A couple of months ago I shared that I was looking for what was next for me, and I’m thrilled to report that I’ve found it: I’m joining ROOST as OSS Community Manager!

What is ROOST?

I’ll let our website do most of the talking, but I can add some context based on my conversations with the rest of the incredible ROOSTers over the past few weeks. In a nutshell, ROOST is a relatively new nonprofit focused on building, distributing, and maintaining the open source building blocks for online trust and safety. It was founded by tech industry veterans who saw the need for truly open source tools in the space, and were sick of rebuilding the exact same internal tools across multiple orgs and teams.

The way I like to frame it is how you wouldn’t roll your own encryption; why would you roll your own trust and safety tooling? It turns out that currently every platform, service, and community has to reinvent all of the hard work to ensure people are safe and harmful content doesn’t spread. ROOST is teaming up with industry partners to release existing trust and safety tooling as open source and to build the missing pieces together, in the open. The result is that teams will no longer have to start from scratch and take on all of the effort (and risk!) of rolling their own trust and safety tools; instead, they can reach for the open source projects from ROOST to integrate into their own products and systems. And we know open source is the right approach for critical tooling: the tools themselves must be transparent and auditable, while organizations can customize and even help improve this suite of online safety tools to benefit everyone.

This Platformer article does a great job of digging into more detail; give it a read. :) Oh, and why the baby chick? ROOST has a habit of naming things after birds—and I’m a baby ROOSTer. :D

What is trust and safety?

I’ve used the term “trust and safety” a ton in this post; I’m no expert (I’m rapidly learning!), but think about protecting users from harm including unwanted sexual content, misinformation, violent/extremist content, etc. It’s a field that’s much larger in scope and scale than most people probably realize, and is becoming ever more important as it becomes easier to generate massive amounts of text and graphic content using LLMs and related generative “AI” technologies. Add in that those generative technologies are largely trained using opaque data sources that can themselves include harmful content, and you can imagine how we’re at a flash point for trust and safety; robust open online safety tools like those that ROOST is helping to build and maintain are needed more than ever.

What I’ll be doing

My role is officially “OSS Community Manager,” but “community manager” can mean ten different things to ten different people (which is why people in the role often don’t survive long at a company…). At ROOST, I feel like the team knows exactly what they need me to do—and importantly, they have a nice onramp and initial roadmap for me to take on! My work will mostly focus on building and supporting an active and sustainable contributor community around our tools, as well as helping improve the discourse and understanding of open source in the trust and safety world. It’s an exciting challenge to take on with an amazing team from ROOST as well as partner organizations.

My work with GNOME

I’ll continue to serve on the GNOME Foundation board of directors and contribute to both GNOME and Flathub as much as I can; there may be a bit of a transition time as I get settled into this role, but my open source contributions—both to trust and safety and the desktop Linux world—are super important to me. I’ll see you around!