Open Source Wishlist

Open Source Wishlist is community-driven infrastructure that standardizes how open source maintainers express sustainability needs and how paid practitioners solve those problems with systematically visible outcomes. Maintainers create validated wishlists from standardized categories—funding strategy, governance, leadership continuity, security, documentation, and more. Skilled practitioners are compensated to fulfill wishes, with outcomes documented as ground-truth data for AI benchmarks and OER playbooks. This creates end-to-end ecosystem impact: maintainers receive help, practitioners are paid for their expertise, sustainability problems are solved, and funders gain systematic visibility into impact through standardized signals. We are working toward integrating wishlist data into ecosyste.ms to make sustainability needs and outcomes discoverable across millions of open source projects—a key innovation requiring funding and support to reach demonstrable impact with sufficient wishlist coverage across ecosystems. We provide the connective infrastructure that allows existing funding tools to interoperate through shared standards while building the data foundations for AI-assisted sustainability work.