For the last 7 years CISA has been one of the major public stewards of SBOMs – publishing many whitepapers, hosting a multitude of meetings, and evangelizing the term so nearly everyone in the industry now recognizes. For those of us who have been working in the SBOM community over the years, one of the best meetings was a Monday morning SBOM community call (morning if you’re in the US, not morning most everywhere else on the planet). The agenda usually started with an informal discussion about news and events and moved to a semi formal presentation about a tool or idea that was being worked on. Occasionally the discussions lasted the entire hour and the topics were always informative and interesting.
As the world of SBOMs has grown, one of the biggest challenges is just keeping track of everything; There are too many events, tools and talks and it is impossible for one person to be on top of it all. And that’s why the Monday community meeting was so useful to its attendees. Even if you weren’t trying to actively keep track of the SBOM universe, the SBOM universe would come to you!
Unfortunately the Monday community meeting has recently been discontinued. It’s tough to keep a meeting like this going, especially for many years, so hats off to CISA for all the hard work! That meeting shall be missed, but we can all respect the need to focus the existing resources to better align with the CISA mission.
But given how valuable the CISA meeting has been, a few of us at the OpenSSF have decided we miss the meeting and would like to keep it going. So the OpenSSF SBOM Coffee Club has been started! Same time on Monday as the CISA meeting (11am Eastern). The format is going to be exactly the same: Show up, discuss the latest news and happenings and share interesting SBOM related events. Just like the CISA list of SBOM events, this one will be pretty flexible and only need to be vaguely SBOM related to deserve a mention.
One of the often overlooked aspects of building a community are the little things that bring everyone together. I’ve been part of many communities over the years, I am honored to be part of the SBOM community now. While our community is built on top of SBOMs, that’s not enough to keep everyone connected. We need a place to discuss topics, share experiences, and talk about new things and ideas, and most importantly, let new people find us. That was the Monday SBOM call. It’s important to me and others to keep a place going that can help the existing community thrive and bring in new people in a safe and welcoming way.
Everyone is welcome, it doesn’t matter if you’re not an OpenSSF member. The invite is available on the OpenSSF public calendar (it’s pretty full of events, look for “OpenSSF SBOM Coffee Club” on Monday. You are welcome to check out the notes document. This will be updated before and during the meeting each week. Even if you don’t attend you are welcome to keep track of what’s happening from the meeting notes. We’ve quite literally copied the events list from the last CISA call and we are going to keep it updated.
I hope to see you at a future meeting to learn, to share and evangelize. I promise you will learn something. And if you have an idea to present, or a tool, or anything really, reach out to the group. See you next Monday!
