 Hello, welcome to Birthman Ospo plus plus Ospo's for governments, cities and research institutions. Quite the long title. It would be longer if we'd actually spelled out Ospo means open source program office, but it's probably a good thing to clarify right at the beginning Richard. Probably a good thing. So, speaking of which, Claire, who are you. Well, my name is Claire Dylan. I'm speaking to you from Dublin Ireland, which doesn't look as quite as sunny as it does in the picture here today but I'm delighted to be here. And I work with my slabs. I also work with my slabs. I'm Richard Litter. I'm calling in from green Vermont, although it's slightly more red and yellowish now as fall has hit us. And today we're going to be talking about open source. Open source is the future. I believe if you're at this conference, you probably already know this open source is the practice of licensing your code in a way that other people can use it and modify it and adapt it. Regardless of where they come from or what they're doing. And this has generally led to a huge boom in technology in the past 1020 years, if not longer, where now open source is everywhere. So, people are able to use code which they haven't paid for themselves to basically accelerate their work. And as Richard has said, it has definitely been the driver of the tech economy for the last little while. We have been seeing huge growth across all industries. And but I think one of the most interesting things about open source in the last little while is the emergence of new business models and value streams that have been emerging because it's not just about the idea that, you know, which people had this idea in the past that it was about hobbyist developers building their passion projects. But these days, there's serious money in open source. Part of that serious money basically has to be funneled through corporate Ospo's. So as Claire said earlier, these are open source program offices. And essentially, if you have a large like enterprise, you need to have someone who is managing what open source means for that company. So these are the sort of six roles that you have within a corporate Ospo, and they do all of these things. First, you have policy experts people who are really good at deciding what policy is going on what what license do we want to use how do we do that how do we integrate our ideology of open source to our company and collaborate with other people. Then you have compliance and legal. Well, are we making sure we don't have any GP licenses down the stack or making sure that we're not trading on anyone else's patent toes. How are we going to do that. And then another job that the corporate Ospo has is measurement of open source activity. Right. So how much open source we actually have at this company, how much our developers doing this in their spare time. How are we working with other people what other open source projects do we depend upon. Claire, can you talk about the next three points. Yeah, I mean, alongside all the above the open source program office also looks at educating the developers about open source coding the development practices the tools, the legal issues that we've mentioned above. So there's a lot of information involved in as both being the interface to the various different open source foundations or the various different institutions that they may have to work with in order to actually do their job. And they're also involved in this idea of being an advocate for open source within the organization and providing communications around their activities so that people understand what's happening in open source in these institutions. But as well plus plus, we want to go a little bit further because that construct has worked incredibly well in corporations and in fact the Linux foundation and the to do group have done an awful lot of work to help organizations understand what they look like, and to get best practices around this. But when we start to think about taking that Ospo construct and actually bringing it to cities and governments and universities, it can often look a little different. So part of that is you have to think about other institutions, cities and governments and so on, and how do they have Ospo's right. What is the university Ospo look like. Obviously it's going to be slightly different you don't have just a management structure that's hierarchical. It's much harder to make things move fast and university settings we all know, and we'll get to more of the differences later but for now think about this idea of well what would it look like for a city for government etc. So part of that is that Ospo's don't just cover source code. They also cover all sorts of other open things open asterisks as I like to call it right open data, open finance for some like NGOs open hardware open scholarship how do you make sure that academics are getting citations for their work and getting it recognized for it. There's a whole ton of things that go on in that sort of setting. But the main thing that we want to talk about is the plus plus for Ospo right for corporations you have just a single Ospo that runs that corporation maybe they collaborate maybe they don't universities and cities and governments. These are institutions that are based around community principles from the get go. And so we think instead of just having an Ospo there we should have a collaborative network of Ospo's that interface with other Ospo's and have a really structured way of sharing all the community advances we have with open source and how to build Ospo so that they can keep their costs down while magnifying their effect. And it's really important because even as we talked about the value of open source earlier. When we think about that in the context of cities or regional governments or universities, none of them can do what needs to be done to solve the problems alone so you know in many respects, you know it's fine when you're thinking about building the code that your company is going to be commercially dependent on but when you're thinking about solving the world's problems. You kind of got to work together around that so this idea of being able to collaborate becomes much much more important when we think about these constructs in a public setting. So, we just talked about collaboration a lot but why now in particular. We think there's a couple of reasons, not regarding the huge amount of political stuff happening in the States at the moment. There are other global challenges that can be met through collaborating between Ospo's great example would be climate change. There's a ton of work which is going on into climate change which is open source. And if we collaborate on that it means people don't have to keep reinventing the wheel and that's a time sensitive issue. Sarah, do you want to talk about social impact. Yeah, you know this is a passion point from my perspective because you know I I came to the open source community and I had already heard so much about the idea of open source accelerating how you how you build software and the various different value around that but for me, one of the most important things is this idea that open source can help build trust, and with the users of the technology and a great example of this is Ireland's covert tracker which when it was built in collaboration between the health service executive and a company called near form in Ireland. When they built that they decided to open source the code in order to allow privacy experts to examine the code and give it a thumbs up so that no one was going to say Oh, the government is tracking my, my, you know, my whereabouts and all the rest of it. And they did that. And as a result, it had one of the fastest take ups of any app that's kind in the world. And like that had a dramatic immediate effect on Ireland's ability to actually combat this disease so it's just such an important thing these days because trust between citizens and governments. And it's so important when we think about digital transformation that people get on board with the technology that is being built and maybe that it should be feeling like it's a little bit more transparent and trustworthy and open source gives you that which I think is incredibly important. And as a result, actually, I think that there have been a lot of public policy changes that have been happening in the last while. And for the reasons we've already mentioned because of the potential commercial benefits or commercial impact, because it builds trust, but also in places like Europe, there's a lot of things happening around tech independence or, or at least removing the risk of being dependent on any one corporation or country. And this brings us back to the collaboration. I mean, really, when we think about when we're investing public money in in creating a software that's going to help us get to the future. And it's really about this idea that we should all be doing this together, and we should all be equal partners in this so there's a lot of public policy discussions that are going on at the moment, and all around the world about making that a reality. So one of the questions then is going back to a previous point, what does an Ospo look like what does an Ospo plus plus look like when it's at a university setting when it's in a governmental setting, or in a city. So, one of the first things that an Ospo needs to do there is do an assessment of the ecosystem. First, where is it compared to other universities or other cities or other governments and secondly, what's going on in its purview with its university. So, if you have say a city, which has an Ospo, you need to see what city services can be offered that are open source what open source code is already being used. Are the people from your city which are doing open source which could be brought in somehow or supported, which is one of the other main points right. How do you support academics who work with at your institution who are making open source code. How do you support students who are doing that. How do you support translation and research dissemination and making sure that their work gets out properly. A lot of people who write code aren't very good marketers, right, so an Ospo should be part of that. As well, relationships and interface. How do you interface with other cities, right. How do you make sure that your code doesn't just live with you and just open source is put out there and then nothing happens to it. That's one of the ways you do that as you have collaborations. How do you make sure that that works. That's kind of the job and Ospo there. And similarly to what we described in the corporate Ospo, looking at the skills required and recognizing that the skills required in the context of a city or government or university maybe different than that the corporate context. And therefore we have to look at the skills and again the awareness of the activity and making sure that people understand what's happening. I mean these these are fairly similar to the various themes that we had in the corporate Ospo, but maybe now Richard we can go into what they may look like in the specific context of both the university and the municipal aspects. So let's look at the university Ospo plus plus. Sounds good to me. First one obviously is research right universities are known for doing a lot of research for us known for education. So we'll get to that a second but research is one of the main things we're all supposed to really really well, especially for organizations or universities which have a large research arm. Right, you want to make sure that that's getting out there and that things are actually changing the world this is great for both the academics and the funders and the university administration, everyone kind of wins here. And the dissemination is also part of that right so there's often a very large section of the university that's just called translation. That's just one of the main goals of the administration is making sure that the work that's being done there has an impact on the world. And so being able to amplify and accelerate voices within the university is one of like the core parts of the university Ospo's education and skills. I can interrupt you there Richard, we've heard from people in universities, like for example say each Audrey who is the director of the open source program office in Johns Hopkins University, and he talks a lot about this idea that, and that that artifact that result of research that is software is such a valuable thing, but so many universities only measure their ability to monetize IP around that software. If you only do that you're only going to get a small percentage of all the available software that might be available in the university. But if you think about the idea that that software could actually have an impact, even if it isn't got, even if it hasn't got an immediate monetary value, and it could still have an impact, and therefore it's another pathway for universities to be able to translate that research into impact. Making sure that your translation is working is also working with future translation efforts, which means training current students to be able to do open source effectively, and not just open source code, we already have that and say our CS programs, but also training people to run us post at universities, building the next generation of leaders who are good at, you know, pervading open source gospel around the world. That's also a very important part of the corporate Ospo and also a very part of the university Ospo's, which we need to think about when we think about what it looks like. And back to having social impact and local impact for universities. So often, the universities have a priority to make sure that they are giving a benefit back to whatever community they actually exist in. And we know that the programs around open source program offices and universities can often have that as a goal. And again, looking to Johns Hopkins, there's a wonderful example they have there of the work that they have done with St. Francis neighborhood centers in Baltimore City where they've taken open source code. And with the students getting involved, they've actually been able to have real impact on the ground with software that those neighborhood centers wouldn't ordinarily be able to access and do it in super quick time because they were able to collaborate using open source. So it's a fantastic way for for universities to be able to have a real immediate social impact in their environment. There's a lot more funding to in terms of actually the the Ospo being a center for being able to interface with with the various other Ospo's and with institutions and with funding bodies per se as well because with all the public policy changes that is happening around open source, there is a lot more funding available that has this this explicit stipulation that the end result has to be open. And in that respect, and Ospo plus plus can actually identify those funding opportunities and even create joint submissions within a network so that so that universities can go after that. So it can be an important focal point for actually bringing funding into a university. So that covers Ospo's of the university level municipal levels are slightly different, but also kind of the same that's why we're putting them both under the Ospo plus plus heading. One of the things that's really important for cities, as opposed to say universities, where it's also important to don't get me wrong, but it's really important to have transparency and trust. Some modern democracies for those of us who are in awesome democracies depend upon trust and citizen services depend upon the citizens knowing that their vote matters and that their politicians are looking out for them in some way. Now, this is kind of at the ideological level. Often it doesn't really seem that way if you ask the average person on the street you trust your government well no not really, but with open source that's particularly true, and it really helps this whole process along. I made a really good example earlier about the COVID tracing app in Ireland, which was a government initiative. Right. And by being open source it would they were able to engender trust in the populace because people were like oh yeah that looks pretty good we haven't had a ton of security experts saying this is awful. Or if they did say that we worked with those bugs very early. I have another one. And I was speaking earlier about the work that Johns Hopkins has done in St. Francis neighborhood centers in Baltimore. I remember being part of one of the events in Baltimore where they were talking about the ability for citizens to get engaged in that software and to actually have the accessibility to to kind of make changes to that software can really help change how the citizens feel about their relationship with the technology providers because there was one phrase that really stuck stuck with me. One of the participants said, we feel often like, like technology is being done for us, but actually we want it to be done with us. And I think that that's such an amazing way to look at how open source can be employed by municipal and governments, and municipalities and governments because really, if we want citizens to get engaged with the future and digital transformation, then then giving them the opportunity to see what's going on, and even maybe participate in that community is a huge benefit. This is right into point two, which is scaling municipal services. Lutex is an open source platform that's used to do participatory budgeting, so that citizens can actually decide where budgets go. This is used by the city of Paris at the moment as well as the city of Baltimore. So it's a trans country trans continental thing which is open source, and allow us people to actually say, we need more garbage collectors in our around the smell right. And so people have actually said that they feel more like they're part of the system, like they're actually doing something that matters and that they can see real changes on the governmental level, which, from a European perspective is amazing because that isn't something that people often say. Lutex is a brilliant one because it was actually the foundation of the work that was done in Baltimore, but I've heard that recently it's actually been taken and it's been implemented now in Budapest as well. So when we think about scaling these municipal services, it's not just even on the ground in the cities where they're created but then that source code can actually be used around the world very quickly with with low effort and resources can be reused for great again great benefits for the citizens, which isn't and when when the new citizens see it working in a previous city it can really it can really help us get off the ground even quicker. It also help with policies, you know policies using one city are often adaptable to another one. So it really scales that out which means less money, less time just movement and progress going forward and involving the citizenry which is excellent. It also helps to have, you know, some expertise in the municipal Ospo around policy development because so often people like these ideas but don't really understand the practical steps that they may have to go through in order to make them a reality. So one of the real core competencies that's very particular to a municipal Ospo is is that ability to understand how to make policies real and how to use the Ospo as an instrument to make that policy real and impactful within a city. Also to influence and advocate other cities and more collaborations and make sure that there's someone there who is actually being a champion for open source. That's part of the point of the Ospo to hold a vessel for these people to do their work so that open source code can really help people out. But there's also a lot of food or fear uncertainty or doubt that still lingers in the system around open source and you know, and I kind of, you're very you're very aware that some of the stories that were surrounding, you know the narratives that were surrounding open source from say 20 years are still prevalent today when people who are not familiar with the great advances that have happened in this ecosystem. If they're not familiar with those, they still think that it's a group of hobbyists who are building whatever their hobbyist projects but they're not probably aware of the amazing structure and the maturity of the whole open source ecosystem so it's incredibly important to have someone who can watch out for that and then to be provide this again center of excellence for understanding where the open source community has come to and help share that news. Part of influencing and advocating for open source and Ospo's in general is of course telling stories. So I run a podcast called impactful open source where I look at these stories of how source code has gone through cities, governments, organizations, NGOs, etc. Particularly through Ospo's and the Ospo plus plus network and shows where open source has actually made a real change on the world. So we're actively trying to collect these stories. If you have some, I would love to hear them. And the goal there is to make it easier for everyone else to say Ospo's exist and we should have one at RC. Exactly what we said in Ireland. And so I'm very happy to share that in Ireland. Liro, which is the Irish software research center and has formed a new Ospo and is part of the Ospo plus plus network. And it's very new in Ireland and we're still working around what that will look like but we've already had the first meetings of that Ospo plus plus group with the researchers in Ireland that are interested in this and it's already yielding results where where the researchers involved were able to share their challenges and share best practices around this. So it becomes immediately apparent of the value of having a central point for researchers to gather around and tell their stories and hopefully we'll get to be on the podcast soon Richard. There will be one of my first guests was actually say each other who you mentioned earlier who's running the Ospo at Johns Hopkins. He's done amazing work there, particularly with coven actually they built a wonderful atlas of what's happening with coven during the world with which was a collaborative open source effort. So we talk about that on the podcast, and also he just a great example of how to build an Ospo at a university. Another great story of Ospo's coming out of the Ospo plus plus network is open at RIT with Steven Jacobs. RIT is a fairly large university in upstate New York that does a ton of research and Steven Jacobs has set up there the first real program for teaching students how to do open source and also getting jobs in collaborative efforts and making sure that it fosters the whole culture of open source at the university level, and works with other universities as well. Right. So he's been working together with Saeed and others in Ospo plus plus. So it makes it easier for him to get this off the ground. Probably one of the better examples of this as well is cross cross is the Center for open source research at UC Santa Cruz run by Carlos Maltzan and Stephanie G. And what they've done is they got a large grant from Sage while who runs set which is a large storage program, and that grant allows them to actually foster graduate students to work on the work that they want to do with help and funds from corporate sponsors. So that at the end of their, you know, PhD, they have a job waiting for them because they've already been doing open source the entire time. So, how do you combine together academia with research crosses a great example of this. Another one would be Brandeis. Go ahead. Not not only is it a great example of what you can do within the university but I think even back to the point of how you can get investment through your activities and open source. One of the other reasons why cross is incredibly great stories that they are cash positive I believe so and it's, it's, it's marvelous to see such an initiative actually be able to get a return on investment from their activities. Speaking of returns on investment brand eyes right now is running the first basically Ospo plus plus training camp, where they have a program at the university to teach people how to become heads of Ospo's. It's very easy to find, you know, open source courses or a professor who teaches open source or a way of doing that at university level, in the sense of like having a student who likes open source can be supported in some way at Hawk. It's very hard to find a university that's dedicated from the administration down from the courses down in teaching people how to do open source in the future. Brand eyes is the first of this, and it's super exciting to watch them investing in the entire ecosystem from the get go, which is what we're doing at Ospo plus plus. So we're trying to make sure that we hold a space for people to have these conversations around what Ospo's are, how to work together collaboratively and how to do it at the city level, you know, government level, and how to effectively strategize to do that effectively. I think some of the learnings that have happened from the Ospo plus plus working group have already been incredibly helpful for anyone who's starting up their own Ospo, or in fact, even a long way down the road because everyone has unique challenges and the sharing has been incredible. One of the things that I have found, again, incredibly impressive is is that we were already seeing collaborations coming out from this work group it's only been in place a couple of months but we've had joint funding proposals in place. There are discussions going on now for collaborations across curriculum development and skills programs. And so I think it's a it's a marvelous working group to be part of. And I hope we can find some more great participants from this from this presentation. And Richard, it probably would be a good idea for us to actually share how people can actually get in contact with us if they want to find out more. Most likely send an email to info at moss labs.io, we will respond so we're very very excited to have pretty much anyone who's interested in building an Ospo and connecting to other people join us. We have a website which is nascent so the URL will be out by the time this is released, which is exciting there's impactful open source. And the podcast which you can look up on Apple on Spotify and go ahead and listen to that. And for now, that's the email. It's right there, send us a line. Thank you so much for listening. And of course we will be here in the chat to answer any questions that people may have. So, so please do reach out we'd love to hear from you. That's us, we would please. Thank you so much.