 So, next up is Michael Downey, and he's going, spoiler, it says on the wall, talk about sustainability of open source in international development, and I was told it's a very specific field, and I'm quite interested in what he has to say, and applause for Michael. Well, thank you all for coming. I know this is getting close to the end of a very, very busy weekend, and I appreciate you making time and keeping your energy level up, as well as the volunteers who have been working really hard. Can we have a round of applause for all the volunteers who have been really hustling this weekend? Thank you. Raise your hand if you were in the community dev room yesterday. I know a lot of you here are interested in community management stuff. Great. For those of you who were in there, you heard a few talks that talked about how projects are maintained long term. This is going to extend on that and talk about an area of interest of how we're applying some of those ideas. To get an idea of who is in the room, how many of you people in here are actively contributing to free and open source software projects today? Keep your hands up if you're doing that, not just for a job, but because you really care about the project, and it means a lot to you. I don't think one hand went down. That's great. Now one last question. How many of you have other interests outside of free and open source software that you really care a lot about? Maybe you contribute money or time, you volunteer for, raise your hands. As much or more people, that's great. If you raise your hand at all for any of these questions, I think you're going to find these topics really interesting. I challenge all of you to take what we're talking about here today and consider how it applies to the own projects and interests that you have. This won't work, so are we frozen? I think the screen is frozen, I apologize. We'll try it the manual way. It goes without saying for all of you here that open source software is a key part of our lives. Normally when I give this talk and talk about these topics, I have to explain how pervasive free and open source software is and how it really impacts all of our lives every day. If those projects were to go away tomorrow, it would be really disruptive to us. Some of you may be surprised just how important free and open source software is in other parts of the world, especially in low and middle income countries. Especially its capabilities to help people who really need it. I want to give you a few examples. First is in financials, what we call financial technology, financial services. You have people using open source software, literally in 80% of the countries right now every day, using open source software to conduct financial transactions. It may be microlending, it may be getting market prices in the open markets in their cities and villages, and ultimately help people trade and shop more fairly. The healthcare area, open source is really, really huge. It's used in everything from information management, managing patient records, helping people manage their diseases, their medication. Really everything that is involved in the healthcare systems and most of even the lowest of low income countries is using open source software today. And then finally, generally charities who are working in these countries helping beneficiaries live better, more productive lives are using open source software because of its efficiency and cost effectiveness to make sure that their programs are running at the optimum level. Hey, that worked. Just a quick order of business. We will take some questions at the end. I want to give you some prompting questions as you listen to the topics here today. Specifically, I want you to think of similar programs that you might have heard that address sustainability for open source. Either you've heard of them in the past, you've heard of things going on right now, and we'll talk about that. We're going to talk about services that we provide to projects. We're all about making projects better. I'd be interested to hear what you have to think projects may need that we're not offering. We're going to talk about funding models. What funding models have you seen that work for open source software projects? If any. Sometimes people are really stuck on these ideas. And then finally, we're going to talk about how we're working in partnership. So if you can think of partners who may be able to provide financial resources and kind resources, we'll talk about that too today. We've got a few goals to go through. First, my goals for you all is first to understand how open source introduces risk and development. I put a little asterisk there because you're going to hear a little bit different definition of development today. It's not just about programming, so stay tuned for that. Second, I want to talk about how the projects that are actively involved in these areas of the world have specific wants and needs. Some may be similar to the projects that you know about and some may be unique. I'm going to talk about our program and our goals for those projects and how we can help make them more successful. And then finally, how we are working together as a group to build a team that will help all of us be more productive and make more mature, more high impact software projects. Finally, I want to talk a little bit about how all of you can make a difference either in these types of projects or in your own projects, and that leads to the last one. Let's get some ideas of how you can take these ideas and apply them to your own work. So let's hop back to these scenarios for a moment. I want to talk a little bit about what they depend on, some of the dependencies that you may not have thought about. When you have open source software in such critical roles, you really have to make sure A, that the right tools are available to meet people's needs, that these tools are kind of continually improved and maintained as people do better in their local economies, their local communities. We need to make sure that the people and the organizations that are using this software are getting the right training and support. These are people with very low digital literacy levels. They're not used to using technology, and we need to make that experience as easy for them as possible. And then finally, and this is a really important one that raises a lot of ethical questions. We need to take care that resources aren't being wasted. A large majority of these projects are being funded either with public money through government organizations, they may be funded with charitable donations. And so as good stewards of those resources, we want to make sure that we're not wasting efforts, duplicating efforts. Really good examples of the push for this are efforts like the FSFE's campaign for public money, public code. The US Agency for International Development is pushing very, very hard for all of their technology-driven projects to use open source. So we're seeing a lot of good developments in this area, but there'll be more to come. The big challenge, and we call it the elephant in the room, is this increasing environment of reduced budgets, reduced resources for these projects. The general feeling of austerity in what we call the global north, that's the highest income countries, has really started a chain reaction of budget tightening and shrinking resources, which means a lot of the funding and a lot of the resources that these projects have had are starting to shrink and collapse. This is a real risk for all the people who depend on these software. Sustainability, as we look at it, is really not just about the international development sector, but as many of you know, this is a conversation that's happening increasingly in FOSS projects. We'll talk a little bit more about that in just a minute. So our mission is to react to this problem and really create an environment of what we call co-investment in shared resources. And what we mean by those terms are diversification of funding sources, getting access to different types of resources, either financial or human resources, and getting the people who have those resources to work more closely together and to coordinate better. A little bit about me and my background and why I'm here talking to you today. I am not a public speaker by any means. I am an engineer by training. I've got two undergraduate degrees in electrical engineering and computer engineering. I then switched my graduate studies into human-computer interaction, how people use technology to get stuff done. And from there, I went into the corporate world. I worked in IT for quite a number of years in the healthcare field, went into financial services for a while, then did a pivot, went into this whole international development space, how people are using technology to make the world better. And for about ten years, I helped lead and launch a project called OpenMRS, which was an electronic medical record system used in 100 plus countries now. At the UN Foundation, my roles are really focused on open source governance, participation, getting people engaged in these processes, building up a practice of community management and knowledge and mind share throughout our organization, and helping people understand how to get better at contributor inclusion. I'll talk a little bit more about our organization. I'm not really here to kind of sell it to you, but I want to help you understand why we are really interested in these topics. All of it really turns on this idea of what we call digital development. And I said development in this talk won't be about programming so much. It's really a shorthand for what the official name in Wikipedia is called information and communication technologies for development, ICT4D. This is a big phrase that really just focuses on technology that supports one or more specific missions and people and organizations that want to make the world a better place. As you're probably aren't surprised as it's moved over the years, but being non-profit, it's moved kind of at a lag as opposed to the traditional corporate world. But we've focused more and more on mobile applications just in the last couple of years switched away from more classical IT systems. So we're slowly catching up with the rest of the world, but it takes a little while. We have a lot of different sectors that are kind of competing for interest and time in this field. Healthcare, financial services, as I mentioned, education, really anything that helps communities become stronger. And most importantly about this is this idea is evolving over time. And this is what's really exciting for people who care about open source. Not too long ago, only a few years ago, the people who were working on international development projects were really of a mindset where we're going to create a solution for the poor people, as they would like to say. We're going to, in some cases, literally fly in, drop it on the ground, set it up and leave. And this is very patronizing. People would call it neocolonialism. There were really a lot of inherent sustainability problems in it. That was kind of era one. Era two was kind of shifting people to be consumers, thinking about the people who are using these tools as consumers of the data and the software itself and trying to interact in some way. The really exciting era is the one that's just starting. And that's where we're looking at people as co-creators. So just as, in our world, we have people creating content and building their own specific tools on cloud platforms or uploading videos to YouTube and other platforms to share their knowledge with others. We're seeing the same things happen in the same trends in this space. So that long lag I talked about is shortening very quickly, which is exciting for us, because as people who create software, we can help them turbocharge their communities in the same ways that we've seen here in Europe, in the US, etc. So two numbers here. 3.7 billion is the number of people who are connected today. It's only about half the planet. We at the UN Foundation are really focused on taking care of the rest of that half, getting that up to 7.5 billion. And that's going to be very hard. And to do that, as I said, we need to give people the tools that they need to create their vision of what we call the digital society in their own world. We don't want to pre-suppose that they will use technology in the same way that we may here in European countries, that we might do in the US, etc. We want to give them the raw materials to work with to make their own future. We understand now that people have different needs for technology and we've got to stop presuming what people want to do. Classically, the thought of how to get here has been about getting people connected, getting people access to the internet and let them use what we have and that'll be good enough. This has actually worked to some extent. The access problem is largely solved. Most people do have at least easy access to the internet, if not as easy as we do in our pockets or on the laptop when the Wi-Fi is working. Our organization, within the UN Foundation, we created this organization called the Digital Impact Alliance because we wanted to talk about something more and we really wanted to talk about how people are using that technology, how people are adopting it. This really hasn't been part of the conversation and so we want to take those tools and make sure that they're actually useful for people. This is a challenge. It hasn't been working. We've tried to create a lot of technology out there and innovation is great. Innovation is fun. I'm a geek. I love creating new stuff but there comes an intrinsic problem with that and I'm not big on charts and graphs but over seven years, the team that started our organization put this study together before we all got together and realized that this is just in mobile healthcare applications. So not even healthcare applications but just mobile-based ones. Every year there was 30% increase year after year over seven years of new platforms, new applications. So there was just huge proliferation happening. People were building new tools. People were building duplicate tools. Every single organization, NGO, every government project that was out there was building yet another tool and we realized that this has got to stop. We've got to stop reinventing the wheel every single time. We ought to focus on making stuff better, making stuff more useful. But what does that success really look like? It's really hard to tell and we have to really move to a place where we're not looking at just the technology but actually how people use it and specifically how that software is measured in terms of what we call maturity, how useful it is and most importantly how many people it can serve, how many people it can reach and what are they actually doing with it. So we're going to stop having to just measure how many new things we're creating and focus on the why and the how. Here's a really painful example that my colleague, Ed Dial, worked on. This is the country of Uganda in East Africa in 2012. Each of the red dots and each of the little names here are different technology projects that are happening in Africa and Rwanda specifically in 2012. By and large, they're all different software platforms. I won't have you read all of these but this was a huge problem and the government actually had to step in. This was just healthcare, by the way, I should say. Just healthcare projects. The government actually stepped in and called a moratorium. They said everybody has to stop. We are the Ministry of Health and we are halting all new technology projects in the healthcare system until we solve this problem because there are way too many. Most of these, has anyone heard of the elephant factor for software projects, a couple of you? An elephant factor is basically how many organizations are contributing to your open source project, how many entities. Most of these projects here had an elephant factor of one. That means it was a single organization or a single individual in some cases contributing to these projects. That's a huge risk because that organization may go away tomorrow. They may run out of funding and the people here, these are actual communities, actual states and regions in Uganda, were really stuck with this and they don't have no way to kind of maintain that software and make sure that's still useful for them. So this was a huge problem. It wasn't just happening here. But it raises three really important questions that we should think about. Why are there so many open source tools solving the same types of problems? Why isn't there more collaboration and cooperation amongst both the projects and the organizations who are using them are developing them? And finally, how many scarce financial resources, how much money is actually being wasted by this type of behavior? We don't have a really good handle on how much that is. We know it's really huge because it's hard to say what the opportunity cost is of having created so many problems. So one last time, let's look back at our three scenarios. I want you to imagine all those red circles you saw on the map just now and think about how many projects in this space, as I said, were maintained by a small group or a very single individual. And think about when that organization goes away, when they lose their funding. What happens to these communities? What happens to the people in the hospital clinic you see here on the right? What happens to the small business person who can't get this odd bug on her phone fix to find out the market prices the next day? What happens when the charity stops supporting the community health worker that's going around making sure people have access to their HIV medication? These are really, really serious problems. They're really huge risks. And if we are to be ethically minded open source developers, we need to start thinking about this. And that's where we step in or we're trying to step in and think about the harm that we're causing and what we can do to stop it. So our organization, as I mentioned, is called the Digital Impact Alliance. We're an initiative of the United Nations Foundation. You all know the United Nations, we're the nonprofit sector of that. We were really created by a lot of these funders that I mentioned calling the halt to the bad behavior that they've been taking. They set aside $75 million for us to help think about new experiments and new ideas of how to solve these problems. Now open source is just one little area here. Oops, where'd I go? We're just one little part of our organization. But I think it's really important to understand what we do. We look at technology, we look at how people use data and actually make change. But more importantly is to understand what we're doing and what we're not doing. Our roles here are not about creating solutions or building technology. We're here to help the people who are doing that work. We're not here to fix things for them, we're here to help them be more effective and kind of turbo charge their work. So that's kind of true to the United Nations if you think about it. We're about bringing people together and helping them be more successful. So our role is to really focus on the ecosystem. It's to focus on the projects that are out there, how to get people more collaborative, how to get more people involved in building better software, better tools, better platforms for people. And then the goal ultimately is to create something what we call an inclusive digital society. And again that goes back to this idea where people around the world can use technology and make their world better whatever that means to them in their own ways, not the ways that we kind of hand to them on a silver platter. So if we're going to talk about sustaining these projects over the long term, we kind of did some early research and talked to people about what that might mean to them. And what we found is like there really wasn't anything unique about our part of the world. These are actually questions and challenges probably many of you people have thought about in this room. Maintain a burnout. Has anyone ever felt kind of overwhelmed and exhausted from maintaining your projects? Yes? No one is here to take over? I'm kind of the last person standing? Yes. So this is common in our world, it's common in your world too. Organizations have strategic shifts, right? If you are doing this as part of your work, I don't know if a few of you raised your hands for that or put your hands down when I asked that. They may have a change of heart the next week. You may no longer have those several hours a week to work on your open source project anymore. Maybe you have time in your spare time to pick that up, but maybe you don't. We can all use more resources. That may be more people, that could be money to get things done, could be more infrastructure, more opportunities, more customers. And ultimately it comes down to reducing single points of failure. A lot of those are those of us who are burnt out project maintainers are often the single points of failure, but there may be other issues as well. There may be outdated dependencies, you name it. And finally a balance of chasing shiny new things. For those of you who are working on projects, how many of you have a growing backlog of bugs that you kind of ignore because it's not very fun to take care of? I know many of us in our project are guilty of that. This is the shiny new thing scenario. And the good news is it's not just the geeks that have this problem. It's actually the people who want to chip in the funding to these projects. These organizations want to build a great new feature set to serve more people, to maybe solve a new disease. They don't want to make the install time shorter. They don't want to help reduce your backlog of bugs. They don't want to improve your database performance. And they're not willing to put up the money to do that. And so all these things come into our idea of what sustainability means. So last June, while we were kind of developing our program last year, there was a really great conference in the middle of a year in San Francisco. They had 100 project maintainers and what we called sustainers who were donors or other people interested in this topic. And I don't know, I saw Nadia here and Xavier's here from Open Collective. They were awesome organizers. We spent the entire day brainstorming with these experts. And the URL is here, sustaino.s.org. Please go read this report if this is interesting to you at all because they came up with really great recommendations here. And they're aligned very well with the list that I just looked at. Pardon me. So while this was going on and while we were working with the group here in June, we were also reaching out to projects in this space. As I said, there are hundreds if not thousands of them. So we started to try to prioritize and have the same kind of conversations with them that we were having back here in June in San Francisco. And we ended up with 10 key findings. These are kind of distilled from those conversations that we had. And these are in no particular order, by the way, but they are really the high-level needs of what the people who are running the projects told us that they really struggled with. And I can, we don't have to read this to you, but probably these look pretty familiar. We would like more mentorship. We'd like more high-level expertise. We'd like experts that we don't have on our project. We'd like access to funding to do more, to pay people to work on those nagging issues, the dirty jobs. We'd like to be more interoperability, interoperable with other projects. We'd like to build a community of practice to train our contributors to get them more expertise and contributing more. And this was the most interesting one to me, is they like to share contributor pools. And this doesn't mean they want to go swimming, but what it means is that they want to leverage people who are working in one project on maybe another project. People who have expertise about health care, perhaps. They may be working on a project over here, but that knowledge could be useful in another project. So we looked at all of these things, and they seemed very, very broad to us. And what we tried to do was take all of these things and mash it up against the idea of maturity. And those of you who are connected with either Apache or some other organizations, some fiscal sponsors, may have heard this idea of project maturity and there are certain factors, so things that you have done that kind of rates how mature your project is. And so we looked at a lot of models that helped measure that, and we tried to kind of create a hybrid. And what we did is we came up with really four key factors that ends up with this giant swirly thing with all the buzzwords, so be careful from this slide. But I think it's really important, and it really, buzzwords aside, it does kind of summarize what we're talking about here. What we want at the end of the day is trust. Because trust leads to long-term sustainability. When you trust your fellow contributors, the other people on your team, when the people who are using your software trust that people will be around and be there to support them and maintain the software, what you do is you have this virtuous cycle here within this environment of trust where you have effective collaborative work, that everyone's getting stuff done and feeling like they're productive, balanced with fulfilled motivations. Whatever reason they are working on this project, you feel like you're getting something out of it. You're getting what you want out of the project and you're meeting the goals. Now to get to this happy place where everyone's happy and continuing to be involved and the contributor base is growing and the project is thriving, we did this synthesis and we came up with four key areas. And going from the bottom up here, this is a big slide, but there's a lot to unpack, one of the most important things that we found was a need for a sustainable organizational home for a project. And what this means is having a neutral place where multiple organizations and individuals can come together and feel supported in their collaboration and know that their voice isn't going to get drowned out by someone else. And you have to really deliberately manage that culture we found as well. You have to make sure that you have processes and standards in place for people to actually do this and to do it on a regular basis. The next most important thing and the next two things actually are really focused on the software itself, not surprisingly. What we call a robust technical architecture really means that you have to have appropriate collaboration tools. And tools is in quotes here because in some cases it's actually literal tools. It may be things like good communication tools, like we're using mailing lists well and we're using forums or using chat tools and we're using good bug trackers and issue lists and we're using good code review practices. But it also actually may be collaboration tools as processes, how we interact with each other, codes of conduct, setting expectations about how we're actually collaborating. And the other side of that is actually what we call structured and unstructured content. This has to do with how your software is actually being used out in the world. Structured content is going to be stuff like having documentation here who loves writing documentation, not too many of us. Some of us do and we love you, thank you. As well as unstructured content for your users and that may be ways for them to get answers to their questions. It may be a support forum where people can go ask questions. It may be actually building up a community of your users to help them support each other. But all of those lead to what we call a technology architecture that is going to be there long term to support the project. Moving up our stack here we get into what we call product development. This is about a long term vision or a strategy for what you're trying to build. Yes, it's fun to just tack on stuff and do things as what looks most fun from day to day. But this is really about listening to the people who are using your software, getting feedback from them, measuring that in a way that it's easy to understand and easy for your contributors to understand what the most important stuff to work on is. And then behavior based success measures. For those of you who are, maybe you've heard some other talks this week about community metrics, open source software metrics, this is really what that's about. It's seeing and measuring the outcome of your work. How often are you doing releases? How quickly are you getting people to come into your community to contribute, to actually write code, check it in, and how quickly is that actually getting released out into the world? So really focused on behaviors of people who are coming into your community, how they're contributing, and how the people who are using your software are getting their needs met as well. And understanding how that changes over time because if you're making changes to any of these things, you want to see that you're doing better and not worse. And then finally, community effectiveness. This is the highest level. And this is about having an environment where you have a clear path for leadership. If you've ever been a new contributor to a project, sometimes you'll maybe write a patch or you'll do a poll request and it may sit there for weeks or months or years, in some cases. Having clear leadership helps you as a newcomer to understand how decisions get made, understand who the people who are involved in, and helps people see a path for them to stick around and be more involved in your project. And governance and community process is really closely related to that. It's about solving problems when they happen, making it clear to everyone how your community works. It sets an expectation of taking this work seriously. And that's really one of the most important factors in these types of projects because when an organization is looking to adopt this type of software, they want to see that this is not a, what we call in the US, a fly-by-night organization. They want to see that there's a real commitment by people to take this stuff seriously because it's solving serious problems. So we've got all of these four areas that we're going to hopefully work on and maintain and build up over time and we're going to lead to this happy swirly thing with all the buzzwords and everyone's going to be happy, right? The question is actually, how do we get there? And I wanted to jump in here really quickly and say that there are a lot of views on this. There are a lot of different aspects to this type of challenges. There was a really great session yesterday during the Community Dev Room that I want to give a call out to and I just added this in at the last minute. Vicky Berser, I don't know if she's in here, but did a really great talk on passing the baton. And for those of you who are feeling burnt out and feel like you would love to pass the baton onto the next generation, please go watch her talk. The link is there at the bottom. She identifies these eight areas of why sustainability matters. And if we understand that this really matters not only to our project and how it's used in the world, but to our own personal interaction with our project, we see that there's work to be done. And it all focuses around cooperation. And so this is the obligatory definition slide. I think you all know what cooperation means, but I wanted to say a few words about it as it relates to our work. The key work that we did in the last year was really understanding that all of these activities on those four bigger arrows I talked about, they really weren't full-time responsibilities for anyone in the projects. They're probably not responsibilities of anyone in your projects either. And often it's rarely in someone's skill set. They may not be very good at it, or they may not like it, most importantly. So we looked at what else was out there in the world to kind of take care of some of these things. Your first thought may be, well, what about some of these umbrella organizations like the PSF or Apache or fiscal sponsors, like the Linux Foundation do, things like this, right? Well, few had kind of the right mix of offerings based on that list of 10 key findings that we found for the projects in our space. And so we looked at other models that did similar types of work in non-software areas. So we looked at things like artist cooperatives, like art studios, where people go to share resources, hacker spaces, maker spaces, where people don't need to buy their own 3D printer, but will share one with other hackers in their space. And other types of these cooperative groups that are doing things together to become more advanced to do cooler work than they are doing right now. And so we started to build this model that is really based on shared goals, shared resources, but most importantly kept that autonomy. In many cases, things like umbrella orgs, they take away your project's autonomy to become part of something bigger. And we heard very loud and clear from the projects in our space, at least, that they wanted to keep that autonomy and they wanted to keep making their own decisions for themselves. And so we came up with this mission statement that what we would try to build for our projects is an inclusive, open-source, meta community for knowledge sharing, collaboration, and co-investment, which I talked about earlier. Most importantly, we had to all be working for this positive social change I talked about. It had to be aligned with the same mission. We would love to support other projects like the awesome games or some machine learning stuff, but it's probably not aligned, at least for right now, with the work that we're doing. We wanted to work together to overcome these key barriers to building long-term, mature, impactful software that I mentioned. And then finally, build public commons, a place where people could go, share information and knowledge with each other, and possibly, as I said earlier, even share contributors or other resources. So based on this, we came up with an idea of what types of services we might collectively offer each other and try to raise resources for. And it really falls into two key areas. Financial support, which is like handing out money to get stuff done, which is sometimes the easiest way. And then also what we call technical assistance. And I'm not going to read all of the words here, but the key thing to know about our ideas about technical assistance is that from the resources that our program will try to raise, we're going to look at two views on projects. We're going to look at their life cycle. How early or late are they? If they're a brand new project, they're going to have different challenges, different things that they'd like to focus on than a project that may have been sitting dormant for a while. Maybe it's been one person kind of hacking alone or a long-term kind of stable project. Everyone's going to have different stuff that they want to focus on. New projects are going to focus on early things like what license should I use for this software? I'm trying to get something started up. How do I get people to collaborate and communicate with each other? Whereas on the other end, when you're very mature, you're going to look at things like how do I do testing better? How do I build a more reliable infrastructure? How do I do continuous delivery? If I'm going to be managing money and donations, how do I do that in an effective way? So this is kind of how we structure that conversation with the projects that we're working with. Another angle on it, if this doesn't seem to fit, is what we focus in on kind of need-focused, what people are really struggling with. These are different ways. It's still the same types of topics, but we're just looking at a different view. People maybe really have internal strife around money. Maybe someone's offered them a donation and they don't know where it should go. We'll help them understand that landscape of fiscal sponsors and how to do donations and fiscal management. Product optimization, if you're not sure what the vision is for your project, what you really want to be focusing on feature-wise, there's another set of types of activities that we can work on. Contributor success, maybe you're struggling with building a vibrant community or maintaining your community over time. Different challenges will happen for different projects. And so our idea is to provide resources that may be consultants, they may be documentarians. If you don't have people doing documentation to help you learn how to do that more effectively, they may be designers, they may be specific, high-level technical resources that can help you answer questions or think about new stacks or new approaches to solving problems over time. So we got a few projects together. We're still growing very, very slowly. We're trying to actually learn as we're going here and not get too excited. But I want to tell you a little bit about them so you can get some ideas of the types of projects that we're working with and how they are different from each other. Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team has actually spoken here at Fosdom a couple of years ago the closing keynote. I think most people know OpenStreetMaps. Humanitarian OpenStreetMaps team is both a community of practice of getting people together to map the world around them in the low and middle income countries particularly, as well as a group that builds software to support that work. So if you're going to get a large group together to map a new village, they build tools to help those people go out and be effective volunteers to make sure that they're covering the entire village community or region. Bomdy down below it is a really cool idea in the healthcare space that is basically built a turnkey system for hospitals that manages patient records, manages laboratory results and testing processes, as well as an entire ERP system for managing resources and funds and personnel management within hospitals. All of this is brought into one user experience. So they're working with these upstream projects and building something that's really important building something that's really easy for people to use that have really low digital literacy and they don't have to become experts in those different projects. SUMSERISER is a very, very new project. It's a spin-off from an academic project actually at the University of California Berkeley and it is an IoT analytics platform that is specifically focused on how people use cook stoves in villages. So people who are going out, they don't have electricity or gas. They actually have to have their own cook stoves. This is actually making sure that the environment for them is healthy and getting data to the organizations that are helping deploy those cook stoves. LibreHealth is a health IT community that builds new innovative types of healthcare tools, web apps that are used in doctors' offices, clinics, radiology labs, things like that. OpenLMIS is started in the health space but is now pivoting out into larger areas. It's a logistics management system. So it's kind of an enterprisey web app to help organizations manage the flow of products, goods, and people throughout the organization. And OpenDataKit is an Android-based client and server application that is really focused on data collection and analytics of that data. And that can be used in a wide variety of charitable situations. To get this done, we're working with lots of different partners because, as I said, we don't want to do it ourselves. We want to hook people up with the best resources that are out there. We're working with software freedom conservancy for fiscal sponsorship and business type related issues. The MIFOS initiative and PATH are working in the health space, I'm sorry, the finance space and the health space, respectively. And they're actually going to be leading working groups for our projects to help them collaborate more closely together, find resources. We're also a sponsor of Outreachy. If you're not familiar with Outreachy, it's an amazing program that helps people get internships in an open source who are coming from underrepresented groups around the world. As to how we're going to actually do the work, we've adopted a very traditional open source style governance project. We're not an open source project ourselves, but we believe in the work and the processes that you all have helped build over the years. We've got an independent governance advisory board that basically is in charge of distributing the resources that we get from our fiscal sponsor, which is the UN Foundation, as well as other funding partners that we might have. Most importantly here, you'll see that each project maintains their own independent leadership. This is not something that's going to replace how decisions are made, it's really to help them and to kind of escalate where people are struggling with technical problems or community problems. There's a working group there for people to come together, share best practices, to help people solve challenging problems. We've also got these sustainability groups that I mentioned in health, finance, etc., as well as technical interest groups when people want to talk about blockchain or whatever the exciting technology is that people are excited about bringing into international development, as well as community working groups, people who want to focus on things like diversity inclusion, for example. So wrapping up, let's go back to these top needs. What we think we've built is something that can at least serve all of these needs that our projects have been worried about. It's not going to happen overnight, but we think we have answers and strategies for each of these. We've already begun to deliver some tactical assistance projects and financial support grants. We'll be doing every six months rolling out small grants of around $25,000 to $50,000 for projects to do development work on these kind of neglected areas. And we've got an open governance plan, so we've got a way to iterate and learn what's working well, what's not working well from these projects and to make changes over time. So finally, our needs, some specific asks for all of you. One, do you know of any projects that align with our mission that might benefit from something like this? We'd love to hear about that. Maybe some of you are connected with organizations or companies that are interested in supporting this kind of work. We'd love to talk about that as well. That could be everything from financial support to in-kind infrastructure resources, other tools. Some people like to donate employment time. We need lots of experts to scale this up because scaling is hard. So you may know people who would enjoy volunteering for some of these projects. They might be wanting to do paid consulting work. We need more hackers. We need more documentation people. We need designers. We need project managers. Basically, people that would like us to like to help us build and run this program and like to help these projects be successful. So if any of these apply to any of you, please get in touch because we want to make this widely understood and we want to test it out fully to make sure that this is something that might be useful in other areas as well because ultimately the problems of sustainability are ones that are very generalized to all of us. And I'll close with this quote by Dorothy Day who is a U.S.-based reporter from many years ago. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless, especially those of us who are burnt out. There's too much work to do and the question is how do we solve that and that's what sustainability has to offer us. Here's our website, osc.dial.community, our email address if you're interested in learning more. I really appreciate all of you thinking about this and thinking about how it relates to your own work because as I said this is a global problem. We're trying to solve it in our area and we hope that other people will start thinking about this as well. So thank you very much. We've got a couple minutes left for questions if you have them. Just raise your hand and we will make sure the microphone goes to where you sit. We have a question here. Hey. Hi. So I was wondering do you have any advice for engineers or technical managers that are sort of more junior within NGOs that are looking to so it seems like usually the problem is is like the NGO will file a grant to solve a certain problem and they'll be like we need this really cool flashy you know MVP to like show them but really when you're doing your research and looking at technical solutions you see there's something that might sort of fit the bill and might be better to contribute to those and I feel like this is sort of touching on the problem you spoke on earlier. Yeah. So people in that role one of the things that we want to try to do as part of this work is to become kind of a clearing house for projects that are hopefully of service to NGOs like that. There's a really great software project coming out of the chaos community if anyone knows about that it's called Prospector and it's a way to understand what projects are are doing what they're working on how mature they are you know is this something that were if you want to make some changes are you going to get your poll requests merged in a timely fashion or not. So we want to be able to provide those resources to the engineers that's only part of the problem right because you can come to your boss with a great idea but they are going to say the funders are saying no and so we're also going to work up the chain as well because we are we were funded by three of the largest funders the Gates Foundation the US Agency for international development and the Swedish development agency we're starting that conversation amongst the funders as well and we're actually hiring someone to work with them on policy and business what we call business planning to get them to start changing the nature of those conversations so they don't come to you with a pre-defined solution and let you do what you're good at. We have another question here. Hey thanks for talking to you good. Thank you. So the example in Uganda if I'm right of the health yeah so it's quite shocking actually to see that thanks for bringing that up. I was wondering if we could or if you can answer maybe or talk about if we could like have the luxury that we could go back in time and digital impact alliance is really strong and how to mitigate what was happening there or how would you imagine how we might do things better right. So I'm a real big believer in failure first of all I think I think we do need to learn from our mistakes and sometimes that's that's really necessary and I have a feeling that this is one of those times because innovation is something that people had to embrace they had to first come to terms with the idea that open source is a thing first of all they they weren't just going to Microsoft or whoever to build some proprietary one-off solution that would have been just as difficult but they wanted to you know to get that environment where people felt free to build their own solutions they felt empowered to do so I think was an important first step so I may not have changed that I wish it didn't get so quite so big and quite so broad but I think had we been there we could start making people aware of what was already out there and helping them to understand the value of incremental improvements versus the the not invented here problem but there was really no one in that space at the time that was even interested in having those conversations they were really one-on-one conversations and there wasn't a lot of clarity and it actually took the funders realizing that they were wasting their money to kind of wake up and hit the pause button fortunately they had done that so I think that this is probably a one-time thing and that we will have learned from that lesson so I'm hoping that this is a failure that was productive thanks for introduction you said that there are people who attended Sustain OSS session could we connect after the talk here it would be interesting to like discuss what were the outcomes who came and yeah yeah if you go to sustainoss.org there's a really great report up there a PDF of 30 pages or so all of our findings and all of the notes and everything that we have all of that raw material is available first of all I don't think there was any kind of recording or anything but this is a topic I think we need to be talking about much more I hope at next year's Fosdom and other events we start having these conversations much more often I know Open Collective is here I don't know if Nadia from GitHub is here those conversations are still ongoing and there are communities you can join and have those conversations at throughout the year but go to sustainoss.org to start with and that will help guide you to some of those participants and understand who's actively working on that right now Hi over here um I have a question whether you're trying to involve developers from the countries where these programs are used in developments and sustaining sustaining the programs yes absolutely so one of the many other areas of dial that I didn't get into today is we're actually building a program and we just closed an RFP to do a pilot program of what we call capacity building and our model for capacity building again this is a pilot we're going to test and see how it works is to take developers who are just out of university this is probably going to happen somewhere in Africa the country is to be determined still people who are coming out of an African university fresh college graduates match them up with both an open source software project and what we call an implementation need so this might be a government ministry who's trying to install one of these projects somewhere and we're going to match them up for six to nine months give them basically a paid internship and give them most importantly senior level mentors people who have been out in the field maybe they're from Europe or the US other you know senior essentially mentors to work with them on these on these projects to get the software out into the field and our hope is that that will put those graduates on the same level as someone coming out of the universities here in Europe who have that real hands on work experience so this is how we hoping to build that up over time I have to interrupt the Q&A we run out of time thank you very much for the great talk thank you all I am pretty sure he's going to be you're going to