May I continue to hone this practice into an art. 🙏🏻 This is my meditation for the day!

This year, the UNICEF Venture Fund celebrates five graduating companies from a recent investment round. For the first time, many of these companies are exiting from the Venture Fund having already earned recognition as Digital Public Goods (DPGs). With the support of a cross-sectional team of mentors, these graduating companies worked to achieve compliance with the DPG Standard.

The Digital Public Good Standard offers a nine-point baseline for evaluation and recognition of Open Source software, content, data, and standards that adhere to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices, do no harm by design, and help attain the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Once a solution is recognised as a digital public good it is discoverable on the DPG Registry.

This recognition acknowledges their use of vetted Open Source licenses, useful documentation, and adherence to relevant best practices and local data protection laws. What makes this achievement a first for the Venture Fund is that these recognitions were achieved by the companies during the investment round. Typically, companies that go on from the Venture Fund achieve recognition after a year or more of graduation. This new shift is made possible by the growing investment in Technical Assistance at the Venture Fund and the leadership of a robust team of mentors.

This article introduces the Technical Assistance mentoring programmes offered by the UNICEF Venture Fund, the addition of new mentors in the last year, the shift of mentor focus around the DPG Standard, and the results achieved to date from the latest graduating Venture Fund cohort.

Origins of Technical Assistance at the Venture Fund 🔗

The Venture Fund offers different areas of Technical Assistance to start-up companies who apply and are selected to receive early-stage seed investment by UNICEF. Originally starting in 2018, the Technical Assistance programmes only included Business Development and Open Source. Over the years, we have piloted and pivoted mentorship models with input from our portfolio of startups. Today, the Technical Assistance programmes cover a range of topics across an experienced team of mentors, depending on the relevance to the start-up companies:

• Blockchain with Arun Maharajan and Alex Sherbuck (former)
• Business Development with Jamil Wyne and Philippa Martinelli (former)
• Evidence of Impact with Milena Bacalja Perianes and Jennifer Sawyer
• Data Privacy & Security with Lydia Kwong
• Data Science & A.I. with Daniel Alvarez
• Open Source with Justin Wheeler, Abigail Cabunoc Mayes (former), and Vipul Siddharth
• Software Development with Iván Perdomo

The mentors work closely with the experienced team of portfolio managers (Meghan Warner, Kennedy Kitheka, and Madison Marks) to guide and coach Venture Fund companies to achieve their targets and success indicators during the investment round.

Starting in 2021, the Venture Fund broadened the Technical Assistance programmes to include Software Development, Data Science & A.I., Data Privacy & Security, and Evidence of Impact. This was a marked change in growing the support and expertise made available to start-up companies during their investment round. However, as the team of mentors and Technical Assistance offerings expanded, there was a growing need to bring a common rallying point across all programmes. How could the mentors ensure their Technical Assistance programmes complemented one another without duplicating topics or repeating conversations?

Further complementing the core Technical Assistance programme, specialized workshops were held by like-minded institutions outside the Venture Fund’s core team of mentors , along with personalized mentorship sessions. The recent Blockchain Cohort, for example, benefitted from targeted mentorship from AW3L, a blockchain consulting firm that share many of UNICEF’s values around leveraging blockchain for social impact.

“Blockchain has immense potential, but it remains just a tool and its impact is dependent on what we do with it. That’s why it is crucial to have local entrepreneurs on the ground building use-cases that solve real problems unique to their geography. We are therefore extremely happy and proud to support UNICEF and its portfolio companies to tackle real-world problems in emerging markets by utilizing blockchain technology.”

Martijn van de Weerdt, Founder, AW3L

How the DPG Standard unified the mentoring streams 🔗

The DPG Standard became a common rallying point for the UNICEF Technical Assistance programmes. As our mentoring programmes increased and topic areas broadened, we needed coordination and a synchronized stream of Technical Assistance programmes. In the last year, the Venture Fund reviewed its workplan development and strategy to enable more solutions to achieve recognition as a digital public good at or near the graduation point for a Venture Fund portfolio. The most recent graduating cohort, the 2021 Blockchain cohort, represents this improved alignment, with 4 of 5 companies receiving recognition of their products as digital public goods by their graduation this year.

How does recognition of an open solution as a Digital Public Good help Venture Fund startups? It is an acknowledgment by the Digital Public Goods Alliance of a commitment and adherence to best practices and steps taken to protect data privacy and do no harm. Additionally, recognition as a DPG unlocks stronger potential for adoption and deployment of the solution by global stakeholders by providing greater visibility in a public roster of open solutions that adhere to best practices and standards. The recognition of 80% of an off-boarding Venture Fund portfolio speaks to both the intrinsic capabilities of the companies and the value of the Technical Assistance programmes and mentorship provided to them by the Venture Fund.

While past Venture Fund companies have received recognition as digital public goods before, this is the first time that a company achieved the recognition at the time of their graduation from the Venture Fund. Aligning the Technical Assistance programmes around the DPG Standard provided common frameworks and mental models for the diverse team of mentors to support the companies and help them achieve the Standard as an important part of their product development lifecycle.

“As an early-stage startup, we struggled with a clear business model. Especially in the last six months of the investment, support from the mentor network helped in building clear business growth and impact metric plans. Also a year ago, we were very heavy on the tech side but lacked considerable planning on network and visibility growth. We have developed a customer persona and a pricing model, and now have a clearer vision of our Total Available Market, Serviceable Available Market, and Serviceable Obtainable Market (TAM, SAM, and SOM) models.”

Rumee Singh, Co-Founder, Rumsan

Further, farther, together 🔗

What comes next? The Technical Assistance programmes at the UNICEF Venture Fund are gearing up for additional cohorts benefiting from our seed-stage investment: a Data Science & A.I. cohort and an upcoming Blockchain cohort. These early-stage companies undergo a technical assistance programme involving a technical and strategic workshop series and monthly mentorship meetings. Graduates of our seed-stage investment that  have received additional capital through our Growth Funding to take their solution to the next level of impact also benefit from customized mentorship to support their evolution from good prototype developments to solutions that can be implemented and scaled, with sustainable business models and proven pilots.

Additionally, mentors are developing digital toolkits to enable Venture Fund companies and anyone to read up and study best practices for building and sustaining digital public goods. Most of these toolkits will be released digitally online under Open Source licenses. You can find three of these toolkits below:

• Data Science & A.I.
• Drones
• Open Source

Since the first Technical Assistance programmes were launched in 2018, the Venture Fund has seen improved results that correlate with the Technical Assistance programmes. In the most recent Blockchain 2021 cohort, across 500+ hours of mentoring, the cohort collectively reached over 700,000 beneficiaries, raised $4M in follow-on funding, and 4 of 5 graduating companies were recognized as a digital public good before graduation. This also marked a new record of external contributors, with a total of 39 people who contributed to repositories across all portfolio companies. The expert guidance and coaching provided by the team of UNICEF mentors aids the start-ups in achieving new record heights.

“UNICEF’s support helped Xcapit build value, with a premium put on discovery, iteration, survey, and experimentation with the end user. The guidance at the right time is priceless. It prevented us from facing a major problem in the future when our blockchain UNICEF mentor guided us when we were deciding the technology to create our wallet. Changing our mindset to become a fully open source company was also challenging. We had the best guidance we could ask, and we successfully overcame the difficulties and doubts, understanding the benefits of open collaboration.”

Antonella Perrone, COO, Xcapit

Contribute to Technical Assistance knowledge and mentoring 🔗

The UNICEF mentor toolkits are open source and you can also participate. The toolkits are currently accepting contributions for UI/UX and front-end development, as well as content curation and authorship. Get involved with the toolkits by participating via GitHub:

• UNICEF Inventory theme (see “good first issues”)
• UNICEF Open Source Inventory
• UNICEF Data Science & A.I. toolkit

With the Digital Public Goods Alliance, we built upon our learnings and successes from portfolio companies and created the DPG Accelerator Guide as a collection of resources for accelerators to also support local ventures in developing digital public goods, setting them up for scale and impact.

The UNICEF Innovation Fund invests exclusively in Open Source technology – with today’s rapidly evolving innovation landscape, Open Source software, hardware, data, and content not only create value and generate revenue, but also ensure greater collaboration and impact. This reflection is a look back at Open Source activity and participation stemming from the UNICEF Ventures Team from June 2020 to date (July 2021).

By the end of this article, you will have a better understanding of the evolving and forward-thinking approach to Open Source taken by the UNICEF Office of Innovation.

This article looks at a few aspects of Open Source engagement at the Innovation Fund:

1. Support models
   1. Legal & policy
   2. Building and leveraging from the community
2. Case study: Cloudline and upstream engagement

New to Open Source at UNICEF? 🔗

If you are hearing about the UNICEF Open Source Mentorship programme for the first time, check out this introduction post to get important context behind why UNICEF invests in Open Source mentorship and support for Innovation Fund portfolio teams:

https://jwfblog.wpenginepowered.com/2021/07/unicef-open-source-mentorship/

Innovation Fund support models 🔗

Start-ups receive both funding and customized mentorship during their 12-month investment period with the UNICEF Innovation Fund. Since the Innovation Fund launched in 2016, the Innovation Fund team noted the impact of hands-on guidance to help start-ups understand how to work open and lead open. Start-ups receiving Open Source support were better equipped to develop sustainable business models that made Open Source intellectual property work with them instead of against them.

By the end of the 12-month investment cycle, graduating companies achieve the following milestones in place with their projects:

• Solid understanding of Open Source licenses and different business models depending on a permissive or copyleft strategy.
• Laying foundations for growing or participating in friendly, inclusive communities.
• Documentation site to showcase their Open Source work, and how to get involved.
• Continuous Integration pipeline to test new changes in the code-base before they are added, and avoid common human errors.

Across these milestones, three themes of support have emerged as as most essential in the past year: legal & policy, building and leveraging from the community, and building in the open.

Legal & policy 🔗

The UNICEF Innovation Fund is unique in Venture Capital on its open-first investment strategy. Start-ups receiving UNICEF funding are obligated to either create their own Open Source works or contribute to existing Open Source works. This leads start-up teams to ask more questions: how does this work in a legal sense? How do you establish a sustainable business model with Open Source dependencies and the different types of license models that exist (e.g. permissive and copyleft)? These are the questions that start-ups receive tailored guidance on from the Open Source Mentorship programme.

How did the Open Source Mentorship programme support both start-ups and UNICEF Country Offices receiving funding from the UNICEF Innovation Fund? The programme improved business and legal resources and referrals for managing Open Source intellectual property. This was primarily done by creating a self-serve knowledgebase of legal, governance, and tech policy: the UNICEF Open Source Inventory. The Inventory was created in close consultation with start-ups receiving UNICEF funding, leading industry experts in areas such as Open Hardware and open design, and other existing Open Source communities of practice.

Building and leveraging from the community 🔗

Over the past year, we also saw more upstream collaboration. UNICEF Innovation Fund start-ups collaborated on existing projects like the PX4 Drone auto-pilot software instead of reinventing the wheel themselves. This enabled the work done with UNICEF funding to go further and impact the wider ecosystem, instead of an individual project with highly-specific use cases.

Furthermore, as the Innovation Fund portfolio continues to grow, new inductees in the Open Source Mentorship programme are able to build on top of work done by previous portfolio companies. This accelerates the rate of development for the new inductees and gives them a model of success to look towards during their engagement with UNICEF.

For example, two companies from the 2019 Drones cohort created documentation websites that were used as models for the 2020 Generation Unlimited cohort. qAIRa from Perú and Rentadrone from Chile created documentation websites using the popular toolchain Docusaurus, created by Facebook’s Open Source Program Office. The work of qAIRa and Rentadrone was leveraged as models by VRapeutic and I-STEM in the 2020 Generation Unlimited cohort. Using graduated companies as models accelerated both technical and content development for the new teams when they had relatable models to use in building their own Open Source documentation websites.

Innovation Fund case study: Cloudline and upstream engagement 🔗

Cloudline Africa (South Africa) operates small-scale autonomous airships that have longer endurance and range than current commercial drones; their solution will help deliver medical supplies to hard-to-reach communities and reduce operational costs in the last-mile.

Four highlights from Cloudline’s period with the Innovation Fund are below:

• The team launched the airship with a payload capacity of 10 kgs with a 50 km range.  
• Full endurance capability (40km/h) along with automated waypoint flying. 
• Contributed flight control software to the PX4 upstream community by introducing a new mode of aircraft to the community in the form of airships.  
• Cloudline received the Fast Company South Africa Most Innovative Company Award 

“Our greatest triumph of the year was the flight of our pre-production airship. Capable of a 10kg useful payload and a 50km range, this aircraft is ideally suited to medical logistics and other high-value scheduled deliveries.” — Spencer Horne, Co-Founder

Going upstream 🔗

Contributions made to another popular upstream community was another major highlight of the Open Source Mentorship programme. Furthermore, the contributions were not casual “drive-through” contributions; they were consistent and focused broadly around the ecosystem instead of a single repository of source code.

During the mentorship programme, Cloudline added 61 commits across four repositories. The summary of their contributions were adding a new vehicle type to the PX4 auto-pilot software: airships. The team first opened a discussion on the PX4 community forum. After getting feedback from a developer, they proceeded to add the Cloudline airship into the upstream software. This was followed by documentation additions with controller diagrams and simulation instructions. Through their contributions, a wider network of developers can simulate and interact with airships similar to the one created by Cloudline.

But the contributions did not stop at code. Cloudline developer Anton Erasmus delivered a deep dive presentation at the PX4 2020 virtual contributor summit. He explained to other developers about how to leverage the multicopter control system, as used in the Cloudline airships and other popular drone devices. This outreach step is important in growing awareness in the existing community for new introductions to the common software, and how both Cloudline and the PX4 community could help each other in achieving their similar yet different goals.

What is next for the Innovation Fund? 🔗

What does the next year ahead look like for UNICEF’s Open Source Mentorship programme? Stay tuned for the final post in this series, which will explore on-going work to standardize the mentorship curriculum, detail how Innovation Fund companies are being coached in becoming Digital Public Goods, and the research and development for an Open Source Program Office at the UNICEF Office of Innovation in 2022.

Special thanks for content and data collected in this post: Sanna Bedi, Zenani Orengo

2020 saw the launch of a formalized Open Source Mentorship programme for the UNICEF Innovation Fund, built up on two years of work from RIT LibreCorps expertise and consulting.

The Open Source Mentorship programme includes five modules about Open Source intellectual property and communities delivered across twelve months. UNICEF grantees are matched with an experienced Open Source Mentor to guide them through the modules. The mentorship takes an interactive, guided approach to understanding the unique context that each team and product exist within. The assigned Open Source Mentor provides specialized advice and training:

• Tailored feedback based on business models
• Existing local user communities
• Best practices for collaborating together with others on similar challenges.

The geographic diversity in the UNICEF Open Source Mentorship programme is unusual for technology incubators or accelerator programs. All funded projects come from UNICEF programme countries. The UNICEF Innovation Fund provides equity-free funding for Open Source solutions from local innovators and entrepreneurs solving local problems. To date, the Innovation Fund has invested in teams from over 57 countries. Argentina, India, Iran, Kenya, Mexico, Nepal, and Rwanda represent the most recent incoming cohort in July 2021.

But why does this kind of work matter to UNICEF or the United Nations?

UN Roadmap for Digital Cooperation 🔗

In June 2020, the United Nations Secretary-General released the UN Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, a call for action and a vision with several key considerations:

• An Inclusive Digital Economy and Society
• Human and Institutional Capacity
• Human Rights and Human Agency
• Trust, Security and Stability
• Global Digital Cooperation

The report explores the impact technology has in each key area:

“Digital technology does not exist in a vacuum – it has enormous potential for positive change, but can also reinforce and magnify existing fault lines and worsen economic and other inequalities. In 2019, close to 87 per cent of individuals in developed countries used the Internet, compared with only 19 per cent in the least developed countries.”

UN Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, June 2020

Open Source Mentorship enables digital cooperation. 🔗

Therefore, the conception and development of Open Source Mentorship is inspired by the Roadmap, in four key aspects:

1. Digital Public Goods: To encourage knowledge transfer and collaboration on practical, everyday advice on building technology projects in line with the Digital Public Good Standard.
2. Digital Capacity-Building: Empowering others with the skills and information they need to be bringers of Open Source change and innovation in a disruptive and competitive Venture Capital ecosystem.
3. Digital Trust and Security: Providing a holistic view of Open Source intellectual property that is influenced by, but not bound by, quarterly earnings reports and share prices. Understanding the commitments of Open Source licenses and technology, and how trust is earned and lost in Open Source products and communities.
4. Global Digital Cooperation: Designing and structuring communities to be healthy and collaborative in nature, united in resolving common challenges and problems.

I joined the UNICEF Innovation team in June 2020, although this is not the first time I have worked with UNICEF Innovation. I have had some opportunity to write about Open Source, but my personal blog has been quiet! So, this felt like the right opportunity to talk about what I am up to these days.

The Open Source Archetypes report (below) provides nine archetypes common among Open Source projects and communities. These archetypes provide a common language and perspective to think about how to capture the most value of Open Source in various contexts.

Open Source Archetypes (May 2018)Download

This article covers the following topics:

1. How Open Source Archetypes align with my experience
2. How I use Open Source Archetypes at UNICEF
3. Unanswered questions

How Open Source Archetypes align with my experience 🔗

The Open Source Archetypes report is useful to me because it aligns with my own experiences and encounters with common Free and Open Source Software projects. An advantage of taking my alma mater’s Free and Open Source Software and Free Culture Minor is experiencing what real Open Source projects are like long before I entered the industry. The projects and organizations I contributed to and interacted with all ran their projects in one of the nine models identified in the report.

The Open Source Archetypes report speaks to my personal experience either using or contributing to projects like Fedora, Kubernetes, SpigotMC, MusicBrainz, and various independent projects. The value of Open Source for any project is in meeting the goals of the intended audience. By itself, “Open Source” is a broad term, even if it does have a legal definition. My experiences taught me the importance of how different Open Source projects meet the needs of different audiences, or even different combinations and balances of audiences. The Open Source Archetypes report creates language for something I previously only understood through direct experience.

When I first read the report earlier in 2020, I knew it was relevant to my work. But how could I begin to integrate it into the Open Source Mentorship programme I manage for the UNICEF Innovation Fund?

How I use Open Source Archetypes at UNICEF 🔗

The UNICEF Innovation Fund provides early stage funding and support to frontier technology solutions that benefit children and the world. Most teams in the Innovation Fund are from countries where UNICEF has an ongoing country programme.

A requirement for solutions we fund is that they must be Open Source. I have seen many different types of projects and business models since I started working as a part-time consultant for UNICEF in 2018. As exciting as this is, it was challenging to understand the best way of supporting each team and their Open Source projects. Each team and project had differences unrelated to their source code, but closely tied to their business models and impact they wanted to have through their work.

So, the Open Source Archetypes report have me language. It gave me examples and explanations of how Open Source can work to teams who had little to no prior experience of Working Open. I take the unique context and details I understand about each team I work with, and contextualize what they are doing compared to the different models in the report.

The feedback I received so far on the report with the 15+ teams I currently work with is mostly positive. Some teams exclaimed this report was what they wish could have read months before because it resolved many of their doubts. Others were more overwhelmed, and needed extra time to read and review.

For my role as a mentor, the Open Source Archetypes report gives me cues for how to best support and direct each team I work with. The task of building an Open Source community or participating in an existing one is not a small task. Whether it is documentation, project management, quality assurance and testing, or community engagement, I have yet to see any small team accomplish all of these things at once. So, identifying which archetype a team best identifies with gives me a cue to guide the teams on their path forward. It gives me context for how to make Open Source something that works for them instead of against them.

Unanswered questions 🔗

I have great appreciation and gratitude for the folks at Mozilla and Open Tech Strategies who compiled this report. But it was written over two years ago, and like all things in life, things can change. So, while I look comfortably from the position of hindsight, there are some critiques and missing components to the Open Source Archetypes reports.

My unanswered questions are below.

Does the Linux kernel (and subsequently, Linux distributions) represent another unwritten archetype? 🔗

The report explicitly avoided using the Linux kernel as the basis for any archetype:

In some ways the Linux kernel project could be considered “Wide Open”. However, both technically and culturally, Linux kernel development is sui generis and we have deliberately avoided using it as the basis for any archetype.

Open Source Archetypes, Page 17

Contextualizing a project like Linux is hard. There is a lot of history to a project that first launched over email in 1991. There are many “yes, but"s about decisions made 10 or even 25 years ago that would not replay the same way in 2020.

Yet this is important work. Linux represents not just the kernel, but also large, decentralized sub-units of other systems that integrate the kernel in order to make it useful (e.g. Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Arch Linux, you name it). These sub-communities include large entities and corporations, spanning multiple countries and organizations of various sizes.

The Linux kernel communities are worthy of a deeper look, possibly in order to define a new archetype.

How can Open Source Archetypes better fit the social/humanitarian sector? 🔗

The archetypes shared in the report largely focus on business sustainability. In other words, the report is biased towards Mozilla’s interest in funding the research in order to better understand how to support a commercially-successful Open Source project. To me, there seems like a gap in models that often work for Open Source projects perhaps like U-Report and Ushahidi.

This is an area of interest to me, and likely others in the UN and NGO space. The report could do more to address these kinds of projects.

How would you teach Open Source? 🔗

To conclude, the Open Source Archetypes report is an invaluable tool that provides me language and context for teaching others about Free and Open Source Software.

How would you teach Open Source? What models, research, or tools would you use to inform an Open Source mentorship or education programme? Share your thoughts below in the comments!

Where Byfield was accurate 🔗

While I don’t agree with all of Byfield’s sentiments, he identified some key challenges that still hold truth today: a predisposition to focus on differences and not similarities, an outreach approach centered on ethics and not software, and the importance of opportunities for intersectional interaction.

Predisposition towards difference 🔗

First, Byfield notes the differing age groups of the activist communities and the tendency for viewing others by their differences first, not their similarities. He seems to attribute the tendency to view others by differences first as a characteristic of older generations; however, this is not necessarily the full truth.

As a member of the young activist community, this explanation is too simplistic of the underlying cause. There is also a political motivation by established power to sow division among the population of a nation-state. It makes community organizing more difficult and presents diversity as an issue to “solve” instead of a source of greater unity and common strength.

This is exemplified by the social media algorithms of today that reward sensational content (judged on likes, views, clicks, or other user feedback) and share it widely across a huge platform. In 2006, it was difficult to imagine the relationship social media would have in the lives of an everyday person; today, a great deal of social power is granted to those who understand how to leverage social media, either for good (e.g. social activism) or harm (e.g. deceptively persuading large parts of a nation-state’s population leading up to a national election).

The politics of division are within the fabric of our political systems; this is a challenge for modern-day activism and community organizing to overcome. In identifying this as a challenge, Byfield is correct that a differences-first approach makes it harder to share and spread the importance of FOSS in other activism circles, especially as technology becomes an increasingly relevant way of how we experience our lives and how our systems of law and justice are enforced.

Outreach on ethics, not software 🔗

Second, Byfield suggests an ethics-based approach to outreach is more effective than a software-based approach. This is also correctly noted, even if perhaps overemphasized. The jargon and language of the technology world is not accessible to the large majority of the global population. While some degree of technology literacy might be expected in some populations, much of the existing FOSS community is deeply rooted in technology. Sometimes this limited perspective is counterproductive.

This revisits the rebranding of “Free Software” as “open source” in 1997. For many subsets of the wider open source community in 2019, the default approach to open source software is merely a secondary thought for how to collaboratively work on technology. This is part of the outcome of the Open Source Initiative’s gamble in 1997 by beginning to emphasize the business sensibility and practicality of open source, and de-emphasize the social roots of Free Software (or rather, try and position itself as some sort of translator between these two “worlds”, as if they cannot be spoken of together in the same room).

As such, those who work on open source software projects are not necessarily predisposed to assume the role of an activist. Truly if Free Software is to take root outside of technology, then those who see the ethical values of Free Software need to better organize and promote the values of FOSS externally. This will contribute to the diversity of Free Software activism by helping non-technology activists add FOSS as a tool to their existing work.

Intersectional movement building is the future 🔗

Thirdly and finally, and perhaps most importantly, Byfield suggests the importance of intersectional interactions between Free Software communities and other activist communities. This is a fundamental requirement for the growth of Free Software as a social movement. Those of us in Free Software see the world around us informed by a background informed by technology; this background is emphasized in a world that is generating new, advanced technology at an unprecedented rate. However, while software and technology are important parts of the world around us, they are not the world around us. They are one part of a greater picture of fighting for a common good and welfare for all people. There are others in similar niches who have a deep understanding of their problem space and how they want to approach a challenge.

“One group may be working against child poverty, another for recycling, but the people in these organizations can almost be transferred from one to the next.”

Peter T. Brown, Free Software Foundation Executive Director (2006)

Just like a healthy garden, cross-pollination of these niches is vital to help others understand how we can help each other in accomplishing our mutual goals (this also feeds into why the politics of division explained above is so pervasive and difficult). Bringing Free Software technologists to activist communities where there is not an overwhelming Free Software background (and vice versa) is vital to building an intersectional social movement that strengthens the social impact of Free Software, not just open source.

Where Byfield didn’t go far enough 🔗

Byfield made one assumption on how activists have “their own share of insularity” and that the presence of connections between two movements does not mean they could immediately connect their existing beliefs with new ones. Fioretti’s challenge was in others understanding why they should listen to him; there was a lack of foundational knowledge of open source and technology that is normally assumed of someone who works as a software engineer.

Indeed, attention is a currency in the world of an activist. It is not enough for a FOSS advocate to expect others to listen to you on an appeal of technology. Part of the work in sharing is understanding who you are sharing with; if FOSS wants to take deeper roots in the activist community, it needs to understand the backgrounds of activist communities and be creative in how to appeal the mission of FOSS to the mission of their work. Where you can build in-roads together with others through common initiatives is the beginning of grassroots community organizing. So, while Byfield is right that there is an almost competitive nature of ideas in activism, it is not enough to write insularity off as a fixed aspect of nature. To not acknowledge this is to deny the influence of capitalist power structures in the humanitarian sector as they pertain to sustainable funding.

What are today’s challenges? 🔗

Some of today’s challenges are about inclusion and power.

Inclusion builds power 🔗

Diversity and inclusion (D&I) are important but poorly understood; not only are D&I about including people of different identities in technology, but also people with backgrounds outside of technology. FOSS stands to benefit by including more people who do not necessarily have a strong technology or engineering background. The goal is to inspire different perspectives to contribute in meaningful ways to build sustainable technology.

Instead of seeing diversity and inclusion initiatives as problematic or unneeded, D&I groups in FOSS communities stand to be the most effective people at building community and influence.

Power and governance 🔗

In the activist / humanitarian / non-profit world, there is a power struggle for sustainability as it pertains to funding. Funding models in non-profit work (usually sustained by grants, sponsors, and donors) encourage solutions that get funded, not necessarily solve problems the most effective way. Many organizations struggle with how to achieve sustainable funding without being so dependent on the expiration date of a grant’s funding.

We need more representative governance models in open source communities that reflect the interests of the communities around them, not necessarily an individual, a company, or group of companies. Building governance models that empower people within a community to make decisions and reduce the corrosive influence of money from humanitarian work.

Where do we go from here? 🔗

This blog post is an active reflection of my own thoughts and perspectives of Free Software, activism, and humanitarian work. If you are interested in pushing this conversation further, find me in Brussels, Belgium for any of the following three conferences and let’s chat further:

• 30 January 2020: Sustain Summit
• 31 January 2020: CHAOSScon
• 1-2 February 2020: FOSDEM

If you want to discuss this further, you can also drop a line in our online discussion community, fossrit.community.

Photo by Walid Berrazeg on Unsplash

Managing an open source project is challenging work. The challenge grows as a project grows. Eventually, a project may need to meet different requirements and span across multiple repositories. These problems aren’t technical, but are important to solve to scale a technical project. Business process management methodologies such as agile and kanban bring a method to the madness. Developers and managers can make realistic decisions for estimating deadlines and team bandwidth with organized development focus.

At the UNICEF Office of Innovation, we use GitHub projects boards to organize development on the MagicBox project. MagicBox is a full-stack application to serve and visualize data for decision-making in humanitarian crises and emergencies. The project spans multiple GitHub repositories and works with multiple developers. With GitHub project boards, we organized our work across multiple repositories to better understand development focus and team bandwidth.

Here’s three tips from the UNICEF Office of Innovation on how to organize your open source GitHub projects with the built-in project boards on GitHub.

Bring development discussion to issues and pull requests 🔗

Transparency is a critical part of an open source community. When mapping out new features or milestones for a project, the community needs to see and understand a decision or why a specific direction was chosen. Filing new GitHub issues for features and milestones is an easy way for someone to follow the project direction. GitHub issues and pull requests are the cards (or building blocks) of project boards. To be successful with GitHub project boards, you need to use issues and pull requests.

The UNICEF MagicBox team uses GitHub issues to track on-going development milestones and other tasks to revisit in the future. The team files new GitHub issues for development goals, feature requests, or bugs. These goals or features may come from external stakeholders or from the community. We use the issues as a place for discussion on those tasks too. This makes it easy to cross-reference in the future and visualize upcoming work on one of our projects.

Once you begin using GitHub issues and pull requests as a way of discussing and using your project, organizing with project boards becomes easier.

Set up kanban-style project boards 🔗

GitHub issues and pull requests are the first step. After you begin using them, it may become harder to visualize what work is in progress and what work is yet to begin. GitHub’s project boards give you a platform to visualize and organize cards into different columns.

There are two types of project boards available:

• Repository: Boards for use in a single repository
• Organization: Boards for use in a GitHub organization across multiple repositories (but private to organization members)

The choice you make depends on the structure and size of your projects. For the UNICEF MagicBox team, we use boards for development and documentation at the organization level, and then repository-specific boards for focused work (like our community management board).

Creating your first board 🔗

Project boards are found on your GitHub organization page or on a specific repository. You will see the Projects tab in the same row as Issues and Pull requests. From the page, you’ll see a green button to create a new project.

There, you can set a name and description for the project. You can also choose from templates to set up basic columns and sorting for your board. As of writing, the only options are for kanban-style boards.

After creating the project board, you can make adjustments to the project board as needed. You can create new columns, set up automation, and add pre-existing GitHub issues and pull requests to the project board.

Now, you may notice new options for the metadata in each GitHub issue and pull request. Inside of an issue or PR, you can add it to a project board. If you use automation, it will automatically enter a column you configured.

Build them into your workflow 🔗

After you set up a project board and populate them with issues and pull requests, you need to integrate them into your workflow. Project boards are effective only when actively used. With the UNICEF MagicBox team, we use the project boards as a way to track our progress as a team, update external stakeholders on development, and estimate team bandwidth for reaching our milestones.

If you are an open source project and community, consider using the project boards for development-focused meetings. Additionally, it helps to remind yourself and other core contributors to spend five minutes each day updating progress as needed. If you’re at a company using GitHub to do open source work, consider using project boards as a way to update other team members and encourage participation inside of GitHub issues and pull requests.

Once you begin using the project board, yours may look like this!

Open alternatives 🔗

GitHub project boards require your project to be on GitHub to take advantage of this functionality. However, there are other open source alternatives available. You can use tools to replicate the same workflow explained above. GitLab Issue Boards and Taiga are good alternatives that offer similar functionality.

Go forth and organize! 🔗

Now, you can bring a method to the madness for organizing your open source project. These three tips for using GitHub project boards encourage transparency in your open source project and make it easier to track progress and milestones in the open.

Do you use GitHub project boards for your open source project? Have any tips for success that aren’t mentioned in the article? Leave a comment below to share how you make sense of your open source projects.

My internship at UNICEF is unique: I support open source community engagement and research as my primary task for the MagicBox project. For years, I’ve done this in open source communities in my free time (namely SpigotMC and Fedora), but never in a professional role. As I navigate my way through this exciting opportunity, I plan to document some of the experience as I go through blogging. My intent is that my observations and notes will be useful to someone else in the humanitarian open source space (or maybe to a future me).

But first, what does “open source community engagement and research” really mean?

What am I actually doing? 🔗

“Community engagement” is a buzzword phrase for the open source movement in the 2010s. Often, we hear about “community engagement” or the work of those “leading communities”, but it’s an abstract concept. In other words, building communities of humans and people is hard. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for any community. Every community has its own unique needs and goals. This means different methods of management and communication work better for some communities than others. My job is to help light the way for what this pathway means for the MagicBox team.

Since I started in January, a lot of my time so far was spent learning. What is MagicBox? What are we trying to deliver to our stakeholders? To the open source community? How does our data pipeline piece together? All these questions and more, I’ve tried to answer to different levels of success.

What’s next? 🔗

Now, I’m beginning to take a more hands-on role with the work, with a clear vision of what I want to do. The next few posts to come will dive deeper into what I’m up to.

If you have questions or are interested in keeping up with what’s going on, feel free to leave a comment here or subscribe to my blog to automatically receive future updates.

Opinions and views in my blog are my own and do not reflect the views of my employer.

Home is a suitcase 🔗

I began the third year of my degree and moved for the fifth time in two years when I made it back to Rochester in August. This time, I found somewhere to ideally live longer than only a few months of the year. I moved into a house with a few other roommates with more space than I’ve had before. For the first time in a while, it’s somewhere I’ve made to feel like home.

This move came months after I ended a semester of a study abroad program and lived in a city for an internship. Most of 2017 made my suitcase feel like a home, but it afforded many unique experiences.

Croatia: Study abroad 🔗

From January to May 2017, I participated in a study abroad program with my university to Dubrovnik, Croatia. RIT has full campuses in both Zagreb and Dubrovnik. This made planning the semester abroad easy, but also encouraged me to go somewhere I might not have gone otherwise.

My choice to study in Croatia was well-rewarded. On paper, I earned 12 credit hours, but I took away more than what I learned in class. My most important lessons came in the form of midnight bus rides to Albania, photograph exhibits capturing genocide in Sarajevo, and hugs from normally faraway friends in Czechia. My time abroad began a process in finding myself that has continued since my time in Europe.

DevConf 2017 / Fedora Diversity FAD 🔗

At the beginning of the year, the Fedora Diversity Team held a “Fedora Activity Day” (FAD) event in Brno, Czechia. If you’re outside of the Fedora community, think of a FAD as a focused, in-person team sprint. Together with our team in-person and remote, we mapped out our goals and plans for 2017 and set out to continue the work we began nearly three years ago.

In addition to the work we accomplished together, it was fulfilling for me to see my teammates that span three continents. I spent a week with not only my teammates but also my friends. The days we get to spend together are a privileged few in the year, and it was fulfilling and motivating for me to spend some of our time together in a way that wasn’t Pagure tickets or IRC meetings.

Read more about our team sprint in this event report:

https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/fedora-diversity-fad-2017/

FOSDEM 2017 🔗

In February, I attended the Free and Open Source Software Developers European Meeting (FOSDEM) for the first time. FOSDEM is the largest open source conference in Europe, bringing together over 8,000 open source enthusiasts, contributors, and leaders from around the globe.

I had the privilege to attend as a member of the Fedora community, so my time was between the Fedora booth to meet the community and catching interesting talks. I also gave a talk of my own on the main track, What open source and J.K. Rowling have in common! I gave this talk to a smaller audience at DevConf, but the FOSDEM audience was considerably larger.

In retrospect, my original talk topic is relevant but I have ideas on how I could have delivered my message more effectively. Regardless, it was a learning experience for me to present in front of a new audience. Public speaking opportunities filled my youth, both in theater and in presentations, but I had never presented to a technical audience before (let alone on a non-technical topic). The experience at FOSDEM helped build my understanding and I hope to return with a new topic someday in the future.

Exploring the Balkans 🔗

Outside of open source and Fedora, my time in Croatia included a lot of time outside of Croatia. When many of my roommates went to explore the wonders of Western Europe, I lost my heart in the shadows of the Balkan mountains. My spring break was a solo trip split between Sarajevo, Bosnia and Hercegovina and Tirana, Albania.

Sarajevo 🔗

The three days I spent in Sarajevo were short but significant. I was truly alone on this visit and it was up to me to make the most of it. Originally, I was skeptical to go alone, but I knew that I would never have a better opportunity to go. My fascination with Sarajevo stemmed from a year of studying European history in high school, and knowing the cultural significance of Sarajevo as a meeting point of western and eastern cultures. In the end, I decided to go, and I was rewarded for it.

Most of my trip in Sarajevo consisted of museums. I visited various museums, ranging from eighteenth to twentieth century history. The most rewarding for me were the Galerija 11/07/95 and the Tunnel of Sarajevo. The gallery documented the Srebrenica genocide in July 1995 by the Serbian armed forces. The exhibit was eye-opening and perspective-shifting. The Tunnel of Sarajevo, sometimes called the Tunnel of Hope, is another perspective-shattering experience. The museum introduces the tunnel used during the siege of Sarajevo during the 1990s, when Serbian forces surrounded the city for an almost four-year siege. The tunnel was the only way for citizens and resistance forces to contact the outside world and keep the resistance alive. A small part of the tunnel is preserved, and the other artifacts make it a gripping experience (not to mention it’s a short drive out of the city, so you also have a chance to mentally prepare and later unpack the experience).

Tirana 🔗

I visited Tirana, Albania four times on my trip abroad. In Tirana, my heart was captured by the people there. For years, I read about the Open Labs Hackerspace community based in Tirana and I always imagined an opportunity to see it in person. I actually remember my first encounter with their community was an Ada Lovelace Day event report. And somehow, the circumstances shifted where I was able to meet their community and immerse myself in the culture, if only for a short time.

During my times in Tirana, I participated in the first-ever 48 hour hackathon to support the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the first edition of Linux Weekend, and the annual Open Source Conference Albania (OSCAL).

https://fedoramagazine.org/students-fedora-linux-weekend-2017/

India 🔗

At the end of my study abroad experience in Croatia, a unique opportunity presented itself to me. I did not buy my return airfare back to the US before I left for Croatia. When price-checking for my trip back, I noticed it was a few hundred dollars extra if I decided to spend a week in India before flying back to the US.

I booked the tickets.

The last day of my classes finally came, and the next day, I was traveling further east, to Mumbai (or Bombay, if you prefer). I had the great fortune of having two great friends who invited me to the homes of their families during my trip. I visited Bee in Mumbai and Amita in Pune, all split across a single week!

My trip to India was eye-opening. For years, I’ve had a fascination with Eastern culture and philosophy, but it was something completely different to experience. Bee and her family took me to the Global Vipassana Pagoda, a personally fulfilling experience for me. We visited the Bandra–Worli Sea Link, Shree Mahalakshmi Temple, and several other places in Mumbai. I remember walking through the streets more than anything.

In Pune, Amita and her family showed me their favorite places. I had a chance to meet many other Fedora friends in Pune too. One of my favorite memories of Pune was a historic gurdwara. Amita took me and the others in our group to visit. For a moment, I finally got to see something I’ve only read about right in front of my eyes. The history and reverence in these places was absorbed into my mind.

I never expected an Indian visa stamp in my passport in 2017, yet it happened. I’m equally filled with wonder at how the circumstances unfolded as I am grateful this experience sneaked into my year.

Chicago: Urban experience 🔗

After my semester abroad and visiting India, I was whisked back to the United States, only to pack up once again for another new experience. From June to August, I lived in Chicago, Illinois to work an internship at Jump Trading. Chicago had a feeling of nostalgia for me because much of my father’s family has origins tracing back to Chicago. But I would find myself losing more of my heart in Chicago than I realized.

The internship 🔗

I worked with a fantastic team of people on exciting projects. Professionally, my time in Chicago was motivating and empowering. I was provided the opportunity to learn and also contribute. I walked in with a dreadful feeling of imposter syndrome and left feeling more confident in my own learning abilities. Docker, Kubernetes, and time-series data became a part of my daily work life, when I had little to no knowledge before then.

By the time my internship finished, I helped contribute to our team’s goal of standing up Kubernetes and contributing a few patches in Kubernetes projects like Minikube. I have great mentors to thank for not only direct, technical assistance but also motivational mentorship and empowerment too.

Everything else 🔗

There was more to Chicago than only the work too. Before long, I felt like a true Chicagoan, traveling the subways into the Loop, catching free concerts in Millennium Park, and indulging in the Chicago tradition of deep-dish pizza.

Unlike other cities I’ve visited, like New York City, Chicago felt easier to integrate into. The culture was notably “slower” than the fast-pace life of NYC, London, or Washington DC. I discovered Middle Eastern markets that became a regular part of my weekends, made friends with the baristas at a local coffeehouse, and had the privilege of hosting friends from three continents for short stays.

I left Chicago and was offered a new contract for the following summer in 2018. I’m looking forward to be back in June again.

Year of Fedora 🔗

2017 was full of time and effort spent in the Fedora community. In addition to the Diversity FAD, I was elected to the Fedora Council (on my third attempt), attended the annual Fedora contributor conference, Flock, and also narrowed my scope for contributions.

When I began contributing to Fedora, I was contributing to many things. Marketing, community operations, Fedora Badges, Fedora Magazine, Ambassadors, Games SIG, Join SIG, the Diversity Team, and maybe a few more things. After a while, I realized my contributions carried great width but poor depth. In 2017, I “reconfigured” my time in Fedora to focus in on the areas where I felt my time yielded the highest impact. This is Fedora CommOps and the Diversity Team.

I resigned as Fedora Magazine editor-in-chief and also formally stepped down from other teams. It made me sad, but I knew it was the right decision for me. I’m happy to spend more time working in fewer projects at a greater depth and focus than I had before.

Flock 2017 🔗

Flock, Fedora’s annual contributor conference, was held from Aug. 29 to Sep. 1 in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Every year, Flock is an empowering experience for me because of the face-time I get with the people I spend much of my year working with remotely. This year was no different, and many new faces were mixed in with the old ones.

The highlights for me were in three forms: the CommOps session, the Diversity Team session, and the Fedora Magazine session. Together with Sachin Kamath, we led the CommOps session. You can read more about our session here:

https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/metrics-docs-flock-2017/

The Diversity Team and Magazine sessions were also valuable for both teams to get feedback from the rest of the community. In the Diversity Team session, we had many active participants outside of our team that reminded us the importance of narrowing our focus for higher impact. I also attended other interesting sessions held by the community, like the future of fedmsg by Jeremy Cline.

CommOps FAD 🔗

Towards the end of 2017, I worked together with our team in CommOps to organize our own team sprint, or FAD, in 2018. We successfully planned the event and organized it in Brno, Czechia, similar to last year’s Diversity FAD.

More details on this will be found in its own event report!

ListenBrainz indie study 🔗

In my fall semester of 2017, I took on an independent study to further explore the ListenBrainz project. ListenBrainz is an open source social platform to document the music you listen to over time. If you’re familiar with Last.fm or Libre.fm, it’s a similar concept, but the focus is more on the data than the social features. ListenBrainz is supported by the MetaBrainz Foundation, also the guiding body for the more well-known MusicBrainz project.

In my independent study, I had a chance to contribute documentation and community tools (like issue / PR templates), as well as explore how the project gathers and builds metrics. I didn’t make my original milestone of major code contributions to the project, but I better understood the community and tried to help in the areas of low coverage, like documentation.

The experience was insightful for me and provided me an excuse to work on something that I am genuinely passionate about. Music is a powerful part of human culture, and the MetaBrainz Foundation takes a serious approach to documenting music, especially in a technical sense. ListenBrainz represents an opportunity for us to better explore and understand ourselves through our music listening habits. I hope someday that ListenBrainz will be a platform for data journalism and research about music. That’s my dream.

Opensource.com community moderator 🔗

At the beginning of 2017, I was brought on board as an Opensource.com community moderator. Together with other community moderators and site staff, I help contribute new content and source new writers to the site. My invitation to the community moderator team came shortly after the announcement that I received the 2017 People’s Choice Award. When Rikki Endsley invited me to the team, it felt like a natural alignment to my passion for storytelling.

All Things Open 2017 🔗

I was invited to All Things Open, an annual open source conference in Raleigh, by the Opensource.com team. The day before the conference, I met the rest of the team and other community moderators at the Red Hat HQ in Raleigh. We spent the day locked into a room together to hash out plans and goals for the next year. It was a productive opportunity for the team to work together and also a great opportunity to meet the other members of the community.

Some of my best takeaways from this experience were catching coffee with other community moderators, meeting Jim Whitehurst to talk about Opensource.com, and giving my talk, What open source and J.K. Rowling have in common, for the final time.

I hope I have the opportunity to go again next year to meet the awesome team behind Opensource.com. (If you haven’t considered before, come and write for us too!)

Happiness Packet Challenge 🔗

Another unusual milestone for my 2017 was the first rendition of the Happiness Packet Challenge. I was introduced to the Happiness Packets website in 2016. Happiness Packets are an easy way to say thank you to someone who has had a positive impact on you. I came up with a challenge to my friends and network to write one Happiness Packet a day, every day, for a week.

I followed up with the team behind the project to evaluate the impact of this idea, and I was pleasantly surprised. Here’s the number of messages sent for the two weeks prior to the Happiness Packet Challenge, followed by the week of the challenge:

• Week starting 2017-03-27: 2 sent
• Week starting 2017-04-03: 35 sent
• Week starting 2017-04-10 (challenge week): 72 sent

You can read more about the challenge in my original blog post. Keep an eye out for it again in 2018.

https://jwfblog.wpenginepowered.com/2017/04/happiness-packets-challenge/

Living openly 🔗

Earlier in this post, I alluded to how I felt like I began to find myself when I was abroad. My study abroad experience was the beginning of a longer process that leads into present day.

In April, I went public with my depression, both to help take a weight off my shoulder and to be a voice for others who are afraid to speak up. I was always concerned of the reaction from publishing something like that, but I was met with nothing but loving-kindness from friends and strangers. It gave me new confidence to live more openly and wear my values in the open.

The story continued in October, when I decided to delete my Facebook and Instagram accounts.

https://medium.com/@jflory7/cut-the-plug-deleting-facebook-and-instagram-6cbe7c86d9c9

I considered this for a couple of years before, but I pulled the trigger in October. Like many others, it felt almost too much of a task to disconnect myself from this huge network of people and friends. But the negative impacts of it were draining me and trapping me. Since I deleted my accounts, I’ve noticed a positive impact in overall levels of happiness and awareness. However, I don’t think the social media accounts alone are the reason for this.

In the near future, I hope to do a follow-up post to my decision to cut away from the Facebook and Instagram machines. Keep an eye out for more.

2018 🔗

It’s already February in 2018 when I finished this post. This year, I thought it would be the year when I get the post out closer to the new year, but somehow I always slip. In either case, it gives me a chance to take in some of the new opportunities and excitement of the new year before reflecting and looking back.

This year, I’m working an internship with UNICEF to help lead on open source community engagement and supporting the non-technical areas of their MagicBox platform. In the one month I’ve been doing this, I feel like I have tens of articles I could write about, but the experience is still maturing for me.

I also have another round in Chicago to look forward to over the summer. I’ll get to work with the same team as last year on similar projects, and I’m looking forward to going back.

As for the rest, who knows what’s to come? So many things that made 2017 what it was were the things I didn’t expect. The surprises in life are the salt to the regiment of daily life, and add flavor and spice in unexpected ways. I have no idea what my 2018 Year in Review will look like, and that’s okay. I’m looking forward to seeing what will make it in.

Thank you 🔗

Above all, every year, I think back on the people who positively impacted my life and contributed to the “flavor” of my year. A close friend reminded me recently that we all stand on the shoulders of giants. And isn’t it true? We all have our great mentors, great friends, and unexpected sages that help us find our own footing on this great path of life. We become ourselves from the various pieces impacted on us by others.

I’m thankful for all of the people who have made my year into the experience it was. The list is too long to write and I fear I would leave someone out – even significant impacts were made by people who had a short-term role in this last year.

A long time ago, my open source experience was jump-started by someone who did something kind and exceptional for me. It was a continuing trend since that moment. My only aspiration is to pay forward the good will that so many have bestowed unto me.

Thanks for making it this far down, and I hope to see you in 2018. Or who knows – maybe it will just be me reading this far down for next year, when I go to write my next year in review. Hi future me!