 Alright, so good day everyone. My name is Laurie. I am the open source program manager at JFrog. I have sort of a history of posting pictures of me and my kid on my intro to myself slide. So she discovered Snapchat filters when we were on a train on our way through Switzerland. So yeah, that's her. So if you ever want to travel with a seven year old, you know, phones and filters are the way to go because they stay completely entertained and people around you just happen to laugh as well. Okay, so please feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or on Twitter, whatever you want to call it. I am the Outreach Marketing Committee Chair for the CDF. I am also the Marketing Chair for the CNCF. I was a part of OpenSSF, OpenSSF Days Program Committee, so I'm kind of Miss Foundation. So if you have questions about foundations and things like that, please feel free to talk to me. I probably don't have the answers you're looking for, but I can find somebody that will. Alright, so the name of this talk was we have an open source project. Now what? Well, first we have to start with an open source project. So let's create one. So all of us here in this room work for our company and it's called the CDMini Summit. That is our company. We are all happy to be a part of this company. But we've got a problem and we've named our problem Waldo. And so what is Waldo? So Waldo is, he's the worst. So we inherited a code base that was clunky, right? It's a total, excuse my language, but it's a total time suck, right? It's morale killer, it's a money pit. There's so many security threats. Basically, whenever we want to get something done, we realize we can't because there's something mucking it up along the way. So what do we do? We find a solution. So we all get together and we talk about it and we figure what do we want. Well, we collaborate. We realize that we want an automated process. We want to set some parameters to identify things that are unnecessary in our code base. And then we want to figure out how to get rid of them, right? Like is this actually causing issues? Can it just stay there and we can move on? Like there's so much of it. Like what do we do? What's more important? And then we want notifications and we want them where we work, right? So that we don't have to like keep going back in and spending more time. Yeah, I'm looking at you guys. So what do we create? We create project while don't because we don't want Waldo anymore. We don't want to find this code anymore and we don't want to have to deal with it. So what is Waldo? It's an AI powered bot that analyzes your code base. It scans your code for classes and variables you aren't using. It creates a pull request with recommendations. And then you're notified via Slack, right? Because that's where you're at all day. So if this sounds like an actual project, that's probably because, again, I live in foundations and I might have just like grabbed a couple of things and put it all together. Does this actually exist? No. I don't know. No. Okay. So we have our project. Now what? Now we realize that we are probably not the only company that is struggling with these types of issues. So we want to share what we've done with the broader community. And we know like, okay, we have to create a community outside of our own company. But how do we do that? Well, we're going to need users and contributors. And then we're going to win. So we need to submit to conference talks. We need to write blog posts. We need to get social. We need to podcast. We need to twitch it up. We need to YouTube. We need to do all of these things. And this is a lot of work. And we actually created Waldo to alleviate some of our workload. And now we've just created a ton more. So what should we do? Well, we should propose Waldo to a foundation and ask the community to help us move this forward. So here are some popular Linux foundation projects. You might have heard of the CNCF, open SSF, all of these other ones. CDF is not on here. It's literally just a screen grab from the screen of this page. You can actually click, use your phones and check out that QR code. And it takes you to the list of all of the projects within the Linux foundation. But there are tons of other foundations out there. So a quick Wikipedia search. And you can look at all of these other umbrella foundations that I'm sure some of you have heard of. The Apache Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, Oasis Open. The list goes on and on. These are just foundations that deal with open source, but basically a quick Google search. And you can find a foundation that, you know, might be a good home for you. So what do I mean a good home? Well, this is the part that people don't think about, right? It's the due diligence. Now it's time to do the dirty work and really figure out what do I do with this open source project? So the first thing I would say is you want to evaluate current foundations, right? You want to have, like, here's some examples of things you should be looking for when you look to maybe home your project at a foundation. Is there project to project or project to foundation alignment? What is the size of the foundation? How many projects do they currently have? What does the membership look like? Am I going to be able to get some end users out of this, some contributors? What are the actual proposal and requirement, proposal and graduation requirements, right? Because we want to get in, but we also want to get out, right? We want our project to be successful so that it can kind of stand alone. And most importantly, and we'll talk a lot about this today, are, like, what are the benefits of being in the foundation? And when you find one that works, you're going to be that little guy on that chair and just having a great old time, happy with everything. So project to project alignment. I don't know if y'all have seen the movie Twins. I might be aging myself, but these are actually identical, Siamese, Twins, Arnold and Danny DeVito there. But if you notice, they're aligned. They're wearing the same thing. They got the same jacket pull, same glasses. They look amazing. So you start, you need to look at your foundation's mission. What is their vision? What are they trying to achieve, right? So the CDF, while we're all here, it's an open source community to improve the world's ability to deliver software with security and speed. You know, is our project in that house? I don't know. CNCF. It's to make cloud native computing ubiquitous. Open SSF. It's all about security. Oasis open. It's standardizations, right? So this is just a very high level of four. I showed you a list that had a lot more. But again, if you want to make sure that your project is in the right place, project to foundation or project to project alignment is very critical. Now, what is the size of the project or the foundation? And I'm using project slash foundation because everybody calls themselves something different and words are important and I don't want to leave anybody out. So, okay. So first, how many projects are currently hosted? Do y'all know how many projects are at the CNCF? Raise your hands. Guess anyone? No. No, no. 172. So, yeah. Y'all are very close, but that's a ton of projects, right? So when you look at this sort of this graph here and it says projects that were accepted into the CNCF and you look at their stages, yellow is incubating, blue or teal, whatever is sandbox and purple is graduated, which I feel like purple is missing because I know that some projects have graduated specifically last year and this year. So I will let them know to update this graphic. You can see there's a ton and there's a ton that are in that sandbox phase. And that's early adopters. That's like really just starting. Like you're just getting innovative. Like these are the projects that are either going to win or they might just fail, right? But the whole point is they were submitted to the CNCF because they have this idea and they want to innovate and they need the CNCF to help them win. Okay. And then again, we're talking about the stages, like what stages are they in? The other thing that's very crucial that y'all should think about is what is the membership base, right? Like our project is backed by a company, the CD mini summit. That's great. But like what if you just made this project up on your own, right? What if you were just tooling around one day and you built a project and you're like, this is awesome. Like a friend of mine, Andres Almere, he's got a project called J-releaser, right? And he's just doing it on his own. But you know, does he have end users? Yeah. But does he have money backing him up? No. So is this a project that can be sustained? Well, yeah, as long as he wants to, he can sustain it. But when you think about proposing your project to a foundation, look at the member base because these people might want to use your project. And what does that mean? Oh, they might want to help fund your project. They might want to assign staff developers to work solely on your project because they had no idea how big the problem that they had until you highlighted it that could maybe solve it. They're like, yes, let's do this. So that's always really important. So there's always a list of contributors on all of the websites for all of the projects or foundation pages that you look at. Check that out. See, like, who's doing what? And, you know, keep that in mind. This is huge, y'all. The graduation and the proposal requirements. I mean, Andrea is on the TOC of the CDF. He can back me up here saying that this is not like the easiest stuff to go through, right? Proposal processes take time. It is not a sprint. It is a marathon, right? You have to get all your ducks in a row. So the due diligence that you do in terms of finding a foundation that might be the right home for you, don't just find one, find one, two, three or four, right? That all kind of work within where you're at because you might not get accepted to the first one or you might not be able to create or finish out some of their requirements, like, because you're just not there yet. So again, due diligence is super important. And the other thing you need to think about is when you propose your project is what does graduation look like, right? So as someone that is maintaining a project, the end goal is to graduate, you would think, right? Is to be able to be a standalone, fully functioning out there in the world. So when you're looking at what it takes to get in, also look at what it takes to get out because you should be mapping that out in your, like, overall plan of action, like what you want this project to do. If you're not looking at the end goal, how are you ever going to get there? Right? So getting in is the first step, but getting out is also something that you should think about. All right. So most important, I think here are the benefits, right? So we've talked about, like, looking at who's where, who's their members, all this other stuff, but like, where's the juice for me? Like I gave you a list of things that you need to do to be able to be successful in getting your project out in the community. And we all agree that we just don't have the time to do every single thing on that stuff. So what is the foundation going to do for me? All right, because if I go with them, how are they going to help me get to where I want to be? So the first thing is reputation management. Okay. What does that mean? I am now, we are now a CDF back project. So that means that we went through that entire crazy list of proposal requirements, we met with the TOC, we got sponsorship, we got this, we got that, and we got in. So now anybody that knows about our project knows that it's backed by a bunch of technologists that believe in it and want to see it succeed. So that's huge. Right there, that gets you like through the front door with a lot of companies, with a lot of ideas of contributors and maintainers and things like that, because they know that you have a group of people behind you already that support you. Program management. How many times have you all been on Zoom calls? And you're like, I would like this project to have its own Zoom account, because there's a ton of us. And we all can't just keep logging into one individual account. We need to have a basis. We need to be able to look at the meeting notes. We need to get those meeting notes put up somewhere. We need to have this, we need to have that. Does the foundation, what kind of program management do they offer you? That's really important because you can't do it all. That is why you want to donate your project. Legal services. Are they going to trademark things for you? Are they going to have counsel that you can ask if maybe you didn't realize you crossed a line somewhere that shouldn't have been crossed? Are they going to go to bat for you when it comes to, I don't know, filing taxes? Legal services are a thing. And you don't want to, like, I'm American, so we all know that we know legal services are a thing. What do we do? We sue first? I don't know. So just be sure that you take, that they're going to offer that to you. Here's another thing. Projects are pricey. It costs a lot of money. I work for JFrog. We sponsor Artifactory accounts for Jenkins. We sponsor it for Adoptium. We sponsor it for a ton of big open source projects. And one of the things I've been working with lately is trying to get the cost down because when you don't have oversight, people just keep adding stuff up, right? And, like, we have multiple mirrors of this and that and the other. So that's a huge expense that because JFrog supports open source, they're like, we are willing to take that on. We want you to use our project, our tool, so we will do that for you. But what other tools does the foundation come with that can help you to move your project forward? Do they have deals with cloud credits? Does anybody know about cloud credits? They're so cheap. Like, what are the tools that they're going to give you to move your project forward? These are all things that you should think about. Then does the foundation or project, again, have certifications and trainings? Can they support you while you grow your project by making your maintainers, give them opportunities to learn more, giving them opportunities to upskill? Can you maybe create a training or a certification to help get your project more noticed in the community? Like, again, these are things that you might not have thought of when you were just creating Waldo, because you just didn't want to, like, look at just all this bad code. But these are things that you should take into account if you're going to submit to a foundation. And because I am a marketing person, I have it in green. Now we're going to talk about some of the ways that foundations really can help you market your project and get it out there. Oh, John Oliver, he's so cute. Okay, so marketing. Here's just some examples of ways that the foundation you work with can help you market your project. So I am very happy to be a co-host of the CD pipeline for the CDF. And what is it? It is a monthly online show. We partnered with Tech Strong TV. Again, the CDF has a partnership with Tech Strong TV to bring up topics each month and then bring projects on and maintainers on and people in the community to help talk about what they're doing and how they're advancing certain things, right? So the first one I think that we did was with Jenkins, because we wanted to do the history of CD and all that good stuff, which was really cool. The other thing, are they templates? So the CNCF is now creating these new project collateral. They're one pagers that help you really go to a conference or create a web page that is very succinct and detailed information about your project and where to find more information. How many times have you tried to describe something and you're all over the map? Okay, so what did the CNCF do for their projects? They created a very clear cut, easy to follow template so that you can now have a very nice, cleanly designed piece of marketing collateral that you can bring with you when you go to a meetup, when you go to a conference. And it's super easy to edit and manipulate. And if you're not a marketing person, you're just like, I'm just a developer, not just a developer. But these are things that the CNCF is doing to help their project move forward. Another thing is blogging, right? So they help promote blogs that you're writing. Like how many times have you looked at your Google analytics and realized that your blog received five views? It's awesome. Yeah, so why not bank on the reputation of the CDF, the CNCF, OpenSSF, whatever other foundation to push your material forward to a larger, broader audience? Maybe you're talking about your latest version release and why that's important. Maybe you're trying to get thought leadership and you want to talk about something that you find very critical. And then you link back to your blog post that has the technical stuff, right? So you're going high and then you get in granular into the weeds. So again, like these are huge benefits that you might not think are there or might not know about, but you should totally take advantage of them. Do diligence, y'all. I can't tell you how many meetings that I've been on and all of the foundations that I work with that they're like, we need blog material. Does anybody have a blog post that we can push out? And I'm like, this is insane. This is insane. Like little things that you think are happening with your project, like a version control or release, a bug fix or whatever can turn into so much more and get you more attention if you use the foundation for what it's for, which is to help market, get maintainers, get contributors, all of these things. So I urge anybody in here in this room, if you're part of a project or whatever and you're like, yeah, we could use some more loving, talk to the foundation that you're with. It's usually like blog at foundation, send the email and then they'll work with you. They'll edit it. They'll make it look pretty and they'll get it out there and they'll push it out to their channels, which hopefully will then grow your channels. So community building, yeah, this is my personal Slack. As you can see, I am a part of lots and lots of channels. So we've got the CDF, CNCF, Fuji, OpenSSF, CPP plus, Oasis, OWASP, Grails, Docker, Adoptium, list goes on and on and on, right? So the bigger the project, they usually have their own space. But within projects like within the CDF, we have our projects have their own channels, which is great because then you're part of the community. But this is where like community building and where a foundation can really help you grow, is by creating these areas for people to network and to talk and to ask questions, then you're going to get more people talking to each other, more people doing pull requests, this, that and the other and just really get engagement. This like, I mean, we're in the virtual era, right? Like it's beautiful to be here with all of you in person. I've been working for home since like 2017. These are my opportunities to see people in the flesh, but how much more do we get accomplished when we work online and async, right? Like when is your next meeting? When is this? When is that? Again, you wrote a blog post where does it make the most sense? Let's blast it out in our community in the general channel. Hey, have you guys been interested in this, that and the other? So while you might think, oh, another Slack channel, there's reasons why there are so many is because it's important and it keeps your communities engaged and together. And I'm just using Slack, you can use Discord, you can use Twitch, whatever works the best for you. And again, as the project, you make that decision and that's what you go with to the foundation. I'm pretty sure that's probably in one of those proposal requirements. Like how are you communicating? Like are you? Oh, there's an ant. That's interesting. That's weird. Okay. And so what else foundations can do for you? Ambassadors. So what was like one of the first things I said that we need to do, right? We need to go to talks and conferences and meetups and present and blog and all of these things. Again, that's a lot of work. But you can have ambassadors, whether it's ambassadors within the foundation itself, like CF has an ambassador program, other foundations have ambassador programs, or if it's your own project ambassador programs, Docker captains, Oracle aces, Java champions, these are people that have been identified as leaders in their industry or in their tool that they're using. And then the project is going to support them by pushing them forward. Well, does the foundation that you're trying to submit your project to also have a similar program? And do you want to nominate somebody to be an ambassador, not just for that foundation, but obviously for the project that you're working on within that foundation? So then you have this line to this bigger community, this broader community. And then when we talk about financial benefits, does the foundation have travel support? I can't pay for something. Is there an opportunity for me to submit somebody for a scholarship application? Does the foundation have scholarships where they can help get somebody to the next step in their career? Has a project, how can we help the next generation or the current generation of developers get their skills up or be able to expound on what we do to the broader community? Again, these are things that you should think about when submitting your project to a foundation. Putting a project in a foundation doesn't mean you're done. You wipe your hands of it. The more you do within the foundation, the more they'll do for you. So how many times have I been on a call where they're like, is anybody using their membership benefits? When's the last time you have 10 certifications a year that you can give to your company? Are you doing that? Is anybody doing that? These are things again that as a project, what are they going to give to my maintainers and contributors? As a project, do we get certifications? Can we send somebody to the new training online? Will they get a certificate? Will they get that cool credley badge that says that they did something really cool on our behalf and they learned something new skill set? Can I help them use this then to become an ambassador? So these are things. So I have no idea how long I've been talking and I do apologize if I've gone long or short. But propose your project today. Don't hoard what you're doing. Share it with the community. If it's an open source, that's what we're here for is to encourage and to share our knowledge. Natalia did a great example of a complete open source pipeline that is going to secure your software. All open source. That's amazing. Where are those projects housed? CNCF for most of them. That's cool and open SSF. So they are getting support of a foundation. You should as well. And yeah, so thank you and follow me.