Tidelift Announces Upstream 2023: Third-Annual Event Celebrating Open Source and Maintainers | Business Wire, March 14, 2023

"...This year’s theme: the accidental supply chain. Over the past several years, the demands on open source maintainers to level up the maintenance and security practices around their open source projects have substantially increased. For good reason—security incidents like Log4Shell along with industry and government standard requirements have dramatically illustrated the importance of heightened security and maintenance measures. There’s one problem: the volunteer open source maintainers who create the code most organizations rely on did not sign up to be a part of an organization’s supply chain, and in many cases aren’t being paid to do the extra work they are being asked to do. How do we fix the accidental supply chain that open source has become in a way that benefits both the open source creators and those that rely on their work? This important question will be the focus of this year’s Upstream. The call for presentations is now open, and Tidelift welcomes proposals from interested speakers who have a point of view on this or related topics they would like to share. “In U.S. politics, an ‘unfunded mandate’ occurs when a government requires someone else to do new work, while not allocating funding,” said Tidelift co-founder and General Counsel (and Upstream emcee) Luis Villa. “We chose ‘the accidental supply chain’ as our theme for Upstream this year because in many ways the new pressure being put on open source maintainers—many of whom are unpaid volunteers—is an unfunded mandate that needs to be addressed through partnerships between industry, government, and maintainers. We look forward to hosting a conversation about how to address this challenge at Upstream.”

CFP due 8 April 2023: https://www.papercall.io/upstream