More Hearts than Stars: Smart Charging & Community Funding
Session Abstract
I’m one of the core team members of evcc, an open-source EV charging system that runs on and works with the hardware you already own. Over the last 5 years, we’ve managed to grow evcc into a sustainable and community-funded project using GitHub Sponsors.
Session Description
evcc has over 300 contributors, 3.6k stars and 6.3k GitHub sponsors that
contribute to the project financially. I’ll talk about how we’ve built the open-source project and grown a sustainable funding model along the way.
The software supports hundreds of different chargers, electric vehicles, energy meters, solar and batteries systems. It provides users with an open alternative to proprietary solutions from energy companies or hardware vendors.
In the talk, I’ll cover the following topics:
– Balancing open-source development with our goals of sustainable funding
– Building a powerful and extensible system while keeping it simple for everyday use
– Learning about and addressing country-specific use cases and regulations
– Managing unique community contributions like photography
This talk will not offer a blueprint on how to build a community-powered open-source project, but aims to give you some insights into what we’ve learned on our journey so far.
