Call for submissions: Platform Engineering Meet-ups
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Call for submissions: Platform Engineering Meet-ups

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Sahiti

No HR, No Budget, No BDFL: Infrastructure Patterns for Volunteer Communities

Submitted Oct 14, 2025

Session type: Talk (30 mins)

I’ve learned some things from volunteering to run infrastructure for communities I care about. Like any other tech support story, there’s a lot of toil; and trying to automate toil always brings up novel engineering challenges.

Volunteer-run communities see

  • high contributor churn and fly-by contributions
  • novel organizational structures and correspondingly novel access & admin requirements
  • an inside-out threat model compared to corporate / for-profit / product-centric firms
  • a heavy focus on process knowledge, i.e. lore, which is stored inconsistently across platforms, documents, and brains.

In this session, we’ll walk through a case study, take a look at infrastructure code that attempts to address some of these challenges, and build a wishlist of solution concepts that don’t yet seem to have a solid open-access implementation.

We’ll learn about:

  • how to securely support fly-by contributions via access control, auth, and secrets management
  • federated identity between organizations: how to let a volunteer “write as the org”
  • democratizing control planes: how admin works in high-churn environments; preventing BDFLs; capability-based access control
  • playbooks for communities: the general applicability of the “systematize your lore” SRE paradigm

This session is for you if

  • you’re interested in running infrastructure for communities and volunteer-run organizations.
  • You’re an SRE or platform engineer who’s interested in a novel problem space.

This talk is itself intended as an early bootstrappy effort to start accruing and systematizing lore in this space.

Slides (draft): https://md.itihas.xyz/p/2tBq6xJmN#/
Bio:

I’m an SRE by training and technophilosopher by aspiration. I’ve been building a standardized self-hostable NixOS image that serves as a community hub for comms and collaborative work.

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