So we're going to be starting in the next minute so if you're staying for the next
talk, please sit down and get cozy. And if you're not staying, please leave through.
Okay, so the next session, we have Dan, Dan J, director of operations at the airline ecosystem
foundation and chair of this sponsorship working group. This session is practical, focus on building
your funding toolkit. And the question that motivates this session is how can developers make
the chore of fundraising easier. And with that, I'll leave it to you. Thank you.
Okay, very good. Okay, good afternoon. So, thanks for the introduction, Dan Jnowski.
So what I'm going to be talking about today is just some concrete things that you can
do in your projects that will make fundraising a little bit easier. I'm not really going to go
into how to fundraise because that's a whole other topic. But these are sort of the
boilerplate things that I think a project needs to have so that when funders look at your project,
they have an idea of what you're all about. Okay. This QR code is actually a link to
this presentation, which is currently published if you want to follow along. But there are a lot
of links in here to resources. And this way you don't have to take any pictures or script
or anything down. The QR code will be up at the end as well. So, no panics. Okay. So, just a few words
about the Erlang ecosystem foundation. So, we support the Erlang ecosystem. We're about seven
years old. And we show up in regulatory and tech forums. We work with other larger foundations
to raise funds for our community to support projects, outreach, events, and so forth. And we mostly
focus on the health and stability, sustainability of Erlang. It's language as a community. So,
my background, I started my work with the foundation about a year ago. After ten years of work
with a mixer, I saw that there was a greater purpose. And so, I've been working to help
make the ecosystem more sustainable. I tend toward advocacy. So, I will try not to get on any
soap boxes, but I've been involved in grassroots politics as well and advocate for renewable energy.
So, just a little bit about Erlang. Some of you probably never heard of it. I'll make this brief.
It's just a different approach to problem solving that uses processes as the fundamental building block,
which leads to very different kinds of answers to problems that we try to solve. It's also
great for building languages. So, a mixer is one of our largest. And we have a newcomer called
Gleam. Okay. So, things I will not cover. Why should open source be funded? I presume that
everyone sort of has an idea of why. And we know from the previous presentation that the value cycle
is disconnected. And I'll make just a brief comment about that. I think that there is a fundamental
disconnect between the way the, the way capital works and the way open source works, where open
source is really a social act. And capital doesn't understand that. It only understands return
on investment. And this creates this fundamental disconnect, which I don't believe has actually
been solved. I think that government, government and non-government agencies actually provide
the best sort of middle ground where it's not about return on investment in the same way that
commercial interest provide or looking for. So, there's a bunch of different groups of
possible funders. This is in my experience. So, people who would fund, but are just too lazy
to show up, who, anyway, have people who want things and then there are people who just don't
get it. Okay. So, here are some basic funding elements. So, obviously, you have finding
funders, which there are lots of different ways. It depends on the size of your project as well,
what kinds of things you might qualify for. There's receiving and managing the funds, which
is actually one of the things that open source projects, especially small ones, are really
not set up to do. So, we talk a lot about how to raise funds. We were really talk about how
to, like, operationally handle the responsibility and the disbursement and the management
of those things. But I'm going to mostly focus on these three bolded things, which is
basically describing what's going to be funded, making sure that you have visibility. So, that's
transparency and history to basically build credibility. That's really what this is all about.
Someone shows up, they want to see, what is this project all about? Is it alive? Does it have a
heartbeat? Does it have the kinds of things that give me confidence that if I put money into
it, that that money is going to go to some good? Okay. So, basics on funding funding. So, obviously,
there are direct sources. Most of you probably heard of those as well as grants. There are many
organizations that are potentially grants providers. And obviously, you have your user base,
sometimes those are, that's a good way. There's another thing, which is the CRA, the cyber
resiliency act, which some of you have, hopefully, most of you, who have not heard of the CRA.
Okay. So, I'll just briefly say that there's legislation that has passed, that there's regulation
that's being written. And the CRA is basically defining for manufacturers that they are
responsible for their supply chain. And open sources in basically every supply chain. Any
product that has any digital element has some open source in it. And what it's doing is it's
defining that there's a responsibility that the manufacturer has for all the things, all the
transitive dependencies that it has. And that may create, we hope, opportunities for open
source to find sustainable paths to sustainable maintenance. So, keep an eye out for that.
So, obviously, you know, look at who's opening issues and filing PRs. There may be,
like, companies that are using your things that you may want to try to get in touch
with somehow. And this is, I think, a really important thing, the last point.
We are open source. We are not a charity. When we're asking for money, we're asking for
an investment. Because that's what we're doing. We're actually investing in society when
we are creating open source software. We are doing social good to find that, however you are,
but we're not doing it for money. We're doing it for people we will never meet.
And because it is a creative act that we all somehow appreciate. So, when we're asking for money,
we shouldn't be panhandling, essentially. We are asking for an investment. Okay.
So, receiving funding, this is the part where it gets a little dicey.
Sometimes you cannot receive funding unless you have a legal entity to receive it.
If you have a bunch of contributors that would potentially benefit from it,
you have to have some sort of legal entity to deal with that.
Sometimes you can associate with a foundation, which will help you with those things.
But then other times, you're sort of faced with the dilemma of, well, we either take the funding,
we don't take the funding, we can apply for it, we can't. Because we don't have,
or don't want to deal with setting up a legal person to deal with those things.
And I will say that in the EU, especially because there are so many countries,
every country has different rules and different, like pitfalls with setting up legal entities.
So, you have to basically do a bunch of research, either yourself,
or talk to people who have done it, and it's not straightforward.
One thing, just getting back to the CRA, specifically, is that it does include a definition
that breaks, that sort of firewalls, liability from software developers.
So, if a manufacturer uses your stuff in their product and it's defective,
the original developer, open source developer, is not liable in some way for that defect,
because the manufacturer is actually responsible for everything.
Whether they contribute back and other things is a bigger kind of discussion.
So, as I said, small projects are really not set up to handle funds,
but I do think that there will be, so I keep bringing this up with almost everyone I talk to.
We're talking about ways sources of funding, we need to start talking about ways to help small projects,
in particular, to operationalize the kinds of funding that they receive.
And that includes things like grants, like writing grants.
I don't know a developer that says, oh, I'm excited, I'm going to write,
I'm going to subscribe for a grant today.
There's a lot of help that we could leverage if the states, or the countries,
saw open source as a real resource that in addition to providing funding,
they also provided support in terms of an organization.
So, my earlier comment about setting up a legal person,
the states can basically do all that work, they have all the lawyers, they can change whatever they want,
they could set up like a research institute, there's a lot of science that has done through research institutes,
because what science researcher is set up to, on their own, go and look for funding.
I think that open source could potentially fall, could benefit from a similar kind of model.
Okay, so now let's get to the nuts and bolts.
So I'm going to be referring to three example projects,
Agus, which is our security initiative, hologram, which is a web framework that's written in Alexa,
and EYG, which is a language written by one of our community members.
Okay, so the first, the overall objective here is presenting your project in the clearest way possible,
so that people understand when they come, whether it's to a GitHub repo or to a website that you set up,
that the project objectives are clearly laid out,
that you have a roadmap for things that you want to accomplish, that you have some means for community engagement.
I've gone to any number of projects, and I have no idea how to get in touch with the maintainer.
But it's also a way of keeping staying in the loop with the people that are using your stuff,
and that will help with the other objectives.
Having governance laid out, which is basically like how your project runs,
and I'll get into the details of that.
Answering the question, are you part of critical digital infrastructure,
because there are funds which are specifically mandated to fund critical infrastructure?
And who are your users?
If there's a way for you to represent who your users are, that also helps.
Okay, so project objectives, or sometimes goals, it kind of depends on the type of project you have,
so having a clear list of public, publicly published objectives is a great place to start.
The objectives can be technical, like performance, they can be security oriented, they could even be organizational,
but general maintenance, as an objective, is like a two sort of vague,
to really inspire anyone to be like, oh, I want to fund that.
All right, so let's see if what happens when I click this link, whoops.
Okay, I guess that doesn't work.
Hold on.
Okay.
Drag it, which way are you, whoop.
Okay.
Wow, I didn't expect a demo to die like this.
Huh.
Okay, well, I guess that we're not going to do that, because what's that?
No, it's connected to the Wi-Fi, so.
All right, I don't want to do this.
So you have the slides.
Oh, this is actually kind of annoying.
Let me just make sure that I didn't spell it's up now, that's correct.
All right.
No.
I didn't spell it.
Huh.
The dual stack, so maybe I should try the other one.
Yeah, I'd probably know, right?
Other networks.
Let's try this one.
This is really funny.
Try this again.
Okay.
Well, we'll just move on then.
Okay, so I encourage you to look.
You have the slides, so there's a very clear table of objectives that the project, the
biggest objective of project lays out.
And it includes the, it's basically just a table of objectives.
I can't describe it much more than that.
Having that, good place to start.
Okay, so let's move on to like feature objectives.
Right?
Okay.
So we know people want features.
Oh, look at that.
So you probably know what they are.
It's a really good idea to like put them out like these are features that we want to build.
There are obvious feature areas.
It's also good opportunity to increase awareness.
So when people are using whatever you have and they see, oh, this is a feature that they would like to implement.
It creates some awareness over where the project is going.
The hologram, the hologram site actually has a really cool kind of graph of all the features that
they're looking, that they have implemented, that they're looking to implement.
Security objectives are sort of evergreen.
Like everything has some need and if you think, if you think along security lines and layout objectives for security,
those are things that can also attract funding.
So let's see.
There's a bunch of resources here on like secure software development.
And some other resources that will give you some other ideas about like how to frame security for your own purposes.
We're all going toward a world that will want to have software build materials.
So dealing with that at some level.
Reproducible builds and then basically any kind of supply chain, vulnerability work can often attract or be a good thing to fundraise around.
Okay, so having a clear roadmap and this is sort of different from objectives is the list of things that you have done completed if it was funded by who
contributed to it.
And then the list of things that you have in progress or the list of things that you want to do.
And these could map to PRs or they could be sort of larger than that.
But what you want to do is illustrate that you have, you have an idea of what you want to do, how much time it will take,
whether it's time, you can even put a dollar signs or euro signs on it saying like this would be 2000 euros to complete.
It makes it easier to talk about what you need in the context of grants.
It also potentially is easier to talk to sponsors about the needs that they have and the kinds of things that they could fill in on the roadmap.
If you have generally interested corporate users and this is available, then you actually have the, they can literally go shopping in the sense.
You might want to put in things about dependencies like you can't pick something that's at the bottom of the list because all these other things have to be done first.
But defining these things really helps.
Having a good model for community engagement and this is, this is really about being in touch with your users.
But I think that there's another part of this which is, it's a really good indication of the product health.
Because the more activity, the more useful and kind of constructive activity there is, the better feeling someone gets for the kind of vitality that you have.
This is a, this is sort of nice if you can do it, but it actually takes a lot of effort and it also takes a little bit of restraint to not like do the easy things,
but to actually have the easy things and have like a really good way for people to get engaged in potentially doing their making their first contribution.
And also documenting what prerequisites exist, so that someone can basically start from scratch and see a list of, okay, I need this software install them, I computer, I need, you know, this kind of knowledge.
And if you write that documentation, you will typically find that you've missed something or that there's some sort of sharp edge that you can polish off that will make contribution easier.
The hologram contributing link is actually really great. He goes through all of these steps and I think it's a good model there too.
Governance is really about projecting a level of diligence about how you're organized and it includes a lot of topics from like how, how PR's emerged to like what license you're choosing.
Let's see.
And then in the course in the context of funding, you have to sort of think about how you manage governance around those items.
So funders look for like how you're composed because they don't want to just throw money into like sort of a nebulous like we don't really know how it's how it's being managed.
Okay, it also helps the project itself to have very clear expectations about how things run.
So you may not get 100% agreement across all contributors, but if everyone can abide by the same set of rules, then you'll end up with better just better operation.
Having a clear security policy, so that first link there, if you click on that, lays out a very clear security policy, who to contact, how to contact what what comprises a security like a vulnerability report.
And that is actually like forget hub, there's there's a tab like specifically for security.
There are a few other good examples and then the open SSF open source project open source project security baseline will give you some other guidance in that same place.
Operational issues, so this side sort of alluded to before.
These are things that a project kind of has to take on if it wants to do fundraising of its own.
You have to figure out like well project management kind of relates to the roadmap and issue triages as along the same lines, but grant application and keeping up with the community which can actually take a lot of time.
The one thing that we don't think enough about is getting non programmers involved in our projects and some of that could be like designers depending on what your think your project is about.
But getting people who will spend a little bit of time engaging with the community or even like maybe helping out with finding granting sources or writing grants is something that a developer doesn't necessarily want to do, but someone else may be like really happy to be involved in your project.
We'll alleviate some of the load.
So basically what you're trying to do is build confidence in whoever might give you money.
And so you want to fund it to sort of envision that their money is going to go to a good place.
Good things are going to happen with it. They're going to have some there's going to be accountability.
They're going to be able to see some results. They're going to be able to report back.
Yes, we did this thing and and we've got a good outcomes.
Keeping a history of what you've done and I don't mean like close PRs. I mean like actually documenting it.
So that's why I said like on the road map, make sure you keep all the things that have happened already in there because that's going to help people understand.
Oh, these people have done all these things and have completed these these different milestones.
It's great to have plans and paths to go and again transparency and structure all sort of lead to this answering the question are these serious people.
So I'd like to thank our funders, the early ecosystem foundation and and that is build your funding toolkit. Thank you.
I'm happy to take any questions.
I don't know how much time how much time do we have now.
Okay, well go ahead.
So I see a thing for the vote.
I see a lot of suggestions.
I'll spend there when once you have.
What would been to happen once you have some potential funders, but something with struggle with is to have actual potential funders look at a project and which out and
we've been trying to push for that for two years and we've been talking with three or four potential funders.
Yeah.
And I don't know how to make up more visibility that we actually looking for that.
I don't know.
So your question is how to get more visibility or.
Yes.
Yeah.
Visibility is a problem like there's you know what hundreds of thousands millions of projects.
It's it's hard to stand out in in a very crowded world.
It's one of the reasons why looking for grants is actually feels more constructive in some ways because you can do it actively.
You can pursue you end up with with a different problem, which is the world is filled with grant potential grants and finding them is also not trivial.
It can depend on like what your project is about there may be a way to focus in on it.
There isn't like a really good answer to your question, at least not one that I've come to.
If you're part of an ecosystem, it does also help.
Just a little bit more color.
So the early ecosystem is like a is a constellation of a lot of related things.
So we have companies that are using our language or one of our languages.
We have open source projects which are like creating components.
So we have a little bit of a known pool.
And if you can identify an ecosystem that you may be even related to.
Then that can showing up at places talking about your project.
You know, like all the standard things is really the only kind of answer that there is.
But I feel for what your your plate is.
It's not simple.
Any other any other questions?
Yeah.
First, thanks for this short but very good introduction to this activity which is not really usual and easy.
Pickable.
Like I have two questions slightly related to each other.
First one is how much ready to use functionality has to be done before doing this activity.
Like a easy requirement to provide something working to show.
Or it's small like a real investment cycle where we promising and presenting trying to find a fit for market.
And as related question is what could be a good start in legal entity for an individual developer looking for a way in that like a port?
Yeah.
I understand.
All right.
So the first the first part of your question is can you do this with a greenfield project that you haven't started yet?
And the second is what kind of legal entities or can you even consider?
So I think it's really hard to do this kind of stuff with.
I think that this can help a greenfield project because you can lay out what you want to accomplish.
I think ultimately it depends on what your source of funding is and whether you can get someone interested in funding a greenfield project.
So a lot of well so like the cyber attack agency is looking to fund things that are part of like the critical infrastructure.
So obviously a greenfield project is not going to be part of that.
It really is sort of undefined but I think that no matter what.
If you're going to try to sell essentially sell someone a greenfield project, you need these things.
You need a set of objectives.
You need some roadmap.
You need some sort of indication of the level of effort that it will take to get some place meaningful.
Even as a personal exercise of practicality for like what it will take to do.
So the hologram project actually he started just working on it in his own.
He was doing consulting work on the side to sort of make his life sustainable.
And then he got to a point where he had like a bunch of stuff done and then he started looking for funding.
So that's the first part of your question.
I think that's the best answer I can give.
The second question about legal entities.
I can't really give you any good advice about it because it depends on the country you're in.
It depends on your on a bunch of other things and there are occasionally lawyers that are floating around.
Whenever I see a lawyer floating around in the open source world, I always introduce myself because they're not enough of them.
Like we usually sort of you know, villainize lawyers in some way.
But the lawyers that float around here are really for the most part.
I haven't met one otherwise are interested in supporting open source.
So I have talked with a few.
This is actually a question that I ask almost every lawyer that I come to which is what's a good venue to set up a legal entity.
And I get that the answers are usually no place or maybe here or maybe there but they're downsides.
So one of the things that I so one of the earlier talks today was they reference the open comment for what is it the European.
I don't remember the name of it at the top of my head but there's an open comment period for European funding.
And most people are again focused on oh well how do we get funding to open source.
And I would say that what we also need to focus on is on a country by country basis.
Research institutes that basically give a place for a small group of developers or an individual developer to be working on something that's meaningful.
And not have all that legal stuff and operational stuff to deal with because it's not our thing.
It's it's unreasonable we're not running a business so that it's anyway.
I think I that's the best answer I can give anyone else.
Yeah.
This one.
Oh go ahead.
No no.
Sorry.
Open source collective is okay.
Open source collective is one answer.
Another question.
Last question.
Yeah.
It's actually kind of follow up of what you just mentioned about all the what is seen as boring legal or accounting stuff.
Yeah.
You said something but I think it's actually very important.
You said at some point during your talk.
You said that you don't know which country is the best blah blah blah.
And you said something along the line of ask around.
Because you know in this country, this person, this lower your blah blah blah.
I feel like it's somehow sort of secret or I know this guy you should talk to him because you're in Belgium or you're in Italy and blah blah.
And I think we should find a way to set up I wouldn't say a list of open source friendly accountants in Italy or Germany or whatever but I think that kind of stuff would be useful.
Yeah.
I think that that's quite reasonable.
We apply the open source mentality to this problem will actually make a lot more progress.
And I think that's all we have.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.