 See share them tweet at me email. I'm happy to discuss this so About me in a past life or in several past lives. I was kind of a devops ish purlish guy I often describe myself as the pro guy on the Java team Prior to after that. I was what I would call a JavaScript RU winner. That's not imposter syndrome That's just the reality of how good I was at JavaScript at the time From there became kind of an agile facilitator helping a company during their agile transformation And then took a job as what I would say as an open source enabler So I was working in a large open source program office helping developers By streamlining the process to open up their ability to contribute to projects be involved in projects release projects of their own Which takes me to the now head of open source at indeed.com. It's the job site The biggest job site in the world And in a future life. I see myself as some kind of combination between rock star vampire wizard and robot But obviously I'm still figuring that out So I want to I want to also tell a bit of a story and this goes back to The landscape when I joined indeed in 2017 So I joined the company in very late November and at that point Budget for running the program office had already been allocated assigned and just sort of penciled in they had a rough idea for what they thought it would look like and There were some sponsorships that they had already on the radar the cloud native computing foundation The Apache software foundation Python software foundation the open source initiative and then money for a large conference sponsorship And then some money to give to web pack I was able to find room in the budget to give some money also to outreach II Want to encourage everybody to do that. It's a fantastic program that we should all be supporting But the thing I really want to call attention to on the picture here is web pack because if you look at everything else there are foundations that are supporting entire ecosystems or You know the open source initiative who guards the definition of what it means for a project to be open source in a Significant conference and then this one software package That isn't clear clearly isn't used everywhere in the stack. It's a you know used in some places And so I asked about How how we landed on this group of sponsorships? And as I understand it the story went something like this There was someone senior in the company who said we should be giving money to web pack because we use it And my boss Jack Humphrey said I think this is a fantastic idea Awesome, and then it just happened right and That's not usually How at least it is supposed to work how it supposedly works as a program head to find the budget And then they select some sponsorships that are strategic in nature things that will help them move messaging forward or things That they think need to be supported and then you know every quarter So you sign an extra execute those sponsorships, and this might be how you think it's going to work And you might hope that it's going to get you to world peace But it doesn't quite how it actually works is the program head asks for some budget And then they get back an adjusted budget that's usually been trimmed in some way or another And then you your mark where you think the sponsorships are going to go Beginning of the year starts it's January 1 and if you're me it's January 2 You start getting all these new ideas of things that you didn't think about when you were doing the original budget And you're now reprioritizing are you know are these the right sponsorships that I want to do Where are these new ideas fit into things and then there are senior folks who come in and they make Recommendations about other projects that they think that you should be supporting and you know We should show up at this conference or we should be sponsoring this community Or we should be giving money to this project And then there are some high-level discussions in this case between me and my boss and some other senior folks And then we have some reasonable disagreements about how we think we should distribute the money And in the end we land to compromise half happy right some of us get what we want Some of us are sad because I think we're doing the wrong things and some people get kind of a mixed bag That's all fine. That's sort of the way you work through these kinds of problems But these high-level discussions are exclusive in nature Right, so if these are the people who are having the discussion. This is not what our company looks like, right? You know, but below us there are several people who manage teams those teams have team leads Those team leads have developers and designers and people all throughout the company Who are doing a lot of work that aren't involved in these discussions, right? So the discussions are being held by a very small group of people and those discussions are seldom transparent Unless you're in the habit of publishing transparency notes on the kind of meetings that you're having Someone who's further down in the organization might understand we give money to the software Python software foundation But they might not have any idea on how you got to that decision, right? So the discussions are seldom transparent and then teams and individuals who have ideas or have Opinions about where you should be sending sponsorship dollars have to escalate requests And that's you know easy if you're high up in the organization And if you're further down in the organization depending on what your organization is like it might be a game of telephone or Hundreds of games of telephone that are competing for information So when we looked at this we decided we wanted to try something new And so we've created something we call the FOS contributor fund And the FOS contributor fund is an initiative that we're running over the course of the year to attempt to democratize this aspect of the Sponsorship progress and I want to talk about How we put it together what we think it's going to do what we've learned about running it so far And what the intentions are so The FOS contributor fund is a dedicated budget That we asked for for the year that is separate from anything at the organizational level or anything at the conference level So these are just sponsorship dollars that we've put in a bucket that will be distributed to projects that we use The projects to receive funds they have to be nominated by employees So anyone in the company has the capability to say this project is important to my work And we should be making sure that we're helping sponsor and and sustain them They the projects do have to meet a set of selection criteria, and I'll go over those here at a moment And then contributors at any given month Vote on the allocation of the funds so anyone who makes an open-source contribution Or a contribution to a free software project over the course of January will get to vote on where the funds for January are distributed And they're distributing on ten thousand dollars. So it's ten thousand dollars a month over the course of 2019 That will go to free an open-source software projects So as far as the project selection criteria go it has to be the project has to use an OSI approved license The project has to be something that we use at indeed now that doesn't mean that it's somewhere in our stack It could be the imaging software that the IT group uses To get new machines ready for new employees, right? So we have to use it somewhere They have to have some way to receive funds not all projects can or want to receive money And so there has to be some way for our procurement department to pay them Anybody here work with procurement departments and corporations? Maybe two dozen hands It's pretty easy for me to give somebody a hundred bucks Lot harder for me to give someone a thousand dollars It's weirdly easier for me to do it if it's ten thousand dollars because there's a process for it, right? So if we're going to make donations of this size to software projects I have to have some mechanism in place and that can be a PayPal button as far as we're concerned But an open collective or something similar and then the project can't be owned by an employee You can't self-nominate your project that you're moonlighting on to receive ten thousand dollars, right? So what we're hoping to accomplish with the initiative is several things The key thing and I really want to talk about this for a second after I get a quick drink Is that we want to drive open-source participation within indeed? So Let's talk for a moment about what it means to sustain an open-source project money doesn't solve the problem Sustainability conversation has been going on for several years now And it's widely understood that the way that you sustain software is you get involved in sustaining the software, right? Money is an easier lever to to flip within a corporate context than time Sometimes not all companies are equal so One of the goals of the initiative is we really want to get people more involved. That's why The contributors over a given month are the ones who have the voice and voting on where the funds are distributed We want to recognize their work there and then run parallel initiatives to get them more involved highlight projects that should be receiving contributions from us and Make sure that people understand sort of what the process is and what the what the inroads are The next thing is we want to highlight projects that are important to everyone in the company and I'm looking around the room here For one of the people I know that also runs an open source program office Who runs an open source program office in the room or is involved in it? Wow farm all far more of you that I that I would expect Keep your hand up if you know 100% of all the open source projects in your company All right one two people, right? If I look at something like a white source report or a code analysis tool that kind of looks at our stack to tell us But there we have thousands of projects and modules that are used Everywhere and I expect that's the same for most of the rest of you in anything but a small company And so if you quiz me in the hallway, I could probably you know give five or six things pretty easily And the longer I ramble I'll get to 10 or 20 I'm not going to name a thousand things But there are people in the company who use these packages and use this software every day And it's critical to the work that they do And it's not visible to us that it's important to them And this is a way for them to highlight projects that are important and to hopefully discover things that that maybe aren't getting the Kind of support that we should be giving them Obviously want to help support and sustain the software that we are dependent on But we also are wanting to try something new in the sustainability space again The conversation has been going on for more than a few years And it really ticked up over the last few years about how to keep these project Sustainable and so there are a lot of different people trying a lot of different things to approach the problem This feels like a new one and we want to run an experiment with it. So All sounds good What could possibly go wrong? Several things I touched on this briefly, but money might be wrong for the project some projects explicitly don't want to receive money some projects You know have decided that The amount of money that they would need to receive to make a difference for the project is so significant that it's not worth the Overhead to try to gain it and they take a different philosophical approach. So some projects just don't want the money Some projects if you show up with a drive-by sizable contribution that actually can create problems for them I think it was Deb earlier that was talking about Conservancy helping with projects who get money and aren't sure what to do with it, right? So money might be the wrong answer and again money won't solve the problems work solves the problems Our voting process might unintentionally select a project that is problematic in some way It might have a toxic leader. It might have a toxic culture. There might be some other problem with the project That we have to like take a step back and see if this is the right thing for us to be doing as a company Our process might break down in so many ways, right? We might get To a point that we realize we're not actually Meeting any of the goals. We're not driving participation. The money isn't making a difference We've laid out how we think this is going to work for us, but it might not go the direction that we think it's going to We might ultimately need to curate nominations You know again thousands of modules thousands of projects in use all across the company If someone goes through and nominates all of them You can't run a civs poll for 2,000 projects, right? You can even when you're trying to do 10 or 12 you're kind of pushing the Boundaries of what people can can wrap their heads around and so we might at some point need to police and curate nominations In a way that's transparent for everyone So there's all kinds of things that can go wrong as we've talked about the project internally We've set the expectation that we're going to learn as we go And we're going to share our learnings as we go and we're going to commit to sharing our learnings both inside and outside the company As we run the fun because we'd like to see other people trying new things In the sponsorship space and we think this is a neat idea to get people more directly involved So I want to talk a little bit about how we got executive buy-in for this because It felt like a very tall ask at the time And I really would like to be able to say Like here is a fantastic strategy that I used to implement to get this sold But the reality is it went something like this Too long don't read could I have a hundred and twenty thousand dollars for a sustainability fund for next year and Jack said that I think that's a fantastic idea and That sounded familiar. It's more or less how web pack went I think anyway, this is more testament to to Jack than it is to anything else The reality is I had written a one-page One-pager so that it would be easy for him to consume And the first paragraph underneath the TLDR was I'm asking for a budget of a hundred and twenty thousand dollars allocated in 2019 for distribution to free and open source projects, which indeed consumes each month indeed would distribute $10,000 to a project voted on by Indeedians who made an open source contribution that month This would democratize where some of Indeed's open source dollars go while giving open source participants motivation To to self-identify and engage with the program And then there were you know a little bit of breakdown of how I thought it would work and how it what I thought the goals would would go look like and I kind of fired and forgot right, you know, I've written this thing up. I've got it out of my brain I'll hand it off. It felt like a long shot. It was very early in the year actually when I sent it So when he responded within, you know, an hour, this is an actual code. I think this is a fantastic idea It's the first thing that he said I was I was definitely caught a little flat-footed And I can't tell you personally how many times I rewrote that number You know, can I have $5,000? Can I have a thousand dollars? Can I have a hundred and twenty thousand dollars, right? Who's who's boss Oh, that's fine. No, it's fine. Uh, he knows I don't really I'm sorry. I was told I was told not to give that away and I was shushed by someone from the front Um, you know, don't tell you don't let your boss know. No, absolutely. I I rewrote this number several times But in the end I decided to ask for a hundred and twenty thousand dollars for it And he thought it was a fantastic idea. The the lesson here is always ask Right if I had asked for sixty thousand dollars, he would have said I think that's a fantastic idea Right. Um, I hope so Um, and I I kind of broke myself of the habit of not always asking Through charity fundraising that I had done over the years. You do enough of it You realize that you you ask people because if you don't ask them, they never have a chance to say yes Right and I'm going to come back to always ask a few times here. So Um, it's very early days, but I want to talk about what we've learned so far. So it is, uh February something I don't know. I've been on the road a little bit Um, uh, it is February something now. So January just ended. What have we learned so far? For January contributions, I can didn't definitively say they went up I hope Brian's not in the room because he's going to want to have lots of questions about this one in particular Um, uh, this is just counts of contributions october november december january November, uh, fairly slow for us. We weren't running any programs and big holiday gap in the us in the middle of it Um, and there were a lot of factors that could be going into why contributions in january were higher But I know they were whether or not it was all tied to the program that remains to be seen Um, nominated projects. We had about 20 projects that were nominated and uh, 10 of them I are our projects that I would probably name if you said, hey, what do you use that indeed five of them I knew about them, but I didn't know we were using them. Uh, and there were five projects. I've never heard of Right five software projects that are free and open source that are in use at indeed That probably show up at a report somewhere Um that are competing for attention with thousands of other things on the same report But they were important enough to someone else in the company Uh, who was involved in and contributing to open source that they nominated them and said we think they should be receiving $10,000 And that's super fascinating to me, right? Um, this is one of the results that I was I was really hoping that we would see Um, so, uh, excited about that. Uh, as far as participation, what has it done for open source participation? I'm not going to make a call on that yet. It's very Very early days very young chick here that we're growing in the program Uh, so participation is is is tbd, but as we learned more about it over the year Like I said, we will continue to share Um, now, uh, if you're interested in trying something like this yourself and democratizing this part of the sponsorship process and putting some of that power into the hands of other people in your company There's some things that you can do If you want to get in touch with us, uh This is basically an email alias to me and two other people in the company So it's not a you know signing up for lists. You're not signing up for leads This is literally send us an email and say I want to hear how this goes Or, uh, we want you to come, uh, help sell a similar idea internally reach out And we'll let you know how it's going as far as, um, the program itself After we get a little bit more information, uh, about how it's turning out for us We will have what we need to release, uh, documentation about everything in the program under a cc license document Probably end of the quarter or so so I'm expecting by the end of march beginning of april We'll push out better documentation about what we learned How it's put together and give the ability for anybody to copy and modify that If you are working in a company and using free and open source software speak up Advocate for the projects that you're using always ask, right? Because if you don't ask, uh, you don't you don't know what kind of support that you'll get If you are someone who, uh, is involved in making decisions about how sponsorship dollars are spent in your company Always ask, right? Ask everyone in the company go to the it desk and ask them what what is important to them What do they need to do their job? Ask people in design ask people in research ask people in all parts of the organization What is important to them and you will learn things you will find things out about the other software that's being used We're past the point where, uh, if you work for a large company, uh, Your budget is almost certainly set by now And you probably have some room to play in there, but not room for a significant initiative or a significant new one But if you do want to get started earlier The open collective launched something I think for the first time in december Where you can purchase digital gift cards that can be used to provide funds For free and open source software actually any project that has an open collective behind it And so this is a great way to recognize open source participants in your own company You know giving them the ability to say here here is some Cashy money that you can give to a project on open collective Super interesting and super cool idea. I'm getting the 10 minute sign there Which is exactly perfect because I wanted to leave about 10 minutes of play at the end for questions I'm good for questions Thank you You uh sort of answered my question. I think a little bit but um the idea of having the employee Being contributors that the people who are voting and not many products is great Um, one of the questions I had was how well did that work with other organizations besides developers and their kind They're contributing to open source projects for those sorts of needs which are often more uh need more attention. Yeah. Yeah, um, so If I I'm sort of mentally scrolling through like what's our um What's sort of the cross-section of Of our contributors right now and our active participants Most of them are developers because the pathways for developers are fairly well-worn The documentation that we push internally and You know the events that we hold internally we consistently try to send the message that this is not a developer thing You could be a designer. You can um be a pure qa test engineer You can come from a wide range of disciplines and come and admit contributions um, we're holding um We're holding an event uh in um q1 Around getting people onboarded for their first contributions So people who've never made a contribution who want to make a contribution We keep trying to cast a wide net, uh, and if I was to be honest, I don't know that we're We've successfully learned how to engage design in these same conversations and other parts of the organization. So We keep trying things and iterating on them and running experiments and we're hoping to grow participation kind of at all levels Thank you Can you tell us a little bit more about the nomination process? The question was can you tell us a little bit more about the nomination process? So, um I alluded in one of the slides that we wanted people Sorry, it was when I was first writing up the document Uh and said that it gave people the opportunity to self identify and engage with the program Um, the the kind of bumpers that we've put around that I guess at first I should clarify We don't have a workflow in the company that forces you to come through and disclose all of your open source work, right? um, we have policies But you don't have to like turn over your github id when you turn up or turn over your other id's We want people to come and self report this information And then we want to get them engaged with the program We take nominations from people who've done that, right? So We promote it through blog posts through We have a An internal network of monitors that we can post slides to we promote it through that So we invite people to nominate projects that they're looking for and when they go to the nomination process They say tell us who you are, right? And after that then they can nominate something Someone else in the program then goes back and vets those nominations And make sure they have an osi approved license That we understand where we're using it and kind of checks to make sure that it meets all the criteria So that's a little more about the nomination process So you hear the story about how your boss was very willing to you know, they I guess approve this program, right? Can you kind of double click a little bit on that for the rest of us whose boss is not that understanding? What part of the pitch you know, you think Align there are sense of concern Fantastic question to summarize it My boss was super easy to convince and not everyone else's is I'm super lucky, right? I have worked in programs that were resource starved and it's really hard to get anything done And in any given company, you know that that same bucket of hundred and twenty thousand dollars is competing with many many other things So convincing someone that this is where you should be spending the money and sometimes be in uphill fight Here's what I'm hoping will happen I'm hoping that we will run the experiment and we will learn enough that we can share the upside of it That then we can give people that ammunition to take back to have those conversations, right? again early days yet still working our way through it but Work for an awesome boss is the best advice I can give right now You've done a lot of outreach internally to educate your employees about What's going on with your idea here? What about the projects that actually win? Are you going to send them a link to your Boston video so that they know what you're trying to do? So an extra credit follow-up. Will you get feedback from them on what they think about it? It's actually a fantastic point and thank you Tom for raising that like what what about the projects? And so one of the one of the things that could go wrong And you know the process coming apart as we could show up to a project and say We've decided to give you $10,000 and I might say no, we're good Right and we haven't built in anything the process that says how do we like re-nominate or what do we do there? We want to make sure that we're pointing them to resources so that they've got the help with the funds If they need them right so and that's kind of the first thing that I think about for projects like webpack and Babel right that are kind of used to this fundraising model. They already know what to do with it But for a project that doesn't know what to do with it We want to point them to conservancy to make sure that they're getting some support there And we want to stay engaged with them to make sure that they've got what they need right if they need help We'd like to help them like get connected to the right resources And for the ones that are willing to talk about like hey, this was great and here's what I did for our project You know we'll amplify those stories as well Um, I'll be talking and blogging about this kind of for the rest of the years Okay, we can take one more question and since Jenny is live tweeting. She totally gets to ask it awesome Hello So in all of your talk you've been talking about projects and they specifically seem and correct me if I'm wrong They seem like projects that are more likely to be things that we're using or toolings and languages and stuff like that But as in this room We've talked a lot about communities not just being about the projects we're actually using but also the events that are going on How does events which are a lot of the time grassroot people who No one knows about going that that needs support to actually even just put a venue over their heads How do they get part of this funding or is our plan to make that act more accessible? um really good question um the way that I Handled this when putting the budget together for this year was we have an allocation Marked for conferences and events sponsorship that is separate from this pool. This pool is protected and only goes to project Now if a project wants to use the money to host events great like it's yours now, right? um, but if there are Events uh, or community needs that are bigger than an individual project that are around more of an ecosystem um, you know, we've got sponsors for dollars that we've set aside for that some of which are earmarked for conferences and some of which are Kind of things we expect to encounter over the year um, and so there's not a Clear we didn't build in a process for that in this part of it Because I did also I didn't want to see us over engineer an initial solution Right as the year goes on if we get a lot of requests for hey We use sponsor this event or this meetup or something that falls in the gray area Then we'll adjust the process as we go Cool. Thank you. Um, buddy wants to come get the mic In grateful reward for you moving in we're about to start distributing chocolate by throwing it at y'all So that's gonna be amazing. Yes, sir. Good to see you. Yeah. Thank you I want in the water sign Welcome everyone. Let's get this off. It looks on the mic. Yeah