment will be an average of 2-4 hours a week. Managers and participants can collectively decide what schedule works best for them as outlined on the expected commitment can be found here.

Criteria for manager selection can be found here.

Criteria for working group members can be found here.

We aim to have groups deliver their initial proposals including their initial charter, goals, deliverables, milestones and meeting cadence by Jan. 2, 2025. Further details can be found at this link.

The official formation of the foundation will be based on administrative milestones, including work group and governance progress, to ensure a smooth transition of organizational leadership. Milestones will include:

1. Working group managers assigned
2. Working groups formed with regular calls started
3. Steering Committee election process determined

The Steering Committee will provide expectations, timelines, tools, and regular check-ins for group leads. In addition, we’ll be available via the Discord community for questions as they arise.