1 00:00:00,099 --> 00:00:15,346 *34C3 Intro playing* 2 00:00:15,346 --> 00:00:21,790 Herald: Organisational Structures for Sustainable Free Software Development. 3 00:00:21,790 --> 00:00:27,090 Title says it all in my opinion and I think this is a very important topic. 4 00:00:27,090 --> 00:00:32,464 The talk will be held by Mo, who has experience with dozens of free software 5 00:00:32,467 --> 00:00:38,065 projects and funding sources. As a funder and recipient of grants, 6 00:00:38,065 --> 00:00:43,492 contracts and donations. The stage is yours, give a big hand 7 00:00:43,492 --> 00:00:45,693 and round of applause for mo please. 8 00:00:45,693 --> 00:00:49,827 *applause* 9 00:00:49,827 --> 00:00:57,769 mo: Hello everyone, nice rainy 4th day of Congress. Yes I'm going to talk about 10 00:00:57,769 --> 00:01:02,844 organizational structures. What I mean by that and why am I talking about this? 11 00:01:02,844 --> 00:01:09,649 I was invited to submit a talk about open source funding and they cut me short. They 12 00:01:09,649 --> 00:01:14,829 gave me instead of the 60 minutes that I offered they gave me 30 minutes. So now 13 00:01:14,829 --> 00:01:18,940 I'm cutting out all the part that is actually talking about funding. Because I 14 00:01:18,940 --> 00:01:24,730 think before you can go and even speak about funding you need to understand that 15 00:01:24,730 --> 00:01:29,729 funding can be dangerous, money can be very destructive for open source projects. 16 00:01:29,729 --> 00:01:37,299 And in order to be prepared for kind of the next part of my talk that you're not 17 00:01:37,299 --> 00:01:43,060 going to hear today. I want to talk a bit more about organizational structures and 18 00:01:43,060 --> 00:01:48,829 another alternative title of this talk could be open source governance so even 19 00:01:48,829 --> 00:01:58,060 more dry than the previous title. Before I go into detail of: why am I giving this 20 00:01:58,060 --> 00:02:06,640 talk? Who am I? Why do I think I have some experience with all these topics? Some 21 00:02:06,640 --> 00:02:12,630 caution, some trigger warning as you've might have experienced I'm using open 22 00:02:12,630 --> 00:02:18,530 source and free software exchangeably in this talk and I know this can cause a lot 23 00:02:18,530 --> 00:02:24,780 of uproar. People can die and I don't want anyone's feeling to get hurt I can go into 24 00:02:24,780 --> 00:02:31,190 detail about why I'm doing this and why I'm using this interchangeably. Both for 25 00:02:31,190 --> 00:02:36,110 the aspects of the licensing where it classically would use kind of open-source 26 00:02:36,110 --> 00:02:44,010 licenses as well as for all the open source principles and guiding guidelines 27 00:02:44,010 --> 00:02:48,930 for the development, the collaboration and everything that is happening on 28 00:02:48,930 --> 00:02:54,690 organizational level. So bear with me. If you're a free software person I'm your 29 00:02:54,690 --> 00:02:55,744 friend. 30 00:02:57,276 --> 00:03:03,180 So a bit about me. In 2010 I was studying computer science at the Technical 31 00:03:03,180 --> 00:03:08,590 University Dresden and as one of my side projects near the end of the studies I 32 00:03:08,590 --> 00:03:14,070 started something called torservers.net . Torservers.net is a network of 33 00:03:14,070 --> 00:03:18,630 organizations so we started with the first organization in Germany a non-profit 34 00:03:18,630 --> 00:03:24,060 members Association. And the goal of this network of organizations is to run Tor 35 00:03:24,060 --> 00:03:30,580 infrastructure. So over the years we've grown this network from this single 36 00:03:30,580 --> 00:03:36,570 organization in Germany to 22 organizations in 15 countries. Most of 37 00:03:36,570 --> 00:03:40,730 these organizations have been set up specifically for this purpose to run 38 00:03:40,730 --> 00:03:48,350 network infrastructure. And most of them are also charitable nonprofits so I kind 39 00:03:48,350 --> 00:03:53,140 of accidentally learned a lot about the the differences between the different 40 00:03:53,140 --> 00:04:03,530 countries. On how they look at charitable law and stuff like that. In 2013 I came 41 00:04:03,530 --> 00:04:08,400 across a pretty new foundation the Renewable Freedom Foundation it was set up 42 00:04:08,400 --> 00:04:15,480 in 2012 by Georg Chef the then newspaper owner of the Donaukurier in Ingolstadt, so 43 00:04:15,480 --> 00:04:21,350 it's a daily newspaper and he started a foundation with the goal to protect and 44 00:04:21,350 --> 00:04:27,650 preserve civil liberties in the digital space. And ever since we've been working 45 00:04:27,650 --> 00:04:32,250 with dozens of organizations and dozens of projects across the whole sphere of 46 00:04:32,250 --> 00:04:39,530 anything that you can basically see at the Congress. And we we are a small foundation 47 00:04:39,530 --> 00:04:47,310 so we had to find our purpose in this space. And we are focusing mostly on 48 00:04:47,310 --> 00:04:54,190 organizational development, taking away burden from people that set out to realize 49 00:04:54,190 --> 00:05:01,460 their goals and in order to realize your goals you sometimes have to do stuff that 50 00:05:01,460 --> 00:05:08,880 you don't want to do and we help with that. And this led to the creation of a 51 00:05:08,880 --> 00:05:15,161 new entity in 2016 the Center for the cultivation of Technology. Which is a non- 52 00:05:15,161 --> 00:05:22,410 profit limited liability company in Germany and a GGmbH and I will go back to 53 00:05:22,410 --> 00:05:29,034 that and mention it later in this talk. So why are we here? What are we talking about? 54 00:05:31,203 --> 00:05:36,280 I cut my talk short, I mentioned this. A lot of the stuff that you're going 55 00:05:36,280 --> 00:05:41,191 to see are basically references to outside material. This is a complex topic and I 56 00:05:41,191 --> 00:05:46,170 encourage you to look at the references and pick them up. They should be now 57 00:05:46,170 --> 00:05:51,480 listed in the Fahrplan for this event. So you don't have to take pictures or 58 00:05:51,480 --> 00:05:57,540 anything of this or follow the video to hunt the references they're all linked on 59 00:05:57,540 --> 00:06:04,720 the website. And my goal for this talk is that there's a growing number of people in 60 00:06:04,720 --> 00:06:10,930 our space that think critically about funding. That also see that more and more 61 00:06:10,930 --> 00:06:16,750 funding is coming to this space and that we need to become better at at organizing 62 00:06:16,750 --> 00:06:23,580 and learning and collectively sharing our experiences with funders with funding 63 00:06:23,580 --> 00:06:30,040 entities. How to write grants and stuff like that and if at the end of this talk 64 00:06:30,040 --> 00:06:35,862 maybe one or two people come up with to me and become part of that network that would 65 00:06:35,862 --> 00:06:38,391 be great, that that's my hope for this talk. 66 00:06:40,015 --> 00:06:43,311 So let's start on April 7th 2014. I 67 00:06:43,311 --> 00:06:49,620 think you all well recognize this logo. This was one of the first times where kind 68 00:06:49,620 --> 00:06:56,571 of in a marketing experiment people described a weakness in OpenSSL. This is 69 00:06:56,571 --> 00:07:02,160 heartbleed. And heartbleed kicked off quite a bit of activities. There was a 70 00:07:02,160 --> 00:07:07,250 blog post by the OpenSSL developers basically how they're not getting any 71 00:07:07,250 --> 00:07:14,800 funding to do their work properly. And also it kicked off a lot of other research in 72 00:07:14,800 --> 00:07:18,881 this area about how can we actually support open source. 73 00:07:20,937 --> 00:07:22,959 One of the most prominent figures 74 00:07:22,959 --> 00:07:27,424 that is walking around talking about these topics is Nagia Eghbal 75 00:07:28,610 --> 00:07:35,492 this is like three references that I feel are very important to to look at. The 76 00:07:35,492 --> 00:07:39,230 unstructured labor behind our digital infrastructure was a report published in 77 00:07:39,230 --> 00:07:47,010 July 2016. I picked out another short talk of her rebuilding the cathedral at the 78 00:07:47,010 --> 00:07:54,370 Strange Loop Conference. And she's maintaining a sort of a list of funding 79 00:07:54,370 --> 00:08:00,080 opportunities so she's comparing the different ways to to get opensource funded 80 00:08:00,080 --> 00:08:05,300 so if you're coming only for that part take a look at that list: "The Lemonade 81 00:08:05,300 --> 00:08:12,770 Stand". Mozilla also did quite a bit of research they're as you know a fairly 82 00:08:12,770 --> 00:08:17,640 large organization handling a lot of volunteers and a lot of volunteer 83 00:08:17,640 --> 00:08:23,598 contributions. We also know that there's a lot of controversy around how well they 84 00:08:23,598 --> 00:08:32,046 manage this and in order to improve they commissioned a few studies, one of the 85 00:08:32,046 --> 00:08:38,719 studies was done by Stanford in 2009. How do you actually work with volunteers 86 00:08:38,719 --> 00:08:42,729 basically the topic always is how do you scale and how do you keep volunteers 87 00:08:42,729 --> 00:08:46,800 excited around your project and contributors. There's an interesting 88 00:08:46,800 --> 00:08:53,430 Community Survey that I invite you to look at and there's a more extensive report 89 00:08:53,430 --> 00:09:00,490 published in 2016 about the motivations of contributors to open source and I will 90 00:09:00,490 --> 00:09:07,360 come back to this because this is exactly the crucial part when you transition from 91 00:09:07,360 --> 00:09:13,930 a project that has been run on volunteer basis or that has some people involved 92 00:09:13,930 --> 00:09:19,309 that managed to contribute to the project. And how to grow your project and keep that 93 00:09:19,309 --> 00:09:25,850 spirit up and and be inclusive as a community. Kind of the most famous and the 94 00:09:25,850 --> 00:09:32,882 most relevant reference here is Jono Bacon. Not necessarily this book. This is 95 00:09:32,883 --> 00:09:38,240 a good book, it's a lengthy book, but he also gave a lot of different talks and 96 00:09:38,240 --> 00:09:45,399 he's giving seminars about this. And I highly recommend his stuff. I put a small 97 00:09:45,399 --> 00:09:49,339 note at the bottom: This book is not an instruction manual because it is an 98 00:09:49,339 --> 00:09:55,670 instruction manual. And I don't like that style so try to read it and read 99 00:09:55,670 --> 00:09:59,350 in between the lines. There's a lot of takeaways that you can have from 100 00:09:59,350 --> 00:10:05,569 this book that are -- that you won't get if you follow it line by line. I think that 101 00:10:05,569 --> 00:10:10,101 many people demand an instruction manual for how to manage communities and then you 102 00:10:10,101 --> 00:10:15,939 end up with that kind of writing. But I still think that this is kind of the most 103 00:10:15,939 --> 00:10:24,410 valuable book describing the motivations of opensource developers. He talks a lot 104 00:10:24,410 --> 00:10:29,759 about like creating a sense of belonging in the community. That you need a shared 105 00:10:29,759 --> 00:10:36,269 belief in the project and that you will need to have opportunity to contribute on 106 00:10:36,269 --> 00:10:43,629 an equal basis. So this is the announcement of the core infrastructure 107 00:10:43,629 --> 00:10:48,779 initiative by the Linux Foundation that is only roughly like two or three weeks after 108 00:10:48,779 --> 00:10:56,170 heartbleed. So they managed to find some commercial companies to bootstrap a 109 00:10:56,170 --> 00:11:02,255 program that would support open source infrastructure and of course the first 110 00:11:02,255 --> 00:11:11,309 software that they supported with this and are still supporting is OpenSSL. And I 111 00:11:11,309 --> 00:11:15,980 will just briefly mention a bunch of funding opportunities and a bunch of ways 112 00:11:15,980 --> 00:11:22,420 how open-source projects might be able to get some funding. To show that there's 113 00:11:22,420 --> 00:11:28,990 been quite a lot of movement in these areas. The P that you can see here is the 114 00:11:28,990 --> 00:11:37,502 German prototype fund, that's the German Ministry of Education and Research that is 115 00:11:37,502 --> 00:11:45,490 supporting this project. So there is German federal government money that is 116 00:11:45,490 --> 00:11:51,009 used to fund open-source development and I encourage everyone of you to check out the 117 00:11:51,009 --> 00:11:56,079 prototype fund website and look at the previous rounds of projects that they've 118 00:11:56,079 --> 00:12:02,749 been supporting because I think it's an excellent selection. I listed a bunch of 119 00:12:02,749 --> 00:12:07,410 others I'm not going to go more into detail about the funders that's for a 120 00:12:07,410 --> 00:12:13,559 second talk, a separate talk, but you can find these resources like, I picked out 121 00:12:13,559 --> 00:12:18,819 tools specifically the snowdrift wiki the market research they did, that Aaron did 122 00:12:18,819 --> 00:12:23,889 is really excellent into the different ways of funding. And also we maintain a 123 00:12:23,889 --> 00:12:31,149 huge list of funding sources that's, I think, around 300 foundations listed there, 124 00:12:31,149 --> 00:12:36,439 not all of them fund open source technology. But since we are active in a 125 00:12:36,439 --> 00:12:44,130 more broader space of like digital everything you will find a lot of material 126 00:12:44,130 --> 00:12:48,860 there. One thing that I want to specifically pick out and highlight 127 00:12:48,860 --> 00:12:55,449 because it hasn't been talked about before not that I know of. Is a program that is 128 00:12:55,449 --> 00:13:01,620 currently in its phase of accepting applications. With a wonderful name of 129 00:13:01,620 --> 00:13:10,319 ICT-24-2018-2019, it's a European Commission call for participation. For the 130 00:13:10,319 --> 00:13:19,040 next-generation Internet. And this is relevant and interesting because the way 131 00:13:19,040 --> 00:13:27,239 they're framing this call will show you quite clearly that they are interested in 132 00:13:27,239 --> 00:13:34,529 the kind of technologies that get built by our communities. And sometimes the 133 00:13:34,529 --> 00:13:40,009 language is kind of funny and the terminology is something that you have to 134 00:13:40,009 --> 00:13:46,319 get used to. But I like it it's kind of human centric openness, cooperation across 135 00:13:46,319 --> 00:13:51,759 borders, decentralization, inclusiveness, protection of privacy kind of that's 136 00:13:51,759 --> 00:13:59,360 that's the values that also we stand for. And in this program the the research and 137 00:13:59,360 --> 00:14:04,470 innovation actions that this is going to fund should encourage when relevant open 138 00:14:04,470 --> 00:14:08,250 source software, open hardware design, access to data, standardization 139 00:14:08,250 --> 00:14:15,410 activities. So everything that kind of our communities have been doing and want to be 140 00:14:15,410 --> 00:14:19,269 doing so this is really a great opportunity and we will see how this will 141 00:14:19,269 --> 00:14:25,529 end up because, and now I'm coming to the to the crucial point of this call. It is a 142 00:14:25,529 --> 00:14:30,279 call for intermediaries so you're not supposed to apply as a project directly 143 00:14:30,279 --> 00:14:34,440 for that kind of money because that just too huge the amount of money that they're 144 00:14:34,440 --> 00:14:43,420 giving out in total budget just for this call is 21.5 million just in 2018. So as 145 00:14:43,420 --> 00:14:50,489 intermediaries you can apply for these fundings and they're split across three 146 00:14:50,489 --> 00:14:54,910 three different topics. One topic is privacy technologies.The other is peer-to- 147 00:14:54,910 --> 00:15:00,319 peer technologies. And the third is kind of data mining big data stuff. And these 148 00:15:00,319 --> 00:15:08,499 intermediaries then are responsible to split up that funding and give it away to 149 00:15:08,499 --> 00:15:13,421 third parties and this is something that Commission calls usually exclude. Usually 150 00:15:13,421 --> 00:15:19,089 they require you to develop everything in- house and make it very hard to involve 151 00:15:19,089 --> 00:15:24,730 external participants. So this will be interesting to follow, the deadline is in 152 00:15:24,730 --> 00:15:34,239 April and sometime maybe during the next year we will see who got this money and 153 00:15:34,239 --> 00:15:36,737 how they're going to redistribute this. 154 00:15:38,539 --> 00:15:42,839 Now, for dealing with money I put this nice 155 00:15:42,839 --> 00:15:52,197 little piggy bank as a kind of contrast to how dangerous actually funding can be if 156 00:15:52,197 --> 00:15:58,399 you don't think about it. So when you want to deal with money and I'm probably not 157 00:15:58,399 --> 00:16:04,439 telling you any news as a as a project you have to decide whether you want to start 158 00:16:04,439 --> 00:16:09,809 some kind of legal entity to help you with that because at certain points you don't 159 00:16:09,809 --> 00:16:15,699 just don't want to have it go through one individual. So you have the option of 160 00:16:15,699 --> 00:16:20,559 creating your own organization or you find an organization -- an existing organization 161 00:16:20,559 --> 00:16:25,389 to partner with. In the hopes that it's kind of less bureaucratic, you already have 162 00:16:25,389 --> 00:16:29,119 some kind of infrastructure, there's hopefully already some accounting 163 00:16:29,119 --> 00:16:35,230 happening and all that stuff. So let's look at the two different options. The one 164 00:16:35,230 --> 00:16:40,389 option starting your own is something that a lot of people feel that is the way to go 165 00:16:40,389 --> 00:16:46,329 because they believe that they stay in control, right. It's your own 166 00:16:46,329 --> 00:16:53,910 thing, you're not depending on some external weird partner organization. But I 167 00:16:53,910 --> 00:17:00,166 I am warning from this model because you're actually creating an organism when 168 00:17:00,166 --> 00:17:05,180 you create an organization you create some organism and that organism develops its 169 00:17:05,180 --> 00:17:12,699 own life and then my experience with many projects is that over time the 170 00:17:12,699 --> 00:17:17,839 organization swallows its people. And you're contributing to something that you 171 00:17:17,839 --> 00:17:24,511 set out to be doing and in this organization. Without necessarily taking a 172 00:17:24,511 --> 00:17:29,919 step back and deciding when to let go of an organization or when to restructure it. 173 00:17:29,919 --> 00:17:35,769 It will defend itself. So, how do you do this? What you see here is a very 174 00:17:35,769 --> 00:17:43,909 elaborate bylaws or chapter or the articles of creation of your organization. 175 00:17:43,909 --> 00:17:48,640 And there's typically two ways to do this. One you go and hire a lawyer and they come 176 00:17:48,640 --> 00:17:56,230 up with some draft document for you. This is kind of very often the way that people 177 00:17:56,230 --> 00:18:03,470 do it in the US. In Europe mostly what you do is you copy something, you compile it 178 00:18:03,470 --> 00:18:07,929 yourself. So in Europe you don't need a lawyer to create organizations. You're not 179 00:18:07,929 --> 00:18:15,590 expected to get a lawyer involved. So what happens then is that you look around you 180 00:18:15,590 --> 00:18:21,179 compare different articles from from similar organizations and then quite often 181 00:18:21,179 --> 00:18:26,130 you copy different parts of these documents together to form your own 182 00:18:26,130 --> 00:18:33,929 organization and the problem in both cases is that here what happens is that you are 183 00:18:33,929 --> 00:18:39,280 getting some template that has governance structure described. That does not 184 00:18:39,280 --> 00:18:43,520 necessarily match the governance structure of your project and it does not 185 00:18:43,520 --> 00:18:48,350 necessarily match the values and the spirit of a collaborative environment for 186 00:18:48,350 --> 00:18:54,744 open-source development. And this is even more dangerous the kind of copypasta. 187 00:18:54,744 --> 00:19:00,529 Because you usually end up with a document that is in itself incoherent because some 188 00:19:00,529 --> 00:19:05,480 of the articles at the beginning contradict some articles coming later and 189 00:19:05,480 --> 00:19:12,870 when you talk to lawyers that see they see this over and over again. So this is not 190 00:19:12,870 --> 00:19:17,399 something that just happens sometimes but this is the usual case that this is not 191 00:19:17,399 --> 00:19:22,800 even coherent in itself. Let alone coherent and compatible with how you 192 00:19:22,800 --> 00:19:30,340 actually want to run the project. And this is this leads to kind of a feeling that 193 00:19:30,340 --> 00:19:34,710 you have to have these two worlds you you think that there are some legal 194 00:19:34,710 --> 00:19:41,550 requirements for your organization that that does not exactly fit the spirit. But 195 00:19:41,550 --> 00:19:49,000 there is opportunity there there is opportunity there to to express the actual 196 00:19:49,000 --> 00:19:55,179 governance that you have in your project and even like probably unwritten right you 197 00:19:55,179 --> 00:20:01,250 have some idea of how you want to work together. So I caution people don't just 198 00:20:01,250 --> 00:20:05,690 copy and paste something don't go to your lawyer and say I want to create a non- 199 00:20:05,690 --> 00:20:11,309 profit or I want to create a company because you're getting the cheap kind of 200 00:20:11,309 --> 00:20:17,970 capitalist model of an organization. I call this the stack overflow effect right 201 00:20:17,970 --> 00:20:22,919 it's copy pasting stuff from stackoverflow and importing it and bootstrapping an 202 00:20:22,919 --> 00:20:28,389 organization like that. The alternative that you have is using a fiscal sponsor 203 00:20:28,389 --> 00:20:33,350 that's the professional term for looking for partner organization and partnering 204 00:20:33,350 --> 00:20:38,620 with an existing organization. And in the free software space there's a bunch of 205 00:20:38,620 --> 00:20:45,120 those that you can pick from and all of these include some guidance along the way 206 00:20:45,120 --> 00:20:50,809 especially if they're made for open source projects and if they're already 207 00:20:50,809 --> 00:20:56,640 experienced with other projects. So this is a newspaper article that in the LWN 208 00:20:56,640 --> 00:21:00,580 article. chooseafoundation.com is a website that compares a bunch of the most 209 00:21:00,580 --> 00:21:05,960 prominent ones in the US. I want to highlight the Commons Conservancy. The 210 00:21:05,960 --> 00:21:10,799 Commons Conservancy is a bit different model it isn't actually a fiscal sponsor 211 00:21:10,799 --> 00:21:16,820 and it's it is a way to define your own governance so independently of what kind 212 00:21:16,820 --> 00:21:21,950 of legal entities you're going to use. You can use the material that the Commons 213 00:21:21,950 --> 00:21:29,149 Conservancy is producing to pick and choose governance models. So they have 214 00:21:29,149 --> 00:21:34,820 documents about forking organizations for example. So you not only forking the 215 00:21:34,820 --> 00:21:40,070 source code but really forking the organization and what happens to the 216 00:21:40,070 --> 00:21:46,300 assets that the organization has domain names trademarks and stuff like that. So 217 00:21:46,300 --> 00:21:51,090 ultimately in any case you will have to talk about this ugly topic and that's why 218 00:21:51,090 --> 00:21:57,779 I use this kind of very ugly slide to talk about governance because that's something 219 00:21:57,779 --> 00:22:02,850 that kind of the projects usually that I work with are loose collectives, are 220 00:22:02,850 --> 00:22:09,220 politically motivated, come with anarchy spirit, are kind of against any form of 221 00:22:09,220 --> 00:22:14,340 formal governance . Which is not exactly what anarchism is about but that's a 222 00:22:14,340 --> 00:22:19,659 separate talk all together. Let's stick to this. So what we have in open source 223 00:22:19,659 --> 00:22:27,110 actually is a lot of tools that have been developed, that implement the governance 224 00:22:27,110 --> 00:22:34,750 models without it becoming kind of a long written statements. So when you think 225 00:22:34,750 --> 00:22:40,790 about issue trackers, when you think about mailing lists the way you interact on code 226 00:22:40,790 --> 00:22:48,409 with with revision control systems all of that is an implementation of inherently of 227 00:22:48,409 --> 00:22:57,049 a governance model in open-source. And we are lacking those tools in the other areas 228 00:22:57,049 --> 00:23:02,700 that become relevant for governance and this is basically what I want to highlight 229 00:23:02,700 --> 00:23:08,950 in this talk so. But how do we go from here? How do we take all these unwritten 230 00:23:08,950 --> 00:23:17,929 rules and this kind of spiritual or ethical guidelines that that we come out 231 00:23:17,929 --> 00:23:21,799 and this will be very different from organization to organization. How do we 232 00:23:21,799 --> 00:23:25,909 turn them into something that other people can follow? And this is important 233 00:23:25,909 --> 00:23:31,960 especially during the phase where you start receiving money because then you 234 00:23:31,960 --> 00:23:35,870 have to make a decision on how to spend that money and you can still make the 235 00:23:35,870 --> 00:23:39,289 decision collectively. But over time you bring in people maybe from different 236 00:23:39,289 --> 00:23:42,460 spaces and they're coming with a different background, they're coming with a 237 00:23:42,460 --> 00:23:47,530 different set of ethical principles. And they might be spoiled already by working 238 00:23:47,530 --> 00:23:52,399 in some bullshit company for a long time and then they come and they take that, 239 00:23:52,399 --> 00:23:58,250 these these principles that they've learned into your nice collaborative 240 00:23:58,250 --> 00:24:03,070 environment. And there's there's a tendency and I see that in many places 241 00:24:03,070 --> 00:24:08,980 that as organizations grow up there's this divide between the principles for the 242 00:24:08,980 --> 00:24:13,750 software development side and the principles of how the organization is run. 243 00:24:13,750 --> 00:24:22,360 A very good book that talks about this in a non-technical environment about 244 00:24:22,360 --> 00:24:28,960 organizations is this book. Frederic Laloux "Reinventing Organizations" and for 245 00:24:28,960 --> 00:24:34,669 me this is very inspiring as a blueprint for how you can actually copy the model, 246 00:24:34,669 --> 00:24:41,710 you will find a lot of material here where you can see directly how it relates to the 247 00:24:41,710 --> 00:24:48,399 open source way of doing things. I picked out the quote "Impressive! Brilliant! This 248 00:24:48,399 --> 00:24:53,010 book is a world changer!" and not because I believe that it is but because actually 249 00:24:53,010 --> 00:25:00,941 as a bit of a warning because it's written a very enthusiastic way. So sometimes you 250 00:25:00,941 --> 00:25:06,520 have to kind of let the author go and and and but still continue reading there's a 251 00:25:06,520 --> 00:25:11,200 lot of good thinking material in there and one thing I want to pick out is the 252 00:25:11,200 --> 00:25:15,259 sections where they talk about the different governance models in terms of 253 00:25:15,259 --> 00:25:21,240 hierarchical structures compared to consensus structures. And the third and 254 00:25:21,240 --> 00:25:27,019 the model that is highlighted across this book is what they call the advice process. 255 00:25:27,019 --> 00:25:30,620 And when you look at the advice process in that book it's basically what our 256 00:25:30,620 --> 00:25:35,299 communities know as rough consensus. So if you have an idea you have the full 257 00:25:35,299 --> 00:25:40,750 authority to execute that idea. But you are you are forced to get input, you're 258 00:25:40,750 --> 00:25:47,200 forced to get advice from the outside so the only way to violate kind of rules is 259 00:25:47,200 --> 00:25:51,320 that you're not reaching out to relevant people for advice and relevant people are 260 00:25:51,320 --> 00:25:55,080 the people that you work with are the people that might have some good ideas 261 00:25:55,080 --> 00:26:00,290 around that topic. But they cannot block you the authority stays with you for that 262 00:26:00,290 --> 00:26:07,990 decision. There's another really relevant section especially given what's happening 263 00:26:07,990 --> 00:26:13,389 here with code of conducts and and all this. Is the clear the need of clearly 264 00:26:13,389 --> 00:26:18,460 documented and explicit decision-making processes. In a way that is compatible 265 00:26:18,460 --> 00:26:22,799 with that kind of thinking that you are a self-organized group and yourself we want 266 00:26:22,799 --> 00:26:27,150 to strengthen the self organization in that organization. And there's really 267 00:26:27,150 --> 00:26:32,750 interesting material in there that could avoid some of the weird code of conduct 268 00:26:32,750 --> 00:26:36,909 stuff that has happened in our communities. So I really encourage you to 269 00:26:36,909 --> 00:26:43,029 at least look at that section of the book. Another interesting thing like they have a 270 00:26:43,029 --> 00:26:46,770 they had that he's looking at something some comparing some different entities 271 00:26:46,770 --> 00:26:52,679 that use this model. In in in their own ways and one of them is a multinational 272 00:26:52,679 --> 00:26:58,990 corporation in like active in 80 countries or something with like 20,000 employees. 273 00:26:58,990 --> 00:27:02,759 And still they have this principle that anyone in the organization can spend as 274 00:27:02,759 --> 00:27:06,669 much money as they want. As long as they're following that advice principle 275 00:27:06,669 --> 00:27:14,120 that I mentioned earlier. Ao this is just something to inspire you when you think 276 00:27:14,120 --> 00:27:17,399 about like managing money in an organization and there's a bunch of 277 00:27:17,399 --> 00:27:24,899 projects starting to appear that are trying to apply open-source principles to 278 00:27:24,899 --> 00:27:31,880 this. One is Co budget you're invited to look at that. The other more known is open 279 00:27:31,880 --> 00:27:35,990 collective, open collective you can sign up as an open-source project people can 280 00:27:35,990 --> 00:27:41,190 donate to your project and you can also establish some transparency. Because a lot 281 00:27:41,190 --> 00:27:45,530 of time you lose that transparency of like what is actually happening with that 282 00:27:45,530 --> 00:27:51,200 money, and who has access to that money and who can spend that money. Just briefly 283 00:27:51,200 --> 00:27:55,860 something about funding sources I already mentioned the "Lemonade Stand" list. 284 00:27:55,860 --> 00:28:02,620 There's like the three sections of like small donor, private foundations, public 285 00:28:02,620 --> 00:28:09,220 funding. There's a lot to be said about small donors but my when people ask me 286 00:28:09,220 --> 00:28:14,250 about crowdfunding and campaigning and stuff like that I I'm very reluctant about 287 00:28:14,250 --> 00:28:19,539 that because it usually doesn't work. So the the only thing that works in terms of 288 00:28:19,539 --> 00:28:24,510 raising money from small donors is that you can show the support of the community 289 00:28:24,510 --> 00:28:29,679 and then get some larger donor to top that up and and agree oh wow that project 290 00:28:29,679 --> 00:28:36,440 really has has users. It doesn't really work that well to for in most cases that 291 00:28:36,440 --> 00:28:43,740 but that's very specific cases. So quickly just dealing with funders some some of the 292 00:28:43,740 --> 00:28:49,779 learnings that I took away from from my work in the previous years. One that I'm 293 00:28:49,779 --> 00:28:53,510 still struggling with is how can we make this planning and writing grant 294 00:28:53,510 --> 00:28:59,200 applications fun. If any one of you has some exciting ideas about gamification of 295 00:28:59,200 --> 00:29:06,880 of grant applications and I'm all ears. And my advice is and and that's something 296 00:29:06,880 --> 00:29:12,830 that also a lot of people are making mistakes there is that plans change. 297 00:29:12,830 --> 00:29:18,169 Right? You you you develop a plan you give it to the funder it's maybe for one year 298 00:29:18,169 --> 00:29:23,320 or two year grant and they expect that this is going to change because it has 299 00:29:23,320 --> 00:29:28,990 changed. It like there's no way that you can follow that plan line by line but 300 00:29:28,990 --> 00:29:36,490 there's this it's it's mostly the side of the recipient that feels kind of weird 301 00:29:36,490 --> 00:29:45,580 when you deviate from your plans. Do that change your plans communicate this early 302 00:29:45,580 --> 00:29:48,770 and not because otherwise you're creating trouble at the end of the project or 303 00:29:48,770 --> 00:29:55,649 you're doing stuff that you don't really want to do anymore. In terms of writing 304 00:29:55,649 --> 00:30:00,539 grant applications a lot of things are kind of a mistake that people are doing 305 00:30:00,539 --> 00:30:05,950 because they're like in the developer mode of thinking. Is they think in terms of 306 00:30:05,950 --> 00:30:10,710 deliverables and deliverables in terms of what kind of features can we add to the 307 00:30:10,710 --> 00:30:15,149 software. This is actually an art form coming up with estimates for software 308 00:30:15,149 --> 00:30:19,179 development I encourage everyone to look into the material about software 309 00:30:19,179 --> 00:30:23,970 estimation. Because it's kind of crazy I cannot talk more about this because I'm 310 00:30:23,970 --> 00:30:29,090 already over time but one thing that I still want to mention and this is the last 311 00:30:29,090 --> 00:30:34,850 slide. Is that in a lot of cases I've seen that you can think about deliveries in a 312 00:30:34,850 --> 00:30:38,769 completely different way. You can think about deliverables in a way that is 313 00:30:38,769 --> 00:30:43,779 actually supporting community growth rather than just feature sets and the 314 00:30:43,779 --> 00:30:47,580 metrics of success that you can define there because funders want some metrics of 315 00:30:47,580 --> 00:30:51,840 success demonstrated. Is the number of people that are participating on your 316 00:30:51,840 --> 00:30:55,080 mailing lists, the number of people you have in your IRC channel that's all that 317 00:30:55,080 --> 00:31:01,309 kind of stuff and redirecting some of the funding to the more kind of community 318 00:31:01,309 --> 00:31:06,200 oriented hackathons, running events, t-shirts and all that. You know about 319 00:31:06,200 --> 00:31:11,419 this, but usually in the moment of a grant application that all that gets dropped and 320 00:31:11,419 --> 00:31:16,590 then you're struggling keeping that up so now that I'm over time I'm going to skip 321 00:31:16,590 --> 00:31:29,169 like maybe a hundred of slides. And I'm going to end with this slide. And thank 322 00:31:29,169 --> 00:31:38,619 you. *Applause* 323 00:31:38,619 --> 00:31:43,810 *Outro playing* 324 00:31:43,810 --> 00:31:52,000 subtitles created by c3subtitles.de in the year 2018. Join, and help us!