34C3 Intro playing
Herald: Organisational Structures for
Sustainable Free Software Development.
Title says it all in my opinion and I
think this is a very important topic.
The talk will be held by Mo, who has
experience with dozens of free software
projects and funding sources.
As a funder and recipient of grants,
contracts and donations. The stage is
yours, give a big hand
and round of applause for mo please.
applause
mo: Hello everyone, nice rainy 4th day of
Congress. Yes I'm going to talk about
organizational structures. What I mean by
that and why am I talking about this?
I was invited to submit a talk about open
source funding and they cut me short. They
gave me instead of the 60 minutes that I
offered they gave me 30 minutes. So now
I'm cutting out all the part that is
actually talking about funding. Because I
think before you can go and even speak
about funding you need to understand that
funding can be dangerous, money can be
very destructive for open source projects.
And in order to be prepared for kind of
the next part of my talk that you're not
going to hear today. I want to talk a bit
more about organizational structures and
another alternative title of this talk
could be open source governance so even
more dry than the previous title. Before I
go into detail of: why am I giving this
talk? Who am I? Why do I think I have some
experience with all these topics? Some
caution, some trigger warning as you've
might have experienced I'm using open
source and free software exchangeably in
this talk and I know this can cause a lot
of uproar. People can die and I don't want
anyone's feeling to get hurt I can go into
detail about why I'm doing this and why
I'm using this interchangeably. Both for
the aspects of the licensing where it
classically would use kind of open-source
licenses as well as for all the open
source principles and guiding guidelines
for the development, the collaboration and
everything that is happening on
organizational level. So bear with me. If
you're a free software person I'm your
friend.
So a bit about me. In 2010 I was
studying computer science at the Technical
University Dresden and as one of my side
projects near the end of the studies I
started something called torservers.net .
Torservers.net is a network of
organizations so we started with the first
organization in Germany a non-profit
members Association. And the goal of this
network of organizations is to run Tor
infrastructure. So over the years we've
grown this network from this single
organization in Germany to 22
organizations in 15 countries. Most of
these organizations have been set up
specifically for this purpose to run
network infrastructure. And most of them
are also charitable nonprofits so I kind
of accidentally learned a lot about the
the differences between the different
countries. On how they look at charitable
law and stuff like that. In 2013 I came
across a pretty new foundation the
Renewable Freedom Foundation it was set up
in 2012 by Georg Chef the then newspaper
owner of the Donaukurier in Ingolstadt, so
it's a daily newspaper and he started a
foundation with the goal to protect and
preserve civil liberties in the digital
space. And ever since we've been working
with dozens of organizations and dozens of
projects across the whole sphere of
anything that you can basically see at the
Congress. And we we are a small foundation
so we had to find our purpose in this
space. And we are focusing mostly on
organizational development, taking away
burden from people that set out to realize
their goals and in order to realize your
goals you sometimes have to do stuff that
you don't want to do and we help with
that. And this led to the creation of a
new entity in 2016 the Center for the
cultivation of Technology. Which is a non-
profit limited liability company in
Germany and a GGmbH and I will go back to
that and mention it later in this talk. So
why are we here? What are we talking about?
I cut my talk short, I mentioned this.
A lot of the stuff that you're going
to see are basically references to outside
material. This is a complex topic and I
encourage you to look at the references
and pick them up. They should be now
listed in the Fahrplan for this event. So
you don't have to take pictures or
anything of this or follow the video to
hunt the references they're all linked on
the website. And my goal for this talk is
that there's a growing number of people in
our space that think critically about
funding. That also see that more and more
funding is coming to this space and that
we need to become better at at organizing
and learning and collectively sharing our
experiences with funders with funding
entities. How to write grants and stuff
like that and if at the end of this talk
maybe one or two people come up with to me
and become part of that network that would
be great, that that's my hope for this
talk.
So let's start on April 7th 2014. I
think you all well recognize this logo.
This was one of the first times where kind
of in a marketing experiment people
described a weakness in OpenSSL. This is
heartbleed. And heartbleed kicked off
quite a bit of activities. There was a
blog post by the OpenSSL developers
basically how they're not getting any
funding to do their work properly. And also
it kicked off a lot of other research in
this area about how can we actually
support open source.
One of the most prominent figures
that is walking around
talking about these topics is Nagia Eghbal
this is like three references that I feel
are very important to to look at. The
unstructured labor behind our digital
infrastructure was a report published in
July 2016. I picked out another short talk
of her rebuilding the cathedral at the
Strange Loop Conference. And she's
maintaining a sort of a list of funding
opportunities so she's comparing the
different ways to to get opensource funded
so if you're coming only for that part
take a look at that list: "The Lemonade
Stand". Mozilla also did quite a bit of
research they're as you know a fairly
large organization handling a lot of
volunteers and a lot of volunteer
contributions. We also know that there's a
lot of controversy around how well they
manage this and in order to improve they
commissioned a few studies, one of the
studies was done by Stanford in 2009. How
do you actually work with volunteers
basically the topic always is how do you
scale and how do you keep volunteers
excited around your project and
contributors. There's an interesting
Community Survey that I invite you to look
at and there's a more extensive report
published in 2016 about the motivations of
contributors to open source and I will
come back to this because this is exactly
the crucial part when you transition from
a project that has been run on volunteer
basis or that has some people involved
that managed to contribute to the project.
And how to grow your project and keep that
spirit up and and be inclusive as a
community. Kind of the most famous and the
most relevant reference here is Jono
Bacon. Not necessarily this book. This is
a good book, it's a lengthy book, but he
also gave a lot of different talks and
he's giving seminars about this. And I
highly recommend his stuff. I put a small
note at the bottom: This book is not an
instruction manual because it is an
instruction manual. And I don't like that
style so try to read it and read
in between the lines. There's a
lot of takeaways that you can have from
this book that are -- that you won't get if
you follow it line by line. I think that
many people demand an instruction manual
for how to manage communities and then you
end up with that kind of writing. But I
still think that this is kind of the most
valuable book describing the motivations
of opensource developers. He talks a lot
about like creating a sense of belonging
in the community. That you need a shared
belief in the project and that you will
need to have opportunity to contribute on
an equal basis. So this is the
announcement of the core infrastructure
initiative by the Linux Foundation that is
only roughly like two or three weeks after
heartbleed. So they managed to find some
commercial companies to bootstrap a
program that would support open source
infrastructure and of course the first
software that they supported with this and
are still supporting is OpenSSL. And I
will just briefly mention a bunch of
funding opportunities and a bunch of ways
how open-source projects might be able to
get some funding. To show that there's
been quite a lot of movement in these
areas. The P that you can see here is the
German prototype fund, that's the German
Ministry of Education and Research that is
supporting this project. So there is
German federal government money that is
used to fund open-source development and I
encourage everyone of you to check out the
prototype fund website and look at the
previous rounds of projects that they've
been supporting because I think it's an
excellent selection. I listed a bunch of
others I'm not going to go more into
detail about the funders that's for a
second talk, a separate talk, but you can
find these resources like, I picked out
tools specifically the snowdrift wiki the
market research they did, that Aaron did
is really excellent into the different
ways of funding. And also we maintain a
huge list of funding sources that's, I
think, around 300 foundations listed there,
not all of them fund open source
technology. But since we are active in a
more broader space of like digital
everything you will find a lot of material
there. One thing that I want to
specifically pick out and highlight
because it hasn't been talked about before
not that I know of. Is a program that is
currently in its phase of accepting
applications. With a wonderful name of
ICT-24-2018-2019, it's a European
Commission call for participation. For the
next-generation Internet. And this is
relevant and interesting because the way
they're framing this call will show you
quite clearly that they are interested in
the kind of technologies that get built by
our communities. And sometimes the
language is kind of funny and the
terminology is something that you have to
get used to. But I like it it's kind of
human centric openness, cooperation across
borders, decentralization, inclusiveness,
protection of privacy kind of that's
that's the values that also we stand for.
And in this program the the research and
innovation actions that this is going to
fund should encourage when relevant open
source software, open hardware design,
access to data, standardization
activities. So everything that kind of our
communities have been doing and want to be
doing so this is really a great
opportunity and we will see how this will
end up because, and now I'm coming to the
to the crucial point of this call. It is a
call for intermediaries so you're not
supposed to apply as a project directly
for that kind of money because that just
too huge the amount of money that they're
giving out in total budget just for this
call is 21.5 million just in 2018. So as
intermediaries you can apply for these
fundings and they're split across three
three different topics. One topic is
privacy technologies.The other is peer-to-
peer technologies. And the third is kind
of data mining big data stuff. And these
intermediaries then are responsible to
split up that funding and give it away to
third parties and this is something that
Commission calls usually exclude. Usually
they require you to develop everything in-
house and make it very hard to involve
external participants. So this will be
interesting to follow, the deadline is in
April and sometime maybe during the next
year we will see who got this money and
how they're going to redistribute this.
Now, for dealing with money I put this nice
little piggy bank as a kind of contrast to
how dangerous actually funding can be if
you don't think about it. So when you want
to deal with money and I'm probably not
telling you any news as a as a project you
have to decide whether you want to start
some kind of legal entity to help you with
that because at certain points you don't
just don't want to have it go through one
individual. So you have the option of
creating your own organization or you find
an organization -- an existing organization
to partner with. In the hopes that it's
kind of less bureaucratic, you already have
some kind of infrastructure, there's
hopefully already some accounting
happening and all that stuff. So let's
look at the two different options. The one
option starting your own is something that
a lot of people feel that is the way to go
because they believe that they stay in
control, right. It's your own
thing, you're not depending on some
external weird partner organization. But I
I am warning from this model because
you're actually creating an organism when
you create an organization you create some
organism and that organism develops its
own life and then my experience with many
projects is that over time the
organization swallows its people. And
you're contributing to something that you
set out to be doing and in this
organization. Without necessarily taking a
step back and deciding when to let go of
an organization or when to restructure it.
It will defend itself. So, how do you do
this? What you see here is a very
elaborate bylaws or chapter or the
articles of creation of your organization.
And there's typically two ways to do this.
One you go and hire a lawyer and they come
up with some draft document for you. This
is kind of very often the way that people
do it in the US. In Europe mostly what you
do is you copy something, you compile it
yourself. So in Europe you don't need a
lawyer to create organizations. You're not
expected to get a lawyer involved. So what
happens then is that you look around you
compare different articles from from
similar organizations and then quite often
you copy different parts of these
documents together to form your own
organization and the problem in both cases
is that here what happens is that you are
getting some template that has governance
structure described. That does not
necessarily match the governance structure
of your project and it does not
necessarily match the values and the
spirit of a collaborative environment for
open-source development. And this is even
more dangerous the kind of copypasta.
Because you usually end up with a document
that is in itself incoherent because some
of the articles at the beginning
contradict some articles coming later and
when you talk to lawyers that see they see
this over and over again. So this is not
something that just happens sometimes but
this is the usual case that this is not
even coherent in itself. Let alone
coherent and compatible with how you
actually want to run the project. And this
is this leads to kind of a feeling that
you have to have these two worlds you you
think that there are some legal
requirements for your organization that
that does not exactly fit the spirit. But
there is opportunity there there is
opportunity there to to express the actual
governance that you have in your project
and even like probably unwritten right you
have some idea of how you want to work
together. So I caution people don't just
copy and paste something don't go to your
lawyer and say I want to create a non-
profit or I want to create a company
because you're getting the cheap kind of
capitalist model of an organization. I
call this the stack overflow effect right
it's copy pasting stuff from stackoverflow
and importing it and bootstrapping an
organization like that. The alternative
that you have is using a fiscal sponsor
that's the professional term for looking
for partner organization and partnering
with an existing organization. And in the
free software space there's a bunch of
those that you can pick from and all of
these include some guidance along the way
especially if they're made for open source
projects and if they're already
experienced with other projects. So this
is a newspaper article that in the LWN
article. chooseafoundation.com is a
website that compares a bunch of the most
prominent ones in the US. I want to
highlight the Commons Conservancy. The
Commons Conservancy is a bit different
model it isn't actually a fiscal sponsor
and it's it is a way to define your own
governance so independently of what kind
of legal entities you're going to use. You
can use the material that the Commons
Conservancy is producing to pick and
choose governance models. So they have
documents about forking organizations for
example. So you not only forking the
source code but really forking the
organization and what happens to the
assets that the organization has domain
names trademarks and stuff like that. So
ultimately in any case you will have to
talk about this ugly topic and that's why
I use this kind of very ugly slide to talk
about governance because that's something
that kind of the projects usually that I
work with are loose collectives, are
politically motivated, come with anarchy
spirit, are kind of against any form of
formal governance . Which is not exactly
what anarchism is about but that's a
separate talk all together. Let's stick to
this. So what we have in open source
actually is a lot of tools that have been
developed, that implement the governance
models without it becoming kind of a long
written statements. So when you think
about issue trackers, when you think about
mailing lists the way you interact on code
with with revision control systems all of
that is an implementation of inherently of
a governance model in open-source. And we
are lacking those tools in the other areas
that become relevant for governance and
this is basically what I want to highlight
in this talk so. But how do we go from
here? How do we take all these unwritten
rules and this kind of spiritual or
ethical guidelines that that we come out
and this will be very different from
organization to organization. How do we
turn them into something that other people
can follow? And this is important
especially during the phase where you
start receiving money because then you
have to make a decision on how to spend
that money and you can still make the
decision collectively. But over time you
bring in people maybe from different
spaces and they're coming with a different
background, they're coming with a
different set of ethical principles. And
they might be spoiled already by working
in some bullshit company for a long time
and then they come and they take that,
these these principles that they've
learned into your nice collaborative
environment. And there's there's a
tendency and I see that in many places
that as organizations grow up there's this
divide between the principles for the
software development side and the
principles of how the organization is run.
A very good book that talks about this in
a non-technical environment about
organizations is this book. Frederic
Laloux "Reinventing Organizations" and for
me this is very inspiring as a blueprint
for how you can actually copy the model,
you will find a lot of material here where
you can see directly how it relates to the
open source way of doing things. I picked
out the quote "Impressive! Brilliant! This
book is a world changer!" and not because
I believe that it is but because actually
as a bit of a warning because it's written
a very enthusiastic way. So sometimes you
have to kind of let the author go and and
and but still continue reading there's a
lot of good thinking material in there and
one thing I want to pick out is the
sections where they talk about the
different governance models in terms of
hierarchical structures compared to
consensus structures. And the third and
the model that is highlighted across this
book is what they call the advice process.
And when you look at the advice process in
that book it's basically what our
communities know as rough consensus. So if
you have an idea you have the full
authority to execute that idea. But you
are you are forced to get input, you're
forced to get advice from the outside so
the only way to violate kind of rules is
that you're not reaching out to relevant
people for advice and relevant people are
the people that you work with are the
people that might have some good ideas
around that topic. But they cannot block
you the authority stays with you for that
decision. There's another really relevant
section especially given what's happening
here with code of conducts and and all
this. Is the clear the need of clearly
documented and explicit decision-making
processes. In a way that is compatible
with that kind of thinking that you are a
self-organized group and yourself we want
to strengthen the self organization in
that organization. And there's really
interesting material in there that could
avoid some of the weird code of conduct
stuff that has happened in our
communities. So I really encourage you to
at least look at that section of the book.
Another interesting thing like they have a
they had that he's looking at something
some comparing some different entities
that use this model. In in in their own
ways and one of them is a multinational
corporation in like active in 80 countries
or something with like 20,000 employees.
And still they have this principle that
anyone in the organization can spend as
much money as they want. As long as
they're following that advice principle
that I mentioned earlier. Ao this is just
something to inspire you when you think
about like managing money in an
organization and there's a bunch of
projects starting to appear that are
trying to apply open-source principles to
this. One is Co budget you're invited to
look at that. The other more known is open
collective, open collective you can sign
up as an open-source project people can
donate to your project and you can also
establish some transparency. Because a lot
of time you lose that transparency of like
what is actually happening with that
money, and who has access to that money
and who can spend that money. Just briefly
something about funding sources I already
mentioned the "Lemonade Stand" list.
There's like the three sections of like
small donor, private foundations, public
funding. There's a lot to be said about
small donors but my when people ask me
about crowdfunding and campaigning and
stuff like that I I'm very reluctant about
that because it usually doesn't work. So
the the only thing that works in terms of
raising money from small donors is that
you can show the support of the community
and then get some larger donor to top that
up and and agree oh wow that project
really has has users. It doesn't really
work that well to for in most cases that
but that's very specific cases. So quickly
just dealing with funders some some of the
learnings that I took away from from my
work in the previous years. One that I'm
still struggling with is how can we make
this planning and writing grant
applications fun. If any one of you has
some exciting ideas about gamification of
of grant applications and I'm all ears.
And my advice is and and that's something
that also a lot of people are making
mistakes there is that plans change.
Right? You you you develop a plan you give
it to the funder it's maybe for one year
or two year grant and they expect that
this is going to change because it has
changed. It like there's no way that you
can follow that plan line by line but
there's this it's it's mostly the side of
the recipient that feels kind of weird
when you deviate from your plans. Do that
change your plans communicate this early
and not because otherwise you're creating
trouble at the end of the project or
you're doing stuff that you don't really
want to do anymore. In terms of writing
grant applications a lot of things are
kind of a mistake that people are doing
because they're like in the developer mode
of thinking. Is they think in terms of
deliverables and deliverables in terms of
what kind of features can we add to the
software. This is actually an art form
coming up with estimates for software
development I encourage everyone to look
into the material about software
estimation. Because it's kind of crazy I
cannot talk more about this because I'm
already over time but one thing that I
still want to mention and this is the last
slide. Is that in a lot of cases I've seen
that you can think about deliveries in a
completely different way. You can think
about deliverables in a way that is
actually supporting community growth
rather than just feature sets and the
metrics of success that you can define
there because funders want some metrics of
success demonstrated. Is the number of
people that are participating on your
mailing lists, the number of people you
have in your IRC channel that's all that
kind of stuff and redirecting some of the
funding to the more kind of community
oriented hackathons, running events,
t-shirts and all that. You know about
this, but usually in the moment of a grant
application that all that gets dropped and
then you're struggling keeping that up so
now that I'm over time I'm going to skip
like maybe a hundred of slides. And I'm
going to end with this slide. And thank
you.
Applause
Outro playing
subtitles created by c3subtitles.de
in the year 2018. Join, and help us!