Ladies and gentlemen, I'm very pleased to welcome Deb's Udo. I think it's the first time
I've ever heard a nurse speak at Forstems. It's the first for Forstems and she's going
to look at how we address the Forst funding paradox. I hope you, Deb's.
Thank you, Jeremy. Oh, that's a very pleasant crowd. Thank you. I'm going to be talking
today about what happens when we ignore the eggs and fond only the chickens. My name
is Deborah Udo or just Deb's because the other is a mouthful. I'm a registered nurse,
midwife and public health practitioner. I'm currently serving in a government hospital in Nigeria
actively practicing, but I am a bit of a double agent. Well, I, in my previous role, I served as
community manager and research software engineer for OLS and I also volunteer some of my
time to the documentaries as a lesson instructor, developer and I also sit on the governance
committee. I am currently in my fellowship here with the Software Sustainability Institute where I
advocate for best practices in research software engineering and my favorite one is that precedes
my baby projects which I founded and direct currently. I have the next 15 minutes to tell you about
precedes. Now, this is some food for thought. How every open source project started small.
I'm sure I'm looking at people who have, at some point, founded or supported a small open source
project, but not every open source project gets the chance to succeed. Have really taught
consciously about the fact that maybe those projects wouldn't have failed, but they just didn't
get the kind of support that they needed and they're in lies the fourth chicken and egg dilemma
where you require funding to make impact, but funders need to see some impact to give you funding.
And I've put the additional notes at the bottom to clarify that funding doesn't necessarily mean
finances in this case. We're talking about resources and you will get to understand more about that shortly.
And why is this such a hard problem to fix? Well, credibility is often judged by metrics.
Someone called the vanity metrics yesterday and I loved that. And performative reports or track records
or the maturity of your governance committee. And these aren't inherently bad or good things.
Actually, they're very necessary to think about it from the funders perspective, right?
There's risk to be managed and they need to be accountable. However, younger projects are
mostly judged by late stage rules. And in doing this, we run into certain blind spots for
instance. We think that because a project is visible, then it has value or because it looks
posh and prime and proper, then it's ready to be funded. Or because it's stuck around longer than
some others, then it means it has impact or network proximity means merit. So being closer to the
key players or having access suddenly makes it look like you're more serious project. However,
these blind spots bet some diversity gaps. And we don't make enough room for new and
unconventional ideas. Now, what's the cost of ignoring these eggs? Well, of course, we
strangulate and stuff the life out of new and novel ideas, no more innovation, no new
antennas. And the previous antennas are crying, burning out. There's a starvation of regional
cultural and disciplinary diversity. There's a nurse speaking at Boston. There's long-term
consequence overall where we have a fragile and homogeneous flat-out boring ecosystem.
And a thought that I want you to really leave with is the fact that considering diversity
is in charity, it's actually the core of sustainability and its risk management for our future.
And so pause and ponder. What if we invested in potential and not just proof or track records?
Free seats. I told you I was going to come back to presets. So presets is an open source initiative
with a community-led curriculum. We're trying to get more research coming out of Africa by teaching
open research skills. And the mission is to find people where they are and deliver materials that
really obscured their knowledge when it comes to research practices. And this also serves
our larger research software engineering community by helping researchers who have come from
non-academic backgrounds to get advertising to the world of research. It's modular, self-paced,
but we also deliver this as workshops. And on the right you see the pillars on which pre-seeds is built.
And these are some, but there's not enough room on the wall for all the challenges for
early stage projects, but there's problems of limited credibility, no access to networks,
in experience, in handling grants, in the general lack of experience, in these tidal waters.
There's on-click of non-expectations, you know, how much effort it took to try and get
enough documentation to be on board at our fiscal sponsors. There's a general lack of
visibility for smaller projects. And a lot of note is that this is in necessarily a competence
problem. It's more access problem. And a fairer metric as my friend Roland would always say is
George Achievement Relative to Opportunity. Now what does it mean to actually support
projects, Ellie? Non-monetary support of visibility, for instance, sharing your platforms,
Ellie, and off with smaller non-shiny projects. Mentorship, as I mentioned, I am
a fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute and one of the programs and one of the benefits
of being a fellow is that you get a mentor, someone to guide you on DAC for the days.
I'm in too far, didn't I? Networks. So access to the right people can really make the
difference between success or failure for open source projects, especially young ones.
An amplification going out there and talking about new interest in projects that you found.
This is credibility by proximity. It really helps these projects more than you know. And at the
bottom, I've put some of the organizations or institutes that have been of incredible support
to precede whether by providing pots of funds or lending on Zoom access for pilot workshops or
letting us go through trainings for free, these make a world of difference.
But I'd like to point out that precedes is not unique. I'm not here to tell you about a challenge
that we faced. This is a pattern that keeps repeating in our ecosystem and small investments
without time or generosity can make so much difference between whether those projects
later get ready for funding. Case in point. I'm sure you see the screen. Sarah and I
really am investing in 14 companies that went on to reach unicorn status, a value of one billion
dollars or more. On the right, you can see some interesting stats. How 79% on the represented
founders, 54% were women, 47% were black founders, 11% were Latino founders,
and less than 2% of all VC money went to women. Food for thought.
And a second case study is from Cindy Gallup to female founders talking about how white men
tend to get funded based on white women. Don't get as much funded and it's even worse for
women of color. All of this and 11,000 plus more stories can be found at nottheonlyone.org.
And so in wrapping up what can you do about it whether you're a funder or an individual who
just cares about open source. It's imperative that we change the things that we count.
We should be more conscious of rewarding, learning, momentum, clarity and not just the scale of impact.
It's important that we share platforms, alien off, and write young projects to speak,
to demo their work to participate. It's also really, really incredibly important to lower the
cost of credibility. It should be enough that someone has made an introduction. References,
count, trust signals, matter as well, and everyone in this room can do at least one of these things.
If we only fund the chickens, how can we be surprised when this ecosystem stops lean eggs?
What questions do we have in true capantry style? I will entertain questions for whatever amount
of minutes I have left. And thank you very much for listening to me.
So we have a few minutes for questions and a reminder again questions, please not statements.
Any questions?
Okay, so I very much agree with the premise that you should invest in potential, but I suppose
to miss quote Macbeth, if I could look into the seeds of time and see what grain will grow,
what will not. I would only invest in what grains grow, but I can't. How do you recognize potential?
Most of the in-between I didn't really catch, but I think the most important part was right at the
end, how do you recognize potential? That's a great question. I cannot confidently answer and say
there's a laid-down metric to identify potential, but I believe that things like passion and
impact and vision count towards potential, and that should be taken into account as well.
Any more questions?
Okay, thank you.
Actually, not so much a question, but you're remark about the white guys getting funded because
they recognize themselves and the white women getting funded when they have proof and the
black women not getting funded. I just want to say that seeing you up here, as a woman seeing
another woman and a setting like this is always inspiring, and I think you have a point there,
and I really like seeing you up here, giving this talk. Thank you.
Okay, I think that's all, but I think that was a very good point to finish on. Thank you very
much, Deb, an inspiring talk. And we have a little thank you from the conference for your efforts.
So thank you very much. We have a short break, and then we'll be back with the next talk in 15 minutes.
Thank you very much.