 Do you need more ado because we can totally give you more ado. Oh, you're set up. Okay, great doing is done. Let us applaud Okay. Oh, wow that works and a switched on great Okay Okay, so first of all, I'd just like to say the My slides to keep them reasonably clear and concise I don't have a huge amount of text on them. If that's something that you find challenging the link to presentation From the event page has full speaker notes with most of the transcript so surgery spacecraft bridges Well, they all have in common When we're simulating life critical situations or scenarios in engineering We need to Understand how or when our tools apply when they're valid to do that We need to know exactly what the underlying theory is what the models. They're using are some years ago an entire oil rig Slipped into a Norwegian pureed as a result of such a misunderstanding. So it really is important now a few years ago I was working in engineering and There was a particularly common proprietary tool that we used and We found some discrepancies. So we wanted we called up the hotline and we said look Can you tell us which of the standard literature models you're using and they told us it was commercially sensitive private IP? Thing though is at that point if there was an equivalent open alternative That was not vendor locked in and we could see all of its models That would make we couldn't justify continuing to use the proprietary alternative And at that point I realized that for those kind of life critical industry critical situations and scenarios Actually closed sources and economic model has a fairly finite life You think of other situations where that kind of accountability and transparency Now you notice I've not mentioned anything about cost at the stage can't build the in transparency and Benderlock and really matter Well, for example the justice system hospitals medical devices data security cyber security public sector And that's in some ways. That's a very positive thought for the future free software But it can make that kind of difference and that will be valued But that only works if it comes down to its own two feet Well, it's not dependent on Proprietary employers putting food on the table. So I decided I Needed to put this into practice if I thought this was the case. I needed to quit my job go out my own set up a company It turns out that's quite hard but I Learned that there are ways of doing this and I'm going to go through some of that now in particular We had to think very creatively and I think it's appropriate to Say a big thank you to a lot of my colleagues in the Belfast Linux group and because despite the fact that this is Being a lot of work in the business sector Being able to work together with colleagues in different businesses Has been critical And I think that's a moral from the open source world in general Now I don't know if many of you have played or come across Table-top games role-playing games things like Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder just just have a quick way there we go We just have a quick show of hands roughly to kind of see who's who at least knows what I'm vaguely talking Okay, this is decent number. So for those who don't Essentially you have maybe like a guild or an adventurer syndicate that comes together Once a month this was when I started out. It was quite stressful. So people people Took kindly to me and pulled me into their games to try and take my mind off it sometimes And we sat down and every month we played some people were wizards some people were Warriors or witches and we would put we would get together different people in different months would turn up But we'd form a little little consortium a little team to take on a quest to find gold or rescue kings and queens our to defeat dangerous monsters and Every every month it would be different Now you probably weren't I'm going with an analogy here I haven't just forgotten what the talk is You might need to bring me back on track once or twice But there is actually an analogy here to what we've been doing over the last a last couple of years And I'm going to try and use that to make it a bit more concrete than talking about business development in abstract terms Which is not normally the most exciting topics Another thing to make this a bit more concrete And I want you to kind of think back on this as I go through the talk a Case study, so about a year ago my micro company set up a consortium bid and That's involved a number of different companies coming together to build a data discovery tool for community journalists and As part of that bid we had to come up with our risks and mitigation strategies to document those clearly We had to put together a credible budget How it was going to be divided up a serious user research strategy and a justification that we could do that We had to sit down with our community journalist partners and actually work out and try and understand their field and Try and see where the common ground was what we could what we could do to genuinely make a difference And that's all before we that's all before we can even bill and it's before we even know whether we've got funding So keep that one in mind. That's I think we once we got the funding the next step was to bring in a lawyer to write a proper consortium contract and then we Started a user research group last week with community journalists in Belfast, which is fascinating and we got some really useful feedback I still in the video. Let's slide this way a bit and Beyond that and we're building out some proof of concept things. We're doing a feasibility study in development Around the practicalities and we'll build a prototype over the next six months At which point we'll see how we can take it to the next version V1 Okay, so I'm going to go through that through the concepts behind that now You probably heard me say the words consortium and syndicate a number of times there Our structures a little bit as I say creative We have a syndicate That's a business syndicate not a crime syndicate. Although if we get more desperate it might move that direction In our business syndicate, we've got a number of different companies mostly ranging from about one up to six people or so and Those companies can work together in different projects They do some of them do most of the work in the syndicate some of them do most of their work outside the syndicate Each individual project has a project consortium And on the far Left For those looking at me. No, wait, right. That's right. Someone can correct me The we can see two companies. There's glaze there UX company They're serving a client as part of a syndicate service serving a client on one project consortium On the left hand side We've got another project consortium with my company flex and to you and a couple others external company serving a different client and In the middle, we've got three companies together formed a project consortium to Try and do a particular phase of product building and those all those can be overlapping in parallel at different times 90% of our structure is in the project consortium those groups now back to the story so Not long after setting up my own. I realized that When you're running a company you need to have a focus and That could be a particular Community that you want to serve it could be a particular Product that you're passionate about your gap in the market and for me. That was that was open source What you find is if you've got to at some point They're going to end up conflicting and often you'll end up having to compromise two things You didn't want to before having to make a decision. So knowing upfront What your focal point is makes a big difference? So I said well, I want to do open source And it turns out that's two things open and source Now I Was quite clear when I set out that that was my focus not a particular product or project So I said to give myself the best chance of sustainability I'm not going to pick not going to say I work on this tech stack or even this sector or even these these tools I'll go where I'm needed and do what needs to be done Not quite that mercenary, but you know what I mean so When we looked at this we thought who who cares about transparency and accountability who values it who puts an actual value on it and That sometimes private sector and that's some a lot of the time. That's public sector and third sector And we realized that they don't see open sources As a unit in itself they see it as a strand and a rope And we began to realize that Source kind of means you're thinking about a dev house in some sense normally and Open means so much more than that one extremely rewarding side effect of The last few years is becoming involved in the open access communities the open data community Open access for those who aren't aware is the share public sharing of research And research findings and open data is the public sharing often of government But also private sector data publicly and they have their own communities and drives behind them also mentioned those are the kind of people who value open source that actually Want to give you work are people who care about open standards open API's open innovation having insight into the process transparency and cybersecurity and So that kind of made us expand our thinking in a number of different directions It's a generalization of that Some of you might be aware of term USP unique selling point and That and a lot of other business terms you start to use fluently after a while business and innovation has its own its own technical language and We realize that actually if we're going to give ourselves the best chance of success because there's very little point in me Standing here today and saying I started an open source company to show that this was sustainable and Last year I quit and went back to working for my previous proprietary employer however, if I can say What does open gave me if I say I'm going to in some ways limit myself by Focusing on clients who value openness Who are willing to agree for us to us upstreaming by default any improvements we make Every limitation should be an extension in other direction. What does that allow us to do? How does that free us up? I Kind of feel this is a bit of a gross misrepresentation of what product building looks like if anyone knows how to How to relate building a product to getting a large box of money, please please contact me afterwards, but In this case, we've got a we've got a project consortium or adventurers for adventurers have come together and They've gone through the quests through the dark dungeons. They've fought the monsters and they finally come to their goal and This is their apparently very successful web platform now we realize that when we're building products some of the work that we do is is internal as R&D and What our proprietary competitors can't really do straightforwardly is work in different groups and share IP between them without a huge amount of complication? That's a competitive advantage for the fact that in our consortia all of our shared IP anything That's not agreed specifically to go to a client is open. So this then meant Take a few different Products that we've worked on and that we do have control over there fully open source I mentioned data times already the one at the bottom is a natural disaster simulation tool for places natural disasters don't happen So you can simulate lava flows in Northern Ireland, but you didn't know that was a niche market In the middle Is one call project lintel which helps open data publishers get their data Shared and validated before it's released and all of these are web platforms with a very similar stack For those of you who are familiar with it kubernetes lara vell and pj s kind of the core and because we are Working in way even though there's consortia that are working on those are overlapping but distinct We don't have a problem about actually building up the IP across them That's something that proprietary vendors just that's a much harder concept. Let's say and you'll see that we have into this this kind of common Benefit of IP coming in from the other side there in that big arrow We slide over to client services and here you can see a poor defenseless dragon That's been attacked by an even king and had all of its gold stolen and our Intrepid adventurers down at the bottom there have formed a project consortium to Help the dragon Rican control of its stable kingdom with balance taxation Now for us if we're talking about doing open One of the ways that we can do that with clients is Look at what they really wants in terms of their IP Is what they want at their IP to be closed or is it to have something that they can commercialize in their own way and Again, we need we've had to be quite pragmatic with that and say okay. Well If you're if you want to keep this private, we'll be happy to agree with you However, here are things that we've improved in open source projects We should be able to upstream those automatically and that should be in our contract We want to be able to say here are the things and this is a very useful phrase for non technical clients non sector specific Things that are non specters sector specific We want to be able to start open source projects or feed into open source projects Because actually non technical clients often what they want to make sure is that they're not going to end up with another Competitor who sees the source online They don't really have an issue with a JavaScript calendar when they are an engineering company So it's trying to understand that and we'll actually find it's much easier to talk about ideas of reciprocation with non technical clients Than it is with technical clients who have a very fixed idea of how the industry should work and I Don't think to my memory that we've actually ended up having this as a permanent stumbling block with a non technical client So a few more kind of practical points First of all Here you can see a group of adventurers hunting a Yeti a giant snow monster This kind of reckless behavior is why you very rarely see them in the wild these days You'll see here that we've got different people doing different jobs We've got somebody trying to heal and trying to protect We've got somebody taking the hits at the bottom from them from the giant monster. We've got a magician doing Doing something over on the right hand side or left hand side And we've got somebody up on the top and she's taking chunks out of its head apparently Those skills You have to be aware in advance that if you go out with a small number of skills There's a lot of things you're going to have to try and work out very fast Having a diversity of skill sets recognizing the value of things that you don't know and have never even considered is critical Just a few examples so infrastructure data systems administration dev ops and cyber security Product user experience user interaction SEO communications copywriting social media tender writing business development finance marketing Oh development front-end back-end app dev systems hardware design audio visual and then training research Funding applications and administration of course and that's just what your average client will expect from a lone freelancer So if you're building a group you need to have you need to have those covered off You don't need to be brilliant at all of them, but you need to be able to To be able to treat them convincingly and actually get in the people who can support you Conversely you need an overlap of skill sets So when you are out in a consortium, and this is particularly important in our kind of our kind of syndicate structure where we have a loose loose group and Individual projects are very tight-knit if something goes wrong with the company it goes under or somebody a critical person is ill There still needs to be an overlap There needs to be built in redundancy and even more than that if you are having to pull from a pull And one particular skill is scarce Then you could end up paying considerably more than market value or market rate for a particular skill And that's not sustainable either. So having overlap of skill sets means healthy checks and balances Not going to spend too much on the what this isn't But just because these are common questions that we get at the end. There'll be a link to some slides and A repository where we have a nice poster trying to highlight some of the differences between different models to make it a bit clearer she mean so It's what we're doing. Is it a startup or a cooperative one of those? it should be it now Cooperatives work in lots of different ways however Most cases they tend to be incorporated our syndicate. That's the the big group. Our syndicate is not incorporated Our project consortia in fact in some cases are the Other difference is that The first focus for all of our member companies is on their company So everybody as we're not asking anyone to say now I focus on the syndicate rather than your company That's part of what you're doing It might be most of what you're doing, but it's still about a balance Is it freelancing or a contractor group? Well, again, there's lots of shades of gray areas in different ways these work But generally in these cases you'll find that the client is ultimately in control over how the group interacts on their project and One of the reasons that we Don't have that is that it involves avoids that kind of power imbalance So we generally only take on projects where which are deliverable waste That's very hard to say deliverable a little bit of this and the and that they have a Requirements gathering within the group that also means that you need to have people who can do business analysis so It keeps that an equitable relationship and both for the members of the group but also for the client some of you might be familiar with an agency model and That's where Normally largely non-technical company will be working directly with clients and then we'll subcontract our work to individual Subcontractors often technical subcontractors That's got downsides for both parties that we try to void An agent from the agency's perspective It's trying to sell on services that it's quite dependent on people who aren't necessarily bought into them They can't deliver if their subcontractors go missing and that actually happens with surprising frequency So they it could be extremely stressful as an agency project manager And also you have to have enough of a markup on people's day rates to be able to cover that risk On the flip side for subcontractors. They're seeing this markup and thinking why am I being paid this when the clients been charged this That's something that's only becomes apparent when you start running projects but It also means that subcontractors often don't feel bought in and you have an incentive structure where the agency is Entirely dependent on the client not in the subcontract and individual subcontractors Which can lead to quite a significant power imbalance all their incentives are to serve the clients ahead of the subcontractor Okay, so the summary take away here is the way this model works is because we can have shared IP is open and That solves the number of complications to facilitate that model. So if it's optional, it's a bit different to what we're doing in structure Right, so that's all very theoretical How do you start out so say you've kind of been sitting here thinking You know either I'm going to go and do role-playing games or I'm going to start a consortium and I haven't worked out which If you decide to start a consortium A few things to think about first off that One area you might want to start looking at initially is R&D and R&D services Particularly because it tends to value highly specialist skills and often if you're wanting to go out on your own You have there's certain skills that you can provide and particularly if you're technical It's one way that you can start working with a couple of non-technical and a couple of technical people and it's In this case we've got as you can see here a little project consortium like About to start a quest And they've got their map shows their way to a misty forest and they don't know what's in the forest But from their experience and from their background knowledge, they can make a fair guess and that's a little bit like R&D That there is it's a bit more forgiving than having to offer five nines uptime and cloud services But it really appreciates when you have a lot of background skills and experience. So have a look at that as a way of getting started A couple of steep learning curve skills we've had to get used to here. We've got a Queen who's been served by the project consortium and She's very grateful and she has rewarded them with this magic wand of light and Unfortunately, the project consortium has two Magical members and so they're going to have to saw it in half and hope they don't end up with two on magical sticks And that's actually quite like one of the big challenges for doing consortium work is Trying to work out up front Maybe on a big project you will have a whole series of cost centers or work packages different budgets that you have to pull from in different ways and You'll also have a set of companies that will be using different budgets out of that collection in different ways And you have to do all the math of that and in short that means a lot of LibreOffice spreadsheets and Python scripts We've been gradually trying to evolve a bit more systematic tooling around that And that's something at the end. I've got a link to a repository We're considering building up some documentation around that if that's something you'd be interested in Please make sure you plus one the feature request for budget pivoting That would be helpful for us to know But essentially working out how to divide up money in advance another aspect is business development and tendering and We can see a lot of the Challenges around going out on your own or around understanding how it works getting out to To business development events some of you might find it's a bit challenging to get To kind of cope with some of the innovation jargon and language and buzzwords But actually it's another language think of it as another technical language that You go out to these events and you meet people and see them as equals work with them as equals And they'll have huge respect for you as well. And that actually pays off in both directions. So valuing innovation and business Digital sector is very important And it's also hard to do things like tendering you might want to pay someone to come in and help you Which we did at one point But also it's very easy. So every company involved should be doing it even single person companies Go on to websites lots of wet lots of countries will have websites that list all of their available funding and resourcing so within resourcing you have a Number of challenges to get people in often non-technical skills. There'll be small companies nearby that can provide those but you should have Should be working in with the local community Did I just take time? Thank you so In our case we have done a lot of work with the Belfast Linux Group Trying to make events varied. We always have interesting Food and activities. I hope feedback is very positive. We even did have a look on github We have an adventure pack for going to Belfast zoo and finding For kids to learn about how open source projects work through their mascots Just to warn some Mosellans who might need to be watching Belfast new zoo's Twitter feed We had an unexpected Firefox release last week But it was found in a car park the next day. So it's okay Also do a shout out to Farset Labs the hacker space again trying to link business and technical communities is hugely important So if you do have a local hacker space do do try and involve them Okay legal particularly critical for Trying to have that structure if you don't have it at a syndicate level you need it at a consortium level So be be structured and also recognize that different projects will get in payment at different rates so You need small projects on the way to getting large projects on that will pay once a year and final lesson that I want to share is that there's a huge risk for new freelancers in drifting into the Into helping people getting say a cat out of a tree when they're being pursued by a legion of the undead Be very careful when you're on a major project that people are depending you about taking on too much extra work Okay, so key summary points Contract equation when you're leading a project you realize risk is an actual measurable quantity If someone is doing deliverable based work for you, that's you should pay them more than if they're doing time-based work It was add together If you're joining a consortium you shouldn't expect to be guaranteed work You may have to go out and find it and that means that you can coordinate it yourself you should also expect That most of your structures around projects they need to be very tightly structured and that gives it rise to The Learning experiences, I think it's a correct term That being fair and consistent makes a huge difference when there's not a huge amount of structure You need to involve people who are good negotiators who are good at being able to keep everyone on board because that's a lot Harder with loose structures And make sure that you're not depending on people or expecting your collaborators to be depending on people who Have priorities that's conflict counter-intuitively Clients who charge less often have more unrealistic expectations. That's one reason to keep a spread of income at different levels