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What I am writing about today is something Tom Callaway once referred to in an AWS podcast as “The Pony Effect:” i.e. what would happen to a project if the people involved simply “rode off into the sunset, on a pony?” He described it as a vulnerability chiefly impacting projects with just one contributor/maintainer. However I would tend to argue that it can affect projects with fairly robust participation as well.

It is a significant concern for nearly all grassroots community projects, or for that matter any FOSS project doing its best to scale.

Here’s the issue.

Open source contributors and maintainers — particularly those of us who are female, trans, people of color, students, unemployed, disabled, or underemployed — are at risk of dropping out of projects.

How are we at risk? Three ways:

1.)  Political Repression. (This is the least likely of the three — unless you are not a U.S. citizen, or, like myself, have openly questioned the actions of ICE.) Please note that repression does not necessarily mean incarceration or detainment. It may simply involve a “gag order,” being placed under house arrest, or having your calls and email messages blocked or censored.

2.) Abduction / Human Trafficking. You may find this impossible to believe, but it is a significant threat for those of us whose gender is not male, as well as for people who hold significant amounts of coin. Back in 2018, Gavin Andresen, one of the individuals responsible for popularizing Bitcoin early on, confirmed to me by email that the risk was real and unavoidable. Since then, the world has certainly not gotten safer! I fear that trans people in their teens and early twenties may assume a level of safety that is in fact illusory. They have never been socialized to see themselves as targets. Violent hate crimes may also be on the rise.

3.) Bad Luck. I am talking about serious health issues and major life disruptions causing people to “drop off the grid.” Something as simple as the theft of a phone, job loss, a car that won’t start, or the end of a relationship can spiral into homelessness and poverty. This seems to happen quite frequently in Oregon, and elsewhere on the West Coast.

In a workplace setting, some manager or HR professional almost always has emergency contact information. Not so on volunteer open source projects — regardless of whether some or any maintainers are paid. To date, best practices and Codes of Conduct have largely centered on the behavior of participants themselves. We are naive to assume that the world outside our communities is benevolent and friendly. Of course, privacy is a huge concern but I don’t think most people realize how vulnerable the human aspects of our networks are.

I was hoping to bring up these concerns at an open source conference I attended this summer.

Unfortunately, I had a two-hour drive to return home on the final day, so I could not stay as long that afternoon as I had hoped.

Had there been a space available and had people willing to listen that Sunday, I would have shown the participants a silver ring that I was wearing. It has two stones: one is turquoise. The other is coral. A close friend gave it to me many years ago. She was a talented programmer (taught herself C in high school) but dropped out of college. I tried to get back in touch with her a few years ago, to no avail. She may have changed her name or gender. It could also have been suicide. I reached out to her mother (her dad had passed away) but did not receive any reply. This is a personal loss for me, but it’s also a loss to our talent pool.

FOSS communities are unique because they have both a social and a work dimension. If we don’t address this issue, we may lose too many people and not even realize it until much later.

Rose C.
August 22, 2026