34C3 - Organisational Structures for Sustainable Free Software Development

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

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