 Okay. First of all, thank you friends for turning up at this last talk of this series, which is fine with me. It's going to be interesting to see if we can make it through the 33 slides in 25 minutes. Let's find out. If you're interested in, I should say this when we signed me up for this talk, I actually worked for a company called Neuroform. I worked for them for almost four years. I stopped working for them last June, but by then everybody thought that I was doing this talk for Neuroform. So I left the branding in. Okay. So we are the people who brought you open-sources art, Neuroform. We really believe that and we really think that in a really short, hey Mike, in a really short bit of time, tells you everything you want to know about how we feel. I get around the world of speeches. One of the things that happened to me a few years ago was I met this guy. If you know who this guy is, then you're laughing but this is a picture of Jacob and I on our first conversation about whether open-source could help him. So some of this presentation is a story about one guy who managed to string stuff together and create a bit of a revolution in his own backyard, but also a little bit about how that could happen more broadly. But first I want to tell you a little bit about the history of open-source as a vector for change in municipal governments. This is Extremadura. That's the first place that we all heard about, because they were gifted a fantastic system for provisioning educational systems in a very, very poor place. Dave Neary is going to remember seeing Extremadura everywhere back about 20 years ago, because they were the poster child for change at a municipal level through open-source. They were very poor. They could not afford, especially in the light of the dot-com bust, any spend on computerizing their schools, and yet they had promised they would do it. They got a grant from some Scandinavian countries, and together they built a really nice client service system that's still in use every day in Spain now, 20 years later. So that's pretty good story, right? Another big story in this in the early days was Munich. Munich famously kicked Microsoft out. Unfortunately, at the time that they did this, that meant they had to have their own Linux distro, and that's a big chunk for a city. So they struggled with it. Eventually, they went back to Microsoft because the administration changed. More recently, they've gone back again to free software. This time, services are serviced by SAS, and it looks like it'll stick this time. But this was a really high-profile thing in its day. We all spent time giving them advice from our lofty purchase in government, I'm sorry, in a tech industry, ASPOS. This is the French Foreign Ministry of Finance, which runs to this day on now Libre Office, CALC. So they have influenced the development of CALC in the direction of being able to use it instead of Excel, which is impressive. France has some interesting laws about public code needing to be publicly available and that have been adopted by a few other European countries now. So they've got a lot of open-source code, which we'll talk about again in a minute. There are large organizations, well-funded organizations, famous organizations that have been working on this problem space for a while now. This is a brigade meeting in San Francisco, and the brigade system was set up by Code for America. So Code for America's original idea was Tim O'Reilly's wife came up with this idea that we could do open-source in a bespoke way for specific municipalities, but because it would be open-sourced eventually, it would eventually build up a whole network of open-source solutions that could be used again. Unfortunately, she had a really hard time getting the municipalities to allow open-source to be part of the equation there. And so they've pivoted their focus, but they learned a lot of lessons. One of the big lessons they learned is the stuff you learned in tech companies is not going to translate well to municipal governments, and as we've learned, also not so well to academic institutions. I mean, some of it is universal, what open-source is, right, but how to implement it for the good or the policy good for outcomes that a municipal government would care about or a mayor would care about, that's a little bit harder for us to know about. There are some organizations that have been trying to learn about this. Bloomberg has spent a lot of money in France on generally making things better through technology, but they're not exactly understanding how open-source works most of the time, most of the people that help. We've had good luck with Sloan lately. They're starting to get really smart about this, and they're listening to us, so that's the thing. And us is the people who have spent the last four years really pushing hard to try to get this to happen. Jason Hibbins here is my hero in this regard because he has been on the front lines forever now. He got his own town, the city of Raleigh, to make a bigger bet in open-source. So it was slightly easier because Red had his headquartered there and they were the open-source darling and some of it was funded by them, but he has done a lot of work on his own time, not his day job, making sure that this would all work, and he wrote a great book that's worth seeing if you are interested in the space. When I wrote this presentation, which was right before Fostam in 2020, San Francisco had just decided that they were going to change their voting to an open-source system, which made Brian Bellendorf and I, who both lived in San Francisco, go, oh, no, because we don't think that's necessarily a good idea, and Brian runs Hyperledger Foundation, so if anybody would think it was gonna be a good idea, it would be him. But at least they're making some inroads finally. Brian and I started talking to them about this literally 22 years ago, so, you know, it changed takes time and municipalities. All right, so this is the real story I wanna tell you, and you may have been hearing scraps of it all week. This is Baltimore, Maryland, last year, okay? Baltimore is going through a very hard time. I gather that The Wire is actually a docudrama. There's lots and lots of mistrust of the authorities by the populace, which is mostly people of color, and they're just, they aren't havin' it. But also, the city fathers, current city fathers, kinda screwed up and allowed a ransomware attack to basically shut down all of their compute systems for a good six months last year, so you couldn't send an email to the city, which is problematic, right? So, this is indicative of a larger problem all over the Rust Belt in America. But the Rust Belt in America is not the only place it has this problem, and I did say global change. So, whatever area of the world you're interested in, you know, think about it, frame it in this way. Places that have not gotten sufficient maintenance over the years, where things have been allowed to kind of rest away, those are the places that we think could really use a boost from open source, and we think that open source program offices at the municipal and academic level are a way to create centers of excellence, and if you make it somebody's job, then the football's gonna move a little bit down the field every single day, whether or not they get it all the way down, at least somebody's paying attention to it, right? What has happened so far in Baltimore, thanks to some people in this room, are the city, as I said, is sort of not very functional right now. But there are some major institutions in Baltimore, of course it's adjacent to Washington DC, so that's a thing, but there are some institutions in Baltimore who are kind of picking up the slack because there is a generation of children that are gonna fall through the cracks if we sit around and wait for the city to get their act together. So these people run neighborhood centers. St. Francis Neighborhood Center is the one that we know the most about, we've worked with most closely, they're great. It's like a boys' club on steroids basically, but it's a private non-profit institution. They offer extra classes, breakfasts, homework after school stuff, meals for kids and for elders, cross education about technology, but they had a need which was they couldn't figure out how to serve their population effectively because they had no way to schedule them, no tool to schedule them. And Jacob, who I showed you a picture of earlier, actually lives not too far from St. Francis and wanted to help them. And so he went looking for a solution and he found me, you guys already saw that picture. But he also went to Paris and why wouldn't you, right? Now, why did he go to Paris? What's there? Well, there's Lutas. You guys heard about this already today this week, anybody? Well, then I'll go ahead and say Lutas is an amazing piece of software that was developed by the city of Paris. They paid some people to write it, but to their specification, it's 217 separate open source services. I mean, all the code is open that they stand up and if you wanna interface with the city of Paris as a citizen, you go through Lutas. You go through Lutas to get a marriage license. You go through Lutas to report a pothole in your street. You go, if you wanted to actually go meet the mayor or something and you need to make an appointment, that's how you get one. Everything that happens happens through Lutas. And it has been open source for over 12 years because of the role that France has about public money going to public code. However, they were not getting traction as an open source project. And this was problematic to their young female mayor who caused one additional service to be built as she was coming in, which was participatory budgeting. They actually put up a sizable chunk of change, like $5 million, is that right? Is it more than that? There you go, 100 million euros every year for the government, I mean, sorry, for the populace to comment on, like how should this money be spent? And they have a process for winnowing through all the crazy asks to some that could actually be actionable and be done. And then they report back that they're doing them and people can see that they had influence. And this ties people to government. This makes people realize that they are the government the end of the day. If you can't convince the French of that, I don't know if you have any hope to do it anywhere else, but it seems to be working. So much so that just recently they've been very, very interested in going deeper. So this is an example of the Greater Paris area and this is the projects of the year that I snapshotted. This is how they report back how the money was spent. This is the CIO of the city of Paris, Nezha. Nezha is our ally in trying to bring this work to Paris. But truthfully, we wanted to help them. This is one of those give and get things. Jacob met them. They wanted to learn how to make a real open source program. We wanted software for St. Francis. And guess what? They have a scheduler in the many services that are available through Lutess. So we made a marriage. We got their permission to talk to their engineers to get some help for some engineers that were hired. Sorry, that's Jacob, you guys know him. By this guy who's sitting over there. So this guy is Said Choudhury. He spoke here yesterday and he was in charge of the library. But one of the things that Jacob did was convince him to open an open source program office at Johns Hopkins University. Because that creates a center of excellence and a focal point for all this kind of work. So out of nothing and a lot of traveling and goodwill that was produced by meeting people because he's tireless at that. He got a major city to agree to collaborate with a major research institution, Johns Hopkins University, for the benefit of the populace of a city that is falling over. If that's not Ospo's networking for global change, I don't know what is. And it's actually working. So I think it's pretty amazing. And I think that we might have to stop for a minute and have a little round of applause for these guys who worked this out because this was not for sure a thing. Jacob's been working tirelessly for mostly no salary for about four years on this. Meanwhile, there he is. He pitches. He explains it to people. Municipalities are interested. So interested, in fact, that we talk to them all the time. We talked to some of them yesterday here about Cascadia. And everywhere we go, we try to find people to talk to about their local situation because that's what it takes. You've got to find people who have a fire in their belly in the local community, a tangible project that can be fixed. Right now, we've got this great tool of Lutas. We've got the desire of the French government to, or the Paris government, to increase the use of Lutas. And by the way, very limited use even inside of France. Lyon is the only other city that has used it very much at all. So they really didn't know how to build community. Now, when I talk about the things that are different about this to the way that we talk about ospos and tech, and I didn't say this at the top, but I actually started the first Ospo when I was at Sun Microsystems. And I mean the first office that was called that. Not saying I invented the concept, but it was a very early open source program office. And then we used it to create change. We open office, that project came out of that office because the company wanted to hurt a competitor to disrupt a market. But I, because I was in the Peace Corps as a kid, wanted to try to make the digital divide a little bit smaller. Nobody in the senior management of Sun cared about that at all. They just wanted to stick it to the people that have an office here. But I knew that it was possible to do good while doing well. If you can align human need with corporate greed, you can get really far. So that was a pattern that I wanted to see more people pick up. There were several people that went through my Ospo that went on to do amazing things in other Ospos like Chris DiBona worked for me before he worked for Google, came up with Summer of Code. So a great program, right? The idea that your Ospo can't only be about compliance if you're a tech company is not something we can say yet to the municipal governments because they don't really even have programming resources most of the time. That's why the connection between academia and municipal government is so important. Because then at least you can get some programming resources brought to bear on behalf of the municipal government's need. Now to remind you, Baltimore hasn't woken up yet and even said thank you. But they will inevitably. These are some kids using Lutas at St. Francis. And I love this picture because it's girls and they're girls of color and they have that because of this work that these guys did. All right, and this is a lab at Johns Hopkins. What's in it for Johns Hopkins? You guys all know that open source runs on enlightened self-interest, right? There has to be a hook for you or you're not gonna be able to pull it off. There has to be a hook for your university or your institution or they're also not gonna be able to pull it off. Well it turns out that Johns Hopkins is very interested in increasing its reputation as a place of innovation. As a place of, you know, I mean they actually get more research dollars than any other American institution. But they haven't done a good job of turning that into headlines that tell you how cool Johns Hopkins is in the same way that say MIT has done. So they were looking for a lever, an edge. And when I say they, I'm now talking about the provost and the deans and the people who said yes to Said and Jacob when they said can we do this thing here, right? All right, so a little bit more about how it's different to address an academic or municipal government than it is to talk to a tech company. And the reason I'm harping on this is because you always know you're doing good work when everybody is imitating you, right? And just now there's all of a sudden a lot of people interested in being experts about how to do an OSPO. There's some really good work that's been done in the tech sector for the tech sector about how that works. It's not as perfectly applicable to these other fields of endeavor as they would like to think it is. And that's, they'll figure it out. There's another institution that started in Europe, a sort of by Europe, for Europe, OSPO advice kind of thing. We told them at the time that it was gonna be a rough road. And they are now discovering that indeed the funding flows in a different way. And if you saw Said's talk recently, he was talking about how weird it is that you do the work and then the money comes in this because it's a bleeding edge thing. Now hopefully we'll be able to educate a couple of the grantors so that it comes in the other way because it's way easier to hire people if you know the money's gonna come, right? But it's a beginning. They did in fact, you know, remuneration for the work that they were doing and not from Paris. They came eventually from one of the funders to Johns Hopkins. So that's one of the things that's different. But also they don't have the same resources at their disposal. They don't even understand a lot of the time. Part of the reason that they're having such a hard time gaining good access to technology as municipal governments is they don't really know how to disambiguate between good and bad, right? And there's a couple of enormous American companies, global multinational, but American companies that are selling the old fashioned proprietary suite of products. And that work locks them in in a way that is really old fashioned. So they get this crazy bundle of stuff. It looks like a really good deal because it's dirt cheap. They get into it and they realize that the complexity of the number of things they said yes to is too much. So they try to back off thinking like anybody would well if I back off it'll get cheaper. No, the contract says that if you take anything out of the bundle you start paying full price for everything. So they're just stuck, right? And it's terrible. So helping them through that, helping them figure out how they're gonna use open source in a time when they don't have resources. They may be already made a bad decision and have blown the budget and something that's not really helping them. They don't speak French so they're a little worried about this Parisian thing we keep telling them about. This is a lot of work, right? That's why we're trying to create a network because academic institutions have really good reasons for learning open source, right? They've gotta, especially if they have CS departments they have to start teaching it. They have to because everybody that's hiring wants that skill now. They, everybody's looking for collaborative development. In my other day job I also run something called Inner Source Commons which Selena was there when we started that. It is designed to teach people how to use open source methods inside proprietary companies. The reason that I spent the last seven years setting that organization up for success is because I believe that is the only way that we're ever gonna get enough maintainers. I don't think we can buy enough. I'm pretty sure we can't educate them fast enough but something like 85% of the engineers in the world are still stuck in the salt mines. And if we can teach them how to work collaboratively some percentage of them, probably only 10% will fall in love with it and start looking for opportunities. That's happened over and over again in already in open source. So that's what the whole Inner Source play is about. It also coincidentally cleans up some really crafty old engineering practices. So yay that. Anyway, this is a different thing than what tech ospos know by and large. We're still learning it ourselves. It's not like we've run into a few of the problems but we have by no means exhausted the problem space. But we're hopeful that people will join us in trying to figure out where all of these land mines lie. This is a slide that's supposed to remind me to talk to you about Cascadia but I kind of already did. We had a meeting with them yesterday talking about the Cascadia Innovation Zone which I gather hasn't done a whole lot other than create a conduit between British Columbian institutions and places in Washington State but of course they want to extend it down into Oregon as well. It looks like there's some opportunities there and we're gonna keep working with them because what we're all about now is finding little nodes of the network that we can help because we can learn more things from that. The other big news which you've heard here before probably in this week is that the European Commission is getting ready, do you need something? Oh no, you're doing her. European Commission has just announced that they're setting up an OSPO at the federal level and they're going to fund 20 ospos at the member state level in 10 in academia and 10 in municipal government. We're super excited about that especially since we helped them to this idea. So yay that and we think it's gonna do some interesting stuff but part of the reason we're seeing this scurrying of people from the woodwork who wanna teach this is that there's money involved now and boy I wish there was a way to decide who sort of right thinking consultants are gonna be. This is a slide to remind me to talk to you about Ireland. This is the city of Limerick. There was a guy who managed the city of Limerick exclusively with open source software kicking out decades of Microsoft for the last five years. He's actually Romanian but he's a naturalized Irish citizen and he just got a plum job in Dublin to try to get them to understand what he did in Limerick. Limerick for those of you who don't know is kind of the equivalent of Oakland or not quite Baltimore but they used to call it Stab City. So they're trying to regenerate and it's a beautiful place. That castle was actually built by the same King John that was after Robin Hood. So there you go. All right, so Ospa plus plus, yay that. The plus, the first plus is to include everything including data and hardware. The second plus is it must be a network and we heard yesterday that to-do group is now also going to be a network so that's apparently an idea that's sticking. So you're in this audience and you're riled up now about Ospa's. What can you do? Well, you can learn about Ospa plus plus and I'm gonna give you a URL in a second here. You can attend a meeting on October 7th for the Ospa plus plus community that's gonna be very interesting and that way you get on our mailing list and you can keep coming to things. You can evangelize the Ospa plus plus network in cities and universities, send them to us. We're happy to talk to them. You can, if you work in this field and you see a pattern that works by all means tell somebody, it doesn't have to be us but we are starting in the same way that we did with Inner Source Commons to collect patterns to give people ideas of where to start and then keep doing it because it's gonna take a while. It took 20 years for open source to win in the marketplace. This is gonna take longer than that. So we gotta all decide that we care and really roll up our sleeves and get there. All right, this is the logo for Ospa plus plus and we have a few lapel pins if anybody's wild to wear one and I am gonna take questions for 30 seconds. Anybody got a question? Wow, was it that complete? Or are you just tired because you've been in this room for three days? Oh, you can totally do that. I'm easy, although I do live in Ireland. So I'd like it to be less. I pulled out every trick in the book to get Inner Source Commons to happen faster.