Lessons on attracting new contributors from 30 years of PostgreSQL

The PostgreSQL project has been chugging along for decades; in that time, it has become a thriving open-source project, and its participants have learned a thing or two about what works in attracting new contributors. At FOSDEM 2026, PostgreSQL contributor Claire Giordano shared some of the lessons learned and where the project is still struggling. The lessons might be of interest to others who are thinking about how their own projects can evolve.

Giordano said that her first open-source project was while working at Sun Microsystems; she worked on the effort to release Solaris as open-source software, "which was quite a wild ride". From there, she joined Citus Data, which provided an extension for PostgreSQL to add distributed-database features; that company was acquired by Microsoft in 2019. She said she now heads Microsoft's open-source community initiatives around PostgreSQL and that the talk is based on her upstream work with that project; as one might expect, though, she noted that the talk would represent her views and not those of her employer.