Open Source projects share a very alluring prospect: contribute to the project, and you'll be able to help shape its future.

However, as such a project grows, this simple principle is slowly buried beneath layers of psychology, economics, and politics. People might start to feel that the impact they're making is negligible or inexistent, and question the very point of contributing as a result.

This session takes a multi-disciplinary look at how the direction of a complex open source project is governed, and how an individual contributor can maximize their potential for making an impact. By drawing an analogy to Newtonian Physics, we'll discuss the forces at play and identify the opportunities for strategic leverage.