OSS + ELC EU 2026

Many communities reach a point where knowledge has naturally concentrated in the hands of a few dedicated people. It happens organically. Someone steps up, carries the weight, and keeps things moving. But without a process to capture and distribute that knowledge, the community becomes fragile without ever meaning to. Contributors arrive eager and leave quietly. Decisions get made but are never recorded. Onboarding repeats itself because nothing was ever written down.
This talk is about what happens when a community decides to change that. Drawing on experience as a maintainer and community manager, I will walk through the journey of building a documentation process from the ground up, not by writing more docs, but by shifting how the community thinks about knowledge itself. From auditing where knowledge lived, to creating structures for knowledge capture and decision documentation, forming a working group that distributed ownership, and building triage and mentorship pathways that made contribution genuinely accessible.