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.

This post is a reflection on the past year in my work with the UNICEF Venture Fund. We integrated new open source tools to capture metrics and data about open source repositories connected to UNICEF portfolio companies and created a shortlist of key metrics that map to business sustainability metrics. Now, we are better positioned to look back on past, current, and upcoming portfolio companies and mentor support programs.

As we move into 2022, this post covers my current thinking on these points:

1. Defining investments.
2. How do these investments impact sustainability?
3. CHAOSS metrics as an open source tool for an investment lens on sustainability.
4. What next?

Defining investments. 🔗

When we talk about investing in open source, what do we mean? What are the known inputs? What are the expected outputs? “Investments” and “investing” are broad terms. Investments typically mean sizeable financial injections of support and growth, but can also include non-financial investments too. Investments can also take the form of both time and energy (i.e. electricity and digital infrastructure).

The UNICEF Venture Fund provides equity-free funding for start-up companies building open source solutions of interest to UNICEF. All the start-up companies are registered companies in UNICEF program countries. As part of the Venture Fund’s location in the Office of Innovation, it is also a vehicle for UNICEF to explore frontier technology areas through the investments. When a start-up company is receiving investment from UNICEF, the company receives both funding and tailored mentorship about business and open technology.

A question I want to know is, what is the impact of the received funding plus guided mentorship? How does this approach enable the companies to be successful after graduating? What discoveries or knowledge could be shared with others to assist the development of their own open programs?

To summarize, an investment can be financial or non-financial. Financial investments include direct funding, grants, venture capital, fellowships, or any other exchange of capital. Non-financial investments include time spent in coaching sessions, personalized content for companies, and shared digital infrastructure. Neither list is exhaustive.

How do these investments impact sustainability? 🔗

Data makes introspection easier. Bitergia’s Cauldron.io was a champion tool for kickstarting an open source metrics strategy for the UNICEF Venture Fund. Its introduction as a tool opened up a wider span of data to look at. There are new opportunities to ask questions and explore growth, scale, and sustainability.

In order to come to a conclusion on sustainability impact, we need streamlined data to test a thesis. The Venture Fund team improved internal processes to how metrics are collected from portfolio companies. The team is unifying behind fewer tools and methods to ensure we see the same data and have the same view of the data points we measure. This also provides a fresh opportunity to review how we measure open source impact across portfolio companies. Many have dashboards on Cauldron.io, but data needs a storyteller for it to make meaning. So, the next step is to ask questions with this new data and frame a thesis to measure and test the sustainability of Venture Fund investments into open source.

Many have traveled before me on the same trail of thought. I started first with the Community Health Analytics Open Source Software (CHAOSS) project and its metrics releases. This served as the initial point of brainstorming to frame questions and different scenarios of risk, evolution, DEI, and value.

CHAOSS metrics as an open source tool for an investment lens on sustainability. 🔗

I reviewed the latest release of CHAOSS metrics and narrowed down four metrics I want to measure in the next year. I also shared thoughts on why collect this data and how to do it. This blog post is no more than me wondering out loud, to help me frame an analytical approach for this metrics strategy.

The four metrics are detailed below:

1. Contribution Attribution
2. Contributors
3. Collaboration Platform Activity
4. Labor Investment

Contribution Attribution 🔗

Question: Who has contributed to an open source project and what attribution information about people and organizations is assigned for contributions?

chaoss.community/metric-contribution-attribution/

This metric is insightful because it is targeted deeply into team and project culture. This metric is a good representation of how much the project leans into an open source model of building their project. This work ethos and intention to forge on an open source path is difficult to understand at times. If a team takes care to attribute their software dependencies and other contributors to their code (if any), this is a good sign that the team accepts collaboration as a value and encourages working with others.

I would measure this across two types of contributions: attributions for software dependencies including those with permissive licenses, and for any other direct contributors to the code and how they are recognized for their participation. This could be filtered in a red-yellow-green light approach:

1. Red: No attributions are made, or all attributions are inadequate.
2. Yellow: One of two attributions are made, or one attribution type is inadequately attributed.
3. Green: All dependencies and used works are correctly attributed.

Contributors 🔗

Question: Who are the contributors to a project?

chaoss.community/metric-contributors/

This metric explores a more human dimension of the people and participants to an open source project. The metric defines contributors and contributions broadly, as “anyone who contributes to the project in any way.” Understanding the people participating in a community, their motivations, goals, and why they choose to be in that community is important to understand sustainability. Otherwise, you may lose out on good opportunities to attract contributions from people who are already engaged, and new engagements may be difficult because of a mismatch of expectations.

This metric is more a means than it is an end; that is, it provides opportunities to ask more questions than provide detailed answers. Nevertheless, it does provide some guidance towards understanding contributors in a project, and it can lead to some concrete actions based on gathered insights. For example, this metric will enable deeper looks in areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Since I work with start-up companies with small, lean development teams, I look to understand the motivations of the developers working on their projects and where the motivations may align with another open source solution. This enables the two communities to leverage their combined brainstorming for meeting complimentary goals around development and innovation.

To collect this data, I would have the team define what areas of contribution they seek for their open source solutions and then map those desired contributions to a specific project area or different team members. This enables a form of consistent accountability for checking expectations with reality and understanding team capacity. Each area could be a key-value pair, where the value is the project area, team lead, or delegated team member for the type of contribution solicited.

Collaboration Platform Activity 🔗

Question: What is the count of activities across digital collaboration platforms (e.g., GitHub, GitLab, Slack, email) used by a project?

chaoss.community/metric-collaboration-platform-activity/

Collaboration platform activity is one effective proxy metric for community engagement if measured accurately. The metric does not define collaboration as much as it provides a data structure to measure it. It abstracts collaboration into key data points like timestamp, sender, whether the platform has threaded or non-threaded discussions, data collection date, and platform message identifier. To a degree, collaboration can be abstracted out in this way: a person takes any given action at a given time in a given way, and this action is measured as project-related activity on the collaboration platform.

There are a few possible approaches to collecting this data from UNICEF Venture Fund companies. Each approach does not cancel out another, but each approach could be combined with the others:

1. Measure common git activity like commits, issues, pull/merge requests. We already measure this data, but use it only in connection to validating Venture Fund workplans for each team with UNICEF portfolio manager(s).
2. Count communications like comments, reviews, public messages, and other outreach. Communications strategies and tools are typically inferred from common git activity. Measuring for engagement and stratifying those metrics into a smaller group could allow for deeper insights to the evolution of early-stage open source communities.
3. Make community hubs first-class citizens in the data curation process to infer about informal engagement. Both open source projects and UNICEF Venture Fund portfolio companies use a variety of tools to communicate, especially in view of COVID-19 and its seismic impact on how we work. Platforms like Discord, Telegram, Mattermost, Slack, Rocket.chat, Matrix, and others are focal points where projects collaborate, ask questions, and support others. Bringing this data stream into the mix offers deeper insights into how teams engage and build community around their work, and also guidance on when to push for contribution opportunities at the right time.

The satisfaction of these three options in their totality is not enough. To leverage the fullest impact, these metrics must tie into each other, and need to be connected back to a narrative. Why is this data being collected and what actions are influenced by the knowledge of this data? The data collection enables the evaluation of sustainability and understanding the birth, growth, and evolution of an open source technology product. Influenced actions can include moving more human resources (i.e. contractors or staff) to support a project, adopting a new open source best practice, and/or engaging new customers, talent, or other leads based on participation in the community.

Measuring collaboration platform activity is not black and white. Many new questions would likely come forward as part of measuring this activity. Yet this is the point—it lays the foundation for the next layer to the data collection, analysis, and reporting process around sustainability.

Labor Investment 🔗

Question: What was the cost of an organization for its employees to create the counted contributions (e.g., commits, issues, and pull requests)?

chaoss.community/metric-labor-investment/

This metric is perhaps the most ambitious of the group. How do you measure labor investment into an open source project? Or literally, the number of person-hours that go into software design, development, co-creation, and community management? It feels like a gargantuan effort, but there may be better ways to measure this in connection to other data the UNICEF Venture Fund is already connected about the businesses.

Measuring labor investment impacts two narratives: the rate of development on the open source work, and the impact of UNICEF investment into a company backing an open source work.

Firstly, understanding the rate of development on an open source work is easier to infer by understanding who is allocated on a project and how much of their time they dedicate to it. If a team of three contributors spares a few hours a week, it will mean something different compared to a team of five engineers spread across different disciplines working full-time. Mapping the labor investment for open source projects supported by UNICEF would enable better planning by understanding the typical labor investment in open source workplan tasks as piloted by other Venture Fund portfolio companies.

Secondly, this gives us a new way of talking about the impact of UNICEF Venture Fund investments as an investment not only in software products but also in labor. It gives us insight into the investment of labor in software engineering talent among portfolio companies. How does this measurement change over time of the investment? Do projects receive more or less investment of labor during the 12 month period we work with them? This could also be used as a proxy metric for the impact of our unique mentorship and coaching opportunities.

What next? 🔗

Knowing is half the journey. Even if the knowledge is not yet firmly rooted. The analysis and introspection are from me as an individual working among the UNICEF Venture Fund and do not represent the views and beliefs of UNICEF or the UN in any capacity. My intent is that by sharing this analysis in the open, it allows for a space where conversation can spark where it could not before. It also invites others to share ideas, feedback, and constructive criticism of an emerging metrics strategy for investments made into the open source ecosystem.

Next, more layers can be added and internal and external validation can help to keep this moving forward. An implementation plan would be the next step to follow this post. The implementation plan considers the process of how start-up companies move through the Venture Fund from start to finish. Who interacts with the companies and when? At what point is a company ready to begin building in a new metric or count in their monthly metrics? Do they understand the implications and assessments of these metrics? At what points in the process is data already being collected? Could these new data requests be added to existing requests? And so on.

I hope to formalize some of this new reporting and metrics strategy in upcoming cohorts in 2022, as part of a renewed effort into communicating how our open source investments tie into sustainable impact towards the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.

This post will serve as a milestone marker on the metrics strategy discussion in the coming one to two months. See you in 2022.

Featured photo by Edward Howell on Unsplash. Modified by Justin Wheeler. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Accommodations move us closer to equality but not equity. The presence of accommodations implies a belief in an “us” and a “them”. One group benefits from default inclusion, while another group either raises a collective voice, or is de-facto excluded. Instead of designing our world for others different than ourselves, we must design our world together. It is a quicker way to achieve a more just world.

The “abled” community needs to challenge our perspectives and do our share of the learning required to see things from another perspective.

An example I saw from Twitter that made an impression on me was how someone explained the idea of combinations and permutations of the five human senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. The commonly-held belief is that lacking one (or more) of these senses leaves you deprived. Without one of these senses, your potential is limited and you deserve to be pitied.

Multi-sensing > accommodations 🔗

So, what does it mean to be multi-sensing? Most of us see our five senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch) as a fixed state of sensory stability. These senses and basic mental stability are socially-assumed as always present. They define how we individually experience life.

Often those lacking one or more of these senses are seen as deprived. They are perceived as missing something or to have lost something they can never fully regain. The absence of a human sense comes with the added psychological burden of living in a world where you are often the afterthought, the “new use case”, the countless trials of countless beta versions of any kind of software that might help overcome the disadvantage of “missing” a sense or mental disability.

I suggest an alternative way to design for accessibility and inclusivity. A personal deviation is not written off as “missing” something, but instead as a new combination of senses gained. Designers should assume an expected and guaranteed variable of this new combination. Accessible design must be a first-class citizen in early project management planning.

To put it another way, observe the presence and lack of senses among us as a matrix of combinations, instead of large swathes of characteristics assumed to always be present. We unlock the best of our design knowledge to think in the pursuit of access to the greatest many instead of “what ticks off the box”.

Before, we saw an accommodation as when a specific feature is added to software for someone lacking one or many senses. But we must shift from accommodations to full inclusion. Accommodations are acknowledgements of disability. It assumes a fixed state where a set of critical features to guarantee usability will always lag behind for a subset of people. True equality is seeing access for those with disabilities as equal to the design of features for those with five active senses.

Featured image photo by Matthew T Rader on Unsplash.
Modified by Justin Wheeler.

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!

This post does not describe what the Principles are (click that link to learn more about them). This post describes the story behind the Principles, and how our Sustain Working Group worked together over three months of virtual facilitation during the COVID–19 crisis to build these Principles.

Overview 🔗

This blog post is a story, or perhaps open source lore. So, here is the abridged summary:

1. The Sticky Idea: How did a discussion topic at a one-day open source sustainability conference evolve into a three-month extended collaboration?
2. Facilitation, Roosevelt-style: The people are here. How do you facilitate a conversation with no scope and few bounds?
3. Is there a next chapter to this story?: The Working Group is winding down. What happens to the Principles next?

If you are hooked, read on.

The Sticky Idea 🔗

How does a discussion topic at a one-day conference evolve into an inter-organizational, international collaboration that spans three months?

When the accountability and transparency discussion groups formed at Sustain Summit 2020, none of us knew what would come after the event. Not to mention, there were several different sustainability topics explored at the Summit.

So, the conversation about corporate accountability was about the same as every other conversation during that morning: someone was motivated enough to step up and say, “I’ll do it – I’ll facilitate this conversation!”

Open Source Accountability Goals 🔗

Duane O’Brien volunteered to lead facilitation on defining goals for open source accountability. Duane proposed four goals to iterate on in the Summit break-out groups:

1. Set and publish a goal for open source contribution relative to value capture
2. Adhere to principles of authentic participation
3. Publish documentation of open source policies, processes, and project governance
4. Well defined reporting process that is publicly available

The morning discussions broadly focused on these goals. After the ice was broken and conversation was flowing, themes and patterns emerged in the stories we shared with each other. Later that day, Allen Gunn asked me if I would lead an afternoon discussion session. The second goal, these principles of authentic participation, were personally interesting to me, and the morning group was engaged too. So I said, “Yes, I’ll do it!” Even though I did not really have any idea what I was going to do yet.

Facilitation of Authentic Participation discussion 🔗

After lunch, I gathered folks for the discussion group to discuss what authentic participation means. If we could propose a basic set of principles that we agree on, could this be a useful tool for the pain points of stories shared in the morning session?

The afternoon discussion was insightful, but lacked firm conclusions. We had great ideas and lots of stories, but nothing to tie them together. I collected email addresses of folks who wanted to continue engaging on the Principles of Authentic Participation. However, I wasn’t sure what the next step would be at the time.

At the Summit, I committed to facilitation of a public Discourse forum discussion, but some attendees voiced that Discourse was not accessible for them. To compromise without exhausting myself across too many platforms, I promised to host a few online discussions for folks to gather and talk about these things again later.

The embers were hot on this discussion at the Sustain Summit. But it was still just embers. How do we get these embers to “spark” into something bigger? Enter the Fireside Chats.

Facilitation, Roosevelt-style 🔗

So, skip ahead a couple weeks. I was ready to push the conversation forward. The time was right for the first follow-up email to the discussion group participants. As promised, I opened a Discourse discussion that summarized our notes from the conference and asked open-ended questions. Later on, I announced the first of four Fireside Chats. The Fireside Chats became the primary vehicle of collaboration for the working group.

Text-based communications are my preference. But video?? I would have to swallow my introverted shyness if I was going to lead this. I never facilitated an online discussion group before. There were also not many public examples to learn from either. The style I took to the Fireside Chats was mostly my own. I relied on my past experience of facilitating open source project meetings and development to drive these Fireside Chats. And I borrowed a little inspiration from former American president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats during the 1930s/1940s.

For the first Fireside Chat on 2020 February 28th, I had no idea what I was doing. I prepared a loose agenda, but I left it broad so people could bring their own interests and passions into the conversation. I figured doing this would allow people to bring their own needs, desires, and wants to the conversation. It was unrealistic to expect a collaboration driven by my own motivations.

A successful collaboration requires all participants to have an opportunity to satisfy their own personal motivations for showing up in the first place. So, my approach centered our collaborative work on the group and not just myself, to avoid a high initial interest that dwindles down over time.

How did facilitation start? 🔗

The first Fireside Chat was exploratory. It was our first time talking about the Principles since the Sustain Summit. We caught back up on where we left off, detailed what we wanted to get out of this collaboration, and began scoping out what we thought we could accomplish together.

Although the first chat was mostly unstructured, it was essential to to identify themes and ideas that led to more focused, structured discussions for the next three Fireside Chats. The Discourse thread was also useful as an accessory for the Fireside Chats. I published notes from each Fireside Chat on the Discourse thread, and there was some asynchronous discussion between Fireside Chats.

Beyond the first Fireside Chat, the agendas became easier for me to write and the feedback became more focused. Fortunately, most of this work happened in public on the Discourse thread. So, if you are curious for more details on how the final three Fireside Chats went, take a look at the discussion thread.

Is there a next chapter to this story? 🔗

For now, the Principles of Authentic Participation Working Group is going dormant. We met our original goal of drafting some basic principles.

So, now what happens? So, let’s try to predict the future! (That can’t be that hard, right?)

My hope is that the Principles of Authentic Participation leads to more story-telling about what it means to authentically contribute to open source, whether you are an individual or an organization. To help curate the stories, I created a template to encourage folks to share them with us. The template provides question that makes it easy for a maintainer to copy and paste the story into our published Principles of Authentic Participation website.

Whether this hope comes true or not, we will see. But the Principles have a life of their own now. It doesn’t mean the Working Group will never meet again, or that we won’t revisit these ideas over time. But these Principles are now the “property” of the community to continue building. I will continue to participate where I can to curate stories about the Principles.

Closing thoughts 🔗

My hope in sharing this story is to help other facilitators and activists in the open source world approach digital-only organizing. Digital facilitation and organization is a skill we are all learning, for better or worse, in a COVID-19 world. But it isn’t a new skill. Lots of folks have been doing this for a long time, especially in the digital-first world of open source.

So, I hope this paints a picture of how we pulled off the Principles of Authentic Participation and how others can take what we did and improve on our processes.

It is possible to work collaboratively with new people on digital initiatives across different backgrounds and sectors. Remote facilitation is someone being brave enough to step up and lead, even if they have no idea what they are doing. After all… isn’t that what many other white American men like me do anyways? So can you.

Download TeleIRC v2.0.0 now! 🔗

If you want to skip the text and get to the software, head to the GitHub v2.0.0 release for more info. If you want the story behind this release, read on!

Eight months later… 🔗

The conversation started in a university hallway after the first RIT Linux Users Group meeting in the Fall 2019 semester. Together, Tim Zabel, Nicholas Jones, and Justin Wheeler set out to rewrite TeleIRC from NodeJS to Go. This was done to address a growing backlog of challenging feature requests on TeleIRC, but also a way for us to gain more experience working with Go. Along the way, we also ended up facilitating an agile-inspired software release process adapted for open source.

So, what happened in the eight months after the first conversation? The team meet for weekly meetings each Saturday afternoon (at first in-person, later virtually), two new core contributors joined the team, and some drive-by contributors provided feedback andf added code to the new release. There were charts, whiteboards and dry-erase markers, and lots of Blue Jeans video calls. But after all this time, we made it to release day!

Thank you amazing volunteer contributors! 🔗

This endeavor was a shared commitment by our volunteer committer team. All five of the volunteer core maintainers spread patience and sustained effort over time. At the end, we made something really cool to show for this work.

A huge thanks to our core maintainers and all current and past contributors to TeleIRC. You have all contributed to the success (and motivation!) for this project. It is fun to work on cool projects with friends!

A proper shout-out goes to the core maintainers who joined the team over the last eight months working on this release:

• Kennedy Kong
• Kevin Assogba
• Nicholas Jones
• Tim Zabel

“I found a bug in TeleIRC v2.0.0!” 🔗

If you run into a problem, check out the TeleIRC documentation and open an issue if it does not answer your questions.

Get in touch! 🔗

If you have questions, get in touch with the developer community. You can find us on Telegram and on IRC (#rit-lug-teleirc on chat.freenode.net).

There are several new and noteworthy changes in TeleIRC v2.0.0. This post walks you through the major changes and differences for TeleIRC v2.0.0. Read on for the highlight reel of this release.

Full rewrite to Go 🔗

TeleIRC v2.0.0 is a complete and total rewrite. With the lessons learned and best practices of the NodeJS v1.x.x releases under our belt, the team set out in September 2019 to rewrite TeleIRC in Go. The rewrite was motivated by fun and personal interest, but it was also intended to make the future of TeleIRC more sustainable.

The rewrite makes TeleIRC simple, fast, and lightweight. TeleIRC is unique from other chat bridge software, which usually focus on extensive configuration and supporting many chat platforms.

Additionally, the success criteria in order to release was feature parity with v1.x.x releases. The team accomplished this almost completely, with one exception. TeleIRC v2.0.0 does not include Imgur image upload for IRC; however, a v2.1.0 feature release will include Imgur support.

To summarize, TeleIRC v2.0.0 is written to be a simple and excellent Telegram <=> IRC bridge. No more, no less.

Run TeleIRC v2.0.0 as a compiled binary 🔗

The new release is available as a standalone 8 MB binary. The only deployment assets needed are the binary and a config file. Other pathways, including build from source and Ansible Roles, are also available.

This is a departure from TeleIRC v1.x.x releases, which required a NodeJS run-time and installing project dependencies. TeleIRC v2.0.0 does not require a Go run-time on the host.

Improved TeleIRC v2.0.0 documentation 🔗

End user feedback shaped and improved documentation during development.

Thanks to feedback collected during the pre-release process, the documentation is simplified and written to be easy to understand. We hope you find the TeleIRC Quick Start page a helpful introduction to getting TeleIRC running in little time.

Future roadmap for containers 🔗

Because of v2.0.0 design decisions, there is a planned future for container and container orchestration use cases. At release time, a Dockerfile is available, but it is not yet tested or documented.

In future releases, the TeleIRC Team will continue to test the container image and iron out bugs. Future deployment assets and documentation will offer pathways to run TeleIRC in Kubernetes or OpenShift v4.x.x.

Article format inspired by Ryan Lerch’s format for “What’s new in Fedora Workstation”.

Why does this matter? 🔗

This exploration and thought experiment is important to understand when revisiting social movements in technology in the current day. In the FOSDEM 2020 talk Mike and I gave, we presented three possible digital “freedoms” for artificial intelligence. The rights-based approach we presented at FOSDEM 2020 was inspired by the origin of the Free Software movement.

But to understand how we got to today with thousands of contributors to the Linux project, billions of dollars in open source company buyouts, and the words “open source” used on mainstream cable news channels, we have to start from the beginning, in 1983.

27 Sept. 1983: GNU Project announced 🔗

On 27 September 1983, the GNU Project was announced by Richard Stallman. The GNU Project was a collection of Free Software tools for building a free operating system. But it was also more than that. The GNU Project came with a vision to give computer users freedom and control of their use of computers. To do this, the GNU Project advocated for four fundamental freedoms:

• Run software in any way desired
• Copy and distribute the software
• Study it (i.e. reading the source code)
• Modify it and make changes

Today, we call these the Four Freedoms.

So, the GNU Project was founded with these fundamental freedoms as the motivation for why they did what they did. It was more than shipping code for code’s sake, but to lead by example in how software could be developed without sacrificing the rights of users.

4 Oct. 1985: Free Software Foundation founded 🔗

Next, skip ahead to 4 October 1985. Two years after the launch of GNU, the Free Software Foundation (F.S.F.) is founded to support and sustain GNU and the Free Software movement. The values of the GNU Project were important and valuable, but it wasn’t enough to leave them out in the world on their own.

At first, the F.S.F. focused on employing software developers to work on Free Software and the GNU Project. Later, the F.S.F. transitioned to legal and structural issues to support the Free Software community.

So, it is one thing to have your values and ethics out there, but they need to be protected and respected by the rest of the world too. The F.S.F. represented the sustainability of protecting these rights and beliefs, originally put forth by GNU.

While the F.S.F. does help sustain those rights, how does a nonprofit foundation actually enforce these rights in practice?

25 Feb. 1989: GNU General Public License created 🔗

Finally, we skip ahead four more years to 25 February 1989: the first version of the GNU Public License (G.P.L.) is created. This is the license that gave “copyleft” a name. It was written and released for the GNU Project, but the license itself was stewarded by the F.S.F.

The G.P.L. put power in the hands of individual people and activists to shape how others used their software. Thus, copyleft is put into a practical legal policy. In a sense, the G.P.L. allowed software developers to place the Four Freedoms at the core of their code.

Although enforcement of copyleft licenses has a blemished history, it was still the “teeth” in translating these values and values to the rest of the world. It took inspiration from how copyright was not something often considered when distributing software until the early 1980s.

And thus, copyleft becomes a radical invention in software with the proliferation of the G.P.L., especially in its adoption in prominent projects like the Linux kernel.

Is the past relevant to social movements today? 🔗

So this was a lot of history. Is the past relevant to where we are today? First, consider how the early Free Software movement responded to these emerging societal issues in the 1980s.

Free Software was a response to the changing ecosystem of software distribution. Software became more valued because of a standardization on hardware that didn’t exist previously. There were simply fewer architectures to compile for!

Suddenly, the value of software increased. It became a commodity.

Before this commodification of software, the Four Freedoms were, in a sense, the default way of distributing and sharing software. After commodification, this was no longer true. The Four Freedoms were rooted in a belief that there are essential rights that belong to all users of computers and computer systems. Stallman observed this change directly at the MIT Media Lab in the 1970s and early 1980s. This motivated him and many others to stand up for Software Freedom by asserting these freedoms.

To respond to commodification of software, Free Software took a freedom-based approach to established their values, as the Four Freedoms. So, looking back 40 years ago, is it possible to extend and make the past relevant again in today’s changing world?

Before we can answer that, we have to first ask. How has the world changed?

Your future is the new commodity. 🔗

The history of Free Software overlaps with what is happening now.

Today the world is about predictions: predictions about human futures. This is accomplished by the combination of software and data. Human futures are a simple formula: Data + Software. Or, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

But how are human futures becoming a commodity? In the 1980s, software became the thing we “sold”. It had inherent value. Today, the ability to predict what you are doing to do next is valuable. This makes both your and my future the new commodity. Where will we go next? What will we buy next? Who have we contacted recently?

But data is only one piece of this big puzzle. It is the enabling force for determining our futures. Third-party organizations collect the world’s data on a massive, centralized scale. Your data is what allows companies to sell your future.

To add a metaphor, data is like oil, not gold. You consume the input (data) to sell the output (human futures).

Where are we today? 🔗

So, how have we responded to our changing world?

There have been some successful resistance to the new value of user data and human futures. The privacy movement and legislation like G.D.P.R. are representative of this.

However, data privacy is only one part of the big picture. Focusing on individual empowerment does not protect us from societal effects. Consider predictive policing and court rulings as two examples.

Ultimately, the data privacy movement has been a key factor in combating the effects of surveillance capitalism, but there are still gaps. Mike and I noticed we need to approach topics like artificial intelligence not in pieces, but as a whole.

And some organizations have recognized this challenge and are working to address it. “Working groups” and reports with non-mandatory recommendations are on the rise. However, these groups are not effective on moving forward ways of ensuring people are effectively protected from the unforeseen harms of AI systems. “Light self-regulation” works on an opt-in model, and it is against the interest of some actors to opt in.

So, if we are in the middle of this societal shift from software as a commodity to human futures as a commodity, where do we go from here? Do we choose chaos or community?

At time of publication, I am still wrestling with these questions. As are a lot of people! To get a wider picture of what is on my mind in 2020, read my event reports from my pre-coronavirus 2020 travels.

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash.

What’s coming in TeleIRC v2.0.0? 🔗

TeleIRC v2.0.0 is a complete rewrite of TeleIRC. The team is migrating the code base from NodeJS to Go. In September 2019, the team began scoping the requirements and how to approach this large task. TeleIRC v2.0.0 does not add new features, but aims to have feature parity with the v1.x.x version of TeleIRC.

You might be asking, why bother with a total rewrite? What does this actually accomplish for the project? To answer this question, some historical context is needed!

TeleIRC v1.0.0 was an experiment. 🔗

TeleIRC v1.0.0 was originally created and released in September 2016 by RIT alum Mark Repka. Mark created TeleIRC as a cool project for the RIT Linux Users Group (RITlug) when he was a student and vice president of RITlug. The project was written in hackathon spirit: to prove that something that was not yet common wasn’t that hard to do.

Fast forward to today: TeleIRC ends up being pretty popular! As do chat bridges (Matterbridge, Matrix/Riot, etc.) as a whole. The Fedora Project is one of our largest users, with a dedicated Special Interest Group to manage the bots. The LibreOffice community is another one of our biggest users. Several international communities also adopted TeleIRC to make their chat rooms more accessible to a new generation of open source fans. Some example users are Linux and BSD user groups and hackerspaces in Argentina, Albania, and across Asia. You can see the full list of TeleIRC users for yourself.

TeleIRC has grown in a way we never thought it would. Which is awesome! But the project was not originally designed to grow or scale the way it has. Additionally, by being at a university, contributors come and go as students graduate and move on to industry. We also have to think about how to maintain TeleIRC beyond the typical student life-cycle common in the academic world.

Let’s approach TeleIRC v2.0.0 as engineers. 🔗

A full rewrite allows us to fully leverage our knowledge as software engineers. In 2020, we know TeleIRC has a large user community and is an important part of how many open source communities communicate. We also know that breaking code into smaller, more modular pieces makes it easier to maintain and bring in new contributors. A full rewrite allows us to apply the lessons the team has learned over the years, in a way that incremental feature releases does not allow.

A few areas are in clear focus for the TeleIRC v2.0.0 rewrite:

1. Write clean, simple code that is easy to understand
2. Test the code so it is easy to tell when things are working and when they aren’t
3. Think about how to bring in new contributors to continue the project in the future

But maybe you are also asking, why the jump to Go?

A Go rewrite distinguishes our project. 🔗

When Mark and I launched the project in 2016, we didn’t look around to see if anything else like RITlug’s TeleIRC already existed. Turns out, there was another NodeJS project with the same name. Skip forward a few years, and there are also projects like Matterbridge, pytgbridge, and other implementations. So, with all this commotion out there these days, why bother with our version of yet another chat bridge?

First, there is one design principle guiding our project from others like us: to do one thing and to do it well. Matterbridge is an excellent tool, and we even use it in conjunction with TeleIRC at our university. However, it is a complex tool with many features and options. For some people, this is a non-issue. But the TeleIRC team likes to think there is beauty in simplicity. Instead of offering a tool with the most features and configuration options, we aspire to do a single thing and to do it really well: connect Telegram groups and IRC channels together.

Second, although the FruitieX/teleirc project is archived today, it was once the biggest alternative to our project, also written in NodeJS. When we decided to launch TeleIRC v2.0.0 development, it had a larger community and user base then ours. So instead of offering a “similar but different” NodeJS project, we would be the first Telegram-IRC bridge written in Go. (Yes, Matterbridge is also written in Go, but see the above paragraph.)

Third… many of the existing maintainers of TeleIRC simply wanted an excuse to learn Go. It is an opportunity to expand our knowledge, experience, and skills, especially since we are students preparing to enter the industry.

Go has a better story for Kubernetes / OpenShift. 🔗

Finally, we are carefully considering the needs of one of our biggest downstream users: the Fedora Project. Several TeleIRC developers also support Fedora’s TeleIRC SIG. Recently, the Fedora Infrastructure team launched an OpenShift instance for the Fedora community, called Communishift. All existing infrastructure in Fedora is gradually moving from virtual machines or OpenStack to OpenShift. To support this migration, we want to make a Go-based TeleIRC as easy to deploy in OpenShift as possible.

And fortunately, Go has a great story in the container orchestration world. Kubernetes and OpenShift are also Go-based projects. Go is the dominant language of this ecosystem. Its excellent performance in the niche of networking makes it a great choice for what TeleIRC does.

Now that you know more about the “why is this happening,” let’s talk on where things are and what you can expect!

TeleIRC v2.0.0: Progress so far 🔗

TeleIRC v2.0.0 is approximately 76% complete. All progress is tracked in the v2.0.0 milestone on GitHub. 46 issues and pull requests were closed since we began in September 2019. At publishing time, about 16 more issues and pull requests are left before we cut the v2.0.0 release.

Earlier in 2019, the maintainer team consisted of Justin Wheeler, Tim Zabel, Seth Hendrick, Nate Levesque, Nic Hartley, and Robby O’Connor. Now joining the committer group, we are happy to welcome Nicholas Jones, Kevin Assogba, and Kennedy Kong to the team. The current core group of maintainers for v2.0.0 are Justin, Tim, Nicholas, Kevin, and Kennedy.

When to expect TeleIRC v2.0.0 🔗

TeleIRC v2.0.0 is targeted for a release date of Friday, May 15th, 2020. At this point, we expect to have full feature parity with the v1.x.x version. We will recommend all existing users to upgrade to the latest release then.

In the meanwhile, the team is getting ready to cut a v2.0.0-pre1 release, our first “pre-release” of the Go port. We expect this release to be available on our Releases by Saturday, March 28th. Along with the v2.0.0-pre1 release, there are a few other details to note:

1. TeleIRC v1.5.0, the final version of the NodeJS version, will be released.
2. No future contributions will be accepted to the NodeJS version.
3. master branch in git will reflect the latest Go version of TeleIRC.

Once the v2.0.0-pre1 release is available, we want help to take it for a test drive! If TeleIRC is critical for you, we do not recommend using it yet, as it does not have full feature parity yet. But your early feedback can help improve the future of the next release while we are in active development.

Get involved with TeleIRC! 🔗

You can be a part of the upcoming TeleIRC v2.0.0 release. We’d love your help! There is no formal commitment to contributing, although we ask for participation through a single sprint cycle.

Read our Contributing guidelines on how to get started with TeleIRC. Virtual developer meetings take place every Saturday at 15:00 US EDT, so anyone can join and participate.

Come say hello in our developer chat rooms, either on IRC or in Telegram!

Background photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash.

Sustain Summit events are led by a facilitator. There are no keynotes, talks, or sponsor demos. Your undivided attention is required. Phones and laptops should not be used throughout the day and you will be asked to put devices away if they are a distraction to you or anyone else.

When we talk about sustainability, we are talking both and equally about the sustainability of resources and the sustainability of its people. We hope you can join us for the conversation.

sustainoss.org/summit-2020/

This is my second time attending Sustain OSS (see my 2018 event report). I attended on behalf of RIT LibreCorps to represent the sustainability efforts at the RIT FOSS@MAGIC initiative, but also to represent myself as an individual and sustainer in the open source movement. For Sustain OSS 2020, I arrived hoping to learn more about community-first governance models. I left with a lot of notes and the first blueprints for Principles of Authentic Participation.

Event reports take many forms. Since Sustain is structured in a unique format, my event report is structured as follows:

• At a glance: structure and key takeaways: High-level overview of what the conference is like and the biggest ideas on my mind at the end of the day
• Community-first governance: I came ready to explore this idea, and had a unique conversation about citizen assemblies
• Principles of Authentic Participation: Impromptu session I facilitated, and thus spent most of my time focused on

At a glance: structure and key takeaways 🔗

If you’re here for the quick overview, this is it.

I loved Sustain OSS 2020 because it is a unique collection of people from various backgrounds in the Free/Open Source movement. Both old and new folks, software engineers and designers, open source program office folks and the FOSS lawyers, all together in one room. Perhaps the best part for me is leaving with a sense of empowerment and connection to a bigger movement of people.

Speed breakout sessions 🔗

The first half of Sustain 2020 started with speed breakout sessions led by many facilitators. There were around twelve small discussion groups focused on specific topics. You could spend 4-5 minutes at six topic groups. Choosing was hard! These speed sessions are primers on what to spend the second half of the day focused on, in a more detailed discussion.

I attended these sessions:

1. Diversity and inclusion
2. Open source movement in Africa
3. Minimum Viable Product: Good governance models
4. Documentation
5. 20 years of sustainability
6. Models for corporate accountability as open source community members / what does it mean to be a corporate member of open source communities?

Key takeaways 🔗

I came up with four key takeaways from Sustain OSS 2020 as a whole (not including the detailed sections further below):

Inclusion is local 🔗

When reaching out to new areas and demographics, include local community leaders. This is to say, if you are organizing communities in Asia or Africa, the success of your outreach campaign depends on your ability to enable and include existing community leaders in these regions. Local perspective is required for authentic grassroots success.

Rules for revising rules 🔗

When defining community governance or policy, expect change. So, include ways to change the rules later when the world changes around your governance or policy.

Generalists transition to specialists 🔗

In the early phases of an organization or project, community members are often generalists. Fewer people wear many “hats.” But context-switching has a cost. As the organization/project grows, defined roles become more important. Defined roles avoid everyone doing everything.

Designers focus first on design. Developers focus first on code. By specializing, you maximize the potentialities of what your team brings to the table.

We got the power 🔗

There was a breakout group about ethics in Free Software. Two emerging themes were creating ethics review boards at organizations and the power of labor organizing. Some suggested normalizing ethics training in employee on-boarding.

Most notably, there was a highlighted need for safer spaces for labor organizing discussions. Labor organizing comes at a high personal cost for many.

Community-first governance models 🔗

I came to Sustain OSS 2020 ready to explore community-first governance models. In December, I published a blog post on why Free Software is still not on activists’ agendas. Free Software outreach often emphasizes technology, not people or ethics. We focus on technology so much, we forget why this movement began in the first place. So, in a world where corporate interests in a project often conflict with interests of grassroots communities, I wanted to know what “community-first governance” really means.

For context, I consult with humanitarian organizations and non-profits that want to build community around their open source projects. But from personal experience, I realize community stakeholders need input to decision-making if the community is going to stick around.

Citizen assemblies in open source? 🔗

While I didn’t explore this in a session, I did have an interesting conversation with Xavier about citizen assemblies and how open source communities might be modeled after them. Xavier explained citizen assemblies to me as a form of hyper-local representation in policy-making in regional governments. For example, U.S. citizens are obligated to serve on jury duty, or a jury with your peers on a court hearing. Similarly for citizen assemblies, individuals are selected at random based on different demographic factors. Those selected serve a period of time on a local legislative body.

In open source projects divided across different contexts, think about the demographics represented in our communities. What might the demographic factors look like?

• In internationally-dispersed communities, it might be approximate region or nationality.
• In corporate-focused projects, it might be diversity of employers.

Citizen assemblies in open source could mean a group of contributors are selected at random to serve on the executive decision-making body of a community. The decision to serve is always optional. If a selected person declines, another person is selected.

I think this is a crafty way to address a cultural divide often present in Global South communities. Many contributors subconsciously look for an invitation to contribute. Being explicit by selecting an eligible, qualified candidate actively includes perspectives not commonly represented. It could also be a way to get around imposter syndrome and self-(non)selection in communities that use committee governance models.

I am still sitting with this idea. But I think Xavier’s idea of applying citizen assemblies to open source communities is valid. I’m interested in exploring what this model could look like in practice when the opportunity for experimentation presents itself.

Principles of Authentic Participation 🔗

I attended a session about corporate accountability in open source contributions. It evolved into a longer discussion about Principles of Authentic Participation. This week, I launched a wider discussion about this on the Sustain OSS Discourse forums, so instead of repeating myself in this post, read the Discourse thread and leave your thoughts there.

However, for the reader’s convenience, the six principles we drafted are below:

Authentic Participation Starts Early. 🔗

This came out of discussions about organizations showing up with mature, fully-baked contributions over which the community had no input.

Authentic Participation Puts The Community First. 🔗

This reflected the general consensus that when an organization and the community want different things, the community needs to come first.

Authentic Participation Starts With Listening. 🔗

This was Duane’s reflection of some comments about folks showing up to projects with no historical context and telling them everything they were doing wrong.

Authentic Participation Has Transparent Motivations. 🔗

Without a shared understanding of the motivations, it’s impossible to resolve differences of opinion effectively. No hidden motives.

Authentic Participation Enforces Respectful Behavior. 🔗

This is about organizations taking responsibility for the behavior of their representatives.

Authentic Participation Ends Gracefully. 🔗

No sudden withdrawal of resources without notification and an exit plan. Clear documentation that would allow the community to pick up projects when a company decides to withdraw support.

Thanks folx! 🔗

To wrap up this Sustain OSS report, a few thank-yous are in order:

• Stephen Jacobs: For always being supportive for yet another trip abroad and helping me push my career forward in a number of ways (and footing the bill!)
• Mike Nolan: My co-conspirator, partner in FOSS, and comrade in arms
• The Principles of Authentic Participation group: I didn’t plan to facilitate at Sustain and I was nervous about it, but you all were wonderful. We had a fruitful discussion and I’m looking forward to the follow-up.

Sustain OSS 2020 continues to give me a lot to think about and consider. I’m fortunate to have attended. I hope this event report gives additional visibility to some of the conversations held in Brussels this year.

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

Transparency is important to me. I wanted to make this announcement ahead of time to set clear expectations for the upcoming months. I am returning to Chicago, IL to work another internship at Jump Trading, LLC. From June to August, I am working at their Chicago office. I am excited to return and learn more from an amazing team of people.

I am not blocked by company policy from contributing to open source, so I won’t disappear completely. However, while I am still able to contribute to Fedora, I do not expect to keep up the level of activity that I contribute at now during my internship.

Away from May to August 2018 🔗

May is filled with other personal commitments, followed by a near immediate departure to Chicago in early June. Thus, I am stepping out of Fedora in early May. I hope to spend time with friends and family before departing for Chicago, so my estimate is a little generous to the benefit of being realistic. My internship ends around mid-August, so I hope to begin my normal levels of contribution around this time.

The only area I hope to stay partially active with is the Fedora Community Blog to continue my post as the editor-in-chief. While I still don’t expect being fully involved, I hope to help with editing and keeping things moving.

I’m looking forward to seeing familiar faces again in August at Flock 2018!

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.

Past term 🔗

In this past election, the Council encouraged the new FAmSCo to retool themselves. They should support the Ambassadors in a new age of Linux outreach and events. And they have done exactly that. Clarifications and improvements to the mentorship policies are taking place, the Fedora Ambassadors Membership Administration (FAMA) was reformed, and a Fedora Activity Day (FAD) for the LATAM region was successfully planned and executed. As a voting Ambassador, I am proud of all FAmSCo members and happy to see the progress they have made this term.

One concern 🔗

However, one thing stood out to me the past election. All of the representatives on FAmSCo were only from the EMEA and LATAM regions. Part of the fault is that there were no NA candidates and only one candidate from APAC. Therefore, the benefit of this was that EMEA and LATAM communities were more in touch with FAmSCo, since members in their meeting included elected representatives. In NA and APAC, this was not the case.

For Ambassadors in these regions, we did not have an attendee in our meetings to share news with FAmSCo. If we wanted to keep up, we would have to dig deeper. In March, I filed two tickets to suggest opening the mailing list to public participation and establishing an IRC channel presence. Consequently, FAmSCo has improved on being more accessible and transparent for all Ambassadors.

However, there is still a disconnection when your region doesn’t have an elected official to help represent the unique needs and perspectives of your region. In NA, I thought it would help to have a representative. This past June, I traveled to India and met with some Ambassadors in Pune, India. My discussions with them led me to believe that APAC needs representation in FAmSCo too.

Looking ahead to the next FAmSCo 🔗

Three seats are open for this coming election in August, leaving four (fantastic and well-qualified) FAmSCo members from EMEA to serve another term. Therefore, this leaves one region of the world well-represented by the Fedora Ambassador leadership body. Seeing as there are three seats up for elections and three regions that could be represented, I encourage voters in the next FAmSCo election to remember how big the Fedora community is.

The planet is big, and it’s hard to know what’s happening in different countries, regions, and continents. While we are all united as Fedora Ambassadors, there are unique challenges that our Fedora friends from one region may face that others may not. There are cultural, language, and currency differences. Some communities have a better foundation while others need guidance and encouragement to grow. I encourage all participating voters in this next election to remember our friends around the world and to help keep everyone included and involved in the conversations that drive the project forward.

During the hiring process, I was happy to ensure that contributing to open source software would still be possible during my time of employment. I saw during my on-site interview that Jump Trading employs open source software throughout the company but also contributes back to open source, either with hours or donations. However, while I am still able to contribute to Fedora, I do not anticipate being able to maintain the level of activity that I contribute at now during my internship.

Stepping out from May to August 🔗

Due to exams and personal travel plans in May followed by an almost immediate departure to Chicago in early June, I will be stepping out of Fedora beginning in early May. I hope to spend time with friends and family before departing for Chicago, so my estimate is a little generous to the benefit of being realistic. My internship will finish around August 20th, 2017, so I hope to begin my normal levels of contribution around this time.

It will be challenging for me to step back for this long amount of time, after my involvement with Fedora has become such a huge part of my life. However, it is only a temporary change, and the time off ends near Flock 2017. So I will have a lot to get caught up on before the conference begins!

The only area I hope to stay partially active with is the Fedora Magazine to continue my post as the editor-in-chief. While I still don’t anticipate being fully involved, I hope to help with editing and to write a few articles during the summer as well.

I’m looking forward to seeing familiar faces again in August!

Communicating between Ambassadors and Design 🔗

From our conversation, I learned that there was a disconnect between the Ambassadors and the Design team. As a sponsored Ambassador myself, I had never seen anywhere documenting the steps or process I should take to ask for art assets when needed for an event. There were also things I had not considered about what goes into the printing and production process for items too. Every region of the world seems to do things a little differently!

With the information I learned from our conversation in a CommOps meeting, I penned up a first draft of what the communication process should look like between Ambassadors and the Design team. The page is not official yet, and I posted a bit ago to the Design Team mailing list requesting feedback on the page. Hopefully, if the information passes approval from the Design Team, we can work on socializing this information with all Ambassadors across the four regions of the world. The end goal of this is to make it easier on both the Ambassadors and the Design Team by doing the following…

• Making it clear what to do as an Ambassador for requesting art assets / printed items
• Reducing strain / load on Design Team from repetitive situations / “common questions”
• Creating a faster and more efficient workflow for Ambassadors organizing events and Designers creating art and deliverables

Long-term, though… 🔗

In this discussion, we acknowledged a wiki page is not a long-term solution to this problem. There are now initiatives in the project to help bring greater unity and cohesion between different sub-projects. CommOps is definitely one of the biggest players to this. The future formation of FOSCo will help specifically towards communication between groups like Ambassadors, Design, and Marketing. Fedora Hubs will also contribute to making this process easier by having improved methods of communicating key information like this.

Communication by Lorenzo Stella from the Noun Project.