 Hi everyone, this is Nithya Ruff and I'm very excited to be here with you at Foss Asia. I wish I could be there in person in Singapore, but given the circumstances, I'm speaking to you on a pre-recorded session. I want to talk to you about contributions and importance of contributions and going beyond just code contributions because we need all kinds of contributions and we need to recognize all kinds of contributions. I work for Amazon. I had the open source program office at Amazon and I also sit on the board of the Linux Foundation and I'm coming to you from North America, from Raleigh, North Carolina. So let's just get started in talking about this topic. One of the first things we need to talk about is why are contributions important? Why does free and open source software rely on contributions? And the important thing to see here is that when you have a common asset that all of us use and we help, we use it to innovate, we use it to develop products and services, etc., we need to then give back to it so that it can continue to grow and sustain. In fact, open source relies on people contributing back to open source in order to continue to improve, to grow, to strengthen, to thrive and to sustain. So it is such an important element of the open source growth, if you will, and success. The second thing would be that when more people contribute than everybody benefits and everybody learns and everybody grows from this and it lifts all boats. When only one person is burdened with improving something, we don't get the benefit of all of the brilliant thinking around the world and the brilliant talent and superpowers from around the world. The third thing is open source gives us a great way to get involved in tech and contribution to me is an on-ramp to starting to get involved in open source and tech. So contributions are important and it's a very core part of open source. But when you think about contributions, often you only think about code and you say, hey, in open source, I need to be technical, I need to be a programmer, I need to code, I need to only contribute code and they only accept code contribution. I need to do a pull request, a patch, etc. And code is extremely important. Don't get me wrong, code is very important because programs and projects have to grow and improve and become bigger. But there's a lot more to open source than just code. The culture of open source and the success of open source requires so much more than just the program of the technology that we all contribute to. There's so many other ways to contribute to open source. I would say the success of a project, the success of certain technologies depend upon all of these other elements working and being successful in order to really grow and be adopted in open source. One of the first things I would say is governance. So there are a lot of great people who have established projects before, have set up foundations, have managed at companies, etc. And they come with this leadership experience, this experience of how to set up the right group, if you will, governance, leadership, decision making, etc. for an organization. And most projects require that. They will start as they grow and become more and more successful. You have more people involved and you need to make sure that it is a fair and well run organization. So people with governance can contribute and help projects establish proper governance and that is a skill in itself. Let's then move on to establishing a community. So good programs and projects have users, they have people who contribute code, their committers, their maintainers, their community leaders, etc. And certainly financial folks and other elements in the project. And all of these volunteers, these are volunteers most of the time, need to be managed, need to have a cohesive sense of belonging to a common vision mission and a common purpose and need to know how to interact, how to communicate, how to work with each other and be recognized, be valued, etc. So the whole aspect of community building and community development and community management is such a big, big part of especially growing projects. So community leaders are much, much needed. So if you have skills in that area, it's a great place to get involved. And most projects require a lot of legal help also beyond just the license and the use of the license to, you know, access the code to a contribution license agreement in to make the contribution to trademarks to patent issues to, if you will, copyrights and branding. And there's a lot of legal stuff involved even in open source. And getting that right is important. And there are some brilliant people out there who balance understanding community with understanding legal nuances and their contribution to open source is incredibly valued and valuable. And one of the easiest ways, frankly, to get involved is to be a user. If you start using a certain project, why not go talk about it, file an issue, get involved in user groups, help other users. And there's just such a nice way to get involved in some technology from the user perspective. And these communities need that user perspective as well. We often tend to think of open source as not marketing friendly. And I have to say, advocacy or marketing is an important element of growing open source projects in the millions and millions of repos that often sit on GitHub or GitLab. Only way to be recognized and to kind of break out of that pack, if you will, is if you have a good outreach, a good advocacy and marketing program for the project. And I don't have to tell you that documentation is an extremely important element whether for users or for contributors. And we need translation so that projects can be global. Mentorship in a project is extremely important for new contributors and existing contributors. I think I covered evangelization in advocacy, but talking about it and everybody supporting it and talking about it broadly, whether it's on social media or any conferences is extremely important. So as you can see, code is important. Once you create that code, you need all of these surrounding elements in order for a project to be successful. And there are many, many benefits, I think, to individuals who get involved in open source. As we talked, it helps you get into tech if you're not in tech. It then gets you a job. Many of us have careers in open source because we develop skillsets working as a contributor in many open source projects. You get a tremendous amount of feedback and learning from others globally, not just in your own organization. And there's a sense of purpose and community when you're an open source because you feel like you are part of this bigger movement. And it's a positive and a good movement. And when you are an expert, you also get a chance to then give back and support open source and support others who are coming up. And that's a really good feeling. Companies benefit tremendously also from giving to open source, contributing to open source. And they do it in many, many different ways. They let their people work in open source. They contribute money through to foundations, sponsorships, cloud credits, et cetera, and sponsor events or host events in their venues. All of it is important, but it also has very good business benefits to companies to contribute. You reduce technical debt so you're not carrying and developing your products on something that's not on the mainline code and hence misses out on all the innovations and the security fixes, et cetera. You can influence the direction of a project through the code that you contribute. You can earn trust and a seat at the table of a project by contributing, by showing you care, by providing support to the project. And frankly, you sustain open source, which is one of the big innovation engines for all of us in all companies. And so supporting that and sustaining that is good for everyone. And many engineers and companies have said that they love the feedback that they get from a broader community of people, not just people in their team. And a company that has a good open source contribution profile and is a good citizen in the community often has a better job or easier time of acquiring talent and retaining talent because people want to work for companies that are in open source that allow their developers to work in open source. How do you increase contributions? I think companies can do a lot through establishing an open source project office, a program office like the kind I lead, which then makes it a point to help developers work in open source, make it easier to work in open source, clear their legal hurdles, clear the process hurdles. We recognize engineers who work in open source. We help teams set aside time for doing it. We mentor teams. But on the community side, also projects and programs can do a better job of making it dead easy for people to join as contributors, give better documentation, have a better community, have getting involved guides, easier licenses to work with, et cetera. I'm also seeing universities do a good job of developing curriculum. You have University of California Santa Cruz, you have Johns Hopkins and others and RIT who are creating curriculum and encouraging students to get involved in open source. But the most important thing is local communities like Claus Asia, which can make it safe, make it easy, make it familiar and comfortable for people to get involved in open source. And recognizing contributors, some of the best organizations I know, which do a great job of recognizing contributors are the Cloud Native Compute Foundation recognizes non-code contributions like they call it the Chop Wood and Fetch Water Award for all of those other things a project needs. The Apache Software Foundation does a fantastic job of including non-coders as members in the organization because of their contribution to the culture or to fundraising or to marketing, et cetera. And then the O'Reilly community awards, I'm very proud to be an O'Reilly community award winner, also recognizes community contributions and not just coding contributions. So with that, I want to draw your attention to some resources that you can read that will give you a sense of other things you can do to contribute and why you need to contribute, how to get involved, et cetera. Thank you so much for your time. And I hope that you have a really good time at Foss Asia. It's a fantastic program and fantastic organization that focuses on local communities and building open source strengths and skill sets in local communities. I hope you'll consider getting involved in open source and contributing in many ways, not just thinking that you have to be a coder to contribute. You can bring any of your superpowers to open source and be a contributor. Thank you again. This is Nithya Ruff. You can follow me at Nithya Ruff on Twitter. And I look forward to hearing from you.