The Stakeholder Journey: From User to Contributor

This is the third post in a series on the tools we picked up during I-Corps training, part of the NSF's Pathways for Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program. The Open-Source Ecosystem Canvas and the Ecosystem and Stakeholder Map both ended on the same question—what does it actually take to keep a project alive?—and on the observation that the passive window we used to watch our communities through is narrowing. This tool is about looking on purpose instead.<br>What the journey is<br>The third tool is the Stakeholder Journey , taught to us by Betsy Peters as part of the go-to-market module of POSE. It maps the path a person takes from never having heard of your project to being one of the people who sustains and leads it:<br>Discovery → Acquisition → Activation → First Impact → Habit → Commitment → Ecosystem Leadership.<br>The Stakeholder Journey. Seven stages run left to right—Discovery, Acquisition, Activation, First Impact, Habit, Commitment, and Ecosystem Leadership—shaped as a bowtie with First Impact at the narrow center, where the two funnels meet. Each stage carries the stakeholder's own words for what that moment feels like, from "I find it and it looks relevant" to "I'm willing to help steward it." Adapted from Betsy Peters's go-to-market module, NSF I-Corps POSE program.Most projects, when they think about onboarding at all, think about the left side. Discovery is whether your project shows up—in search, in a tutorial, in a coworker's recommendation, in an AI's suggested package. Acquisition is whether someone reaches it: installs it, opens the docs, clones the repo. Activation is whether they get past the first wall—the README works, the install command runs, the example does what it promised.<br>These are the things engineering teams instinctively optimize for. They're also where most projects stop. We made it easier to install. We rewrote the getting-started guide. We added a Colab badge. All of that work matters. It's not enough.<br>First Impact is the pinch point<br>The pinch point at the center is First Impact —the moment when a person can say this thing helped me achieve a goal I actually had. Not "I got it running," but "it did the thing I came here to do." Without First Impact, nobody moves any further to the right. Everything downstream is gated by it. A project can have a beautiful README and a flawless install and still fail at First Impact, because the person came looking for a result, not a successful build.<br>The right side of the journey is what you're actually building toward. The left—Discovery, Acquisition, Activation—is about volume and lowering friction. The right is about depth, repeat use, and the people who eventually keep the project alive. And the right side is where the open-source-specific problem hides.<br>Everything up to Habit used to be relational by accident. To get the install to work, the example to do the thing, the edge case to resolve, you had to look in someone's docs, read someone else's post about hitting the same wall, maybe venture into the somewhat hostile waters of Stack Overflow. None of that was billed as community engagement. It was the cost of getting the thing to work. But every step put you in proximity to other people's care—the maintainer who wrote the doc, the contributor who answered the question three years ago, the stranger who took your duplicate question seriously enough to point you somewhere. The community wasn't somewhere you went; it was somewhere you passed through to get to the thing you came for. AI dissolves the passage. The install still has to run, the example still has to do the thing—but you can now clear those walls without ever touching the artifacts of care that used to do the introducing. AI and the Invisible Newcomer in Open Source was about what we didn't know we were relying on until it was gone.<br>Habit is the territory of repeat use—the project becomes a default, a known quantity in someone's toolchain. This can still happen passively. People settle into tools because the tool works and they don't have to think about it. Someone finds your project, uses it, relies on it—and you may never know they exist. Habit users have never been fully visible—plenty went unseen even when public friction was the norm—but the passive window the Ecosystem and Stakeholder Map named used to make more of them visible than it does now, if not to maintainers then to each other. That visibility to each other matters: people who can see others engaged at the same stage recognize themselves as part of something larger, and what you help build feels worth more than what you just consume.[1] AI absorbs the friction that produced that visibility, which means projects at the Habit stage increasingly have plenty of repeat users and no idea who they are.<br>Commitment is different. Commitment is a crossing—the moment a person stops being a user and starts being someone who tends to the project. They file the issue. They open the...