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CHABOT.DEV — A FIELD JOURNAL — VOLUME I, NO. 4

12    RESOURCES   ✣

Foundations and Organisations.

Institutional infrastructure for the DevRel discipline. Some long-established; some new. Together they form the field's professional backbone.

ENTRY · 4 MIN · 930 WORDS

Institutional infrastructure for the DevRel discipline. Some long-established; some new. Together they form the field’s professional backbone.

Developer Relations Foundation

Announced. August 12, 2025, under the Linux Foundation umbrella.

Mission. To elevate the professional practice of developer relations and increase awareness of it as a driver of business value.

Steering Committee (inaugural cohort). Wesley Faulkner, Stacey Kruczek, Arun Gupta (JetBrains), Divya Mohan (SUSE), Tabs, Jayson (Semgrep), Ana Jiménez (Linux Foundation Senior Project Manager), Aditya, and others. Elections planned through 2025–2026.

Activities. Working groups, conferences, professional standards, community programs, advocacy for the discipline.

Significance. First formal institutional home for the field. Comparable in ambition (if not yet scale) to professional bodies in adjacent fields.

Caveats. New; institutional impact will be measurable over years, not months. Whether the Foundation produces durable standards depends on sustained governance and resources.

Linux Foundation (parent)

Beyond hosting the Developer Relations Foundation, the Linux Foundation hosts many sub-foundations and projects relevant to DevRel:

  • CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation). Kubernetes and cloud-native projects.
  • OpenJS Foundation. Node.js, jQuery, Electron, and others.
  • PyTorch Foundation. Hosted since 2022.
  • Rust Foundation. (Affiliated with the Linux Foundation since 2021.)
  • GraphQL Foundation.
  • Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF).
  • TODO Group. Open-source program offices community.
  • LFX Community Data Platform (formerly crowd.dev).

These foundations are themselves DevRel surfaces — many large companies’ DevRel teams maintain memberships and contribute to them.

CMX Hub (community management)

  • Founded. 2014 by David Spinks.
  • Focus. Community management broadly; substantial DevRel overlap.
  • Acquired. Through Bevy’s parent company.
  • Events. CMX Summit, CMX Connect events globally.
  • Membership program. Active.

The DevRel Collective

A Slack-based community of DevRel practitioners. Long-running; informal but durable.

How to join. Apply on their site; invitations typically processed by community moderators.

Significance. The de facto peer community for the field outside formal conferences and foundations.

Developer Marketing Alliance (DMA) / Product Marketing Alliance (PMA)

Operator of the Developer Marketing Certified and Developer Relations Certified courses. Also runs:

  • Developer Marketing Summit.
  • Developer Relations Summit.
  • Various smaller events.

Membership. Paid; provides access to community, courses, events.

SlashData (the analyst firm)

Not a foundation but an analyst and research organisation whose work is essential to the field:

  • State of the Developer Nation reports (twice yearly).
  • State of Developer Relations reports.
  • Developer Marketing and Relations: The Essential Guide book.
  • DevRelX Podcast.
  • Custom developer-population research for technology companies.

RedMonk

Industry analyst firm focused on developers, founded 2002.

  • Founders. Stephen O’Grady, James Governor.
  • Output. Blog posts, research reports, conference talks, the Programming Language Rankings.
  • Significance. RedMonk’s New Kingmakers thesis (developers as decision-makers) underpins most modern DevRel business cases.

Major League Hacking (MLH)

North America’s primary student-hackathon organiser, founded 2013.

  • Scope. Operates an annual season of student hackathons globally; partners with corporate sponsors.
  • DevRel relevance. A major pipeline of early-career developers; many DevRel teams sponsor MLH events.
  • 2026. Matthew Revell (DevRelCon founder) leads DevRel strategy and consulting at MLH.

CHAOSS (Community Health Analytics for Open Source Software)

A Linux Foundation project defining metrics standards for open-source community health.

  • Output. Metrics models, working groups, software (GrimoireLab and others).
  • Significance. The standards used by DevStats, LFX Community Data Platform, and many corporate community-analytics implementations.

TODO Group

A Linux Foundation working group for Open Source Program Office (OSPO) leaders.

  • Activities. Sharing best practices for running open-source programs inside companies.
  • Membership. Open to OSPO practitioners.

OASIS, W3C, ECMA, OpenJS, and standards bodies

For DevRel teams whose product touches web standards, these organisations matter:

  • W3C. Web standards.
  • WHATWG. Living standards (HTML, DOM).
  • ECMA TC39. JavaScript / TypeScript standardisation.
  • IETF. Internet protocols.
  • OASIS. Various standards.

DevRel teams at companies whose product depends on these standards often have engineers participating.

Industry consortiums

  • Open Source Initiative (OSI). Custodian of the Open Source Definition; licence approval.
  • Free Software Foundation. Different philosophical lineage; relevant for some communities.
  • Mozilla Foundation. Web standards, Rust, MDN.

Geographic / regional DevRel community organisations

  • DevRel India community.
  • Tokyo DevRel meetup community.
  • Various national / regional informal communities — most discoverable through DevRelCon attendee networks.

OSS sustainability orgs

  • Open Collective. Pooled-funding for open-source projects.
  • GitHub Sponsors. Direct sponsorship of maintainers.
  • Tidelift. Subscription-based maintainer support.
  • Sovereign Tech Fund. German government program funding critical open-source infrastructure.
  • NumFOCUS. Sponsoring scientific Python ecosystem (NumPy, Pandas, Jupyter, etc.).

Conferences as community-builders

Several conferences themselves function as community-organising entities:

  • DevRelCon / Hoopy. Discussed throughout this almanac.
  • All Things Open.
  • Write the Docs.
  • FOSDEM.

Industry awards

  • CMX Community Industry Awards. Annual.
  • DevRel-specific awards are still informal; the Developer Relations Foundation may formalise this over time.

How to engage

For a DevRel professional reading this in 2026:

  1. Join the DevRel Collective Slack.
  2. Follow the DevRel Foundation as it formalises.
  3. Attend DevRelCon at least once a year (in-person or virtual).
  4. Subscribe to SlashData reports.
  5. Read RedMonk regularly.
  6. Engage with one foundation relevant to your product domain (CNCF, OpenJS, Linux Foundation, etc.).
  7. Maintain peer relationships beyond your immediate company.

The institutional infrastructure of the field has matured substantially since 2015 and continues to mature. Participation is now substantively easier than it was a decade ago.

See also