Please welcome Jonathan.
Hmm, first challenge of the day.
All right.
Well, first of all, so that was a great talk about individual communities.
My job now is to expand that to say that we need to be more than individuals in the tech community.
We need to bring more people in.
So who knows what an Ospo is?
Job is easy.
So for folks who don't, that's also great because we're going to explore what they might be in the future.
Fingers crossed.
So an Ospo is an open source.
If anyone can make like lawn order sounds, program office, don't, don't.
So program office comes with a specific sort of field to it.
It's a program which has a definition that has to be followed and it's an office.
It's something I go to get my teeth clean or something like that.
It is outside of where I normally exist.
So to kick things off, I am from Burlington for a month.
We are starting to do a lot of what I'll be talking about today, which is uniting a lot of our communities.
Starting with the tech community.
And we just had a really good meet up the other week.
And someone came in and talked to us about fraud, essentially.
They were showed us this slide, feel free to read.
It's a lot of information about how much some people are really bad and steal from other people.
The core demographic that gets stolen from is actually young people.
But the most amount of money gets stolen from the other.
People is 65 or plus, 70 plus.
And their solution to this was to create a conference.
Let's have a conference.
Let's bring in someone from the FBI.
And let's have them talk about how not to get scammed.
How not to lose your money to fraud, how not to click that link.
Look for the little security symbol.
That sort of thing.
It was an interesting solution and we'll come back to this a little later.
So when we think about open source, at least when I think about open source in this context,
I'm here for four key reasons.
One is the philosophy.
This is why I got into this space in the first place.
You just start building something.
That's it.
You can expand on this and you can look at the self-serving nature of open source.
You just start building something that you need.
And then you bring in the collaborative nature.
You just start building something that you need.
That someone else also needs.
So you're building it with them.
And then there's this interesting layer where you start to leverage the self-service
Self-service nature of open source to support the commons.
So you just, I have to read this off the screen.
You just start building something you need with someone else who needs the same thing.
Or just want to learn some code, collaborative practices, project management, community management, whatever.
So they increase their employment prospects because they want to challenge or for fun.
They're upskilling.
They're just bored with their day jobs so they want to do something else.
They want to learn a new programming language.
They're not necessarily interested in the thing you're building.
But they're interested in the outcomes that they get from helping you build that thing that you are building.
So there is this subsection, this educational program within numfocus called Pi data,
which I think exemplifies some of these core principles.
Pi data is very large.
It's global 200 plus thousand members.
They've gone through.
They don't all go to all the meetups, obviously.
The meetups are actually fairly small unless you're one of the big events.
Pi data, London, Pi data, New York, etc.
But people go through this program.
They learn about Python.
They learn about data science.
They learn about Julia.
All this fun stuff about open source.
They meet friends.
They network.
They can find jobs.
That sort of things.
Fantastic program.
If you don't know about it, go to Pi data.
The website.
Learn more about it.
Point being, it's huge.
It's global.
It's effective.
It makes change around the world.
So when we expand that beyond Pi data.
I'm sure everyone's seen most of these numbers.
Open source is huge.
I've got to say that again.
Open source is huge.
It is probably the largest institution that exists in the world.
It's more impactful than universities.
It's more impactful than governments.
Trillions of dollars of GDP.
So we think right now.
How do you measure this?
But you've got, you're affecting hundreds of thousands of people that go through this institution.
Learn how to contribute collaboratively to software.
And hopefully more things as I'll explain in a second.
And exit with a job, with a degree, not maybe a piece of paper or a certificate.
But they have a degree.
They're experts in coding or development or community management or anything.
They're experts in open source.
We have to leverage that.
We have to respect that we are probably the largest open, the largest institution in the world.
Creating some of the most good in the world.
The biggest changes.
So we're reaching this point now.
We're recognizing it.
Well, what's the risk that could come if we don't fully embrace
everything that we do?
The technology we build, the communities that we exist within.
Don't build technology that exists solely in those communities.
We affect everything.
If we don't appreciate that aspect, we're going to end up being some of the institutions that we might
Not appreciate currently.
We might become another siloed sort of corporate open source endeavor.
We might have local communities standing completely outside of the open source development world.
Standing completely outside of the academic silo, standing completely outside of the local tech communities,
which are outside of the policy makers outside of the tech industry, which is developing the commercial aspect of everything.
And then we're going to try and smoosh it all together as the separate silo is probably not going to work well.
Probably going to end up with some negative consequences.
This is a real risk that I fear is more likely to happen than the alternative right now.
So another story that this same meet up, I met some folks who lead a group called Code for BTV.
It's an extension of Code for America, if anyone knows what that is.
They had a community member.
Let's start this way.
There was a community member who had a baby.
And then it was no longer a baby and they had all this baby equipment wasn't used too much.
And it's Vermont.
We love supporting our community.
She's excited.
Hey, I'm not going to throw this out.
I'm not going to donate it somewhere where it can get resolved.
I'm just going to give it to someone else who needs it.
So that's what she did.
People loved that.
And so more people started saying, hey, I have this slightly used baby equipment.
Can you find someone who needs it and give it to them?
So she did.
And this grew pretty rapidly.
And it was managed in spreadsheets.
And that, as amazing as it was, was not very effective.
So what ended up happening is she connected with these folks at Code for BTV.
And they connected her with developers who were able to create an application.
They're currently creating the application.
That is going to streamline this process.
Make her be able to continue to doing what she's continue to do, what she's doing.
And just make it easier.
So she can kind of scale it.
If she wants it, whatever she wants to do, really.
It's just going to be a simpler process.
That to me is amazing.
So what if we scale that?
And what if we bring more people into that sort of process?
And this is the potential.
I'm bad with slides.
And what I really want to happen here is like all these circles from the risk.
Combined together.
And then there's a big light.
But no.
Can't do that.
So this is what we get.
But if we bring in all these, let's go back to the risk side.
Actually, if we bring in all these communities to be one entity, one organization, one community,
then we can do so much more than like the use baby equipment being distributed to other people that need it.
What if we talk to our local community members who are technology impacts every day.
They're the core stakeholder.
I know we hate that word.
I hate that word.
But they are the core stakeholder of everything we build.
Whatever we build affects everyone in the world every day.
So bring, go to them.
Talk to them.
There's no problem.
Do you need help managing irrigation, managing water and farming equipment, that sort of thing?
Okay.
Great.
Let's bring that problem and you, the person who thought of that problem, to the university in the local community,
where we can research that problem.
Does this problem exist elsewhere in other communities and other nations and other, anything?
All right.
Great.
Let's develop a solution.
Keep in the original community member with us.
Let's go to maybe the design meet-up.
Design community.
Let's design a wireframe.
Let's design an idea.
Build out a roadmap for completing that idea.
Wonderful.
Let's keep everyone who's been in that process so far.
Now go through sort of a development community.
All right.
Let's develop an MVP.
Let's make it open source.
All right.
Great.
Let's bring this to maybe the commercial community now.
Is there a way to commercialize some aspect of this so that we can bring money back
to sustain the open source aspect of it?
Wonderful.
If not.
Okay.
Let's bring it to the local government and implement some policy.
Let's adopt this at a government level because it's core open source infrastructure.
The university says, hey, these four other cities could probably use this solution as well.
They'll help you maintain it.
That was actually done in the South Coast, southeast and coast of the US with hurricane disaster relief.
They needed some software to help manage.
I don't know the specifics of it.
We managed the responses to these disasters and it was developed by one city and then another city.
By hurricane and they helped maintain it in development and they're just passing on the hurricane path.
Really interesting story.
I don't know much about.
But great example of multiple cities working together to build and maintain open source software that impacts
everyday local communities.
So that's the potential of what we could build.
If we brought in our definition of community to include everyone, not just development community.
Local communities, universities, policy makers.
If policy makers were in the room from the beginning when we're talking to the local community member who has a problem,
we wouldn't have to get to the end of the process and then start explaining to the policy maker.
Doesn't understand anything about anything we've done so far.
Hey, this is important.
We should implement this.
They were there when the constituent said, I have a problem and they want to stay in power.
They want to stay elected so they're going to do what the constituent wants.
Makes life a little easier.
So this brings us back and I'm going to have a lot of time for questions.
So please think of something.
This brings us back to that original problem that came up.
The fraud problem.
When we get in scam and the core demographic of the people getting taken advantage of being elderly people,
people who don't necessarily interact with technology.
And in Vermont, you're also incredibly rural.
You live out in the country.
You live in our biggest city is Burlington, which is a small town.
It's beautiful.
It should come.
But it's tiny.
So and most of the population does not live in Burlington.
They live in many more smaller towns around the state.
So is a conference going to help teach those people how not to get scammed?
They're probably not going to leave their home or their local community to come to Burlington.
The big city to listen to someone from the FBI talk about how not to get scammed.
That's just not who they are.
That doesn't speak their language.
This idea is a conference idea is a great idea.
But it didn't go out and speak to the local community first.
Why are you getting scammed?
Do you do these things?
What's going on in your day-to-day life when you interact with technology on the internet?
So the idea now is let's have the conference that teaches the teachers who then go out to the local community
and have those conversations.
Go to where they are.
Go to the coffee shops, the bars.
Have conversations, have round tables and town halls to talk to people about how they can be safer online
and safer with technology.
So they don't get scammed.
So that's largely if we can abstract that fraud concepts to everything else that we build, what I'm advocating for.
It's bringing the open source program office outside of the program office.
Don't give it a definition as a program.
Let it be what the local community needs it to be.
And don't put it in an office.
Put it in the coffee shop.
Put it in the local community.
Put it in the person's home or on their farm where they need solutions every day.
And the great thing about Ospo, which is why I think they can the program office Ospo, which is why I think they can play such an important role in this,
because they already exist.
And they already exist in many cities, in many universities, in many institutions and corporations.
And we can link them up into what might be a regional Ospo.
There's that hurricane story going along the southern coast of the US.
Although that technology I think died out.
But if those cities linked up with their Ospo at the time, if they had them, I don't think they did.
But they could keep that stuff going for longer.
If we have UVM has a wonderful Ospo.
I think there's corporations in the Northeast that have Ospo said well in other institutions.
We're able to link all those up.
Think about Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, if you know they're in the Northeast.
New York and a bunch of all those states working together to maintain open source software that affects all their local communities.
And then also partnering with maybe the Pacific Northwest, which is also doing amazing work,
experimenting with a sort of local community to policy pipeline of software development.
And then maintaining software collaboratively that way.
And I know there's a lot of stuff in Europe.
There's actually a lot of organizations in Europe that are exploring different ways to bring local community into the development process.
So if anyone knows about those or wants to tell me about them, I am all ears.
But I'll end with a reframing of the Ospo.
Maybe it's not a program office.
Maybe it's just open source people and organizations working together.
And I will say I take this idea of reframing Ospo from Jacob Green, who has like 6,000 of these Ospo.
These Ospo redefinitions.
And they're all fantastic.
So is anyone not convinced that we should bring more people into open source development community?
Great.
Let's do it then.
So I have, yeah, I've got 10 minutes for questions.
I can talk about what we're doing in Vermont and a bunch of other stuff too.
Shall I repeat it?
I'll repeat it.
Mr. Anderson.
I want to be more in cooperation.
And that's reading the trainer.
Open source.
We're working with the ship.
We're doing something for the last month's year.
We have been doing different level.
And the struggle we have is to follow this.
The software is not coming from communities.
That was a times like that.
It's a strength in the community for them to take over.
And so you have an idea how to do this.
Praise for those of you who are in relation to Ospo.
That's very outside of Europe, on US, with more creating a void where you have
to manage to keep people that you train.
You need to train.
The developer also locally.
Do you want them?
Or not to leave this away?
Yeah.
That's a big question.
So the question is how do you train, how do you bring someone through this process and have
them stay in the community and help develop this software?
I'm going to add something to it.
And keep people from maybe taking advantage of mentorship programs where they go into
Learn a skill to get a job.
Which is not like a bad taking advantage of what it's built for.
We want them to stay in these communities.
I think, so one of the biggest benefits to this sort of community to policy pipeline is that you're
trading, so an individual that goes through it is going to learn all this software stuff.
It goes back to that fourth principle.
You're learning how to learning these skills because you're an open source.
But they're learning these skills on something, on building something that affects them personally.
That is why I stay in open source.
I'm building this kind of that first and second principle.
I'll just build something that I want to use.
So if we train people on something they want to use and don't necessarily look at them as a
Commercial and product, like this person will either help me build a tool I can sell or be a consumer of the
tool that I sell or the product, I think they're more likely to stay in.
And the core aspect is get them to work on something, train them by having them work on something
that affects them personally or someone in their family or their local community.
So they stick around.
They get to see the impact of it immediately.
The answer to your question is a very broad question.
Okay.
Happy to.
Any other thoughts?
Does anyone yet go ahead?
Do you think there are any inherent characteristics of the open source communities that make
it difficult to collaborate or communicate with other parts of society?
The deeper infrastructure for sure.
Yeah.
Are there some open source communities or development projects that are more difficult to integrate with local community?
Yeah.
For sure.
The deeper infrastructure aspects.
I'm not sure people should be learning how to contribute to open source on deep infrastructure.
But they can learn on the application level, which is very impactful to an individual.
And that's what the local community cares about.
And one of the, another benefit of taking people through this community policy pipeline is that
they're going to learn that, hey, my browser depends on a lot more than just this thing I double click on.
There's more under it.
And if they're interested, they can stay involved because they're working on an application that impacts
them so they stay in the community and they go deeper and deeper deeper.
And ultimately, we can get people contributing and supporting the deeper infrastructure.
But yeah, maintaining programming languages, I don't think, is something we can bring to a local community.
But people who maintain programming languages probably have local communities that they're a part of.
This is another aspect.
The remote aspect of technology work nowadays.
Burlington Vermont is a great example of this.
Vermont in general, there are a lot of remote workers up there who don't work for any companies that exist in that state.
They don't go to an office, they don't do anything like that.
They also don't necessarily interact with the community.
So the community is being siloed from the tech community.
And that's probably not something we want to see continue.
We want to be part of our local communities.
So it's more work and it's difficult work.
And this is what we're starting to do in Vermont is organize organizers.
But let's ourselves as the open source community.
Even if we are working on the tech that the local communities might not appreciate or understand,
let's go to the local community and ask them what they want us to work on.
And we don't necessarily need to work on it.
But we can help organize the rest of the remote community and say,
here's something that Jim down the street asked for.
It would help him a lot.
Can we build it?
And someone probably is going to have some spare time.
They're a consultant or whatever.
If you have time off, sure.
I'll help build that thing.
I'll start it.
We'll make it open source or continue.
And then bring that to other cities and other communities and see if we can grow it that way.
So it's sort of a way, even though there are aspects of open source and technology that probably
are not appreciated by local communities.
It is a way to still engage them as individuals.
It's a long answer.
So for where are it?
It's like, how did you get started?
How do you get to attract people if you're going to speak to them?
You're going to pack your tones.
What has been working for you?
So I moved to Berlin to three or four years ago before that.
I was in Rochester, New York, which is very different.
It's much larger in different communities, kind of world.
Same type of people though, for sure.
And so that was right after the pandemic.
And I've been told that before the pandemic and I very much believe this.
The technology community in Vermont was very united.
It was very cohesive.
And like so many other things.
The pandemic kind of blew that apart.
So and it hasn't come back together yet.
So what we just started doing is, you know, we have half a dozen meetups in Berlin to
themselves.
We have an entire corporation of meetups.
We have the user testing and the product managers, the design meetup, the development
meetup, the data science meetup.
Just like you guys are, it's not.
No one had the capacity.
No one organizer of each of those meetups had the capacity to organize something once a month
regularly.
So we said, let's stop organizing separate stuff.
And let's make a group of organizers that can support one another to build one singular
up that can then also branch off into support for niches, more niches.
And the thinking there is also that as a more cohesive group, we can get support easier.
Instead of the data science meetup which is 15 people going to a local company and saying
hey can you buy his pizza, it's a large group of a couple hundred people saying hey can your
name is going to get in front of a couple hundred people can you buy his pizza.
And we're hoping that will happen.
Because we did just start doing this.
So what we did, the quick answer to this is we connected all the organizers into one group of
organizers and we're continuously inviting more people to come organize.
Some of us have a lot of experience in organizing, some of us are just getting into it.
So we're also teaching people to organize.
Which is something that I separate from all of this, something that gets critical for open source
but even more organizers.
But that's expanding from there.
So it's meetups.
We want to grow into hackathons and we want to start inviting the local community into these sort of
conversations.
Our first meetup was fantastic.
It was at UVM which is literally an institution on a hill in a classroom that it feels
very disconnected from local communities and it was a bunch of brilliant tech community
people that are talking about amazing things.
But there is no one from the local community there.
There needs to be meetups and hackathons.
Can you see how to brush them up and move up intermediate to the new episodes that
meet them now and they can have like only half of the time with them.
And that's possible.
The other way is that they'll help remind the people that it's community reports.
Yeah.
And I apologize.
I didn't repeat that question, which is how do we start this?
And this question is have I seen a project grow up so big that it becomes self-sustaining
essentially?
I don't think they're making nothing comes to mind where they reach that end state.
But there is a project out of the Portland and not main Oregon which is Northwest
US where they created software that helps.
I'm going to use some of the wrong words here so forgive me.
But someone goes to jail.
They get a stain on the record that they've been in jail.
And when you get out of jail, it makes it really difficult to get a job.
And in order to get that thing sort of removed from your record, you have to go through a process
which can take a lot of time and money and it's prohibitive.
So you don't have a job, you don't have time and money.
You have to now spend time and money to get this thing removed so you can get a job.
It's kind of mad.
So what this group did is they created open software that now cost $50 instead of like $500
or $1,000 to get this thing removed from your record so you can go into jail.
And that has been incredibly successful.
And the local government in the Northwest looks at it and appreciates it.
They're also working on digital identity for just people, always open source software, just fantastic.
I forget what the group is called.
But his name is Hugh and he's out of the Pacific Northwest and check it out.
He does great work.