 Hi everyone, my name is Jory Burson. I am the Community Director at the OpenJS Foundation. And I'm so excited to chat with you today, alongside my bestie, Joe Seppi. Hi, yeah, I'm Joe Seppi. I work for IBM as an open source engineer and I also am the chairperson of the cross-project council at the OpenJS Foundation. We like to use the acronym CPC a lot, which I think confuses people, huh, Joe? It's true, it's very true. But it stands for cross-project council. It does, it does. And what is the cross-project council? Council, which I think is a fun word. But yeah, so we're the cross-project council, cross-project meaning we try to help all the projects in the foundation and we have different representatives from different groups and different projects, as well as people that are outside of the individual projects as well, coming to help make things better for everyone. I like the word council as well, because I think it captures, it captures like what the spirit of the group tries to do, which is really help, like, and also provide advice and work collaboratively with projects and with the community and with the board too. And, you know, I think that's a, so I think council is like also like apt description of like some of the activity. One thing people may not know too is that the council really is just, you know, there for support for the projects and stuff, but we don't dictate technical decisions for any of the projects, nor does the OpenJS Foundation Board of Directors that we really kind of have this balance of, you know, obligations and responsibilities where the projects really get to, you know, do what they want to do. Yeah, and I think that there's, it's a, I don't know, freedom is the right word. It's a freeing kind of thing in that we are really just working to make things good for the projects and just trying to improve their, the resource that they have and the ways that they can support their own communities and be a part of the larger ecosystem. So it's really kind of a good place to be where you feel like you're doing positive things. You mentioned earlier, you know, that we're doing a lot of programs and things and we'll get into JavaScript landing and some of the others that we're really, we're working on actively now, but what are some of the things that the CPC does or that we've been working on that have helped projects? Yeah, there's an assortment of things that we are working on currently and have on the, you know, the plate that we want to get to as well. I mean, I think a big one that I think is, has a lot of clear impact is like the community fund that we've started to flesh out. In the node space, we used to have the travel fund and we still, you know, do, but we're working on morphing that into more of a community fund. So it's not just travel specific, but we have a good chunk of money set aside that folks from the community or the projects can request funds for various reasons. I mean, a common one in the past would be someone who wants to speak or be engaged at some sort of event that's related to our projects or our foundation. We would reimburse them for their travel to get to and from and other expenses that came along with that. So we're trying to broaden that scope, but that's a really, I think, tangible thing that people can benefit from. Another thing that we've done, although it's hard to speak too specifically in this case, but we've got such a good group of people with such a broad range of expertise. There have definitely been times where we've helped maintainers sort of connect with experts on specific issues like security vulnerabilities and sort of the process of kind of responding and understanding like the scope or impact of a report. And that's just been, I know, really helpful for a number of our new maintainers and we've got a collab space actually that's kind of popping up around that too. So that's one I know has been made a big difference for folks this year as well. Yeah, for sure. And I think we'll get in the collab spaces more in a few minutes, but yeah, there are lots of things that we're working on. Like standards is another one that just popped up immediately when we started working together at this level. Right, like book club. You know I had to pop by, you know I had to pop by, but that's just sort of this like, community of people on Slack where we just started exchanging like, oh, I just read this, it was really good. And now there's this really active sort of exchange of people talking about, you know, things that books they've read recently that they love and we even have like periodic calls where we get together and talk about programming books or open source books or whatever. So that's been so fun. Yeah, and we do have a lot of fun people in the group and we just generally have fun with whatever we're doing. It's really a great group of people have emerged active in the space, but we want more people. So we're here to tell you how to get involved and hopefully give you some entry points and to get you excited about getting involved. The way that I usually point people, we have this helpful URL. I might even have it here. Look at this, what a bunch of professionals. OpenJSF.org slash collaborate or collaboration which we've used in the past. I've asked for both of them to work and they do. But on this URL, you can find links to join the Slack for the foundation. You can find links to join to access GitHub. The link to the calendar is there. So there are a variety of resources on this page that help you to get involved with the fun and helpful work that we're doing at the foundation. And I think you mentioned this before, Joe, but just to reiterate, this is not closed to only people who have contributed to one of our projects. This is really open for anyone who is interested in just open source JavaScript projects and wants to get involved with them, a community that's here to support those projects. So if you are a fan of any of our projects or just wanna kind of get involved with a welcoming JS community, you're more than welcome to join us. Yeah, and that's a great segue into our next kind of area that we wanted to talk about, which is collaboration spaces. And I think the driving force of this when it was created was that we want to provide opportunities for folks who are sort of outside of either a project or the foundation work, but generally just people in the ecosystem that want to get involved and help make positive impact in the space that we're all working in. So this concept of collaboration spaces was created. Thank you to Michael Dawson for spearheading that. And so it's a place where, Jory had mentioned earlier, the security vulnerabilities collaboration spaces that's been spun up. There are a variety of people from different areas of the ecosystem that are coming together to work on that problem and try to make progress there. Yeah, that's gonna be spearheaded and I believe Darcy Clark and West Todd also have a talk specifically about this that they're gonna share as part of Open JS World. So go over and check that talk out if you're interested. But it's a great example of the foundation providing some resources and support for the community, both folks within our projects and also member organizations and other open source projects who aren't part of our family to get together, talk about the issues and figure out how they could maybe work together on an approach to reduce noise and package and security vulnerability reporting. So that's gonna be really taking off I think later this summer. And then we'll have others that we're gonna announce soon. I'm sitting here, we're recording this a few days before the conference. So I'm not sure what will exactly be public but I know there's a couple more coming down the pipeline that we're really excited to see announced. And anything that you can think of in terms of maybe you have an interest around a specific space like IoT or you wanna work on tooling or you wanna work on packages or you wanna work on just something in the community. A collab space may be a place that you can come to the foundation and get some support and talk to our network about collaborating on it. Yeah, and this kind of brings up a good point because as you were talking, I wanted to encourage folks to get involved if they have an idea that they think would make a great collaboration space, what steps would they take to even suggest it or propose it? And I actually needed to go to our GitHub repository to find out more information because it wasn't at my fingertips as to how to go about doing that. And I'm gonna throw up a banner here really quickly. So here is our GitHub repository for the cross-project council. And I'll just take a quick moment to talk about like open-open source, although I know on the day of the event, Michael Dawson and Beth Griggs and I are doing a keynote about open-open source. But the concept is that we try to do as much in the open as possible. So for example, in GitHub, our meetings are streamed public, our meeting notes are committed to GitHub, Slack and all these other places where you can get involved. But my instinct was, I don't know how to do this, so I'm gonna go to the GitHub repository and find the document. And at the top level, there's a collaboration space progression document that gives you the steps for how to suggest a proposal. So if you have any ideas for a collaboration space or anything else that you wanna get involved with us, please go to GitHub, look in the documents, issues and PRs are a good place to check out too. But we welcome everyone to get involved. And of course, if you want help sort of brainstorming that idea or refining that further, Slack is a great place for that too. Yeah, for sure. Cool. Well, that is kind of all about collab spaces. I know that this time next year, we'll be talking a lot more in depth about several of the collab spaces that are launching this year. But we wanna make sure that if you're interested in working with the OpenJS Foundation or any of its projects or its extended network, that you think about doing that through a collab space. So should we talk about the standards working group, Joe, you mentioned earlier the structure of the Node Foundation, which we largely incorporated in many ways into the cross-project council, included a lot of working groups and things like that. The standards working group is but one. And it's one that's been really active lately, huh? Yeah, yeah, like I said, this seemed, yeah, so standards working group and it has been fairly active lately. We've had some invited speakers talking to us about a few different things. But yeah, that's also an exciting place to get involved. And again, you don't have to be a part of a project to come and start to engage in that work. So please feel free to. But yeah, why don't we dig into a couple of things that's been going on? Yeah, so, and this is another space where we really aren't expecting people to have a lot of prior experience. It's just in the same way, you don't have to have prior experience and open source to get involved in the OpenJS Foundation. You don't have to have prior experience and standards to get involved with the standards working group. In fact, one of our goals for this year is to really develop a set of resources and a website for developers and those interested to learn more about standardization activities in general. What we've found is that it's still really opaque for a developer who maybe wants to get involved in web API standardization in some way to understand where do you go to get information outside of say, in DN, where are the risks information found in terms of like what the process is, that sort of stuff. So our team is pulling together a set of educational materials that should give people the context and hopefully just the background info that they need to be successful as they learn more about participating in say the JavaScript standardization process or a web API process or something like that. So... Yeah, I think it's really, this is gonna be a really valuable resource because we're fortunate that we have experts in a number of these standards bodies, the work that's going on in a variety of areas. So whether it's ECMA scripts and the ECMA found international and TC39 work or W3C, what working group kind of work, we're lucky that we have people from all these different areas coming together to talk about this. I mean, the first thing we need to do is figure out what we're gonna call it, which is always the first challenge. But I'm really excited about the resources that we'll be able to provide as we kind of flesh them out further. It's exciting work. Those resources are currently available on our GitHub repo, which is the slash standards and sort of slash cross-project council, but that will be available as a web resource very soon. As Joe mentioned, there's so many awesome people in our community that have a lot of experience in standardization activities and they're really excited to share what they've learned and help people succeed where they may have failed in the past or made a mistake or whatever. So there's a lot of cooperation and a lot of interest in mentorship and teaching and that kind of thing. So if you are at all curious, do reach out and either watch that repo or come join us in Slack. And get involved there. Another way that we're supporting standards work this year for our projects, this is something people may not know, but many of our projects like jQuery, for example, and Node and others have really contributed a lot to standards work over the years. PEP actually, which was moved to emeritus stage earlier in the year, was really instrumental early on in a pointer event that web standard. So the jQuery project always was quite active in the JavaScript specification for years and years and years. And so we're working on just tightening that feedback loop between the open source projects that implement or create polyfills or that sort of thing for specs to the committees that are standardizing those things into the implementer. So that's another area of focus this year that we're really excited about. Yeah, that's amazing. With all the projects that we have in the foundation, which I think is well into the 30s now, almost 40 or so. It's like 37 now. So we're approaching the number where I'm like, ish. And it's exciting that other projects are applying and we're growing and it's really exciting. But there are new and old projects in the foundation and there's just a lot of history and experience and a lot to bring to the table to work through the stuff. And I know standards sometimes can be a little bit daunting reading a spec and figuring out how to get involved. But that's what we're here for us to try and help people over that hurdle mentorship or resources have you. So it's exciting. I'll just add to really quickly, we meet regularly. The OpenJS calendar is readily available. There are Zoom links typically in the meetings entries. So if you wanna get involved in any of the things or lurk in a meeting, you don't even have to get involved. You can just hang out and see what we're doing. And we're doing a lot, it's fun. Yes, great that you mentioned like how to read a spec for example, that's one resource that we're gonna provide. And thanks to Hemant from the TC39 community published a lot of great resources there. So that's the kind of thing that we're gonna help you find if you have a question. We're like librarians. I like librarians. They're always very helpful. Right. And so for that, I've never acquired. Just ask my wife. So what's next? Should we talk about our other topic that we're excited about and wanted to share in this talk, Jory? Oh my gosh, yes. So the, not saying like best for last, but it's like a really big program and that we launched earlier this year. And it's called JavaScriptlandia, which is a mouthful to say, but I promise it is. It's quite fun. This is our individual supporter program. So one of the things that people have wanted to know for years is, hey, you know, my company can't join but I'd like to support the projects in some way. Is there an individual membership or is there some way I can do that? And we, the cross project council put our heads together and came up with this program called JavaScriptlandia for folks who wanted to want to do that. It is a very small annual $25 support due. But with that, you get access to a website that has badges that you can collect to support our different projects. So if you want to show, you know, your support for Node or for Appium or for WebDriver or any of our awesome projects, you can collect a badge for that project. There's a JSlandia badge. There's an OpenJS World badge for people who've come to register for OpenJS World. In addition, we send out supporter only newsletters, deals for training and certification, swag, that kind of thing. So it's really sort of a way we can say thank you to all of the community who support these projects, use these projects and, you know, and support our maintainers of these projects and get involved in that way. We're really excited about the future of this program too. Yeah, this is very exciting. And we've already got, I'm bouncing around and looking at the website. Maybe I'll even share it here. We've already got, I think like 200 members or so in our supporters, our individual supporter program. I hope they don't mind that I share this here, but yeah, it's a really exciting and active program. Yes. And so this site that Jo just showed is our existing website that's going to be converted very soon to a passport site actually, where you'll be able to click into each, if you, for example, want to click on me, you would see all of the badges that I, you know, that I, all the things I've supported or whatever. So it's a little bit more of like a, the concept being sort of a passport and you can collect your passport. This is sort of the beginning of the program as well. So as we said, we launched this earlier in the year with just one badge and, you know, a monthly newsletter with the event this week where we're launching the new site and a lot more badges for our participants. So if you want to collect a badge either to display on your GitHub profile, on your website, on LinkedIn or whatever, you can join the JS Landia program and do that. But we also imagine a world where we're getting these folks like more and more involved in our programs and in ideas and campaigns that support our open source maintainers and their projects. So, you know, this is obviously we're in a unique situation in the last year or so. We haven't been able to do the meetups, do the in-person stuff that we wanted to do, but we think our JS Landia crew, our participants are just the right group to help us get back into those spaces when it is prudent to do so. Yeah, and I'm looking forward to those times. Be quiet, you two. I think what's great too is we've been talking a lot about ways for people to get involved and that's really the takeaway here. We want folks to get involved in the work that we're doing. We're having fun, but we're also really just trying to just work for the community and make things better for everybody and have fun doing it and a rising tide lifts all boats. And I think if we all kind of chip in and work together, there's so much fun, great stuff that we can do that can really be beneficial to the community. So I know we've mentioned it a few times. We have this helpful URL that will give you all sorts of ways to get involved, Slack, the calendar, GitHub, everything should be kind of there and yeah, that's our call to action. Yeah, really the only requirement is passion for JavaScript and the desire to help the project communities that we support. We've got a lot of big plans and we need help sort of figuring out how to make those the most useful they can be and make sure that of course our community of maintainers is able to take advantage of all of that. So if you're interested, then please just give us a holler and join, we'd love to see you. We would love to see you, it'd be really great. With that, let's say thank you and bid you adieu. I hope you enjoy all the other talks and the keynotes and everything that's going on and really happy to chat with you. And we hope to see you in person at OpenJS World 2022 if you're able and that's, I cannot wait, I really cannot wait. Hallway track. Yes, exactly. Great, all right. Thanks everybody. Thanks all. Adios.