What the Ortelius Outreach Committee Achieved in 2025: A Year of Community, Growth, and Momentum

2025 was a big year for the Ortelius Outreach Committee, full of experiments, new programs, fresh contributors, and a whole lot of collaboration. As I looked back over our meeting notes, one thing became clear: this community showed up. Month after month. Project after project. Whether it was supporting job seekers, planning conferences, onboarding new contributors, or pushing our messaging forward, this team put real heart into moving Ortelius ahead.

Here’s a friendly walk through what we accomplished together in 2025.

We Expanded Our Community and Our Events

SecureChainCon 2025 Took Center Stage

One of our biggest wins was SecureChainCon. We opened the call for papers, selected speakers, organized keynotes, recorded talks, managed social media, and pulled off a full-scale virtual event, all as volunteers. The logistics got smoother each year, and by 2025 we even improved the visual layouts for speaker videos and ran the event simultaneously on YouTube Live and Zoom.

We Built a Year-End Celebration Worth Attending

Our annual Holiday Gathering became a true community moment. With speakers like Eric Brewer, Sacha Wharton, and Brian Dawson, it wasn’t just a party, it was a knowledge-packed morning that brought together developers, contributors, and open-source friends from across the industry.

We Added Another Gold Legend

Jing Chen became our first woman Gold Legend. This badge is hard to earn, we challenge you to it. Great job Jing!

We Launched a Job Seekers Webinar Series

One of the most human and heartfelt accomplishments this year was our Job Seekers Webinar program. We know the market has been tough, and we decided to do something meaningful about it.

We hosted multiple sessions with strong turnout, the first webinar alone had 53 downloads in the first day. Community members got hands-on help with:

• LinkedIn profile improvement
• Personal branding
• Resume writing
• Career tools
• Recruiter Q&As

We even set up a “transform my LinkedIn profile” exercise featuring Jing Chen, and it was a hit (thank you Jing).

We Energized Contributor Growth Through Hacktoberfest

Hacktoberfest is always a fun annual milestone, and while we set an ambitious goal of 36 PRs, this year became more about quality over quantity. We onboarded three new contributors and opened a flood of beginner-friendly issues around MCP servers, Renovate updates, and broader architectural areas.

A few committee members hit their 6-PR Hacktoberfest badges too, proving we walk the talk.

We Strengthened Our Voice Through Blogs, Messaging, and Thought Leadership

2025 was a thoughtful messaging year. We published new blogs (including an excellent MCP Server piece by Jing), updated our positioning for 2026, and started experimenting with the idea of a “Digital Twin” for software systems, something we’ll likely refine further next year.

We also promoted SecureChainCon, wrote about our holiday event, and continuously pushed fresh content into the ecosystem.

We Expanded Developer Outreach — Especially to Jenkins

A big strategic focus this year was connecting with the Jenkins community. We:

• Identified their discussion channels (Discourse, Gitter, Google Groups).
• Started planning an onboarding flow for Jenkins users.
• Explored how SBOMs and post-deployment vulnerability detection fit into Jenkins workflows.
• Worked with Mark Waite on documenting requirements.

This is laying the foundation for more formal integrations and broader adoption in 2026.

We Showed Up at Industry Events and Leadership Roles

Inside the open-source world, Ortelius had a louder voice than ever:

• Sacha Whaton was elected to the CDF Governing Board as the open-source representative.
• We prepared talks for Open Source Summit, CDCon, and OpenSSF Community Days.
• Ortelius swag flooded events — including 300 T-shirts distributed at conferences and meetups.

We didn’t just participate — we helped lead.

We Improved Our Product Conversations and Architecture Vision

In true Ortelius fashion, the Outreach Committee didn’t stop at community work — we dove into product strategy too. Discussions this year covered:

• MCP Server adoption
• Jenkins SBOM workflows
• Dashboarding with Grafana
• Persona-driven UX design
• Transitive dependencies and SBOM accuracy
• New supply chain threats like Shai-Hulud 2.0
• The future of pipelines, orchestration, and software “Digital Twins”

We weren’t just talking — we were influencing direction.

We Supported Each Other and Strengthened the Culture

If I had to wrap 2025 in a sentence, it would be this:
We built more than a project — we built a community that genuinely lifts each other up.

From sharing job tools and giving LinkedIn endorsements, to collaborating on blogs, to celebrating contributors, to welcoming new people into open-source for the first time, the culture of Ortelius stayed rooted in generosity and inclusion.

Looking Ahead

2026 is shaping up to be an adoption-heavy year, tightening onboarding, reaching developers where they already work, and sharpening our message around post-deployment vulnerability detection and decoupled architectures.

But for now, it’s worth pausing to appreciate everything this committee pulled off in 2025. It was productive, collaborative, and deeply human.

Here’s to an even stronger year ahead — together.

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