 My name is Leszek, I'm with Wikimedia Deutschland, more about it in a second. I would like to share a few lessons learned of doing open source software development for a couple of years. In that organization, maybe a few words about Wikimedia first. The name might not be similar to some website that you might have heard of, the Free Encyclopedia website and it's not by accident. So Wikimedia Movement is a global community of folks who are committed or dedicated to free knowledge. So there are two sides of it, kind of one is the contributors, people who create content on Wikimedia projects including Wikimedia, the Free Encyclopedia that you might have heard of. And there are also other projects and there's also a software side of it. There's a media Wiki software which is the underlying Wiki software and there's some other software pieces in it. And I will not focus on the community, the content creation part of it, I will focus on the software part in this talk for the next couple of minutes. And two organizations that I would like to call out here, one is Wikimedia Foundation which is US based on profit. There are the folks who host Wikipedia and do the whole operation side of it and they are the main maintainer of this Wiki software. And there's also Wikimedia Deutschland. Deutschland is a German for Germany in case you haven't come across that. So we are German chapter of the Wikimedia movement and in terms of software development we focus more on the projects called Wikibas and Wikidata which are to oversimplify the knowledge graphs that are curated in a Wiki way. And Wikimedia Deutschland is also my employer who sent me here, thanks for that. And I would like to start with a bit of reflection or I'm sure all folks in this room have been thinking about it, what is open source and there was mentioned multiple times in the keynotes in the morning. So the people way smarter than me have shared their thoughts about what open source is. So it's a bit embarrassing and feeling silly to share my idea about it, but with me. So if I ask Wikipedia what open source is there's this highlight on the license and on the permissions to use and distribute the source code and folks at Gabriela or Niti earlier today mentioned what is truly open, what is open and those kind of things. So the open, the license is very important but and looking at what Wikimedia Germany does it seems that we use the right licenses or like this or basically all source code that we create is public on those platform them. So it seems like we are good, but then I cannot help to think that the open source is more than that. So to me open source is a tool. It's not the tool, but it's one of the tools that could bring equity to tech. So it could be a tool that could drive the social or social or economical change. So you don't have to be a big tech organization in order to create a successful software product or you don't have to be a big tech organization to solve real people's problems. So I have this idea of a thriving ecosystem of projects that enable each other. So apart from equity the enablement is also a part of open source in my mind. So my former colleague Pablo used to make his reference to this saying of standing on the shoulder of giants. So basically I imagine this work where folks build upon others work. They don't have to solve all the problems themselves but also they also give back what problems they have solved. So anyone who could enable through it and build software that allows that. And with that kind of extended in course definition I would like to share, I did a bit of lame analysis on my own. How the community of Germany does and I would like to share some numbers. I'm not saying these are good numbers or bad numbers, I actually do not know. But when I looked at our flagship software project they called Wikibase. We had a bit more than 1200 commits or contributions this year. And out of those seven folks have made contributions who are not non-Wikimedia staff and they made 75 contributions there. So this is less than a percent there. And when I look at our GitHub organization we have 54 members there and I looked at what those folks have been doing. Myself included in 2023 so far. And those users or eight of them made 130 contributions to non-Wikimedia related projects. I myself apparently didn't do none as well. So I think it cannot help the feeling that we as Wikimedia Germany could be doing better than that. So I did a bit of with my colleagues and my peers in the community we did a bit of analysis what we're doing and being a software engineer and other practitioners at heart. I couldn't think or couldn't help approaching it a bit like retrospective. So I will share four highlights. There were many takeaways but given the short time I have I will limit to just a few. So I kind of framed it in the framework of dropout, keep, improve retrospective if you know the format. So the thing that seems to me like is the most pressing issue or the biggest anchor for us that stops us from being more open source that we are so far is falling this not invented huge trap. So you might know it or not but for many reasons very often quite well well these are valid requirements or valid reasons but sometimes they might be excuses. So often we because of security or performance or we think we have special requirements we wouldn't use the software which exists there but we will build our own solution for a problem at hand. And while again this is oftentimes justified what it also results we built the software that no one else uses in their project so we basically build that maybe the best software in the world but this is just for us and also we are not making that much of upstream contributions because then again we don't base our work on someone else's work so there is no upstream to contribute to. And a related thing that I would like us as Wikimedia or Wikimedia Germany to changes open up for a perspective for more than a single maintainer organization. So we are in a setting that we are a single maintainer organization which makes maybe easy for us to fall in this not invented here think as well because we do not make the vision or what the software or the projects should be explicit. So as long as it serves our purpose is fine but we are not clear about it. So that makes makes it hard for others to understand how to contribute or what do I want to get from the software? So if we made the we allowed other perspectives who would then define what is the vision for the software it would also be easier for folks to contribute because they will understand what kind of things are needed what contributors maybe will be welcome what stuff makes zero sense to work on because nobody cares about it. And there was a quite interesting talk a few minutes ago about giving compensation to open source contributors. I think this is a very important topic but I think there's opposite side of spectrum that we ended up at some point in our history. So basically Wikimedia has hired almost all contributors that existed there. And I think that helps to burn out or basically limit your contributor base quite significantly because it's easier for folks to drop out if there are staff members and if that's all the contributors exist you end up again in the kind of software which is in its own cycle and no one else is contributing to it or using it. Thing that I would like to give a shout out to my colleagues at Wikimedia Germany is supporting or helping build up those self organized groups that use the software or try to build the software. I give an example of Wikibay stakeholder group there. They are very good because Wikimedia Germany is a member there but we are not exclusive leaders so this is kind of going towards what I was saying in the previous slide. So there's multiple parties who have some interest in the software. They have an idea that they can articulate what they want the software to do. And that could lead to a bit more meaningful space for contributors. So this is kind of a step towards improving what we are missing that I think we should continue doing. And out of many things that I think we could be improving or should be improving is I will highlight the overly complicated software architecture. So I think Niti Rath also mentioned in her keynote earlier today that one of the things that are important for open source is making it easy for developers. That's exactly the point I'm trying to drive here. So our software has grown off their ears. You might know that as well. You have a kind of big model that would grow for a decade or multiple. It's hard to reason to contribute. But I think in our case it's hard to get paid stuff on board. It takes multiple months for people to be meaningfully fluent in what they're doing. So there might be even harder for folks who are not paid to work nine to five on that thing. And that's basically is a massive barrier of entry that software architecture is important for many things but in this case I think the barrier of entry is the thing I would like to flag. And I think I ran out of time by two minutes but thankfully I could start earlier. So that was it for me. I'm looking forward to hearing your stories. I'm also happy to discuss those points more with you folks throughout the conference. Thanks very much for listening. Have a lovely time in Bilbao and enjoy the conference. Thank you very much.