 Thank you for all coming and thank you for everybody who's on line as well. So who am I? Well, I've been involved in POSPRO for almost two decades now, doing a lot of different work in regards to that. Currently I'm the Executive Director of IEEE SA Open, which is IEEE most of y'all but we know who that is. SA is the standard portion and open is where we're doing work to support open source, open hardware and open data into the standards. So we have our own platform for doing that. So some of the stuff that I'll be talking about comes from all of these different areas where I'm both doing this work in IEEE. There's a lot of stuff that's happening in regards to inner source on the board for Open at RIT, which is the University Rochester Institute of Technology. And that's our open source office and then also working with public code and government and working on a bunch of good governance initiatives including the OSS PG, which is the open source software project governance, best practices that we're doing with IEEE standards. So that's what a lot of this is going to be based off of. So, you know, a lot of this is like built upon some of the stuff in the past. So some of the other talks that I've given in regards to this kind of leads up to this kind of culmination of all of this to the work which occasionally ends up being very high level and I apologize. But if you want any additional work in regards to that, I can give you links to all of the other presentations that you've already been online. One of the major ones is why we started doing this diverse advisory which I'll talk about in a little while. I've been also talking about how you get this diverse advisory because you're actually a creative village which is also, you know, the canopy board that I use for an ecosystem. So, and then also I gave a talk about unconscious gatekeeping and tools which is one of the ways you can accidentally hurt your diversity. And also there's been a lot happening in the EU in regards to digital or data autonomy and so a lot of that also drives off of this. So first of all, what do I mean by an ecosystem? And to be quite honest, I started adopting this language because of Stephen Wally. He gives a bunch of different talks about how open source is not a business model and instead we need to be thinking about the ecosystem picture in regards to it. And I think that that's a beautiful word for doing it because I normally think of it in regards to the biological context of where you can create these little ecosystems that all really work together. And if you forget anyone, you're not going to be sustainable. And so that's why diversity becomes such a key element. Very few ecosystems work correctly with too much singularity. They need to have variety. So when I look at ecosystems right now in the open source world and the free and open source world, I think of all of these different groups that are coming together. Right now I feel like we're in a third era of free and open source. Our first era was developers doing stuff for developers. People don't like to admit it but we were a bit supported by government and academia in regards to that. And so we were able to do all of this really amazing work like Apache and Linux and things of that nature. And then we entered into our second era, which is when corporations started to get involved. Thank God we had the OSI in regards to that because they really held the line in regards to what it meant to be open source and really held to that culture and forced a lot of different entities to adhere to that because otherwise I feel like we could have lost our soul in regards to it because corporate has different agendas often than we do as volunteers and so it was very good to have that. But I feel like right now we're embarking into this third era and in this third era it's going to involve educational institutions, foundations and governments. Right now, especially with what happened with Log4J and things of that other nature and what's also happening in Europe in regards to data autonomy, governments are getting involved. And I feel like I'm kind of uniquely positioned in regards to standards for that because way too often, thankfully in some ways, maybe not in others, they first come to standards to look at what the standards are before they start making those policy decisions. But I feel like open source has not been as involved in that to make that good transition. So we do have to think about that. So that's why I included all of these stakeholders that I did because I really do feel to get to that third level of the ecosystem we need to consider all of those groups and all of those stakeholders when we're creating the projects that we're creating. So what do I mean by sustainable? I mean that it can be maintained. I don't mean that it has to always keep growing. We don't have to be that fine into capitalism and I don't think that's what we actually have to do. I think that we do have to have our ability to grow and let other things die while other things come up too. And so with sustainability, I don't think it has to mean constantly growing but I think it does have to mean a certain amount of reliability. Like what happened with DNS and some of those other different tools, those tools did not need to keep changing. They were good. It's just that they didn't have a sustainability enough so that when the few errors that did come up or those different things happened, we weren't able to evolve because we let those stagnate. So instead, how do we actually look at making sure that those things don't stagnate and they continue to be viable and upheld? And so what do I mean by diversity? Well, I'm going to be honest with you. I mean all of it. If you go and look at this one thing, it's 39 different types. I think way too often we get kind of wrapped up in limiting those definitions. And those definitions are good. We need labels. It makes our lives easier, right? How do we measure something if we don't create those? But at the same time, I ask that we not limit ourselves in regards to this. You know, oftentimes in the corporate world when we talk about diversity, we're talking about legally protected statuses, right? We're talking about sex and gender and race and religion and age and disabilities and things of that nature. But I want us to go beyond that. I want to talk about roles. I want to talk about locations. I want to talk about languages. I want to talk about experience levels. I want to talk about all of those because when I sit down and say it takes a village, I really do mean that. I really do mean that it takes a diverse village and especially a lot of the work that we're doing. It's worldwide. It's global. We need to look globally in regards to doing that. So we need to look at all of those different parts of the university. So right now we've got some mega systems out there. This is one of the ones that I love to do as it spills off of the edge. CNCF. This is their landscape diagram. You want to get off of their website. Hope they don't mind. But you can sit there and see what happens when the landscapes get big. This is a big ecosystem. This is where the majority of us start off at in regards to our open source projects. We've got some code. Maybe we've got a little bit of a community going on. If we're lucky we've created some processes. Maybe we've gone a little bit beyond just the whole maintainer-contributor relationship and have kind of diagrammed a little bit more than that. Hopefully we have some governance. Not necessarily do all groups have governance yet. That's why we're trying to do the OS SPG. But there's a big problem with that. And that when does that open source project become an ecosystem? You're going to need a certain amount of sustainability. You're going to need a certain amount of maturity. And you need a certain amount of reach to get there. So we run into this huge gap. Where you have these open source projects. They want to get to an ecosystem or something resembling obviously we all don't want to be seen CF. But we want to get to somewhere where we can actually bridge that gap. And there's a lot of information on doing a project and there's actually a fair amount of information as to those ecosystems. But there's not a lot bridging the two explaining how you can get there. And the biggest problem that I see that happens is money. You sit there and you have an open source project. We're all in there. We're doing our thing. We're trying to figure it out. But how do we figure out how to handle the money question in regards to when we want to create that ecosystem? And a lot of times it ends up being a chicken and egg scenario. I don't know if that's 22 always. If everybody knows about that cross-culturally. But it's when you're in a bind where you need something to do something. You need that to do that. And so you just end up in this infinite loop. Bad recursion. And so I feel like money incurs this all of the time. Where people are like, oh, we don't want to give you money because you don't have all of these things in place. Oh, but it takes money for me to get all of those things in place. Even opening a bank account requires that, right? You have to be a business, which means you have to do filings, which means you have to be a textable entity. It causes a lot of problems. There's some groups out there that are trying to help with that, and they're trying to help with the collective. Which yay, thank you, thank God you're doing that. But I feel like there needs to be more. So to me, one element in regards to how you can make that job is diversity. You have to go out and look for other different roles. In the earlier group that I talked about when you're talking about open source 1.0, it's developers and developers. Those are not always the same people you want to make that growth to bleep that gap. You want to make sure that you've actually gone through and created this actual ecosystem. And so that means having things like evangelists who are going around and talking well about yourself doing social media, having event organizers and writers and artists, and most especially the users themselves. I had a great conversation this afternoon with all the Linux. And that's a huge push in regards to what they did and why they're doing it the way that they are. It's because they wanted to make sure that users had a really good voice in regards to that. So at IEEE, one of the things that we did to stress this was we created these advisory groups that advise the open source committee that answers to the board. And what they do is we purposely broke them out to where we have a community advisory group which represents the users and nonprofits. Because we are a nonprofit entity. We're a 501c3, which in America means a member-driven organization. So our members and our board makes the budgetary decisions. So it's pretty hardcore in regards to that. It's not a trade association. It is, it works that way. And then we created a marketing advisory group which is a little bit of a misnomer because it includes just more than marketing. It's like design for a place for a lot of the artistic things to exist. And they also do things like open source intelligence and all of these other different aspects. They created a social media toolkit, things of that nature. And then we have the technical advisory group which is similar to what most of y'all are used to seeing projects yet when they grit a certain size of having a technical steering committee that makes a lot of those technical decisions in regards to architecture and features and what direction the software goes into. So we purposely added these additional ones. I'll admit I totally cribbed from the Linux Foundation on that one. I worked on Hyperledger and we had a marketing steering committee and I loved it and I loved the work that they did and so that's why I brought that over in regards to the advisory group. And then I also saw how some of the Apache ones actually have the community one as well. They kind of own more things like codes of conduct and things of that nature to make sure that everything stayed nice and friendly and I kind of expanded the scope but it was lessons learned from other open source projects. And so for doing that, it's about when you want to bridge that gap and you have to remember that it's more than just code because once you start doing the money parts and you start figuring those out, you have to go out there and figure these other things out. You need to talk about marketing, doing the different research, working with designers and architects and here's the one that always gets some people a little bit in a tizzy. You do have to talk about management. It doesn't mean top down hierarchical dictatorial style of management that some of y'all experience in your career. It is very much so not that. It's still driven from a volunteer basis but it, you know, managers to me, a good one helps facilitate communication and so it ends up helping with that in regards to the management. It's not a top down decision making thing instead it's a hey, did you know that someone's going to go work on this feature and you're working on that feature? Maybe you two could work together, things of that nature. And that way you can get to things like quality and safety and maturity and the next thing that we have to scale with that 3.0 level where we have to deal with governments and when we're dealing with academic institutions and nonprofits, we really have to be careful about what we're doing. We're entering into an age where I feel like it's just like electrical engineering back when IEEE got started where Nikolai Tesla and Edison were doing, you know, Edison going in like electrifying poor elephants. Like how horrible is that? We needed to be created because they weren't endangering people and we're seeing that with software now, right? We're watching things that end up being dangerous in regards to what we're doing and how we're doing it. And we need to have that more for us for making that next jump into that next level. And so that's why we're seeing things like open SSF being created and the foundation for public code and all of these other different entities because we do realize we need to address and call the issues. So here we have some of the elements of a successful one as to how you get to that. Again, the diversity I think plays a big role in regards to it and if you don't have the inclusive processes you won't get to where you need to be. And I really do feel that inclusive is the next step that you need to take in regards to diversity. It's like, okay, you've got all the people there. Listen to them. Please listen to them. Listen to how you probably have to change some of your processes. Listen to how you might have to do something different in regards to governance. We're watching that happen right now with codes of conduct. I got to watch that front foremost in regards to Drupal. You really want to be there and help take care of those types of issues. There's a bunch of studies out there. The Harvard Business Review did this whole thing for the past 20 years about diversity and it found that like 19th that businesses that were had more diverse governing groups made 19% more profit. So there's a bunch of different ones that happened and these are some of the different ones that you automatically get when you have diversity and you have the inclusion processes for that. So without doing the inclusive ones your diversity will go away. If you don't and listen to them you'll lose the different things. The ones that I'd like to highlight for us most especially tools and governance you cannot depend purely on Git. Be it GitLab or GitHub or Gitly or whatever. That is not inclusive. That's not inclusive to handicapped people that's not inclusive to all the different diverse roles that you have. Oh yeah, go put your account in GitLab and come back and talk to me about that afterwards. You'll have an accountant once you're dead. You can't do that with governance either. There has to be governance I know that we're working on an open-source governance standard but what that is is it's about shoulds because governance reflects your culture and if you don't create governance from that inclusionary process you're going to have problems. And to be quite honest if you're not inclusive are you really open? Are you really embodying that whole thing that we've been trying to work for so long in the past three decades? I would say philosophically you're probably not. And then once you get there and you have all of this then you have your resilience and the sustainability that we're all really here trying to achieve is by going in there and doing that then you'll have all of those processes you'll have the marketing you need you'll have the ability to bring in a community and keep people there because they love it and they want to keep doing what they're doing and if you're able to get the funding that you need you'll have all of those different pieces if you go through and address those parts and then of course the other thing is is then you get the safety security maturity so one other major element is looking at the diverse governance if you don't have inclusive leadership you're going to have problems what does your steering committee look like? If it's all just corporate representation you're not going to have it you have to make sure like your users are in there you have to make sure your developers are in there you've got to make sure that those people all come from different walks of life and then you'll have much better governance that if they all look the same and they're all doing the same thing you know, look at chat GPT you can tell that it was read by a bunch of dudes it sounds like an overconfident 25 year old white male intern you know, diversify people come on, you can do it one thing that I like to sit down and see is do you have relationships with other nonprofits who represent some of these different groups of people if you do, then you're going to get to where you need to be you want a diverse sponsorship you don't want to go for just one company giving you all the moneys it's very problematic it's not going to do well and then what happens when that one business leaves you will not be sustainable with other revenue streams with IEEE we have membership that's a great way to do it it's not always accessible to everyone but you can do sliding scale there's a lot of other different things you can do you can figure out other ways of making money you can do training, you can do certifications you can do all of these other different things look towards that as well don't stay just in regards to expecting sponsorship from other corporations it's not a healthy place to be because then you will always be holding to them and if you incorporate all of these different things it's a lot I know but then I believe that you will truly obtain sustainability and will be able to grow and keep things going and thank you here's some of the links to some of the studies if you want to copy the slides I'll send them to you and thank you so much for having me I really have enjoyed being here in Singapore the food has been amazing and I can't wait to go to the mechanical garden store so, yes let's do it all