The Spirit of Open Source: Penpot’s Recipe of Ambassador Program

At Penpot, we've always believed that the best products are built in the open, together with the people who use them. That mindset shapes how we build features, ship releases, host events, write documentation, and create new initiatives. The Ambassador Program is one of them.

Launched back in March, 2026, Our Ambassador Program already spans across five continents within its first months. It is a peer-to-peer learning network where designers, developers, educators connect and celebrate the open-source spirit, while building an open library of insights, together. This is not just its case study, but more a celebration of building something great with and for our community in the spirit of Penpot. You will find our core insights, guiding principles, ways of scaling, some numbers and future plans.

Now let’s rewind a bit and go back to the beginning.

Building the Penpot Ambassador Program 

While having an ambassador program was something we’ve always wanted, we also knew it had to come at the right time and shape. With that in mind, here are the three main pillars we’ve built everything on top of: The insight, guiding principles, and structure. 

The Insight

Throughout conferences, posts, reviews, industry insights, we often see the “bigger responsibility” and “giving back” themes. That, us creatives, designers, developers, marketers, we all need to think beyond whatever it is we’re building and find ways to make things more accessible, more open. But at the end of the day, a good majority of these learnings end up collecting dust on notepads, in a somewhat alternate universe from due dates, sales, business priorities and so on. 

Along similar lines, when we’ve gone over our observations and learnings from the industry, we noticed patterns and those patterns didn’t feel very fitting, very Penpot per sé. Promoting a product or service, promoting it more, more and even more with an end goal sometimes missing, alongside clear benefits for the local community members and the wider community itself. 

As a result, we’ve decided what if we combined the two above? Create a program that has an end product, a bigger goal, provides a sense of giving back, all the meanwhile putting Penpot to the secondary objective in an effort to echo what Penpot Fest did in 2025: The spirit of Open Source, sharing, growing, together…The result? A collective open library of insights, built together with Penpot Ambassadors, covering evergreen topics and providing real world, localized insights directly from community members. And the best part? It’s fully open, to everyone, everywhere!

Guiding Principles

Much like many of our frameworks and projects, we’ve decided to put guiding principles for the Penpot Ambassador Program, too. We reflect them to certain extents throughout the communications around the program. 

• Open collaboration
  • Open collaboration forms the very spirit of our library. Every key insight we learn, we learn it together and we build everything together. We don’t “task” Penpot Ambassadors and then let them carry on as silos. Every Penpot Ambassador joins the program with a yearly plan carefully crafted and one of the questions we ask often is “How can we best support you to achieve this?”. 
• Peer-to-peer learning
  • Very much similar to the principle above, peer-to-peer learning transforms the experience from consuming similar, already existing content to real world examples, stories. We think it’s better to hear how Layshi from Puerto Rico uses Penpot and how her community engages with Penpot as opposed to doing X, Y and Z with Penpot. 

• Inclusivity & safety
  • The more, the merrier and safety in numbers. This principle moves beyond inviting different backgrounds, profiles, beliefs. It’s about inviting cultures, regions, their behavioral mechanisms and welcoming everyone and everything with no bias. 
• Role balance
  • While Penpot offers full-stack design, it also offers it for teams of varying titles and responsibilities. Everything we produce in the Penpot Ambassador Program needs to have a balance between designers, developers, marketers, project managers. We can’t simply focus on design related topics and expect our program to be open.
• Transparency
  • One of Penpot’s key attributes and strengths. The way we communicate with all candidates, ambassadors or anyone within our community, we do it with transparency in mind. When we create content plans for ambassadors, we share it with others, we get feedback. This is why we explain every decision taken with context behind. 
• Sustainability
  • The Penpot Ambassador Program is not here to make a big splash and then fade away slowly. While we often see this happening with similar programs, we want the opposite. This gets reflected on both our selection and expansion strategies. More to come on these topics below.  

Structure

So how did we put all of the above on a structure that was functional? Not only functional, but also appealing and valuable? It starts with our selection process and follows “Learning Cycles”.

• Selection process

Simply put: Quality over quantity. While on paper it might have looked like we had massive success if we said in the first three months, we had 150 Penpot Ambassadors. In reality, how much time and effort could we allocate to those ambassadors? Following the same mindset, we’ve decided to go forward with a waiting list to make sure we give enough time and attention to everyone and play the long game. This meant we would only accept a few ambassadors every quarter. 

Here are a few more points on why we’ve introduced a waiting list:

• Even though our resources are limited, we want our Ambassadors to each receive the same amount of care. This is only possible if we go slowly, but steadily. 
• Most Ambassador programs chase product education and exposure. This is great but things plateau after a few introductory events or content pieces.
• We want to play the long game by focusing on learning as a community instead of shorter term product exposure. 
• Genuine interest. Not just about Penpot but also design, development or Open Source. It's also about  being able to move beyond transactional engagements. 
• Similar to the second point, trust is essential to go the longer route and it needs time and effort from both sides to work out. 

This is one of the main reasons why we are proud of the very first Penpot Ambassadors. Over the year(s), we've come across so many passionate community members who dedicated substantial time and effort in Penpot. It's only fair they get an opportunity to claim their early adopter status but most importantly, the well deserved spotlight.

• Learning cycles

The idea of learning cycles is simple. Every quarter, Penpot Ambassadors learn one topic. If they already know the topic, great, they can go ahead and share it with their communities. However, if they don’t, that’s even better! Because we help them first learn and digest before they introduce it to their audience. And the findings? They go into the Open Library. 

Take our Q3 ‘26 learning cycle for example: open-source design and contribution. The main goal for Penpot Ambassadors is to share their insights on the Open Library. Some ambassadors are planning workshops, some are thinking about online discussions, and some of them are slowly dipping into the resources before sharing it. Every region, every ambassador will have different takes on the same topic and we believe those learnings are very important. This is the Penpot Open Library and it’s our main requirement to contribute to it. 

In short, Penpot Ambassadors focus on different but relative topics each quarter and introduce the topics to their communities. Their observations and highlights find their place in the Open Library. On the side, they are happy to push out contents or events that focus on Penpot as a product and we help them with that as it’s key for further growth. But, unlike many other programs, this is the secondary objective.

• Incentives

And what other things Penpot Ambassadors get in return? First and foremost, their own Penpods, local communities! On top of the industry standard perks like swag, recognition, social media coverage and such, we’ve also allocated a budget towards their activities. If it's content and they see value in boosting, let’s go for it. If it’s an event, we help with the venue, food&drinks, and also offer joining the event in person. For these reasons, our 2026 events budget mainly consists of Penpot Ambassadors and we’re proud of it! 

Maintaining the Penpot Ambassador Program 

Here are some of the steps we’ve been taking in order to make sure the Penpot Ambassador Program runs smoothly. 

• Routine checks, personal touch and feedback
  • We make sure every now and then we sit down with Penpot Ambassadors and go over how things are going, what can be improved and what went well. 
• Annual show&tell for findings
  • At the end of each year, we plan on getting Penpot Ambassadors together to do a mini presentation. These presentations will aim to highlight topics, nuances and details that gathered the most interest. 
• Community Council for curation
  • Connected to above, our (soon to be formed) Community Council will go over Open Library contents, annual show&tell and also the current industry trends to decide what next year’s learning cycles can look like. 
• Program KPIs / Success metrics
  • As the key outcome of the Penpot Ambassador Program is the Open Library, a big success metric for us is the amount of entries on it. 
  • Our initial goal was to have 5 to 10 ambassadors for 2026. By the end of this year, we will likely be close to 15!
  • On top, we have the usual metrics like cumulative reach, amount of applications, RSVPs to events, attendance rate, activation rate and more. 

What are the initial results after the first learning cycle? Let’s talk numbers! 

• 150-200K+ organic reach. This number only reflects the reach coming from official Penpot channels, not the individual posts from ambassadors. 
• Over 300 applications in three months. Fully organic, only announced with one emailing. It’s also equally important to highlight the fact that the application form on average takes 6-7 minutes to complete and we even have dozens of applications where each answer is over one hundred words! 
• A total of 8 events in three months, across 7 different cities.
• Over 600 RSVPs with > 50% attendance rate. 
• 21 content pieces spread across Open Library, social media and more. 

Expanding the Penpot Ambassador Program 

What’s next for the Penpot Ambassador Program? Where do we go from here? We have exciting plans and some of them you’ll see for the first time right here! 

• More regions to cover
  • We want to cover more countries and go for 15 to 20 Penpot Ambassadors by 2027. 
  • This also means as we grow, we want to introduce multiple Penpot Ambassadors for one country. 
• Self-curation and Penpot Community Council
  • As mentioned above, we want to introduce a community council where we self-govern and self-curate. This council will be formed of Penpot team members, Penpot Ambassadors and prominent names from the industry. 
  • Another aspect of the council is to be able to publish reports based on Open Library insights, trends and yearly observations before picking new learning cycles.
• Perks for professional growth
  • Who better to demo Penpot to companies of all sizes than Penpot Ambassadors in their local language? We want to find ways to bridge our ambassadors with companies to allow more opportunities for professional growth. 
• Perks for Penpods
  • Our local communities, Penpods, will have access to discounts, exclusive swag, early access, opportunities to talk with the Penpot team and more. 

• An in-person ambassador get together
  • Perhaps an ambitious plan but we do want to have at least one in-person get-together to celebrate all things Penpot community, ambassadors and our achievements!
• An achievements program
  • A tiered rewards initiative to unlock more and bigger things with a taste of gamification in it! 

We have a clear roadmap for what's ahead, but we expect the program to keep evolving with the people who make it possible: our ambassadors! But for now, we hope this detailed walkthrough of the Penpot Ambassador Program gives you new ideas, inspirations and hopefully becomes a go-to resource for community building.