 Hello, everyone. My name is home food that I am a board member of the open source business alliance Europe. I act as the vice president of the open source initiative. And I am the founder of false Asia, an organization that foster free and open source movement in Asia. You probably heard of the false Asia summit, which takes place in March every year right after forced them. But many of you might not know that we actually release quite a number of open source software and hardware projects. We have a stand here at foster them in the hardware cluster in case you want to check out our work. By the way, I'm calling in from Berlin, Germany. I could not get back to Asia seen April because of the pandemic. Of course it's a very challenging time for all of us. I'm still glad that we are able to meet and connect virtually. And today I'm here together with definitely cousin. She is the general manager at open source initiative. She has 15 years of experience in false licenses and policies. She also the founder of canoe linux conference in Seattle. And that is calling in from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hello, Deb. Hi, it's great to be here. Yeah, so we wanted to talk about how open source culture is pretty US centric but maybe it shouldn't be and then maybe go into some of the ways that we can make the, like the big picture conversations a little bit more global and inclusive. The reason we thought of it is that OSI is working to be a global and inclusive organization, but we sometimes struggle to find a way to engage both US folks and non US folks. Sometimes the challenges and problems are different, but sometimes they're pretty similar. So we wanted to look at, you know, how we could improve that. And we also wanted to look at, like, why a lot of the conversations seem to center the US. We know that a lot of the like big tech companies are from the US originally, like Microsoft and Facebook and Google and Amazon. But also even a lot of like the big kind of old school open source projects, like, you know, a lot of the Debian and Fedora developers are based in the US red hats from the US, things like that. So, but we know that there are contributors all over the world to open source. You can see here that only 28% of fast contributors are based in the US while 53% are based in Europe, Middle East and Africa. And this is from a recent study by the Lynx Foundation. So a little skewed towards their community, but still really telling numbers around, like, who is really participating in building open source around the world. So, I guess, if you want to talk about, like, why we care who participates in the conversation around open source policy, I'll hand it back to you. So open source only happened because of the global collaboration of people from everywhere around the world. So, the software that we usually there is not only developed by the people from one region, but from the people of everywhere. So if the software that we use being developed by people around the world, why the conversation on policy is not inclusive for all the contributors everywhere. Yeah. So I think that open source is stronger when it's truly global and truly a global community gives a wealth of different perspectives and help us to view software that is accessible to more people. Yeah, and you kind of pointed out to me that it can be a little annoying when people get together on a supposedly global conversation but then they end up just talking about US stuff. Yes. Yes. So, yeah, you know that. So, we, we meet at, like, regularly, because of the work of the open source initiative, we also met at, like, different conferences, right, but you see, majority of the speakers are come from the US and if we have a group the question you can see that a lot of actors, the participants are coming from, from this region. And of course, there's the conversation around how can we be more inclusive to communities in different region is always a big topic. And of course, it's important that we discuss and and and and find out how we can what we can do to improve. Yeah. And I think it's especially important here in the policy track, because a lot of the best ideas around adoption of open source aren't coming from the US so like the state of like free and open source software adoption is pretty different in different places. And, you know, the challenges to building and pushing for open source use vary, but we could share a lot more ideas. There are definitely strategies that we see for, you know, pushing to get more open source adoption in different places that could be tried in a lot more places. So, I also sort of feel like it feels like unfair that because like we end up we end up taking a lot of cues from users from really wealthy nations. And if if like free and open source software is this force for good in the world, then everyone has to be able to participate in the conversations about the future of technology. And there's still a lot that open source can do to serve like minority language groups or vulnerable populations or economies that don't look like the economy in the US. And so I'd really love to see us, you know, kind of get to work on how we could help each other include our policy approaches. And that's kind of the reason we wanted to make this conversation more global. So, I guess now we're going to talk a little bit about the state of open source policy work. Yeah, so I think that is a good next one for discussion. Yeah, so I think that, yeah, so I think we can now talk a little bit on examples that we have seen in places outside the US around like open source policy. Yeah, as you have so many experiences in policy. Yeah, I'll start with them. And then, and I know you have some too. In my, in my previous work at the open invention network, I looked pretty deeply into software patent policy. Software patents create kind of this chilling effect on sharing and collaborating on software and, you know, and then the US like, you know, there's like you can buy a T shirt that says like I hate patent trolls and stuff like that. And so there's definitely a lot of like, we should do something about it but then when you go to like New Zealand, they just kind of made it so that most software isn't patentable there. Part of that's because New Zealand's a little smaller than even its neighbor Australia or, or the US, but, you know, they decided to start lobbying to take software out of the scope of patentability, and, and they were successful. And India has done a similar like where they've, they didn't really have a culture of patenting there, but there's definitely been some pressure to consider adopting like a US scope of patentability or European scope of patentability. And they've resisted that because I think it would be harmful to their home grown local open source industries, especially like the cheap smartphones. So, and then once, you know, once they took that stand on like, no, we're not going to accept the kind of the European scope of patentability. There are open source projects that open source culture really started to flourish. And so India has just in the last couple years decided that they're going to prefer open source a little bit like you have to. When you're doing government procurement, you have to say, here are the open source options. And if you want to use something proprietary, you have to make a case for why the open source option isn't good enough. And so, you know, as far as like procurement, and I know that FSF he's been working on public money, public code, but it's already happening in India, but I think they're not even the first ones to do that. Are they harmful? When we talk about like earliest adopted or free software in Asia. So, I believe it is probably Taiwan. Yeah, back in the, in the 90s. When the new utilities were introduced in university campus across Taiwan. And it led to the creation of the Chinese Linux extension CLE. This project was created in 1997. This is also the most reference Linux environment in Taiwan and then later they also develop something called LSD another lightweight desktop environment. And in Taiwan right in the early 2000, the government introduced the national strategy on open source software to promote a nationwide utilization of free software in high school, and they also considered free software as an alternative for government procurement act similar to what you mentioned in India before. And from other government agency, they form a Linux promotion task force, where they also do a lot of promotion in open source indication in more. So today, Taiwan has a very healthy and active free and open source ecosystem, I believe so they have a very well connection among different actors like government, and then the industries and communities and, you know, so there's I also in the position of community there's so many members from from Taiwan they doing very good work and they also focus a lot on these days on open hardware. Another example is, it's about China right. So in the recent years we have seen like tech giants like Huawei by do Alibaba Tencent, they have contributed significant open source code around like cloud infrastructure you can see you can see on on GitHub you can check out like the top contributors actually come from this company. They also release a lot of code around machine learning. Yeah, and like on the government level the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China. And in the recent years has officially embrace open source, especially in the context of cloud computing, big data in AI. Of course, we can recognize that it's come from the influence of the big companies of China but another reason was the US and China trade war right. It's pushed into the acceleration of China adoption of open source, because they want to be independent from from US vendors. So, and this also adding to the fact that open source become more and more popular in China. Can I just say that that's so interesting because a lot of what drives free software adoption in South America is also a desire to be independent from US companies. Yeah, so and in China we know already so they have a huge market and the idea of being a cell reliance nation is always there from the start of China. So, yeah, so it's important for them to be independent and they recognize open source and for foundation for in here for innovate new ideas and solutions. Yeah. Yeah, I could say I could say another example from from Singapore. Yeah, so Singapore the open source adoption is actually in line with the Singapore smart nation vision. Yeah. So, so for many years is that the vision of Singapore to become a smart nation of the region. And the government actually tried to push a number of initiatives and to highlight, and there is that go tech which is the government technology agency of Singapore. For example, in 2011, they launched a government's one stop data portal that release a lot of like public data sets to the season for our 70 government agency. So the whole idea is to do to encourage to encourage developers and industry to to build application based on governments open data. And also in 2017 go tech release be like under open source license to be lies is a government mobility platform, and it was really a big step forward and like adopting open source by engaging the community to contribute to a government platform. And also recently, they also released the Singapore trace together application open source so this is a call it contact tracing app. Yeah, and, and it's really great to see how government actually want to engage more citizen and and the community into national solutions. Wow. Yeah, it's interesting here with the government side because there's also a lot of activity on the non governmental side and a lot of different places to. So, I would love to like highlight the digital impact alliance, which is working on. You know, advancing digital inclusion in a lot of what folks call like underdeveloped nations where the economy isn't so great. And they're working really hard to make open source platforms like the building block for creating businesses and and adding like specific localized values so that those communities. They have their own code of their own software it's and it's built on open source no one's ever going to be able to take it away as a way to sort of empower folks in those different regions. So it's like, like, the NGO kind of presents a lot of that is in Africa. There are some other places in South America which we touched on. The other thing I think is super interesting and this usually comes not from like a big player in the NGO space like the United Nations, which is where the digital impact alliance is held but there are like a lot of smaller more localized initiatives in the digital public goods area where you know there's a chapter in India there's a chapter in Norway there's work having in Sierra Leone. And they're looking at preferring open source software solutions for like specific localized problems. And of course, like every city when you live there it's a it's different it's special but it definitely has things that it shares with other cities so you know part of forming alliances across like these different like non governmental organization kind of initiatives is so that they can share and reuse and you know kind of borrow strategies from each other so it's a really good framework if you if that's the specific thing that you're trying to get done. So it just it's there's so much exciting stuff. Exactly. There's so many examples of people doing like open source policy around the world right. But we don't seem to be doing as much learning from each other as we could. Yeah, I wonder so some of this could be because people used to their own area. They're even like their own purpose and some might. So, like used to the way. Like we communicate and we frame our conversation here. I think that the goal of our conversation so basically to to discuss a few ideas how we could do better and we would also love to hear from from the audience to hear from people participate in foster their suggestions how we can make like open source policy more inclusive. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's really exciting. And it's I think like 1 place that would be easy is maybe for folks to start is to make sure your existing open source communities really represent all your stakeholders and not just where your home offices. Or where your founders are and that means choosing meeting times that might be a little less convenient for your US people. But are better for like a wider range of time zones, or you can kind of rotate through so that everyone each region gets a turn being at the really kind of awkward time in the day. You can also make sure that all of your important conversations or decisions are captured in a synchronous way so that everyone can come back and see like what the conversation was while they were asleep on their side of the world. So, that's like 1 thing that I think would help communities start to push more of a global conversation. Yeah. Yes, and yes, so you said about a how to make a meeting participation more convenient for people outside of the US so we also need to highlight the big elephant effect so when we are in the conversation that engage like companies, it's a national company right so, so it's more about okay so less the big elephant in the room speak and we listen. Yeah, but I think in terms of learning and sharing it no matter where you are, you form a small or big project there always something that we all can learn from. It's not to say that the big company do not have something to contribute because they have a lot to do to contribute. We want to learn from them but we also want to give a chance to do to small and medium business to understand the way they do open source in their region and also for smaller open source project how they engage their community. I believe that at the end, each of us can always like learn something from form from each other. Yeah, and I think it's so interesting because the way that companies from the US and the tech and culture interact is really different than it is in some other places and an example that I want to share is that. You know, in the diversity work that I've done diversity in the US is largely focused on including women, and it has just started to get a little better about looking at some other places where we can improve diversity but. In India the diversity challenge is not gender so much as it is cast. And so when people meet to talk about diversity, this, you know, interest that we all share the solutions that work in one place, don't even always address the challenges in another place and so it's. And it's possible that, you know, by talking about cast in and as a diversity element, it might lead us back to the US to talk about like class as a diversity element and so I think. You know, the focus can, you know, where folks are focused is a little bit different but that we can still learn a lot from each other's approaches. Yeah. Yeah, so I can only second that I think like absolutely. What what you said in your example right so the challenge as different from many parts of the world. And we cannot. I mean, the only how do you say to transfer what do we believe to other communities. Yes, and another thing that do to make space to make space for people that are not that you are not familiar with. Yeah, so, so, so, so for, for example, welcome speakers that are not regular and for them. It's easier during the pandemic than it's ever been before. Yes, exactly. And though it said we cannot connect in person it is opportunities for us to connect to people who otherwise we will be very difficult to to be here with us. Yeah. Yeah, so so I think that is one of the good side that we have because of COVID right. It's a great opportunity to reach out to to other communities. And yeah, I think you were going to say sometimes that can be tricky though because if you if you do present somewhere outside your region you have to be careful about some of the short hands and some of the. abbreviations that you use because it's they might not be understood. So if your example relies on a really local experience, then you'll have to explain it to the whole room so they can understand your reference. And another thing is that when you're looking at, you know, like a policy effort or you want to change something where you live. Look at the other countries where they've been successful in making that change and reach out before you build something from scratch right I mean that's kind of the open source way right be open minded and use other people's work when when it's offered. Yeah, and it's like the policy campaigns we were talking about before, especially some of the work you're talking about like, it seems like Taiwan is like 20 years ahead of what people are just starting to talk about in the US like, you know, pushing for government open source adoption and teaching open source and schools. And I think, you know, we can learn a lot from each other's mistakes and successes and US policymakers could learn a lot from. Not just Taiwan, but also like India and New Zealand and some of the other places where they've chosen to kind of help open source succeed as opposed to put roadblocks up. Definitely, but I also want to highlight one challenge so because of the language barrier right so somehow in different like my country in Asia Africa. They are doing good work but they are not so like accessible to the world, you know, because they've written the documentation or they've written their policy in their national language. So they're like to understand and to aware of what's going on, of course, like usually like the communities that you have every open source projects or that they have like community members and contributors from everywhere. So try to use them as your resources try to use them as the door to enter like different country to learn from different nation and then they can support you to find the right information or the right lesson from their countries. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing I would say is running out of time soon. Yeah. I think we're just going to say like, yeah, encouraged your, you know, plug into the networks that you already have within your project you might find that there's a global, you know, pile of meetups in your, you know, program language space. And keep looking for amazing events like fast Asia and fast them to participate in and then, oh, and we would love to have you join us with the OSI affiliate program, which is a global project. So, thank you. We'll take a couple of questions. I think that we're going to end our session here and they've said we're happy to take some questions.