How the OpenSSL community was built on Heartbleed

Name: How the OpenSSL community was built on Heartbleed
Start: 2026-01-31T14:10:00
End: 2026-01-31T14:10:00
Location: UB5.230

UB5.230 | Day 2 | 14:10 - 14:35 | Speakers: Jon Ericson

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Abstract

Before April 2014, OpenSSL was a backwater open source project with fewer than 10 regular contributors and 1 1/2 maintainers. Meanwhile its code had become a pillar of secure communication and data privacy in the industry. This was an unstable situation that was exposed when the Heartbleed bug became global news.

The way the OpenSSL project responded to this crisis was informed by the principles of open source. Jon Ericson, the Community Manager for the OpenSSL Foundation, explains how a security bug ignited community growth and how the open source community provides ongoing stability to the OpenSSL project.

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Slides: How the OpenSSL community was built on Heartbleed

Speakers

Jon Ericson

Jon Ericson is the OpenSSL Foundation Communities Manager. He started his career as a C programmer for the US National Weather Service and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. When Stack Overflow launched in beta, Jon was an early contributor and later joined as a full-time community manager for the entire Stack Exchange network. Since then he's helped a variety of communities overcome their social and technical hurdles.

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