 All right. Well, thank you all for coming. I know it's been a long week for many of us. Who's been here every day this week? Yeah, it's wonderful content and thank you so much to the volunteers our Room leaders our video people you have been awesome And we really appreciate all the work that you've done I want to talk a little bit today about passion and just as a show of hands How many of you either have an open-source project or really any cause in your life? That you really get excited about and means a lot to you and you like to do when your spare time permits Most of us right? Yeah I Think for all of you and maybe even those of you who who don't have a lot of time to work on things I think the topic today is hopefully going to get you thinking about some interesting questions A little bit about me. My name is Michael Downey I work for an organization called the digital impact alliance which is part of the United Nations Foundation and I am leading up a program called the dial open-source center, which is the subject of what I'm going to talk about today but I want to talk about it in context of a really challenging a challenging issue that we're facing and that there is a risk of This presentation not moving sorry one second Thank you. There we go. Sorry I Want to talk a little bit today about how open-source software projects are used and some really remote places around the world and some really Poor and impoverished places around the world and places we might not always think about a lot of us think about how we use open-source on our Personal laptop and use it to do the work that we do every day But here's a few scenarios for you that you may not have thought about when you think about how open-source is used Think about small businesses how they run their finances how they get loans from organizations Because right now every day open-source software is used to help support those activities Connecting money trade prices market prices and health care open-source is used in almost every country around the world It manages your information when you go to the doctor or to the hospital It helps with teaching and training of health care professionals And ultimately helps to make sure that the care that you get is reliable and safe and then finally just general charity work When you have nonprofits or other organizations who are going out to help people in their communities Many cases they're relying on open-source software to do that work and to help them manage that information And make sure that they're getting the most out of the money And the reason I'm talking about this is I want you all to think about the risk that's here As many of you know a lot of open-source software projects are led by a single individual or a very small group of people and Just imagine for a moment if those people were to decide that they're kind of done with the project and didn't really want to continue it And that project were to kind of stop development stop maintenance think about some of the risk that is involved for a lot of these organizations So this is really on our mind quite a bit and when you put that in context of international politics and this idea of decreasing funding for international development As well as this idea that sustainability is a growing challenge for for FOS projects generally This really means that we need to think about ways to help mitigate that risk reduce that risk And so our project is focused on two ideas here co-investment and shared resources co-investment meaning diversification of getting people to help the project and maybe individuals that might be money to do certain things It might be collaborations between organizations And the shared resources idea is about basically working together across multiple projects to share things like infrastructure tools training processes And even contributors that might have expertise that could be shared between one project and the other And so today we don't have a lot of time, but I thought I would talk about a few things with you all Talk a little bit about the risks and development and I'll a little asterisk after development because it's not what you think Also talking about the projects in this space what they need and what they want to be long-term Sustainable projects Tell a little bit about our goals for these projects what we found over the last year and then describe kind of what we're planning to build together and Hopefully for all of you think about how you might make a difference either in some of these projects Or how you might also take these ideas back to the open source projects that you're interested in or you're working with and Maybe help them become more sustainable over the long term So first thing is first I'm going to be throwing around this word development today, and it doesn't mean programming Not just just for this hour. It doesn't mean programming It's also known in our in our circles as digital development or this wonderful acronym called ICT4D, which is information communication technology for international development Basically it's talking about Projects that are mission oriented They're usually mobile or cloud-based these days and ultimately they're trying to work people work with people where they are working in agriculture Education or health care So that's kind of the field that we're working in and dial and the UN foundation and what we're focused on One important thing here that This idea has really shifted over the last few years It really started as people in what we call the global north the richer countries Thinking about what technology we need to build for the poor people of the world and Fortunately that feeling has changed Completely 180 degrees and now it's about helping people create the tools that they need in their local communities to do what they want to Do as a community to make their world better And so we've finally made that shift to empowering people to use the internet to use technology Just as you or I might use it today And that's wonderful to see And people are understanding that open-source software is a big important key to making some of those realities possible Why does it matter? Some of you probably know this already, but just under half the world is connected to the internet today and taking advantage of it We would like to see that change our organization specifically is about getting people more engaged in what we call the digital society and Helping them to you know make full use of the technology that most of us here in this room use every day In order to do that we need to really think about the building blocks that are kind of fundamental to that a lot of it's Simple things like getting people connected to the internet. It's been a big theme over the last many years But fortunately that problem is getting solved fairly quickly And so now we need to think about applications and what people are actually doing with that connectivity that they have And so our organization is specifically focused on how technology is being adopted or in many cases neglected And so if we think about how people are basically helping others to help themselves like if you're talking about an NGO Helping people to use this technology to improve their communities it's important to think about what does that look like if it's successful and This is a very difficult question because just making a lot of cool technology isn't quite the answer Our team before we formed our organization Worked in and various teams to do a little study here and it's a little dim on this screen But what you'll see here is that year over year you have an increasing number of Mobile applications for health care that were being launched in fact between the years of 20 or 2005 in 2011 It was up 30% So every year there was just this an increasing number of applications many of them were doing the same thing And so if you think about all of the money and all of the resources that went in from these charities these other Organizations to create the same mobile data collection app over and over There's really a lot of waste there and we really start need we really need to start thinking about how people are using this Technology and being a little more thoughtful in what we're building together and think about how we can work together as As the open-source community at large to reduce the duplicated efforts Here's a wonderful or a really sad example of that this is a map of the country of Uganda in eastern Africa and The names the black names that you see around the the perimeter here are different Mobile health care application platforms. They're all open source. Well, almost all of them are open source And the red circles show you kind of health Extensively they're used the big circles are used much more extensively So this was a snapshot toward the end of 2012 So at one point in time there were a little literally all of these very very similar applications being used in one single country Obviously, this is a little bit scary that there are so many applications serving the same space and What happened was the Ministry of Health in Uganda actually had to come out and say no more We're not going to allow within the health care system any more applications to be to be deployed We really need to start focusing in and reduce this proliferation that's happening And what this what this does is it raises a few questions First of all, why are there so many different tools many of them open source tools? And why isn't there more collaboration? Why are there so many different groups and organizations building all of these things and then most importantly? How many resources how much money is actually being wasted by so much duplication? And a lot of times this is money from from taxpayers from the public It's from people who are donating to charities and hopefully I want to see that money stretched as as well as it can be So this raises a lot of questions and this is not the only case where this is happening There's just one example And and when you go back and look at these projects here the fact that that money is being stretched So thin between so many projects Really starts to raise some red flags more you think about it in terms of risk Because a lot of those projects that you saw on that map were run by a single organization Some were run by a single person That person or that organization could shift their priorities tomorrow And then you have to think about what would happen to those those clinics in Uganda that we're using the software And ultimately what harm are we indirectly causing in these countries in these places that are using this open source software? So that's where our organization comes in this is our big fancy Organizational charts, and I'm going to bore you all with with all the details But the the basics are this is that we started this organization to help bring people together who are already working in this space We didn't want to reinvent something ourselves, but we wanted to focus on three areas How software and technology is being used we call that platforms and services see if my laser works there we go We wanted to think about how open data is being used by these organizations And then finally what people are doing with that data and those tools what we call the insights and the impact And we do that by working with with private donors with governments with private sector organizations with corporations Basically anyone who's interested in improving this space True to our kind of United Nations roots We are really focused on empowering others to do their work, and we don't necessarily want to do their work for them We want to make them more effective So those of you who are familiar with the UN you may have seen some of these things called the millennia I'm sorry the sustainable development goals formerly the millennium development goals they are a list of 17 things that we can all focus on by the year 2030 and if we can take steps in these directions on One or more of these areas it should help make our world more peaceful more more harmonized Basically a better place to live and so our thinking is by investing and sustainability of open-source software in this space We can work on these six areas Things like gender equality we already see each Opportunities for women and other groups to get involved in open-source and technology and learn from that There are work and economic opportunities by leveraging open-source for small businesses There's this idea of building core infrastructure for countries and other parts of the world using open-source tools Reduced inequalities it helps kind of level the playing field get people access to better health data like we saw in the previous presentation And 12 most importantly it's this idea of responsible Kind of long-term thoughtful production Because back to that idea of that map in Uganda where you have all the waste And the way we do it is number 17 by building and strengthening partnerships because if you rely on any one sequel organization You set something up for failure So A lot of us talk about sustainability and you hear it in a lot of different ways and you talk about the environment and waste and all These things but for today. What's open-source sustainability? Apparently it's nothing there we go What we think of sustainability is is a hedge or a bet against burnout for maintainers And if you worked in an open-source project for very long Most of us have felt a little overwhelmed and get a little bit tired Sometimes you want to quit or sometimes you just want to take a day off. That's perfectly normal But you have to think in these kinds of projects. What's the risk of that happening? Organizational strategic shifts like I mentioned on that map a lot of these projects are driven by a single Organization they could decide to close up shop tomorrow or focus on a new area and we have to think of what happens after that So we want to think about how do we provide more resources to projects reduce those single points of failure and balance the the geekiness Trend that we have to chase new and shiny things You know deploy the latest technology figure out how to get blockchain into our projects. Maybe Get new features out to people. We want to balance that innovation with Reliability and other things that we should also be investing energy and and attention to The important thing here is like this is not specific to this international development sector This is really all of open source are starting to think about this And in fact back in June of last year There was a really great conference in San Francisco that we participated in there were a hundred different project maintainers and what we called sustainers We gathered at the github headquarters one day and spent the day brainstorming ideas of what to do about this There's a really great report if you're interested in this go to sustain os s org Just freeze download the PDF Highly encourage you to go read that I won't read through all these bullet points But there were some really key takeaways that probably aren't too surprising if you've struggled with this very long We also did research last year For projects in our sector around the same thing and not surprisingly these were about the same they lined up pretty well So our group wasn't particularly unique I'm not going to read all of these out to you then the numbers are just they're just number They're not really prioritized but things like facilitation of collaboration getting good mentorship getting direct assistance with things like infrastructure and Project management skills at open-source software projects often don't have from volunteers So when we look at all of these areas We tried to build a model of what we needed to do And what we wanted to get to and so we get to this buzzwordy slide that we like to show people Where you have this magic happy balance at the end of the day where you have people who are doing Work together. That's effective and collaborative people are kind of happy in their open-source work And they're getting their motivations fulfilled. So whatever brings them there They're they're happy with that if it's just being able to geek out on technology That's great if it's a good feeling about helping people in different parts of the world They're getting that if it's to help their organization They're getting that and the more this cycle continues you get this steadily increasing trust And we see that as the key to long-term sustainability for open-source projects, especially in our space and to get there We kind of we've identified for what we call pillars of sustainability One is having this organization only neutral home where different groups that are together can kind of collaborate without anyone being Too dominant so everyone's voices are heard Having a good technical architecture Where there's a good feedback loop from the users coming back in to understand What needs to be built making sure the right tools are in place for collaboration that you're using a good test strategy Or you have a continuous improvement process in place. I'm sorry continuous integration process in place to improve your software You've got a vision for the product that you're you're trying to put out into the world So this goes to talking to your users understanding what they're actually wanting and meeting And then making sure that the open-source group is working together effectively to actually build what they what these users want a lot of us You know sit there and think what would these people like to do and we never actually go out and talk to them And then finally and most importantly to enable all of that is community effectiveness And this is the idea of having distributed leadership amongst multiple organizations that represent You know all the orgs and the people who are participating in the project very well And there's clear governance decision-making processes are established So our idea is if we can invest in all of these areas We'll have this steadily increasing trust and we'll end up with more sustainable projects And Obviously if you've been around open source very long the way to do this is through cooperation We all know the benefits and the challenges of that We looked at some models of how people kind of build good cooperation groups And there are certainly groups within open source that try to help Things like umbrella orgs that bring different technologies are different projects using the same technology together and collaborate There are things The business are running the accounting for your projects These none of these had exactly the right offerings for that model on the previous slide to invest in all those areas So we started looking at some other models out there. We looked at things like artist studio Collaborative groups people who would go in and share artist studio space and paints and easels and and canvas We looked at maker spaces and hacker spaces This is a great example of people coming in and exercising their creativity and sharing resources together and kind of Collectively deciding what that group should should work on to the benefit of the larger group So we looked at some of those groups and we tried to find a model that focused on on sharing But balancing autonomy as well because we knew by talking to these projects They didn't want to give up their own vision for what they were working on nor should they because we really wanted to tap into that mission And so for our group we came up with this mission of the dial open source center Which we called this inclusive meta community Basically a community of multiple projects that are working together for knowledge sharing Collaboration and co-investment going back to that term from earlier Obviously you want to promote positive social change or want to work on the things that we talked about earlier health care education economics And ultimately overcome key barriers to getting good open-source projects that are mature and they're going to be impactful out in the world And we wanted to do that by building a pub what we call a public commons Things that people could share together be it knowledge be it tangible resources tangible or virtual tangible resources like infrastructure And actually sharing even collaborators and contributors across projects Because another thing that we saw is people would need experts and health care Maybe to answer certain questions from time to time in their project They didn't need to be developers, but they needed certain experts that could come in and help guide them on what they were doing That was whether if you were in here for the last presentation That was a really great example that sometimes you need an outsider to come in and help guide you to make sure you're doing the right thing So we have two areas of assistance that the organization is designed to To provide right now the first is what we call technical assistance We have a nice little model and we have kind of a menu of services people can choose from Which we should display it a few different ways This is kind of life cycle based from early projects to more mature projects And these are some of the areas where people tend to struggle with from from our interviews and our research And so what we're able to do is connect people either directly to Consultants who are working with or our internal team We have some funding for several years to help provide one-on-one consultation experts in open source legal issues Kind of product architects who can help people with more vision kind of questions of what the project should be doing And at different places the projects can engage in different ways And so they're not stuck with one kind of help It's basically goes from quarter to quarter. We have dialogues with our projects and ask them what they'd like to work on We can also have a different way of viewing it if people are really focused on financial issues or making the product better Or making the community better. We can also talk about the services in that way with them as well So here's the exciting part. We we started in October. We already have six projects that are participating in the organization Just a few words about each of these. They're all really awesome You should go check them out. Look at their webpages the humanitarian open street map team. Most of us know about open street maps Hot as they call themselves is basically a way to crowdsource mapping If you've ever made edits to Google Maps on your phone or on your on your desktop You've seen this happen kind of in real time where you can correct data They will go in after a disaster Get new aerial imagery after an earthquake or something and the Mappers from around the world will go in and very quickly update the open street maps layer So the people who are going in and responding after the disaster to be at the Red Cross or some of these other organizations will have Instantly available up-to-date maps that are accurate As of the time that they're going out there very important for for their needs Libre Health is a an umbrella community a meta community for small health care startup projects They're working on things like making health care projects more turnkey easy easy to use for startups and small clinics radiology offices Bombay is also in health care but goes the other direction to hospitals and Packages up several different health care related projects into one kind of complete system for them that deals with things like Schedule and supply management information management for patients, etc Open LMIS is a logistics management system Helps people kind of deal with the issues of tracking all of the things that their organization needs to get things done Some surizer is a very new platform for analytics of data from cook stoves They're working with a group that builds little iot devices that go on cook stoves that people may use in their villages They help track things like gas and environmental issues That the NGOs and the nonprofits that go in and help provide these cook stoves are able to educate them on how to use them more effectively and more safely and Open data kit is a long-running project that is an Android based mobile data collection app an analysis application For charities or other organizations to go out into the field talk to people Collect data and then and then act on it We've got a lot of service delivery partners software freedom Conservancy is able to help our projects with legal issues with fiscal services like Managing your bank accounts getting trademarks registered for your projects Mifos and path are working in the finance and the health care industries Respectively to hook those projects up with finance opportunities for funding opportunities grants other collaboration Projects where multiple software projects can work together apply for some really big funding get a lot of work done for their projects in the process We're also a sponsor of outreach II does anyone here know about outreach II one person. It's really awesome It's similar to Google summer of code, but it's focused on women and other underrepresented groups They aren't necessarily students But it helps get them involved and open source matches them up with a mentor and pays them for an internship for the summer or the winter Right now we're getting ready to do place five different interns throughout reach II we did some about six months ago as well So finally real briefly we've built this up as an open-source style organization. We've got an independent governance board We've got groups looking at technical issues helping the projects work together to tackle their the technical challenges a similar group working on community related challenges like diversity Community growth this idea of sustainability advisory groups in the health sector or the finance sector that I briefly mentioned So in closing we are now ready to actually do the work We've we've got a few groups to start with and this actually maps very closely with the list of needs that you saw earlier We have a strategy for each of these areas of engagement with the projects. We've already got begun to deliver technical services We just help a product a project launch their website, which is going live next week. I think So things are actually running already We've got a long list of projects waiting in the wings as we scale up over the next year and we've got an open governance plan It's all on on git lab and we're iterating and we're getting feedback and helping to evolve the project over time So finally what do we need to make this thing successful? Specifically for this group and the people that you talk with if you know of any projects that are kind of aligned with this mission That you think might benefit Please send them our way If you might be connected with an organization that is interested in supporting this kind of work Maybe your your employer wants to do you know financial support or able to give end-to-kind services or donate time From some of your staff members all this stuff would be super valuable for our community So scaling is hard right and it is hard for all of the projects that we're working with So we also need more hackers. We need documentarians. We need designers People that would be interested in working across all these projects and sharing their time So if any of this is interesting to you or you know of people who might be interested, please send them our way We would love to hear from you All right, so last slide. This is our closing an inspirational quote from you Dorothy Day We shouldn't get too hopeless. This sounds like a really hard problem, but it's really important problem So go back think about it in your own open source projects and think about how you can you know help those projects Be more sustainable in the long term. Thank you