 I so empathize with that too much food thing. You haven't lived until you've had a party for your conference and then wandered around Portland Central Eastside Industrial District with an industrial food service tray of tahini. And falafel trying to give it away to people who are working in the graveyard shift, because that doesn't bicycle very well. How's everyone doing? I think kind of a heavy day. I'm not going to help. Sorry. In high school, occasionally I get called Debbie Downer, which probably dates me to a certain era of SNL. Maybe earlier than a lot of you just sitting here because I didn't hear a lot of laughs. Want, want, okay. I just had to do the sound effect. All right. Some housekeeping. I have cough variant asthma. Usually I can get through talks, especially short ones, but asthma is triggered by stress and I'm going to be talking about some stressful stuff. If I start coughing, I'll just step away because I don't want the captioner to have to, you know, caption that and I don't want, you don't want to hear it in the mic. If it happens for a long time, maybe you talk and dance a jig or we can crowdsource some jokes or something. But just so you know, I'm okay. I'll finish coughing and come back. Also, a few content warnings. I'm going to be talking about suicide. I think graphic, but I am going to mention it. I'm also going to touch upon issues of burnout, mental health, housing instability and other ills of capitalism. Please do what you need to do to take care of yourself. You step it at any time. I'm going to post a transcript of this and I think it's being recorded. So you'll be able to catch up if and when you want to. So in Portland, we run a conference. Some of you may have heard of it. It's called open source bridge. We call it the conference for open source citizens. We focus on participation, connection and inclusiveness across the open source ecosystem. I could co-chair the conference for five years. This year was my first having no official job whatsoever, other than letting everybody else do their job without budding in. A little harder than it sounds if you've been in charge of something for five years. But I think I did a good job and it was wonderful. It was wonderful to see, wonderful and rewarding to see something that I'd put so much of my heart into continue on without me. I also helped start and run an on-profit called Stumptown Syndicate. The syndicate works to bring tech and maker skills to communities in ways that enable positive social change. Through my work with the syndicate, I've helped organize other tech events like bar camp, which is an on-conference ignite. And I co-authored the Citizen Code of Conduct, which some of you may have heard of. Somewhere in the middle of all this organizing, a few colleagues and I thought it would be a good idea to share what we've been learning about organizing. So we put together a book and a workshop about how to organize these things. Like all good workshops, workshop materials, ours included a bingo card. Of everything that might go wrong. I hope some of that is readable. Is it readable? Should I read some of them? Okay, we've got speaker hit by a car, or otherwise struck down. First attendee shows up an hour early, more like three hours. Venue demands generator for your excess power draw, running out of coffee or food. Let's see. Speaker or sponsors hung over. I think we've all experienced that one way or another. Too much food. Oh, there's some good things on here too. Like participants hugging you for offering gluten-free options. Say what's another thing that's funny? It's funny that you mentioned that. So I just realized I should stop my scrolling teleprompter. My speech is way ahead of me. All you need to know about that is don't. Don't do it. What it says, the toilet paper has printed words on it that say, sorry, I have a progressive lens. It's hard to see from this angle. Your insecure hosting environment, fire host sponsored that. And they were in every single restroom across the Oregon Convention Center. I started bringing my own toilet paper. You can tell, or those of you familiar with the conference, can tell that I haven't updated this in a little bit because otherwise there'd be a square for foodborne illness outbreak, which is something that happened last year. That's how I learned very viscerally the value of your local health department. And also need to add a chapter to the workbook about that. So the point of this card is to show that yes, things will go wrong. And that the things that go wrong won't necessarily be the things that you expect or that you're prepared for. But you can survive them and you can become stronger for it. Or at the very least, you can yell bingo at some point. There's another square missing from this card. I'm not sure I'm going to add it though because, well, it turns out it's one of the hardest things to deal with both as an individual organizer and as a community. It would warrant its own entire bingo card. And that's the unexpected death of a key organizer. In 2013, a few days before we were to send speaker acceptances and finalize our schedule for Open Source Bridge, Eagle Koshavoy, one of our key organizers and someone who'd worked on Open Source Bridge since its beginning took his own life. Those closest to Eagle knew about his struggles with depression and social anxiety. He had been withdrawn from the community for months. Welfare checks had been requested and performed. And yet, you were never prepared for this kind of loss. Eagle died in early April, 10 weeks before Open Source Bridge was scheduled to begin. Contracts had been signed, tickets had been sold. We had to notify speakers and publish our schedule. We had no choice but to move forward, to make the conference happen, to help settle the affairs of our friend, to navigate our grief. And most of us had day jobs and family matters to attend to as well. Somehow we managed to keep the conference more or less on schedule. Open Source Bridge year five happened. It went as well as it ever had. We had a big party at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry where we celebrated our fifth anniversary and we celebrated Eagle. There's a great story behind each of these photos, including the butt navigation one, but it's not mine to tell. While writing this talk, I tried to figure out exactly how we kept everything moving. I couldn't. I looked through the archives for our email planning list and the messages didn't look substantially different from any other year. We canceled exactly one planning meeting, the week of Eagle's death. I think we were able to do this because we had a lot going for us, relatively speaking. It was year five of the event, not year one or even year two. Year two was really hard as well. We weren't in a significant transition year in terms of the core team and our team has always been really dedicated. We were also supported by the tech community at large. While we planned the conference, we also planned a celebration of life for Eagle. This is how I learned that it turns out the skills that you use for organizing community tech events also apply to memorials. As they did so often with many of our events, the Portland Tech community came together to help with folks we'd been convening with for years at bar camps, user groups and other gatherings pitched in here and there in small and in big ways to make Eagle's celebration happen. It turns out that for a lot of people, Eagle was one of their first connections to the Portland Tech community. It was his warmth, his presence, his dedication that helped bring people in and make them feel welcome. These are just a few of the things that people said about Eagle upon his passing. This certainly matches my own experience of Eagle. I moved to Portland in the fall of 2007 and he was one of the first folks I distinctly remember meeting. Actually, I first encountered Eagle on Twitter and it's kind of intimidated him, intimidated of him just because of his Twitter avatar. Do you ever have this experience? You sort of meet someone from afar and then you instantly think, way too cool for me, right? Makes me wonder what people's first impression of me is. So I saw this avatar and this is kind of embarrassing now but I thought that's a kick-ass person. They can probably bench hundreds of pounds and set things ablaze with a single glance. But once I met Eagle, I quickly realized that my impression was a little off. As a former Eagle scout, he was very resourceful but he wasn't scary or intimidating at all. He was warm and friendly and dedicated to serving the community. He went out of his way, oh, he loved cats. I forgot to say he loved cats. Can't forget that. He went out of his way to see that people got what they needed. He spoke several languages. He used to take and share the most amazingly detailed notes. Once he explained to me his process for creating these notes, I never took note-taking for granted again. For Eagle, it was a complicated process because the language of his mind was not English and so he had to translate twice. He had to translate once upon hearing material and then once upon writing it. That was Eagle though. He would do extra effort if he thought it would provide value to the community. Eagle also created beautiful art. Someone was a little weird in a creepy, funny way. I just had to include that. And Eagle struggled. The extent to which is something I only learned after he was gone. My impression of Eagle changed significantly from when I first met him to after I got to know him. And it evolved further when I learned things about him after he passed. I call attention to these disparities for a reason. We often project ideas about the organizers in our communities that aren't necessarily true. We project that they feel empowered by the power we place in them. We project that they feel like they can ask for help because we are so willing to provide it if asked. We project that they know they are appreciated because we feel appreciative of all that they do. We project that they are doing okay because we see them getting shit done. We project that they feel loved because we love them and all that they do for us. We project that they can set objects of blaze in a single glance because they have a stern Twitter avatar. While holding leaders is accountable, it's important to recognize that we need to build systems and communities that allows leaders to access the self-care, the respite, the appreciation, and the support as they need it. In addition to planning our conference and a memorial for EGAL, we also worked to safeguard the community that our community assets that EGAL or that had been in EGAL's possession at the time of his death. Because EGAL was so involved in the activities of Portland Tech, he actually owned or controlled a lot of our community work and assets. Things like domains, code, hosted applications, right? In our case, we were lucky if you can call it that. Although EGAL attempted to leave a will, it wasn't legally valid. We were, however, able to transfer these assets, A, because EGAL had left us with all his passwords and login credentials. Two, by this time, we had already created the Stunttown Syndicate, and so there was an uncontroversial and appropriate place to move things to. And three, EGAL's family was cooperative and didn't mind us doing this. EGAL didn't host all of these things for us to be controlling or to concentrate power, but he did it out of a sense of service and to provide convenience. I think this is true for a lot of our community work. You get together to write an app to do a thing. When it's time to deploy, someone creates a droplet or a VPS or a VM or whatever is in vogue at the time. You get the thing up and running. In fact, I think if we were to take a census or a survey, the majority of our small group work product in open source is probably controlled and owned by individuals. Think about your own community's work. Who owns the account under which things are set up? Who has access to these accounts? Do they have access simply because the password's been shared with them or are they an actual authorized person to access the account? There's a difference. What would happen to these accounts and their assets if the owner were to die unexpectedly? The laws vary on this by location, but generally if the person hasn't left a will and if the will isn't valid and lots of people don't have wills, then ownership and control falls to the person's next of kin. Is that person going to be available, cooperative? How many of you have successfully explained open source to your relatives? This issue is relevant not just to community assets, but to your personal body of work as well. If you care about how your work is used and where any proceeds generated by it are directed after you're gone, you need to account for that in your state planning. A while ago, Neil Gaiman noticed that authors, novelists, were in a similar situation. It was common for them to pass without having left a will in place that explicitly outlined their wishes with regard to their creative works. And because of this, there would be conflict among their surviving friends and family members and possibly things would happen with their literary estate that were clearly against their wishes. When I read Neil's post, I immediately thought of Steve Larson. I'm guessing we have some girl with the dragon tattoo fans here, so some of you may know about this. Larson's wildly popular Millennium Trilogy was published after his sudden death from a heart attack at age 50. Like EGAL, Larson attempted to leave a will, but it was not legally valid. As a result, his literary estate passed to family members and not his longtime partner, Eva Gabrielsen, as he wished. As a result, we have a fourth Elizabeth Sallender book, not written by Larson. Not to mention that Gabrielsen didn't get to benefit from any of the wild financial success that the books had. And so Neil Gaiman worked with an attorney friend to create a boilerplate will that explicitly covered this type of creative and launchable property. And I think we need something like that in open source. There are any attorneys in the audience that want to, like, work with me on that, let me know, or if you know attorneys. Okay, it's been a little over three years since EGAL passed. I no longer feel the same acute pangs of grief that I did back then, although occasionally, I think I see EGAL out of the corner of my eye. And a moment of joy settles back into a dull ache of sadness and regret. I don't know if any of you have this experience. Looking back, what I regret most is not spending more time just hanging out with EGAL. Outside of the few annual holidays that EGAL spent with us at our home, most of my interaction with him was in the context of our open source community work. This pattern isn't specific to my friendship with EGAL. I built a lot of friendships based around work. Actually, until recently, I built most of them around work. Some of this is Protestant culture and work ethic. I grew up in a family where work was paramount, play was discouraged, and even sometimes punished. I learned early on that in my family, volunteering was one of the few permissible ways to socialize. And it often made accessible to me activities that were otherwise out of reach because of our economic situation. Open source greatly benefits from people like me who are conditioned to seek out extracurricular work, projects, and volunteer opportunities. And so it rewards and encourages this behavior. Indeed, open source thrives on the line, oh, I'm supposed to be advancing here. Indeed, open source thrives on the line between vocation and hobby, being as blurry as possible. Because open source is dependent on a steady source of free labor. This is a problem because there are very few, if any, mechanisms for monitoring contributor well-being. Why is this so, and what does it mean for our movement? Well, what are our phosphor bearers have to say about this? It turns out, not much. They have focused, for the most part, on the intellectual property rights aspect, the licensing of open source. For example, the Free Software Foundation, I think some of you have heard of the Free Software Foundation, primarily concerned with user freedom, and they do most of their work through GPL enforcement, GPL being the GNU public license which they created. The open source initiative, its main business is to determine what qualifies as an open source license. The few organizations such as Apache Foundation that are focused on individual developers, they're concerned mostly with infrastructure and with ensuring that the production of open source software continues rather than being concerned with contributor and community well-being. What these approaches lack, and I find it to be a serious omission, is recognition that open source is as much a mode of production as it is a matter of intellectual property. By mode of production, I mean the combination of labor and materials, infrastructure and knowledge required to make and distribute things. In the case of open source software, in the case of open source, we're generally talking about software, sometimes hardware, some characteristics of open source that are kind of unique to open source software production. It's a mix of free and unpaid labor, volunteers and employees. The labor tends to be geographically distributed with many working in non-traditional environments and non-traditional hours. There's no professional body governing entrance into open source or ethics or continuing education. For the most part, if you have the skills or the gumption to learn them and access to a computer, you can start producing. The materials and infrastructure provided by a mix of individuals, foundations and for-profit companies. The material input and work product are shared by partners and competitors alike. Sometimes, sometimes people roll their own. Because a major advantage of open source is being able to use the prior work of others, it tends to favor interoperability and standards. And, and this kind of goes back to what some of the prior speakers have talked about, because contributions of code are among the easiest to track and therefore make visible, merit is assigned disproportionately to technical contributions and technical roles tend to be valued above all others. I left out a whole part. That's okay, I remember it. So, open source, when we look at it like this, it can feel really empowering to individual contributors. You can participate from anywhere. You get to keep your portfolio of work and share it as you move through your career. No formal training or degrees are hard. I have an English-lit degree. Turns out a lot of people in open source do. You know, it took like 10 years for me not to feel bad about that. It's cheap to get started because there aren't prohibitive software licensing fees. All of those reasons are why I got into open source initially. It wasn't the ideology, it was economics. What mattered to me at the time was free, free as in beer, not free as in freedom. As time went on and I gained some financial stability and started participating in open source, I got more into the ideology. It seemed to explain why I felt so good being a part of the community. Not only was I helping to build something greater than myself, but I was helping a righteous cause. Free software felt righteous. This is my super scientific graph of my career progression. For a time, I thought contributing to open source was giving me a unique career advantage. For several years, as I became more and more involved in open source and more visible, I got better and higher paying jobs. Eventually, I even got my open source dream job at Mozilla. But it turned out my open source dream job wasn't all that dreamy. That would be that glass wall of despair line. While Mozilla is highly visible and often looked up to, it's extremely dysfunctional. How did the shit is twisted? Very twisted. And it's fairly socially regressive, especially compared to its peers in the tech industry. During the time that I struggled at my dream job, I watched friend after friend hit their own glass walls of frustration and burnout. I watched them run out of patience, waiting to be appreciated and recognized for their technical acumen. I watched friends struggle over and over again to meet their basic needs for housing, food, and healthcare. I observed myself, a struggle to balance my increasingly complicated health and family needs with my open source community obligations. I struggled to understand why I was unable to effectively apply my extensive open source experience at my dream job in Mozilla. All the while, I was growing weary and really wanting a break from unpaid volunteer work to explore other life pursuits. Losing EGAL, watching people I care about struggle and facing my own disillusionment, prompted me to start thinking critically about open source and how current norms and practices affect individual contributors and our communities. I'm not alone in this. Many of us are starting to have these conversations, talking about sustainability and our impact on the world. Here's where I am in my analysis. There are, I see two significant downsides to the way open source is practiced today. The first is that organizations disproportionately benefit. How? Three ways. First, they profit from the aggregate of our free labor. The sum of the free labor that we collectively give to organizations in the form of our contributions, it reduces their cost of production and increases their profit margin. The thing is, they're not obligated to redistribute any of that profit or reinvest it into the community or recognize the economic value of our work in any way whatsoever, and for the most part, they don't. Two, organizations have more power than individuals working alone. There are a few exceptions to this. There are a few exceptions to this, like if you're Linus Torbolds and you hold the copyright to something like Linux. But generally speaking, large open source projects or even medium-sized ones face little to no consequences for dysfunctional behavior because they can easily withstand when folks stop contributing here and there. At worst, the organization will simply hire someone and pay them a salary to do the work of an unpaid contributor who is left. Three, organizations have a better shot at sustainability because they have greater capital, access to capital to invest in product, research, development, and distribution, all of which in turn generate profit. And they have greater access to capital because they have access to investors, which is something individuals for the most part do not. And they have a cheap labor source, us. This is really uplifting, huh? The second significant disadvantage I see is that individuals disproportionately suffer. Three ways. I like triplets. One, the economic value over labor is made invisible. This is bad because it contributes to under-employment and under-payment. We might think we're getting good resume building experience and for folks who are new to tech this might be true, but it has significantly diminishing returns. Most companies won't pay for things they know they can get for free. Two, open source promotes building a community and social relationships in ways that are fundamentally fragile, unaffirming, and extractive. This is because open source transforms what should be our third spaces, places that are anchors of community life like the neighborhood coffee shop, the community center, the church, and so on into work spaces. The problem with this is that it brings work type stress into our personal relationships. It keeps those relationships one-sided, bound if not to professionalism directly, but to a directive to always be getting things done. It squeezes out the space to simply play together, relax together, be together. Three, an emphasis on consistent technical contribution as a requirement for inclusion reinforces the idea that we are only valuable and deserving of care and so much as we are able to contribute. If we become unable to contribute, either in the short term or the long term, or if we were never able to fully participate in the first place, it can leave us feeling worthless. Our value as human beings and our right to be included in our communities shouldn't be contingent on an ongoing ability to consistently make technical contributions. We are so much more than that. Next time I'm adding more Pikachu's, which will probably require me to learn about Pokemon, which I've been resisting. The title of this talk is, When the Worst Happens. On a macro level, it's about the challenges our community faced when losing one of our core organizers. On a macro level, it's about how we're all participating in a system dependent on an ever steady stream of contributors who give as much as they can, often without any monetary compensation for their labor until they can't give anymore. Not being able to give anymore means different things for different people. Some face emotional and physical burnout. Some have to take pain jobs outside of open source. Some can't find pain jobs even with their extensive experience. Some decide that the pain of this world is too much and decide to leave it like Yigal did. When I criticize open source culture, I'm not arguing in favor of proprietary licenses. I think the less restrictive that proprietary or the intellectual property rights are, the better society is as a whole. Rather, I'm arguing that we need a better model of free and open source software. One that prioritizes our humanity. I think if we did a word cloud of all the talks here at this talk, humanity would be like pretty big, which is cool. One that helps meet our needs for food, shelter and security. One that helps us build communities that realize everyone's potential, whatever that may be. One that contributes towards building a better future for all of us. The four freedoms that Richard Stallman outlined are meaningless if people don't have enough to eat, clean water to drink, a place to live, or adequate healthcare for mind and body. They're meaningless where trans folks don't have a safe place to go to the bathroom and where black lives don't matter. Oops, sorry. Oh, there we go, I'm caught up now. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered. Who recognizes this quote? It's almost 30 years old. Martin Luther King said this about the Vietnam War. I came across it the other weekend and I was shocked at how contemporary it felt. Okay, so what I want you to take away from this jury slog of a talk. One, ensure your community's assets are safeguarded. At the very least, document, that's going fast, at the very least, document where everything is and how to access it for bonus points instead of some kind of structure that can withstand transitions. Two, ensure your personal body of work is safeguarded. Get a will. Three, oh, it went too fast. I didn't do that. Three, build communities and well-rounded now we don't have any bullets. So if I go to the end, I might auto advance. Maybe if I stop it. All right, I'm new to keynote. I switched from Linux recently. So, oh, okay. You know what, I'll just let it do its thing. Okay, that's my excuse like not, oh, I'm on Linux and that's why it's not working now. It's, oh, I came from Linux and that's anyway. Three, build community and well-rounded ways and help restore our third spaces. Think of yourself more like an ecumenical community center than a user group or an open source project. Finally, join me in building a better, more sustainable model. One that recognizes and fairly compensates everyone's labor. Think of starting co-ops or benefit corpse. Yay, Ali. Rather than VC-funded 10X startups or even traditional foundations. I like to rant about nonprofit. Lastly, and my slides already kind of gave me away, but I want to honor and recognize those we have, come on, those we have lost before our time. During the last couple of weeks, I've been asking folks for the names of people that we've lost before their time. They're listed here. I know that this list is probably not complete. Please add any name that's missing now, either by speaking it silently to yourself or out loud as you like. Matthew Coochler's, I'll repeat it for the Seth Rich. Thank you for that. And you can send me names. I'm not sure what I'm gonna do with this, but I'll update it. Okay, so this has been kind of heavy, and I want to end with a little bit of hope. Angels in America, a gay Fantasia on national themes. How can you not like something that has gay Fantasia in the subtitle? How many people have seen this, either the player or the miniseries? Oh, great, okay. It's one of my all-time favorites. It's a massive work about AIDS and queerness in 1980s America. One of the issues it grapples with is how to make sense of lost. This quote is from a monologue that closes the play. It goes something like this. Night flight to San Francisco. Chased the moon across America. God, it's been years since I was on a plane. When we hit 35,000 feet, we'll have reached the tropopods. The great belt of calm air. As close as I'll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane left the tropopods, the safe air, and attained the outer rim. The ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things. Souls were rising from the earth far below. Souls of the dead, of people who'd perished from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up like skydivers in reverse. Limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles and formed a web, a great net of souls. And the souls were three atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there's a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind and dreaming ahead, at least I think that's so. I believe we are working towards a kind of painful progress, and I like to believe that the souls of those who have left us are helping out somehow from wherever they are. I ask you now, let's dream up a better future and start building it today.