SAN FRANCISCO – September 11, 2017 – The JS Foundation has had some great successes and learned some valuable lessons in its first year serving the broader JavaScript ecosystem. We had an extremely successful launch in October 2016 at OSCON EU and continued to have an ongoing presence at 9 more industry events including a JS Foundation track at Node Summit. At our launch we brought the total number of projects we serve to 23 and since then we have added 2 more and we’ll be announcing more projects joining this week. We’re also very proud of the Appium project which recently was our first project to graduate from our mentorship program, serving as an example to our other projects of how we see projects implementing policies and procedures that promote long-term sustainability. As we continue to expand the breadth of the projects we serve across developer tools, UI libraries, build tools, IoT projects and with our recent announcement of the new project architect expanding us into the cloud functions space, the JS Foundation is becoming the place developers look for the solutions they need in the open source JavaScript ecosystem. Check out the infographic in this article which highlights more of our accomplishments over the last year.

One of the biggest lessons learned is that umbrella organizations like the JS Foundation are big and it can be hard to find your way around. It can be difficult for members to find the right area to invest in when their focus is on a specific subset of our projects or particular area of JavaScript like tools, client, server, IoT, etc. That’s why we’re introducing Domains to help distill the JS Foundation’s overarching initiatives into smaller ones that projects and members can specifically align with. Both projects and members can connect based on shared initiatives to collaborate on efforts and find contributors through this built-in network.

Each Domain will have a dedicated web presence and community on the JS Foundation website, helping build brand affinity around targeted industry/technology segments across web properties, projects and outbound communications. They will receive dedicated investment in support and outreach initiatives through marketing campaigns, events, support staff, and more.

This allows projects to build their brand association and affinity within a specific Domain. It also allows for more funding opportunities to increase community engagement through marketing, events, developer relations, and more.

Similarly, members will more easily be able to align their brands with industries, technologies and JS Foundation projects that are strategically valuable to them while focusing their collaboration efforts and investing funds directly to a specific Domain. This will also allow us to build partnerships with industry organizations like standards bodies, open source projects and companies engaged in that space.

Overall, grouping projects into Domains allows the JS Foundation to provide more dedicated support for marketing, community management, infrastructure, and project management. There will be more opportunities for focused collaboration with other members and industry organizations.

While the JS Foundation as a whole will continue to provide the stability needed for projects at every point in their lifecycle, Domains provide the necessary focus from invested constituents at the time in the lifecycle where it makes sense to that group of members and projects. We believe that this network of Domains is a key component to long-term sustainability in addition to our ongoing efforts to support projects, developers and the JavaScript community through infrastructure, legal, technology and organizational alignment. We’re really excited to share our successes of this past year and our plans for the next chapter at the JS Foundation as we enter year two.