OpenSSF

In this special episode, the What’s in the SOSS podcast welcomes Sally Cooper as an official co-host. Sally, who leads OpenSSF’s marketing efforts, shares her journey from hands-on technical roles in training and documentation to becoming a bridge between complex technology and everyday understanding. The conversation explores why marketing matters in open source, how personal branding connects to community building, and the importance of personas in serving diverse stakeholders. Sally also reveals OpenSSF’s 2026 marketing themes and explains how newcomers can get involved in the community, whether through Slack, working groups, or contributing content

00:09 – Welcoming Sally Cooper as Co-Host
01:28 – From Technical Training to Marketing Leadership
03:54 – Bridging Technology and Understanding
06:19 – Why Marketing Makes Open Source Uncomfortable
08:11 – Personal Branding and Career Growth
10:42 – Understanding Community Personas
12:33 – Getting Started with OpenSSF
14:44 – OpenSSF’s 2026 Marketing Themes
16:18 – Rapid Fire Round
17:09 – How to Get Involved

• Sally Cooper’s LinkedIn page
• Get involved with the OpenSSF
  • A Software Developer’s Journey with the OpenSSF
  • An Open Source Program Office’s Journey with OpenSSF
  • The Marketing Journey with OpenSSF
• Subscribe to the OpenSSF newsletter
• Follow the OpenSSF on LinkedIn
• OpenSSF Slack Invite
• OpenSSF Blog
• Reach out to the OpenSSF Marketing Team
• BEAR Working Group
• OpenSSF Tech Talks
• OpenSSF Case Studies

CRob (00:09.502)
Welcome, welcome, welcome to What’s in the SOSS, the OpenSSF podcast where we talk to people, projects, and we talk about the ideas that are shaping our upstream open source ecosystem. And today we have a real treat. It’s a very special episode where we’re welcoming a new friend. And this is somebody that you probably know if you’ve been involved in our community for any period of time.

This young lady gets to help us with our messaging and how we present ourselves to the outside world, how we get our messaging out to all those interested OpenSoft community contributors around the globe. And today she’s officially joining Yesenia and I as a co-host of What’s in the SOSS. So I am proud and pleased to welcome Sally Cooper.

Yesenia (01:02.916)
Woo!

CRob (01:07.488)
Sally has been helping lead our marketing wing of efforts for the last several years. So before we jump into kind of what you do within that marketing function, Sally, we would like to hear a little bit about your open source origin story and how you got into technology.

Sally Cooper (01:28.549)
wow. Well, thank you so much, Yesenia and CRob. I’m super excited to be here. And yeah, I started my career a very long time ago. I actually started in tech with hands-on technical roles, working in training, documentation and support, and really helping people understand systems and tools and workflows.

Yesenia (01:52.21)
Yeah, I want to welcome Sally. great to have just another voice on this podcast, putting the hard work that our open source ecosystem is out there and getting more of these other voices. But you were talking about that you started in tech early and for me, that’s new for me. I would love for you to dive into these like technical roles. I think understanding your background in the technical and how you’ve gotten into marketing and working with open-assess that’s just going to relate to folks and understand that.

You don’t always have to be technical or work in a technical field to support your security. So I’d love to understand your background and how you’ve connected your technical background into the transitions you’ve had in your career.

Sally Cooper (02:35.611)
that’s such a good question. Yeah. I think you really nailed it there because you don’t need to always be technical and sometimes you don’t even, you can be technical and you end up in something like marketing for me. So, when I say started in tech, mean, this was like really entry level, hands on, learn it from the ground up. I worked in finance in my first job out of college. I was working at a data processing center and it was really operational.

accuracy, lots of responsibility, really not a lot of glamour. So the thing that kind of was a turning point was that we went through a major systems upgrade and we moved from a legacy system to entirely new software. So suddenly people who had been doing their jobs a certain way for years really were expected to work differently and often overnight. And I became one of the people who could help bridge the gap.

because I understood the technology and how to explain complex systems in an easy to understand manner. And I ended up being in training. So I became a software trainer and trained the whole organization on how to use the software to do their jobs.

Yesenia (03:52.776)
That’s very useful.

Sally Cooper (03:54.649)
Yeah, thanks. It’s funny because we all have to get started somewhere, right? And that’s how it worked out for me. After that, I worked at a startup in B2B e-commerce and continued on with educational software training, writing technical guides, books, some of the first e-learning programs. So I’m definitely dating myself here. But looking back, yeah, looking back, the title marketer wasn’t something that I thought of.

CRob (04:17.772)
Yeah

Sally Cooper (04:24.131)
But I was doing a lot of work in marketing without knowing it, just helping people understand concept topics. So yeah, that’s how I got here. Thanks for asking.

Yesenia (04:37.906)
Yeah, we all date ourself very easily. mean, we’re in tech. It already ages us the minute we walk in. But I think that’s a great understanding and background, right? I think that’s one of the most important skills when it comes to this technical is like, can you bring this high level technical aspect into something that everyday folks can understand and then drive them in? I’m curious from there, now you’re doing marketing. How did you get involved with that?

Sally Cooper (05:06.713)
Yeah, great question. So around the time when my career sort of took off with the technical education, there was something happening in the background. So early 2000s, this was the dawn of YouTube, smartphones were starting to emerge, companies were beginning to realize that technology wasn’t just about features, it was about an experience. And so I find this a very full circle moment because before smartphone, I had an iPod.

It was a pink metallic iPod and I got really obsessed with podcasts. So podcasts were new. It wasn’t just about the music for me. It was really listening to, you know, a conversation that was educational. And I could do that while raising a family, doing, like going for a walk, getting exercise, making dinner. You could have headphones on and just bring yourself into a whole other world.

So yeah, so that’s when I really started like it I also loved the campaign like looking at the billboards and seeing the silhouettes with I You know the iPod and the headphone all of that. So it’s kind of full circle

CRob (06:13.484)
Yeah.

Yesenia (06:19.934)
And it’s really lovely, especially when you see those nice like billboards and like, how much thought has someone taken into that? And like, when you think of like open source, like it’s people’s hobby projects, there’s just like no profit. And I feel like marketing in a sense, I’ve learned it from my own personal knowledge, professional growth, as you could say, there, I realized I was doing marketing without realizing I was doing marketing.

But marketing can just make some people uncomfortable, especially in the open source space. Like, what do you think about that?

Sally Cooper (06:53.463)
Yeah, that’s really valid. Open source is really personal. A lot of projects start off as a hobby, a passion, a side project built on nights and weekends. The word marketing can feel a little uncomfortable. It like, it doesn’t really belong there. I’ve definitely heard that feedback from developers. In open source, we’re not selling software. So it’s a completely new concept for me. I did have some marketing jobs after the educational jobs and

CRob (07:04.014)
Right.

Sally Cooper (07:23.479)
So I’m learning still, I’m learning from all of you and from our community that we’re sharing ideas, tools, practices, and that the currency is really people’s time, attention, and trust. So without marketing, great projects stay invisible, maintainers get burnt out, and users can struggle in silence, and the people who can contribute never even find the door.

CRob (07:50.142)
And this is extremely interesting to me because I observe Yesenia and kind of for the trajectory of her career and so much of your online persona is you do a lot of work of kind of branding yourself and providing advocacy and outlets to help empower other people.

Yesenia (07:58.589)
Yeah.

CRob (08:11.522)
It seems like a really big part of what you do outside of your day job and outside of your foundation work. So from your perspective, Yesi, how do you see these worlds connecting?

Yesenia (08:17.359)
Absolutely.

Yesenia (08:23.39)
I will recently I think it’s an interesting area. I heard this quote from a co worker. I would love to call her but I don’t have her. But it was like, your branding should be getting you the next job, right? Your next step your next opportunity. And as I started in my career, I was really thinking about like,

I kept getting seen and told like I wasn’t technical, but if you looked at my background, it’s in my education. It’s like, how am I not technical? Right. So I really started thinking about like where branding is like where people start meeting you. So your resume is a form of branding, your LinkedIn page is a form of branding. And I really saw it as like sharing a story about yourself, your impact, your value. I really letting them know what they’re getting into before they even reach out to you. So.

It just naturally happened as a way for me to like leave a toxic work environment and get into the next space. And as I realized I was doing it, like I said earlier, I didn’t realize I was doing marketing until somebody was like, you’re marketing. And I’m like, cool.

CRob (09:30.102)
I think what you do is very effective.

Yesenia (09:32.338)
Thank you.

Sally Cooper (09:33.345)
Yeah, I agree. Yesenia, you were an inspiration to me when I first started at OpenSSF because you were so good at branding. You had the cybersecurity big sister. I saw that somewhere. It’s like, yeah. And then you started tagging me on LinkedIn and you just made me feel like I was welcome. And I know that you do that to the community. You make people feel like there’s someone who is technical, but also human who leads with authenticity. So I was super impressed and I always learn so much from you.

Yesenia (09:37.448)
No.

Yesenia (09:45.371)
and

Yesenia (10:02.462)
What you guys gonna make me cry? No emotion. No, there’s no crying about the bars. No need baseball. I just aged myself there. But yeah, I think it’s really about creating those personas. And this is just something that you can do for yourself, that you do for your community, that you do for your projects. It was just something that I realized we just needed to connect people and get them moving. And personas has been talked a lot today.

CRob (10:05.006)
There’s no crying in open source.

Yesenia (10:31.39)
in this conversation. Sally, I love your expert opinion on this. Why do you think they’re so important when it comes to open source marketing?

Sally Cooper (10:42.189)
Yeah, well, CRob and I ran a project along with the OpenSSF staff where about a year ago we polled our community and we asked them a few questions to try to identify who they were, what their job titles were, what was important to them, how they learned about OpenSSF and how we could serve them better. And we came up with a list of personas.

I will link the personas in this transcript, hopefully I can figure that out. But we have software developer maintainers, open source professionals, the OSPOs, security engineers, executives and C-suite. And there’s a whole bunch of titles there. And then we came up with a new one that we hadn’t thought about before, which is funny because now that we’re talking a lot about marketing, there’s a product marketer.

CRob (11:11.662)
you

Yesenia (11:13.146)
Ooh.

CRob (11:36.91)
Mm-hmm.

Sally Cooper (11:36.985)
who is very much someone who is interested in open source software and open source security software. They’re typically a member or looking to become a member of the OpenSSF and they wanna help elevate the people that they work with, the projects that they’re working on, all the great work that their companies are doing in open source. really, Personas help us move from here’s a project to here’s how you ship secure code or

Here’s how we can help you manage risk or here’s how we can help you meet policy requirements. Marketing has really become a service and that’s where personas fit into the mix.

CRob (12:17.794)
Very nice and thinking about this from like, you know, we’re three kind of insiders for the foundation. If someone’s brand new to the OpenSSF and kind of wants to learn more, what does that journey look like for them, Sally?

Sally Cooper (12:33.429)
Yeah, that’s such a good question. So first of all, we’re all really nice and welcoming and you’re all welcome here. So if you have an idea, marketing can help bring that to light. If you are just new to OpenSSF, you can join many of our, actually all of our working groups. We have an open source community. One that would be really beneficial is the bare working group, belonging, empowerment, allyship, and representation and they meet frequently and they record their meetings on YouTube. So if you’re unsure, you can watch a few and learn a little bit more what it would be like to be in a working group at OpenSSF. Strongly encourage you also to join our Slack channel. We will link that and to follow us on social media. You can sign up for our newsletter. We try to meet people where they’re at.

So when we were talking about the personas, we learned that people are on different platforms. Some people would prefer to watch a video or read a blog. And so we try to cater to that, but we’re also always looking for feedback. So join the Slack, make yourself known. Again, if you have an idea, we can help you bring that to light. So we’d love to hear from you.

Yesenia (13:53.181)
And, know, no personal bias, but the bear group does do some awesome work. You know, there’s also, says the co-lead. We’ve also have a few blog posts that was released last year that Sally and her team has helped kind of release that go into how to get started into open source that I know the community as a whole has been sharing with new members as they come into a Slack channel. They’re like, I’m new, how do I get started? So it’s great resources there.

So we’re kicking into 2026, even though my mind keeps thinking it’s 2016. I had to figure out what’s going on there, but you know, one day we’ll go back there. Sally, as an insider, I’d to know what is marketing working on this year for openness, the staff’s mission and the growth of the communities?

CRob (14:30.101)
You

Sally Cooper (14:44.078)
Thank

Yeah, yeah, great question. So OpenSSF exists to make it easier to sustainably secure the development, maintenance, release, and consumption of the world’s open source software. We do that through collaboration, best practices that are shared, and solutions. And so our themes are showing up in 2026 quarterly to help people in our community meet these needs. For Q1, which we’re in now,

We’re focused on AI ML security. Q2, we’re going to talk about CVE, vulnerability transparency.

CRob (15:25.432)
heard of that.

Sally Cooper (15:27.289)
Q3, policy and CRA alignment. Q4 is going to be all about that base. So Baseline and security best practices.

Yesenia (15:41.01)
Very big fancy buzzwords there. So if anyone’s playing bingo as they listen, you got a few.

CRob (15:48.014)
Well, that has been an interesting kind of overview of what’s been going on. But more importantly, let’s move on to the rapid fire part of the show. have a series of short questions. So just kind of give us the first thing that comes off the top of your head. And I want that visceral reaction. Slack or async docs?

Yesenia (15:58.879)
Thank you for watching.

Sally Cooper (16:18.092)
Async docs.

Yesenia (16:21.15)
Favorite open source mascot.

Sally Cooper (16:24.947)
The Base. Honk as The Base.

CRob (16:27.79)
Nice. Love that one. What do you prefer? Podcasts or audiobooks?

Yesenia (16:27.934)
Go, baby.

Sally Cooper (16:33.273)
podcast.

CRob (16:35.662)
Star Trek or Star Wars?

Sally Cooper (16:38.489)
Star Wars.

CRob (16:40.43)
And finally, what’s your food preference? you like it mild or do you like it hot?

Sally Cooper (16:48.939)
medium.

CRob (16:50.188)
Medium? Well, thanks for playing along. So, Sally, if somebody’s interested in getting involved, whether it’s contributing to a project or potentially considering, you know, joining as a member on some level, how do they learn more and do that?

Yesenia (16:52.658)
That’s your question.

Sally Cooper (16:55.033)
Great question.

Sally Cooper (17:09.995)
Amazing. So go to openssf.org. From there, you can find everything you need. We referenced a blog. You can go check out our blog, find out how to contribute a blog. Everyone can join our Slack, join a working group, follow us on social media, subscribe to our newsletter. And we would love to see you at our events. Those are open to all. And if you are a member, please get involved, submit a blog.

Join us on the podcast. We would love to have you. We have a key study program. We also do quarterly tech talks. If you can dream it, we can build it. And the best place to plug in is our marketing advisory council. It meets the third Thursday of every month at 12 p.m. Eastern time. You can also reach out to us at marketing at openssf.org.

CRob (18:02.392)
Fantastic. And I may state how thrilled I am to be adding you as kind of a voice of our community and kind of joining us as a co-host, Sally.

Sally Cooper (18:13.133)
Woohoo!

Yesenia (18:13.374)
Yeah, I’m very excited for a new voice, help offload some of this work and the stories that you’re going to bring the guests we’re going to have on and as you had shared earlier, our marketing for 2026.

Sally Cooper (18:27.982)
Well, thank you so much both for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

CRob (18:31.662)
Excellent. With that, we’ll call it a wrap. I want to wish everybody a great day and happy open sourcing.

Yesenia (18:35.718)
You’re welcome.