Purpose

FOSSHive turns contribution into career ownership. This path shows how you can grow from first-time contributor to steward, advisor/partner, and (optionally) C-shareholder … while staying rooted in Free & Open Source Software & Hardware (FOSS H), transparency, and community impact.

Path at a Glance

Contributor → Steward → Senior/Principal Steward → Advisor/Partner → (Optional) C-Shares

Each stage adds responsibility, decision rights, and recognition. Progress is based on evidence of impact, not tenure.

Stage 1 … Contributor

You focus on: learning the stack, shipping small but valuable changes.

Entry

• Complete onboarding (Code of Conduct, contribution guide).

• Ship 2–3 merged contributions (code/docs/design/ops).

Milestones

• First “good first issue” closed.

• Paired review completed.

• Profile shows verified contributions/badges.

Support

• Onboarding cohort, starter issues, buddy mentor, open tutorials (Moodle/Open edX).

Stage 2 … Steward (Role-based)

You focus on: owning outcomes for a defined scope (project/module/community/ops).

Entry criteria

• Consistent contributions across one release/quarter.

• Proposal accepted for a steward scope (OKRs + KPIs).

Typical roles

• Project Steward (roadmap, releases)

• Mentorship Steward (onboarding, coaching)

• Community Steward (events, moderation)

• Privacy & Security Steward (threat modeling, disclosure)

• Infra/DevOps Steward (CI/CD, SLOs)

• Docs & Education Steward (docs IA, tutorials)

Decision rights

• Prioritization within scope; release gates/community moderation per policy.

Evidence

• Quarterly OKRs met; decisions logged (RFC/ADR); dashboards show KPI movement.

Stage 3 … Senior / Principal Steward

You focus on: cross-team leadership and repeatable improvements.

Entry criteria

• ≥2 consecutive successful steward quarters.

• Mentored ≥2 new stewards to confirmation.

Milestones

• Cross-repo change delivered; measurable reliability/quality/community gains.

• Accepted RFCs that simplify process or architecture.

Decision rights

• Standards within domain (e.g., build, Docs-as-Code, security playbooks).

Recognition

• Senior/Principal badge; invited to facilitation/gov circles; conference support.

Stage 4 … Advisor / Partner

You focus on: strategy, external alignment, and client value.

Entry criteria

• Track record as Senior/Principal Steward or equivalent community leadership.

• Positive peer review; no CoC or license issues.

Responsibilities

• Guide roadmaps with clients that practice FOSSH.

• Steward high-impact initiatives (interoperability, sovereignty, reuse).

• Sponsor stewards; ensure ethical & privacy standards.

Benefits

• Revenue share on advisory/placements per program policy.

• Public profile as Advisor/Partner; case-study features.

Optional … C-Shareholder

(Equity Path)

Why optional? Stewardship is about ownership of impact; equity is a complement, not a requirement.

Eligibility (typical)

• ≥2 successful steward/Senior quarters (SIS ≥ 70),

• clean compliance (CoC, licensing, SBOM),

• approved conflict-of-interest disclosure.

Mechanics

• Clear vesting, buy-back, and governance rules published in the policy repo.

• Equity never substitutes fair compensation; it aligns long-term stewardship.

How Progression Works

1) Define scope
Pick a role, write OKRs/KPIs, link your board (Taiga/Redmine) and repos.

2) Deliver & log
Work in the open. Link issues, PRs, tests, RFCs, incidents, events.

3) Review & recognition (quarterly)

• Submit a PR to the Steward Registry (evidence + metrics).

• Cross-team peer review + automated checks (CI, SBOM, SLOs).

• Badge/level updates and dashboard refresh.

4) Grow deliberately
Choose learning goals; request a mentor; rotate roles to broaden skill.

What We Measure (examples)

• Delivery/Quality: release predictability, cycle time, test coverage, MTTR/SLO.

• Community: onboarding throughput, 90/180-day retention, time-to-merge, CoC outcomes.

• Knowledge: docs freshness, tutorial completion, certification pass-rates.

• Governance: RFC throughput, decision-log completeness, license/SBOM hygiene.

• Client/Social Value: adoption, reuse (stars/forks/downloads), case-study impact.

(Weights and formulas live in the public Steward Impact Score spec.)

Support You Get

• Mentorship & circles: regular steward circles, facilitation coaching.

• Learning credits: courses, certs, conference CFP support.

• Tooling: open dashboards (Metabase/Superset), decision logs, templates.

• Wellbeing: sustainable pace, no hero culture, team-owned outcomes.

Example Journeys

Dev → Project Steward → Senior → Partner
Ships reliability improvements, leads release cadence, authors RFCs, then advises clients on sovereign stacks.

Designer → Docs & Education Steward → Principal
Builds IA, tutorials, cert rubrics; lifts pass-rates; becomes cross-project education lead.

Ops → Privacy & Security Steward → Senior
Introduces threat modeling, hardening guides, and incident drills; reduces MTTR and risk.

FAQs (short)

• Is equity required? No … stewardship stands on its own.

• Paid or volunteer? Roles can be funded; compensation is transparent per engagement.

• Can I pause? Yes. Roles are time-boxed; handovers documented.

• External contributors? Welcome … recognition is portable and evidence-based.

Start Your Path

Ready to grow with transparency and impact?

View open scopes

Pick a clearly defined, time-boxed stewardship role. Ship real outcomes. Earn recognition (badges), public credit, and (optional) partner/C-share eligibility.

Project Steward — Public Pilot (6–8 weeks)

Mission: Deliver an EU-hosted collaboration stack (Nextcloud + Matrix + Jitsi) for a municipality team.
Time: 3–5 h/week Team: 1 infra, 1 community, 1 privacy steward
You’ll do: backlog & roadmap, release plan, demo & adoption metrics.
Stack: Taiga, GitLab, Nextcloud, Jitsi.
KPIs: go-live ≤ 6 wks • WAU ≥ 60% • support tickets ↓ 30%.

Privacy & Security Steward — DPIA & Hardening (4–6 weeks)

Mission: Complete DPIA/DPA, set retention, and harden services (SSO, backups, logging).
Time: 2–4 h/week You’ll do: DPIA pack, CoC/mode policy, incident runbook, SBOM checks.
Stack: Keycloak, Matomo (cookieless), Borg/Restic, Prometheus.
KPIs: 100% DPIA/SBOM • 0 critical CVEs > 14 days • restore test ≤ 60 min.

Infra/DevOps Steward — SSO & Observability (4–8 weeks)

Mission: Stand up SSO, monitoring, and backups across services.
Time: 3–5 h/week You’ll do: IaC, SLOs, alerts, weekly ops notes.
Stack: Keycloak, vLLM/TGI (optional), Prometheus/Grafana, Ansible/K8s, Restic.
KPIs: 99.9% uptime • MTTR ↓ 40% • backup success 100%.

Community & Training Steward — Onboarding Cohort (4 weeks)

Mission: Run a contributor cohort and ship docs/tutorials that stick.
Time: 2–3 h/week You’ll do: welcome call, starter issues, buddy system, tutorials.
Stack: Moodle, Nextcloud, Rocket.Chat/Matrix, OpenWebUI (optional).
KPIs: 20 newcomers • 60% 4-week retention • PR time-to-merge ≤ 3 days.

What you get

• Open badges (verifiable), public profile & case story.

• Mentorship from senior stewards.

• Path to Advisor/Partner and optional C-shares after ≥2 successful quarters.

Don’t see your scope?