 All right, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Joy Berson, and I'm a very enthusiastic supporter of the OpenJS Foundation Cross-Project Council. Joined today by John Kleinschmidt, who is the core maintainer of the Electron Framework, but he also is not unfamiliar to the JS Foundation, having previously been a maintainer of Hospital Run, which is one of our fabulous at-large projects. He's been working on JavaScript for over 20 years and is a developer for Microsoft, yes. And also Ben Morris, who is a developer advocate for Google working on the AMP project. He is a former full-time musician, but today is working on making the web a more beautiful and musical place. Welcome, welcome, welcome. We are so excited to have your communities here with us at the event today and to be joining your communities. And I think what we were hoping to talk about in our fireside chat, which is conspicuously absent a fire, there's no fire, so sorry we oversold that, is sort of kind of what brought you here, what brought your projects here to the point. When did you start to feel it was time for your respective communities to maybe think about joining a foundation? Yeah, so for Electron early this year, we formalized kind of a governance structure for Electron and it was really at that point that we began to explore the idea of joining a foundation of kind of in some ways moving on from our corporate founding to really be independent. Yeah, I think for us when I joined the AMP project a couple of years ago, there was a lot of discussion then about how AMP was an open source project but it wasn't as open as it really could be and Google did most of the work and there was a strong desire to make it more of a thing for the web because that was the idea of AMP as a thing, not for Google but for the web originally. So last year they took steps to have a similar kind of governance model that was outside of Google that involved various people taking care of AMP who aren't just Googlers and then the desire was to get it to be as open source as possible and this is how we came to OpenJF. And your communities are pretty big communities today, right? I mean, these are big projects that we're talking about and they've been stewarding the projects fairly successfully for a few years now, right? AMP's four years old, Electron's... That's a good question. Three, four years old? Yeah, it's a couple of years old. They're young but they're quite big. What does it mean to your communities? What does it signal to them, you know, move like this into the foundation to make this kind of change? You know, I think for Electron, the thing that we really wanted to relay is that it's not just like this corporate project. It came out of GitHub. You know, GitHub had been acquired by Microsoft and so there was some kind of... There's some perception of like, well, okay, is Microsoft gonna ruin Electron? Or... And I don't think that's based in reality but the reality of the Electron project is we work across many different companies with individual contributors and joining a foundation really helps us stay true to that goal of being independent, of not being kind of at the whims of a corporation or of kind of those type of business needs but really being a community project because that's what it is. I think that our goals that are pretty similar actually. That sounds oddly familiar to me. Yeah, I mean, one person started writing out by himself and Apple was created by one person and then many folks are working on Apple together, mostly from Google and expanded beyond Google and we thought the time had come to just have everybody really make AMP together and to make sure that we were really being honest to the idea of being open source to make things as open as possible and also to expand the contributions, again, for their beyond Google and the decision-making process also beyond Google. Also, Google, for example, part of AMP is there's an AMP cache, a couple out there actually, the most well-known is Google's AMP cache. We have this domain, we have a lot of servers out there that serve AMP pages and it's important that that be done in a way also that's open and that the foundation really control how these things actually work instead of Google trying to use it for its own business goals to point down in the future. I think it's kind of both of you seem to be kind of drawing on this theme of like open means more than just like technical openness but also of the governance itself and sort of the story of, and I wonder if you can maybe tell a little bit more of that story of opening up the decision-making as you put it for their projects which are individually very fascinating. I think it's just better if things were open. I mean, we'll make things, as people at Google, we think people want, we'll go out there and ask people what kind of features they need and try to find problems, get-ups full of future requests. My job involves finding developers out there, finding gaps in the product, filling those gaps, but truly everyone should have a chance to do what they want to do with AMP. It should be a thing which is good for the web and makes the web faster, makes this full better for more people and if more people have a say in how it actually runs and who actually makes it, it'll be a better product. I think that's an important part of it, right? Like that feedback into the product because you're getting more, people feel more comfortable giving input into it and kind of guiding it so they get more feedback on the product. Have you seen that played out with Electron? Yeah, I mean, I think we've always had that heart being open of always valuing an individual contributor just as much as a corporate contributor. So I think for us, it's just really reflecting the values we already had. And so just us moving to this open governance model was just an expression of the kind of tenets of what we were already doing. So it's just, you know, I kind of consider like joining the foundation like just another step of like publicly recognizing like this is an open project and we really want it to be run that way. I'm so glad you mentioned like the values because both of your projects have really great core values which was something that we looked at and part of that application process is like, okay, do their values match the open JS foundation values? I'd love for you to share those today with our community because they are pretty great. Do you want to share a little bit about the vision and the mission for AMP and Electron, respectively? Yeah, I guess the vision for AMP has always been to make a better web and people that made it from the beginning, that was our idea to make it easier to make faster websites people could use across the world more easily. If you're on a slower connection or a slower phone somewhere else, you can still use websites. They'll still work great for you and things were not slower than they had to be in order for them to work. So that's been part of AMP from the beginning and also I guess the inclusiveness, I was saying inclusionary before, it's not really a word is it? We can make it one. Inclusivisionary, this inclusiveness of AMP was part of a little project that was designed for accessibility for all people and then this should also be part of the way that it's created as well. So AMP tries to bring in people from all over the world to help out with making AMP better and with the open JS involvement, open JS incubation process, that should just get better. Yeah, and I think from Electron's perspective, I guess our vision would be to allow developers to build desktop applications using web technologies and for us, from a values perspective, inclusivity is really important. One of the things that I was really impressed with as well was as we're kind of going through the process of joining, there were different questions and one of the questions was, would you accept the open JS COC code of conduct? And the great thing was we looked at it and it was basically the code of conduct that we were already following. So it just was kind of a perfect alignment of the values that we had as a group. And both Electron and AMP are in this incubation phase, which means that they're in the process of transitioning. It's not something that we can just snap our fingers and everything is done. It's actually a lot of work, isn't it? So this is a period where we're making that transition. What has this process been like for your project so far? What's it been like working through some of these things that we have to check boxes? We have to complete. I was actually expecting it to be a lot more difficult and it actually has been a really easy process. Everyone along the way has been really helpful. At different parts, we've had different questions about are we able to do X or Y, kind of how much freedom would we have in the project? I know it was kind of a reoccurring theme and just along the way, we're just able to have very helpful conversations and kind of work out things and figure out if there are things we needed to adjust or just to kind of really make sure everyone had a really good understanding of the intention of where we're heading. Everyone was really easy to work with and really responsive and yeah, it's been a great process. Yeah, same here. It's been pretty smooth I feel like so far. There have been some questions. Things are trying to align the codes of conduct properly and to make sure contributors can contribute more easily with your guidelines, not the current Google guidelines which we're kind of annoying anyway. It's good to have these things. I think it's good for us to be honest about all of these things too. But the nice things people here have been very nice and easy to work with. It's been like we're kind of already on the same side with the same goals to begin with. So it's just been a nice and smooth process. I think you touched on a theme that sometimes is kind of a question when you think about making a change. It's like maybe a fear of a loss of control a little bit or like what, am I giving something up? But it doesn't sound like are you giving anything up too much? There will be moments people will want to have things that want to have control over certain things about the process of what gets prioritized. There'll be things like giving over our brands, these can be made ourselves, giving them to somebody else. But it's just for the better of the project and for the better of the web. Giving it to the community now really is what it is. It's something we're going to share. It also seems like it's a nice process to go through just to sort of like do some project housekeeping. As we look at the policies that you will adopt as an OpenJS Foundation project, that's just sort of a nice thing to review from time to time, I would guess. We do things, we try to make things open, have meetings that people can all access via video conference or come to in person and things like that. They're just making us be really honest about all these things and finding places where we're not being as open as we could be whether it's still a clique that are involved that do certain things because people know each other in certain ways, opening those things up to everybody in a more transparent fashion. So one question people might ask is like OpenS, yay. But why do this? What are the benefits of making a transition like this? What are the benefits of joining a software foundation when you think about it from a more abstract perspective? Why consider it? So the one thing that I think is really important is longevity of the project. People kind of talk about this bus factor, like Electron's kind of a big project so a lot of people would have to get hit by a lot of buses in order, but you don't know over time as like most of us work for bigger companies that have budgets to contribute to the project. Over time, you can't say whether or not that will be there. So I think the idea of moving to a foundation, like as long as the project is useful, like there's a home for it. And I think being able to have that is really good reason. I also think about, so I don't know how it was at Google, but at GitHub when we started the project, there wasn't always good corporate support around, there were some, but just even things like marketing. I think everyone on the project, our day to day were coders, we're not marketers. So I think having marketing support and even things like legal, like if there's like a trademark issue, like that's not really something that I wanna have to deal with. So it's things like that that I find are important. And I think it also adds some legitimacy to the project of listen, like it's backed by something, but it's not, again, it's not like just a corporation or some large entity, it's a foundation that is there to care for these projects, to sustain them. I'd echo all those points there. You're talking about corporate support. I mean, Google has been very supportive of AMP and it's still very supportive of AMP, but it's important that it be part of something which is larger than Google that goes beyond Google. We were discussing before the importance of maintainability and people think maintaining our project is kind of mundane work, making new things that it's exciting, maintaining things we already use is not quite as glamorous, but of course, maintaining things is important and they work for longer. If tools are useful for a little while, they're probably a thing that for good reason that could be used for longer than that. So it's nice to have sort of more of the open community support involved in maintenance. Also, we're just kind of proud to be part of this family. I mean, Node is here, all kinds of interesting things are here we use every day and we're just very honored to be part of that group of products. I'm really glad that you brought up like the glamour of maintenance because that's what we want to promote because we're here to maintain the communities that maintain the projects and support, so I love that. And one question that I wanna know is why ultimately when you were looking at different third places, as I like to call them for your software work, what ultimately helped you choose like the OpenJS Foundation community? You mentioned Node, so I mean obviously JavaScript, it's kind of related, yeah. But why OpenJS? One nice thing about this organization is that it's really cross, I guess product is the wrong word, cross project, I guess? There's various projects here. We found that there are certain open source organizations that were more about taking a corporate open source project that goes up in source really because the goal was to kind of onboard developers into a certain ecosystem or to get a company a certain amount of cache in the community. And this was more about really having a home for different kinds of useful projects that really appealed to us. Also the people seemed like they were nice people, it's been true. So there's been no nasty surprises like finding people were on me or something like that. Yeah, I mean I think it's, we look at the community, I mean our users are JS devs. And so to be part of an organization that is about JavaScript, like that's really important. Coming alongside Node, which is very important part of Electron, like we, it kind of makes sense to kind of partner together there. I personally have my own personal bias in bringing another project hospital run to what was the JS Foundation, but now part of OpenJS. And so I think it was kind of a natural selection of just everything seemed to kind of line up to what we wanted to do. And yeah, hospital run, you brought up hospital run as a much different type of project, but still an important and interesting project. Wish that the new maintainer could be here today, he's awesome. This being like the second project that you've brought, I think you've probably could look at it from projects of different sizes. What's different about hospital run versus Electron here? Yeah, so Electron certainly is a more mature and larger project. And hospital run was kind of me and a couple other developers. And so it was kind of in a different state. But it was also something that needed care. There was a lot of work that had been put into it and that work is continuing with the new maintainer. And so again, kind of longevity of the project for both Electron and hospital run, I think there's similar goals there. I think that the difference and one thing that I would encourage projects who are thinking of joining a foundation and thinking about is things like governance. Because if you already have that in place, that kind of makes the transition easier because you already have a structure to kind of run the project, which I think makes it easier. Now, I think maybe too, that's a scale thing, right? In a project like hospital run, governance would have been like me and like two or three other people sitting in a room. Governance at Electron's scale is, which I remember, it's like five or six different working groups, each with like five to eight people on it. So it's a lot larger scale. But I think in both cases, they can be served by the foundation. Large projects, small projects, I think both have a place. And one thing that recently mentioned, hospital run has a new maintainer, but because it was part of our family of projects, even though it was a small, it is a small project, we were able to help with that sort of succession planning. And that's a big function of governance is like people are gonna come in and then they're gonna move on other things, which is great. But you don't want the project, especially something as important as hospital run is to some of those communities to just fall away. So, yeah. It's a great point for us too with AMP because AMP is made by, again, a lot by Google now, other folks also by Google. And people that use AMP out there, there's many, many sites that use AMP and it'll still be there in five years and six years and this helps guarantee that for them. Yeah, long-term maintainability. So, we're nearing the end of our time but I'm really curious to know, I'm excited about the future of OpenJS and all of our projects, but what are you most looking forward to in the new year as an OpenJS Foundation project? I'm hoping we're gonna get better swag. I'm just kidding. Now, I think the Electron project is really looking forward to more collaboration with other projects, especially with Node, but also just to be more ingrained into the JS ecosystem to really not only gain benefit, but to be giving help where we can in other projects or just to be a good member of the community. I think that's something that's important to us is to not just think about what we're doing but kind of that whole ecosystem and how we can be helping. Yeah, I'm looking forward to more people out there feeling more ownership of AMP, like they can actually not just say, AMP lacks this feature that I want. I'll try to make a feature request and see what happens in six months by actually saying, oh, AMP lacks this feature that I want. I can make this feature because I also am part of AMP and that would be a very nice thing. There are those who are doing this now and people don't often do this, but they can do it more. And also, swag, hexagonal stickers are great. And also beyond that, that we run events around the world. We have conferences and mini conferences all over the place from Pakistan to Brazil to Australia to everywhere. And trying to maybe involve all of you and more of that a little more. We could have events that would be for developer tools in general, for developers to come to, who are JavaScript developers to learn more about more things they can do to make their lives easier and make their websites look better and be easier to make. That's awesome. I feel like you must have been reading my mind because we should definitely close with a call to action here that both Electron has a collaborator summit, AMP has a collaborator summit. We're doing the OpenJS Foundation Collaborator Summit tomorrow and Saturday right here. And we would love you to stick around for those and also think about joining one of the road shows or coming to a summit for either of these projects because this open source is your open source. It's our open source. So great. I want to thank both of you for your time this afternoon. And let's welcome Electron and AMP.