 Welcome back to the third day of Congress here at the Hux stage with a very interesting sounding talk. Open Source as a model for global collaboration where Hong Fuk Dong will share successful examples on how open source can be a helpful tool or solution to global problems. And I think with that out of the way I can already give over to our speaker. Thank you Lenny for the introduction. I'm very happy to be here. My first Congress was 31C3. At that time I also gave a talk on stage about local production in fashion in the textile industry. I still remember how I was so impressed with the whole thing overwhelmed with the ambient setting projects and the people at the CCC back then. And of course like many people I came back every year. I still can't believe that this year there is no face to face Congress but I'm still very glad that we have this virtual experience and happy to be part of this. A little bit about myself. I was born and raised in Vietnam. What is my relationship with open source? I am a founder of Force Asia. This is an Asia-based organization that develops open source software and hardware. We promote open source activities and try to grow the communities in the region. Because of my work and engagement in the open source community over like 10 years I got elected to be the Vice President of the Open Source Initiative. This is a U.S. non-profit that safeguards the open source definition and maintains the open source license list. Recently I also joined the open source business alliance as a board member. This is a German non-profit that operates Europe's biggest network of companies developing, building and using open source software. What is different between now and the 31st C3? Not so much. I'm pretty glad to say that I'm still doing the same thing. I forget for open source development activities and build the community. This is what I do. Today I'm going to cover three topics. At first I want to talk a little bit about the lesson learned and example how we build open source projects and community and how open source is a model that can enable global collaboration. And then I want to touch briefly on two trains that bring negative effects to the open source ecosystem that I have seen the past few years. And finally a small call to action. Lesson learned. It all started back in 2009 when my partner and I founded FOSACHA organization back in Vietnam. At that time we realized the opportunities that open source and open technologies can bring to the people in the developing nation and country. The opportunity to learn, to share and to develop your own solution. We see this opportunity and we want to bring this opportunity to spread the idea to more people, build communities so that people can make their own decision and build their own solution for themselves. FOSACHA basically a network of people who share the same idea, the same belief in sharing and collaboration. Even though our name is FOSACHA, we have members, contributors from outside of Asia as well, from Europe, from Australia, US and many countries around the world. What we are doing, we develop software and hardware projects like many other open source organization out there. We run events to bring people together before it was face to face event now it on the virtual spaces. Another focus of us is on education. So we teach people how to write code, how to contribute to different open source projects. Because we believe that in order to change something, in order to increase the adoption, everything needs to start with education. So it's also our big focus. Since 2009, we managed to to sustain the operation and this is actually not so easy as we started with two people as a grassroots organization. We bootstrap most of our activities ourselves, do not have any backing by cooperation or by government or American life funding organization, something that is to start everything on ourselves. So it's always a big question for us how we can sustain the operation, the question about how to continue to rule and develop further. We constantly think of a model, how open source can generate an income financially that's have to continue to build and work on the projects of our interests and that we are passionate about. So there are different ways for us to sustain. For instance, we offer services around the software that we develop, we sell hardware and we also do consultancy. The scale of the organization, we have about 35,000 subscribers to our mailing list and social media, about 4,000 developers registered on GitHub. Through our training education program, we onboard 2,000 young developers and students every year through coding programs. We organize a lot of face-to-face meetings, like reverse year now we do a lot of virtual events and also hackathons. We maintain technical blocks, basically this is a space for people to share technical knowledge. These are some of the software and hardware projects that we develop in the 4th Asia community. Today I would just emphasize, I want to introduce 2 projects as an example how open source works in a low-spot scale starting from somewhere in Asia. First of all, EventYear. EventYear is a project that started in 2015. This is an open-source event management system. We organize events since 2009 and it's always challenging for us to see what kind of tooling to use for call for papers, what to use for scheduling, for taking things and we always have to use multiple tools in the beginning. In the very beginning, we use Google Form just to collect submission. But we also want to realize that there should be an open-source solution that helps organizers to run events. It's really important to do events just like the Congress where people can get together, can share the idea. That was the original goal to have an open-source event management system. So we started to build this EventYear and now it becomes fully functional. It's called for paper scheduling, ticketing and we also recently integrated video conferencing, the solution entirely open-source. And we also work with other open-source projects. For instance, we integrated GCC, BigBlueButton and of course there are also bridges to other video solutions. This is something that we see as an alternative to proprietary software like Eventbrite. Another project that I forgot to mention, we have about 100 contributors since 2015 contributed to EventYear. They are not only coming from Vietnam into the part where we are in, but we also got developers from Europe and the system being used by organizations in the US as well. And now we can continue to collaborate with more projects to develop further EventYear. PocketSignLab. This is another example. We previously, I think the past few years, we have our assembly at the GCC and we also run WorldShop on the PocketSignLab. This is the open-source hardware device for education that built as a teacher-student project starting from India. But now it has become a consumer product. We distributed in many different continents including Europe, the US and the collaboration here. We came to the GCC some years ago and we got feedback from the community how to change the design, the blueprint of the hardware. And we also collaborate with a European-level project, the Horizon 2020 on PocketSignLab, worked together with Frauhofer Institute here in Germany on the production of the hardware. So I want to talk a little bit about something that we learned over the years of developing projects and also building the community. I often get the question from people, so how the whole thing gets started? How do you get people to contribute? How do you come up with a good project to work with? So back in 2009, Port Asia started out as a conference, an event where people meet and exchange ideas. And when people come together, they start to develop projects, they start to work together. But it's really important in the beginning of building a community, we need to understand the landscape. So people around you, what kind of technology they are familiar with. When you introduce something, you need to be sure that the people in the community are excited about the ideas of the project. And as you see on the picture, the people around us at that time are very young people. They just getting out from university and also did not explore a lot to the whole global open source movement. So we try to promote a contribution apart from coding. So there are a lot of things that people can contribute. For instance, doing design, writing articles, promoting a project or organize events, doing fundraising and many more. And we realized that to promote contribution apart from technical can help to attract new joiners. And one thing is still valid. It's valid until today, which is try to keep the entry barrier low. So if you contribute to various projects as an open source project, you can see in order to set it up on your local server. So somebody before they start to contribute, they need somehow to install it on their local machine. And it's always different experience for different projects. Not something like out of the box that can easily be done by a beginner. So for us to know the question is how to keep the entry barrier very low. How to get people that setting up inside it before they can actually contribute. Another lesson that we learn is to understand of the motivation of developers. So if you want to do to attract like people who write code, which is like the core thing of the project. So you need to do to aware of their motivations. A lot of people from Asia community are motivated by opportunities to get higher in the future opportunity to travel outside of the country, which is very difficult for many citizens in that particular region. And of course they are motivated to work on tooling that they are familiar with. So we understand this, understand the motivation and what we try to offer to our contributors is something that's March and that can satisfy their wish. Since 2012, we try to reach out to more international communities and invite developers, we go from the West to come and connect with our people to share the knowledge. And at the same time we look for opportunities to bring the contributors like overseas where they can get explore to more global environment. Another thing that we learn over the year, there are so many open source projects out there, right? It's not that one day you develop something to put it online and then there will, there will attract like attention from from the community. It's really difficult these days to get to onboard new developers or to get people actually engage and contribute to your projects. And we learn that as a developers, as a, as a, as a coach writer people, people like to improve their skill. So we organize something like coding contest has been going on for the past four years already. So we do this throughout the year, try to do, to, to help people at first to learn how to code and then seeing the, as they get leading and the better they also win the price for contributing to our projects. And it's, we find it's really useful not only to attract new contributors, but at the same time you, you need to widen the pool of contributors. It is the first step to, to guide people to, to, to, to show people how to contribute to not only our project, but also open source in general, develop retention. So this is why I, I just want to emphasize that there are a lot of things that happening in the, in the last 10 years. I'm not be able to, to share every details, but I hope that to, to summarize a few highlights in this presentation. Retention is a big question for many projects, not only ourselves. When you build an open source project, you, like, you need to aware and understand that at one point people will move on. So people will need to go on with their life. They find something a little more interesting. It's difficult to keep like people like continue to engage over the years. So therefore it's important to always reach out to more people in the community, try to do, to, to engage and change new commerce. At the same time, you should not like put the knowledge into like one core person is always important to make sure that you have a backup on whatever you are doing. Like introduce, like peer review to ensure that there are more people can review the course and of course minimum to maintainer so that you can, you don't have to rely on one person over the time. Delegate tasks, this is something that we find very useful when people join the project. People like to have more responsibilities. It also motivated them. This is quite interesting fighting. So people not only motivated thing by, by financial benefit or by traveling, but some people do motivated by the responsibilities that they have. So we introduce like mental roles where people can, can have the, the younger developers or newcomer to, to, to get involved. And this is something that can motivate and keep people engaged in the project. Yeah. And we also introduce development practices. This is something that is not new to many like a project out there. The, the question is how can the practices being enforced and implemented in, in your development? This is the question. So a few things that we got out from, from our development practices, which is always much one issue to one pull request. They sound very simple, but a lot of people don't do it. Right. Big issue into multiple small issues. It's also easier for people to review. It doesn't have required so much effort from, from the reviewer test before making a pull request. So, of course, this is a standard way, but a lot of people still to make a PR without testing before that they make a PR with the, make things like more difficult. If you merge and then something goes wrong, you have to, to reverse the change. Only change that you stay on the PR. You set the PR on one thing, but actually there are a lot of different core change into one PR, which is not welcome or encouraged. Have each other review each other pull request. This is like a peer review practice that we always encourage document while coding. So document is, is not a favorite thing to do for developer. But we always encourage our contributors to, to, to document why they are coding. So the next person can understand and follow up with them with the progress, earn right access. So basically after contribute to the project for some time, you'll be able to earn the right access to the repository. And one thing that very important is to avoid private conversation and only collaborate with the community, with the, on the project level chat. So we give the, for our chat and every single project have their own project channel. So instead of two developer talking like on private about how to fix an issue, we encourage people to, to, to, to have their conversation on, on the, on the public channel. Yeah. And, yeah. And how can you make sure that people really follow the practices. So it's about encourage people to remind each other is a practice that the developers continuously helping each other and being a place for being, being appreciate for, for, for follow the practice. So again, so open source is a decentralized software development model that encourage open collaboration has proven how collaboration could work successfully on the global scale. Of course, the project that we developed is on a very small scales compared to Wikipedia or compared to the Linux kernel. As you could imagine, starting from a project somewhere in Asia is now being used by many other country at the same time heavy contributors from everywhere. So if we can achieve a local collaboration with this project, imagine how much impact it could have if open source be done on the national level or on government level. So, yeah, so I just want to give one quick example here. The current Corona virus pandemic, right? So a lot of digital solution have been developed everywhere around the world. This is an example of the digital contact tracing application developed in Southeast Asia. As you can see here, we only have 10 countries in, in, in Asia and in Southeast Asia region. And these six countries, they all like develop their own solution. Yeah, and it's all tackle similar problem. They all see that they all want to have a digital contact tracing app, but different country set is their own application. Even though it could be possible like to share and call a break in some way, but it did not happen. So I don't know how much it costs for this country to develop the solution, but I read somewhere online. The Corona fund app developed in Germany that's cost over 20, 20 million euros. So you imagine if each country spend this much money to develop similar solution why there is no collaboration across nation so that we can save the resources at the same time speed up the whole process. Corona pandemic is only one of the challenges that we are facing needed this day. Climate change, political war, so many issues. Open source collaboration could be a solution to many problems, but we need more examples. We need a successful example to accelerate the whole open model in all industry. Open source should not be only about software. It could be the open model could apply for for hardware for pharmaceutical formula could apply for processes. And it should be open source open center or should be a default for for all different industries and encourage more collaboration across borders. Moving on, I want to talk a little bit on the trends that bring negative effects to open source ecosystem that I have observed in the past year. First of all, I want to talk about digital shaming. So digital shaming is being electronically attacked online. It can literally destroy people's lives financially and emotionally. And sadly, there is an increasing number of open source contributors or anyone could be victims of this digital shaming. Have you ever participated in a digital shaming act? For example, if you unconsciously like a treat or retrace something that you read online. So I don't know if anyone remembers a treat that happened in Python some years ago where some people talked about a private conversation of two male developers in a sexual way. And then these people got fired for for for the act. Yeah, and this is just one of the example. If you see something that's happening online and you see so many people like the treat and you think that you should also support this activity by live or retreat. So think about it before you do something. If you do not know the person and do not have the understanding the whole situation, do not be part of digital shaming. One thing I think that is important to understand is the self-serving bias. Self-serving bias is an action done only for one's own benefits, sometimes at the expense of the orders. It happens every day in our life. For example, a few days ago, I forgot to call a doctor to change my doctor appointment. And then when I was asked by my partner if I've done this because I don't want myself to look bad. I just say that I called the doctor office but nobody answered the call. So we tend to be always biased on our side, on our self, right? So whatever information that you see, people claim online, you need to see that people often talk on their own perspective. And of course, I can be a very fair person, but I will always try to protect myself. And a lot of activities like this happen on the Internet. And I see many older generations of contributors are leaving the community because of this digital shaming. Because something that they might have spoken in the public and then being criticized so much by the public and then forced them to leave the community. And this really creates an unhealthy environment for people who contribute and involve in open-source community. And there's also something that we should be aware of. There are a lot of people out there who use vulnerable acts for public interest because they think that if you stress yourself as a victim, you could get the attention and the support from the public. It's also good to build up your profile and interest. So this is so unreasonable but it's still a practice that happens online on the Internet. So it's important for us to be aware and do not be part of this whole thing. If we do not support a digital initiative, if you do not know the people who involve or do not have a clear understanding of the real story. Another thing that I also want to highlight here, diversity and inclusion. I'm really glad that there are so many initiatives and so many efforts in our society to push diversity and inclusion these days. By definition, diversity refers to the traits and the characteristics that make people unique while inclusion refers to the behaviors and social norms that ensure people feel welcome. And as you can see, there are so many corporations, big companies now embrace diversity and inclusion by saying that they want to get more women into leadership positions. They want to develop a more inclusive recruitment process where discrimination in recruitment could be limited and there's also many more. So you can see there's more agency now being formed to advise on diversity and inclusion. There's more jobs created for people who research and who want to develop further in that field. So I'm also very happy because myself as a minority, I have a diverse spectrum. I'm a woman at the same time coming from Asia. So this whole bee is like for many years during my career life. I also experience discrimination and this is a really great thing for people like myself and also a great thing towards a more equal society. However, there are some side effects that I want to emphasize here on this. There's different initiatives that we should support, but there are also something that create more confusion for people, especially people coming from non-English native speakers. Have you ever experienced that you come to a meeting room with your colleagues or people you work with and you're afraid of bringing up, afraid of saying something because you're not sure, afraid of addressing a person, because you're not sure what kind of pronoun you should use to address that person. And there's a lot of rules about the way how you speak in public. Yeah, of course. If the advantage is for being a non-native speaker, I can always say that I'm not aware of all the implications in the languages, but it's really difficult for white people who consider as a native speaker. So they now started to be worried about what is the right thing if they're allowed to say or not. Will there be an offense somebody in public? And I heard it's a lot in the communities these days. So I just want us to see that diversity and inclusion is a good thing. We definitely need to support it, but we also need to be aware that white people, white men, is also part of the community, part of the diversity and inclusion group. It should be about everyone. So we should not exclude or make people feel uncomfortable about coming up with new initiative that only applicable for people in particular countries. And again, I'm worried about the whole diversity and inclusion. The side effect is our freedom of speech being limited because of too many rules of life these days. And do people really can freely give their feedback? Riticism actually is not always bad. So it helps people to improve and become better. I want to give another example that has happened to me recently. I was at an open source event where there was a group of people talking, presenting about policy on a European level. So this is a group that advised the commission on policy and they're using a closed source software like Microsoft PowerPoint to present. And there was a message in the community saying that, okay, so if we advise the commission on using open source, we shouldn't use open source ourselves. And this person gave the comment being attached so much on the chat saying that, okay, so this is an act of excluding the people. So even though he just likes to say the truth that if you work on open source, don't assume you use open source yourself. And he's being called out by many people saying that this is a bad act because you should not really decide people, should allow people to participate. So for me, I do not think it's a big thing, but I see that people have different opinions and that person did not want to come back anymore just by saying a fact. And then he's stating the fact, being really decide as not support inclusion practice in the community. So this is something that we should all be aware and we should all be aware and think about, support the right initiative and be more open, like put yourself into other people's shoes, right? Not everyone have the same understanding and when people say the fact, it doesn't mean that they try to redesign the other person. Call to action. Each and every one of us can offer support with, we are capable of, there's so many things that we can do to become a good citizen. First of all, use open source software. As I mentioned that example earlier, so my grandmother, my mother, they have never support open source before, I could understand it's difficult to get these people, but if you are working as an organization that advise government on open source level, please use open source. If you got funding from the government to develop open source project, use open source products yourself, there's so many alternatives. So instead of Zoom, you treat the big blue button, instead of Event Pride, you even get instead of Google Cloud, you next cloud, there's so many options out there that you can use. Just by using open source software, you have put support on the ecosystem. Contribute to open source projects, there's so many ways. So if writing code contribute to documentation, globalization including localization, so translate project into different languages, organize virtual events, and try to bring people together, there's also a lot of design works and also make donation to open source project. Talk about different open source projects, there's something that anyone can do. If you are a developer, release your work open source, and assemble earlier about the tracing app, so imagine how much money we could save just by sharing developer play together. If you have one problem, so why do we develop 20 different solutions to tackle one problem, so we can also work together. Advocate for open source model in your organization. So open source is not only about software, it's about open collaboration, it's about sharing the knowledge, bring the knowledge to more people. Advocate for this model inside your organization, in company and in your government. There's so much that you can do here if you live in Europe. So in Asia it's so difficult. We never have the opportunity to talk directly with our politicians, but you have the chance here. So do that and make sure that there's a support for open source development. I know that there is a new open source strategy that being introduced by the commission for 2020 and 2023, so you can check out that as well. Support open source small and medium enterprise. So if you could give a contract or could hire someone to work, so why not work with small and medium companies? So we don't want open source it's a battlefield for cooperation, multinational companies anymore. We want more companies to come and also be in part of the ecosystem. And finally, bring open source in education. So there's several ways that you can do that you can make education possible. For instance, I teach my mom how to use Ubuntu or labor office. So education could suck in your home and then it could be like in school or in your teacher university do education coding program like what we do at the First Asia. But there's so many small things that you could do, like connect with people around you, educate people around you, your friends, your family members. Finally, take an active role. Anyone can make a difference. You can do it. Yeah, I would like to take the chance to invite you as well to our summit in March between 30 to 21st of March 2021 to connect and collaborate with open source community in Asia. This is going to be a virtual event as well. Below is my email. I'm happy to stay in touch and if you have any questions about our projects or about this presentation, please feel free to contact me. Thank you. All right. So I have four questions as of current standing and I think I'm just going to go with the first one. Do you know of solutions to avoid information hierarchies, in essence single people knowing crucial information? So I don't know a solution like to avoid hierarchy, but I could say that the open source development model so when the source calls and the process openly available to everyone, so this is a way to avoid information in terms of hierarchy. So if you do open source, like in the open way, so you documented your work, how the infrastructure develops so everything is openly documented so everyone can have the access. So it's the same with many open source projects out there. If you look up on GitHub, there's no secret on our repository, right? The way we develop and how the infrastructure set up what is the blueprint where everything is publicly available to everyone. So I would say that the open source model is a way to limit hierarchy to information. Okay. Thank you. We have a question about inclusion. How is there an easy way to break the language barrier in an international community? Many people want to contribute, but not everyone does speak English well enough to discuss technical or other issues deeply. Yes. So the language barrier has been a topic like for so, so many years. So what do you think that what could be a suitable solution for this? So there's like translation application out there, but of course this is the barrier that is always there, the language barrier, right? However, on the good side, more and more people getting like being trained on English. So you can see this there even like in developing countries like Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, more and more people started to learn and speak English very good and fluently. So it's about like we need time for people to get into to learn the language and at the same time to contribute. It's not an easy solution to break the language barrier. There's always like some project they do, they translate to make sure that they translate the contributor like the contributor guidelines. So to show people how to contribute in different languages, but at the same time, you know, it's not a ultimate solution because in order to write a code, there's a lot of the same tech, you know, and of course at written English people need to understand and also have a certain level. But the good thing is that people getting better and better. So there's so many ways that people can have to learn the language. So I think that in the next few years, hopefully there won't be a language barrier anymore as everyone could be able to speak in writing English. And do you have plans on expanding outside of Asia or with for Asia, maybe to Africa or other continents? Yes, so for for Asia, right? As I mentioned, we base out Asia, but the projects that we do, it actually not only focus on Asia. So we have a partner here in Europe. So we work together with the European Union. We work together with the Sproul Hopper Institute. We are part of the OpenNext program. So there is already existing collaboration. So we not focus only on the Asian market because open source is a gross border. So anyone can do, anyone can contribute. Africa is also a very good question here. So we connect with like Africa for us. It's again, so it's not on any there's no nothing Congress that I could share at the moment, but there's also initiative and user group that active in Africa and we also like connect with them at Congress. I don't know if anyone from Africa is here at the Congress, but at the Open Source Initiative at South Asia Summit, we do have people coming and exchange and connect with us. Okay, very cool. The last question for today would be how much of post-Asia interest or activities promote contributing to existing popular post-software projects? Could you repeat that question places quite long? How much of post-Asia's interest is into promoting contribution to existing Open Source free software projects? Yes, so actually we promote not only our object, but we actually do promote a lot of open source project. As I mentioned we use from the start. So the entire pandemic we try to use open source solution as much as possible. We set up our own next cloud instance in the project. We use liberal offers for several years. We use scheme in-scales. So we promote also in our training like at university and at school that we work with. We offer training on open source solutions to people. So not only we do not only promote our own post-Asia project, but we actively promote all the projects. And I believe that there's also some projects that I know in the community getting a contributor from the post-Asia community. So which is something that we are very class in order to survive in order to roll the ecosystem. It's not only about your organization. It's about the collaboration. You need to work with other organization and you need to foster collaboration in order to roll and foster the entire network. So we are very open to work with other project as well. As I said we integrated GC already and also big group burden. So there are many more examples. Okay. I think that really nicely concludes this great talk. You left your details in the slides. So if anyone still has questions as she said, write her an email. And I think from our side this talk is finished. And if you have anything more to say so and apart from that we're done. Yeah. So I just want to say thank you very much again for having me. Thank you Lenny and Marcus for setting up the whole thing. I really appreciate it. Ciao!