 you're pretty. Some familiar names. I'll go ahead and share my screen with you guys. There we go. And now off to keynote. So this next 45 minutes is going to be about everybody wins but who's paying. I was thinking I'd need like 30 minutes to say what I want to tell you guys and then after that I'd be happy to take some questions or to hear your ideas and discuss. But in case you do have like a pressing question that cannot wait feel free to interrupt. At this point now I'm sharing my screen I cannot see you guys anymore so feel free to just interrupt with audio because I can also I cannot read the chat so if you put something there I won't read it until the end. Let me turn on clock as well so I won't lose track of time. Yeah there we go. So you can all hear me okay right? Yes. Okay perfect. So my name is Emma. I'm currently in Paris but I live in the Netherlands. I'm 21 and I know open knowledge in Belgium mainly through education and that is because four years ago I graduated from high school and I decided not to enroll in a university but instead to design my own college education. So that's a whole different story and a whole different talk but I just wanted to let you know because that was really the entrance for me to become interested in open source and working open in general because I created Emma's College. So Emma's College is it says it there clearly it's a personal university designed managed and attended by me. I decided to that I wanted to learn in the real world. I researched learning and education and I began giving lectures in that and consulting companies and and schools on their learning strategy. So what started out as something that I wanted to learn for myself and delving in those theories and then using myself as a guinea pig also started to become the way for me to earn money so it was kind of like a two-way street of being an entrepreneur and guiding my own learning and that is what is Emma's College. So if you go to emascollege.com you find this notion page that has really really is documentation of what I've done the past years and I created that about a year ago or I started creating it then because I was I think about two years into this journey when I figured that it might be important for me to document what I was learning and what I was doing because I had a pretty it wasn't like I was just doing or bringing into practice executing this master plan because I don't think learning works that way it's way more organic than that but I was very precise on which mentors I had which pairs I had how I made sure I'd write balance between online and offline learning and practical and theoretical learning. So I wanted to share that because I figured I'm not going to get a degree and my friends that were in university were like approaching their final years and writing pieces. So I decided to delve into the world of how to create a portfolio and also open badges and that's how I came across open recognition and open recognition is something that open knowledge also works a lot on and it's the idea that if we create openness in the skills and knowledge that people have learning becomes easier and everybody wins because imagine I think it's like 15 of us right now in this group imagine that we have clear insight into the skills and knowledge of everybody involved here it would become so much more easier to so much more easy to learn from each other and with each other and there are quite some initiatives already focusing on hey as the nature of work is changing and as the nature of learning is changing we should go differently about how we make learning visible and how we credit learning for example through open badges but in open knowledge I really found the first partner who who spoke about learning and who spoke about recognition in the same way as I thought of it and that is not something that has to do with evidence and proving and status within society but rather as making a continuous process visible and in doing so enhancing that that precise process of learning because it becomes more effective or you can more effectively find others to learn from and to learn with if you have that open recognition so open recognition was really the first contact point I had with working open and with the philosophy of open knowledge and in Belgium and and that made me question what does open source mean really throughout the past three years I'd been involved with the development of multiple software products and apps that had to do with making informal learning easier and making it easier for the learning groups and most of those initiatives were open source but what I saw happening is that open source was really reduced to putting your code on github and telling people that yes it is there you can look it up but I can't code myself I was interested in the the possible solutions those those ideas or those products could offer but there were no way accessible and yeah to extent I was kind of disappointed in what open source was at that point or the first interactions I had with how the philosophy was brought into life until I I found out that years and years like 20 maybe 30 years ago when Mozilla started publishing about what open source should be they really define it as open source should be working transparent and participatory and for me the the element of participatory is exactly what I missed as I'm not a coder myself but I am and interested and I know like enough of the basics to be able to have a constructive conversation with somebody who who does know how to how to build these things um so I became interested in in how can we use open source in a way that it was intended and for me that is going beyond putting your code on github and making that transparent it goes beyond giving solely a technical explanation it's really um I don't know if you guys there are some Dutch speakers in the audience I don't know if you guys know the correspondent um this is where if anybody knows it you should offer yourself you should speak up yes I know it yeah you know it so what the correspondent does their news platform and they are their like slogan is an antidote against breaking news so they have this whole philosophy which is very interesting and you should definitely check out they have this whole philosophy about how news should be about things that are important that things that sell and things that click so it shouldn't be breaking it should be constructive so they're way more on if you have a spectrum of like the the one hour news cycle and then investigative journalism there are way more to the right of that spectrum or to the left for you guys um but what they do what for me is a very interesting example of working open or working open source is that they give insight into their process as journalists and their research process but they write it in such a way that anybody who's not a journalist can also understand and for me that is the level of participatory software development or participatory solution development of any kind should be so with that in mind and given that I kind of had seen the world of of designing your own education or I wanted something new I uh I created or founded the open fields foundation this at the beginning of this year and here I just copy our our mission statement the open fields foundation works on open entrepreneurial and quick-witted solutions for complex problems our work arches over the borders between countries domains and clusters in society in uniting the power of tech and the power of inspired citizenship we aim to advance equality it's a very fancy text basically saying that I and we my board and I we think that open is a good idea and that open in the definition of being transparent and participatory is a good idea to kind of remember within software development as well as reintroduce or further introduce into other domains of society mainly in how research is being done academically for example so when um the when open knowledge belgium asked me if I wanted to say something or I give a talk during um during open belgium I first thought well what do I have to say they're they're way more experienced in anything open and uh with regards to this whole field I I really feel like a new kid on the block which I like but also might not give me the full credibility to uh to talk like too with too much confidence about it um but what I did think what might be interesting is to talk about the financial structure behind doing um work that involves advancing openness in society because as I started the open fields foundation I um I really thought a lot about how can I make this a healthy organization financially and how how best to go about um in general um how to best go about projects that involve openness and projects that um in which everybody wins but it's unclear who's going to pay for that um because it's it often is hard to quantify the or at least I find it hard to quantify any of you totally disagree with that I'd love to hear your thoughts later but I often and I find it hard to quantify the benefits of openness because so much of it is is dependent on a philosophy or a worldview and the hardest thing is to quantify the the benefits or the economic benefits benefits in general of working open before you start a project so there's if it's already there it's obvious but then it's already um from everybody or like of everybody so there's a very interesting uh really problem of the comments when it comes to um making things open because there is a reason things are the way they are and let me check the time yeah we're going good and that involves conflict conflicting interests uh there are people for example it let's take the example of um a governmental institution that is not enclosing certain information that would be um right for citizens to know um there is conflict conflicting interest because um it might not be in the interest of the people working on that information to share everything because a transparency can be also it can lay bare their faults or their mistakes or their maybe lack of efficiency and that might not be in their interest because of course they want to keep their job uh there's power there's money and there's fear and these are all broad concepts but um there's habit I'm not sure if any of you guys kind of follow what happened with uh a scandal in the Netherlands revolving uh fraud with allowances so um is there anybody that knows that yes yes I it was in the news in Belgium as well ah okay yeah so basically what happened is that uh Dutch citizens have been treated horribly by our tax agency um there was racial profiling but also very harsh punishing of kind of minor mistakes which drove people into thousands and thousands of years of debts of losing their houses and really not um their cases were um not handled well by judges as well as the tax agency um there were just people that were kind of stuck in this uh Kaskajsk um is that an English word as well um this dystopian world where they were kind of held captive by a government that they wouldn't have access to this one person that would just help them um I think the easy solution there is well the everything that a tax agency does or their procedures should just be open and um that is of course easy to say but there are a lot of reasons also uh why people working there for example do not feel equipped or uh able to stand up for what is right um anyway that is um a long way to explain that there's also a reason why things are not open and that makes that not only it's unclear uh who's going to pay but it's also unclear if there's even somebody willing to pay because it there's this contraintuitive uh dynamic between open source being um or or working open being uh productive and better for society when it's there but the process of getting there is this is long and hard and nobody wants that when I started the open fields foundation I uh that was at a point where I decided that for the coming years in my career I didn't want to maximize for profit but for independence and I talked I thought about that for a long time because um there there are for-profit companies and what they are optimized for is very clear they're optimized for profit uh but then you have non-profit organizations and my question for a long time really was uh I don't want to have an organization that is defined by what what is not optimizing because then what are you going to do right and optimizing for for every everything else and also it's it's just not clear where you're going so I don't know if this is just my brain but a non-profit is just a very unclear concept for me um so then I thought well is it for for um for impact but that can be through for companies as well or is it for social justice but that can be through for companies as well and if the sole purpose of an organization in essence is to um continue to exist then I think what in my definition the the goal for a non-profit should be optimization for independence so that you can continue to exist doing what you find important whether that is having impact or or solving whatever problem you're aimed at but do that independently so you cannot be corrupted by corrupted by money issues or time constraints or organizations that really stop you from from doing your work because you are dependent of them well dependence that is the interesting word of course here um the big challenge around money is that you become dependent and whether that is from clients or from subsidies or from private investors as soon as you need their money you need them and you are dependent and that is exactly that is exactly opposite of that independence that I that I want for the open fields foundation so I I thought about this and I think that all money relationships with stakeholders you can see in um like somewhere mapped on this graph so one x is time and the other is power so you can be time dependent time independent power dependent or power independent and with time I I mostly mean cash flow really maybe I should change it into cash flow because if you're dependent on money because you need to deliver certain results at a certain time and your development of the solution that you're trying to create is constrained by the time restraints because you need money um then your time dependent and if there are no such constraints your time independent and when it comes to power if people investing money or paying money to your organization means that they have decision-making power or they can influence the things that you're doing um in a in a profound way of course no organization is an is an island and it is of course you're going to be influenced by your context and your stakeholders but I think there is um also a spectrum of how much the the money and flow influences the decisions that you make as an organization so for example government subsidies it could be time dependent because you have you are really restricted to their time frame on which date they're going to give you money and which you have to deliver like what things you have to deliver at a certain point and you could be power dependent because if they're the only one funding a project if they don't agree with something that you're doing that makes you lose your funding and and makes you unable to for example pay your employees then of course you're dependent but there are also scenarios imaginable where you're you are time dependent but not so much power uh dependent more so power independent because the way the content contract is structured uh they have no um no influence to the decision-making process well what i've defined for myself are um and for the open fields foundation is this philosophy of three pillars that i try to uh stick to in every money related um decision that i make first being all stakeholders are investors some with money others in value of course i find it naive to think that you don't need money as an organization because you do um you do need money in order to continue to exist because we live in a world where a lot of things cost money but money is not only is not the only value that your stakeholders can give you they could also give you social value they could give you recognition they could give you um access to their social capital their intellectual capital uh they could give you information and feedback and those are all valuable they could give you access to their stuff or to their building and those are all um important ways to define value as well so for me this is a way to not get like a a tunnel vision on on solely people that you have a money relationship with because there are a lot of different value relationships you can have with stakeholders or people that are affected by the work that you do or that you're trying to do then access over resources in a world where um resources are abundant i truly believe that i think that access truly is the the the gold and and maybe money is the silver and in all cases where i can choose between access over resources i will always choose access to to people to networks to information to data rather than resources because i think that the access is where the scarcity lies and the resources uh is where the abundance is and then lastly money should increase and not decrease freedom this is as soon as i step or i'm i'm about to step into a relationship with a stakeholder uh money relationship with stakeholder where honestly the the freedom of of the work i'm doing is decreased rather than increased i take a step back and decline and that is very contra it can be very contraintuitive because um i think a lot of things in our society revolve around we need money to be free so it's um so we find it sensible to kind of let our freedom be degree decreased so we can be free so we offer freedom to be free if that makes sense i think that's the wrong way around so i tried to keep this as a slogan um in my mind um my phone keeps screen locking so i'm not sure where the time is that's why i keep looking there um so this is all like a nice story how would that work so we've only just started like two and a half months ago um so it might be weird for me to talk about this uh but i thought that it might be interesting to share my ideas and to hear you guys's especially as we are a young organization and i've i spent a lot of time lately thinking about this uh ideas for the future would be to distribute investors so to make sure that you're not dependent on just a few investors but to consciously choose to for example not accept bigger grants but go for a few smaller um which can cause a lot of acts from work but i think that it pays off in the freedom that you get from that um then um a personal payments so this is the idea of buy one give one so a lot of social entrepreneurs have incorporated that within their business model and i think that nonprofits can learn from that uh so how can we create solutions in which people would not only be tempted to pay for it themselves but also for others and it could be like a pay get one give one but it could also be buy something for somebody else so i would be interested in experimenting with that then consistent crowdfunding not only for project but uh for example in the forms of loans there's a company in Netherlands called lend a hand who's a very they're a very good example of crowdfunding with loans um and there you can loan money to an African farmer for a few years and they give uh market average interest rates on all your loans and that for me is a very great example of how crowdfunding can also be something more long term rather than your stereotypical or your average in ego go project that is just or go fund me that is just about one project and one raising it and the very like urgent campaign ever rules around that um i just wanted to i when it comes to distribution of investors i think that is going to be even more important as there is this financial crisis that is going to come i think we we haven't seen the worst yet at all when it comes to the economic impact of COVID as well so i'm curious to see how that's going to develop the whole landscape of subsidies as um yeah it's going to be tougher weather for a lot of governments i figure not that i'm such an expert on that but that's just a thought uh and then lastly what i'm very interested in is the fire movement but then for organizations i'm not sure if there are many examples of it i haven't seen it so if anybody in the crowd uh know something like this i'd love to learn from that the fire movement it stands for financial independence retire early so there's this whole niche or like self-culture of people that have defined uh being financially independent as a goal from for themselves and they have investment strategies but also spending and income strategies that that make sure that they reach the financial independence as early as they can so the idea is that you build this um the amount of money that you need to keep in the bank and to invest and with the average yearly interest rates you will have your own basic income so you can take out um let's say a thousand a month and because the total amount of money is so big it just keeps on growing without you having to do anything um that is of course also not something that's accessible for everybody but i would be interested in exploring the possibilities for that as an organization to create total independence because you just have that much money uh to invest and take it like an industry that just keeps growing well then bringing this into practice this summer i'm hosting the open summer of code in the Netherlands which is a project that has uh done fantastically over the past nine years already in uh in belgium organized by open knowledge in belgium uh so i'm sure that a lot of people in the crowd know more about it or maybe even have seen more about it than than i have the past year or yeah year and a half um so what we're going to do is to take uh societal problems uh and have students create solutions for that open source for the month of july and in ossock nl projects always entail a societal problem in dire need of fixing the open source technology you need to fix that participants that dare to share and a commitment to make the world a better place so open summer of code is really like an accelerator for projects like these and what i would like to do is to take every project and and fund it in a different way to make sure that i and we as the open fields foundation uh can experiment with different ways of investing and i'd be happy to share our experiences with that uh because um when i started looking to what does it mean to run a non-profit i was kind of disappointed by the uh the the tiny amount of uh honest reflections on that or like lessons learned or best practices um maybe there are resources that i've i've totally missed but when it comes to uh running a for-profit company there are so many resources on how to how to best do that um and i don't think there are that many for for a non-profit organization maybe because the landscape is so scattered because of your non-profit then and what are you um but anyways i'd be happy to share our experiences there as well so this was mostly just ideas uh that we'll be bringing into practice for the coming months and i'd be happy to share our experiences um and for now i think it's like four thirty uh three thirty i mean so i'll stop sharing and i'll be happy to take any questions if there are any questions there's something in the chat yes oh that was way earlier that was maybe about what i if i was uh if you could hear me okay are there any questions no questions at all is there anybody who wants to share their experience maybe ask it do you want to share something about how um how you guys are doing this at uh how you go about the financial health of open knowledge not a good question good question i should think about that before i uh before i answer i'm also happy to hear from other from other people in the audience first and people can use their uh audio if they want you don't have to type your question in the chat uh hello can can you hear me yes i think so uh hello uh i recently uh also founded a non-profit so the questions you presented are the ones we've also faced regarding to uh acquiring uh the needed resources to to make things and to build things and to um just to to to free some time in fact for us our reflection was that um acquiring money would just allow us to buy our self-time to invest in our foundation in our mission because most of us uh do already have uh jobs uh so our non-profit non-profit is like a site occupation for most of us um so we we we didn't have that that many reflections on how to acquire the money because we could just use our own existing resources to go forward so um so it still was interesting to to hear about your reflections and your how you uh differentiate its the money income on being the independence you could buy to you can have with it and not being constrained in time and money it's very interesting to know i didn't really have a particular question because i also i'm very we were very as soon and you know i've a very young uh uh organization so we we're not really facing needs of money right now because if only to buy ourselves some time yeah but i wanted to to congratulate you in fact for your for your investment and wishing you good luck on your own and on your pursuits that's great thank you yeah i think that's a that's a the strategy um that's very common and that that i'm uh mostly doing myself now as well so um the financial independence what i see happening a lot is that the organization a non-profit organization itself is not necessarily uh completely financially independent or sufficient and and healthy and therefore all the people involved uh do unpaid work or uh do like have a job and then do this as something second tier which there is nothing wrong with that and that can be a very uh yeah very productive way to advance the the uh the cases or the issues that you find important but what i really find like it would make me so happy if i managed to create something that in itself is um is healthy and that the independence lies on the organization rather than the people like rather than a coming back to the shoulders of the people that are involved but yeah yeah yeah so it's so it's not a burden to carry on if you can carry on on your own and not be uh have to sell your values or or um just uh attack the be fragile in that aspect on the independence yeah exactly exactly yeah thanks for sharing anybody else well if there's nobody um oh there's nobody also what should we do do you want to uh say something about the uh how open knowledge or maybe you saw that Bert is also in the in the call as our financial responsible from the board maybe he wants to comment as well i was i was listening in and also working at the same time so uh thank you for the presentation um so yeah for i don't know if it's the open knowledge view or the uh for my view my personal view but what i'm mainly interested also in is how because a lot of the dependency of open knowledge is also on public money and on subsidies which is not always uh as sustainable as it could be on the long term because each time you need to reapply for subsidies and it is uh it's not a secure long term sustainable uh income source uh and rightfully so so it's good that there are good uh processes to to decide on where subsidies goes but what i'm wondering is if if you are in a space of open source and yeah there is some public interest if there is not another model possible in which public money gets allocated to public interest things in a in a way which is more uh flexible than current subsidies programs because like you like your title of your talk also say if everybody wins if society wins and everybody's paying that's the subsidy all our money then uh yeah this is this is uh then this is another kind of uh subsidy than uh something which is uh less reusable so i'm just i'm just wondering what what's possible in that field yeah what i find interesting and i'll put a book in the chat it's called a new social contract a new social contract by a dutch politician that played a major role in um kind of um uh enclosing everything that happened with the allowance affair um so he did a lot of research and one of his uh analysis about how this could ever happen is really um one of the things that he highlights is that the and i haven't checked the data so i mine this might not be the most intelligent quote i've done this session but um he he said that there has been this erosion in organizations that uh are non-profit and that exists to kind of control the power of government uh as well as support government um so so he states that yes we have this system of um of paying taxes and being in a democracy and choosing your government but that system is uh it's not perfect so there will always be be flaws and citizens active citizens have to take up that um uh take up the space like the where the the erosion exists and control government for example or to show government how you can work openly um and i'm saying all this because yes um governmental subsidies are a great way to fund things that are for everybody but at the same time sometimes what's good for everybody is to control the mere institution that should distribute that wealth and if you create a relationship of independent or of dependence with them um uh you might uh lose some of the the freedom to to work so that's um i'm not sure frank says something this system exists her called funds would give money to a fund yeah it is um it is nothing new i know that uh funds uh do exist what i find interesting however is how you as a non-profit can create a balance of governmental subsidies as well as funds because um funds can be um uh can give you freedom in the sense that they are not governmental but at the same time they can also like restrict or uh uh take up decision-making power that you don't want to give away so um i think the the interesting discussion is not necessarily which one uh you should go all in on but uh which like you could combine to create who's then to take taking decision yeah that is the the board of the um of the organization that you've started this is a funny conversation that when you're typing a fund also has a board yes that is true but if you see organizations as collectives of citizens that try to uh support or control what the government is already doing if that is like a rough definition i can just pose um um then i think none of those uh collectives of citizens are going to be perfect um so so i think that the power really lies in the multitude of them because of course the the board and and how i lead my organization is not perfect the same goes for for open knowledge if i may uh maybe a three to say that i okay can i can i add something to this what uh what Hans is also saying yeah my point of view on this is so i totally agree what you're saying France the my point of view is maybe from the government perspective how do you avoid that if you fund anything that uh some of these funds goes to things that are not in the public interest so actually the other the other way around how do you avoid that the subsidy is uh used on things which is is not in the in the general public interest i think that's that's more the the point coming from my perspective and this is mainly in funding of uh technology projects by government i think i think they can it can be improved on how much of this work becomes public domain uh so the the whole idea of being default in the public domain and then only the things that is really necessary out of the public domain i think that's uh that's the uh the point of view and i i shared also a link what i what i isn't what i think is an interesting idea of what's an interesting idea i don't know the status of that but in the us the atnf micro purchases platform in which uh actually so that this is a this is another way of uh uh trying to be as flexible as possible to solve a problem from the government with money from the government and anybody who can contribute uh as a possibility to contribute to it so it's uh it's not like a procurement process elis not a subsidy or something in between and i think this is a very nice it could be a very nice model for specific use cases yeah it also it also exists in belgium uh there is nothing new and first of all in the united states you don't have to pay that much taxes so if everybody is paying taxes to a democrat a democratical uh uh government who is spending then the money in subsidies it's uh i am a board member of many uh not-for-profit organizations and you have small incremental subsidies they are called tenders in belgium so you can win tenders which are small and incremental but they give no continuity to the objective you want to realize in uh some of those not-for-profit organizations the objectives are not always short-term objectives they're always long-term objective objectives and so you need long-term money you need a lot of money and if you want to be independent to realize some things then then you have to have a mixture mixture of many different sources of finance and then it's only possible to be some kind of independent yeah but in a way you're always dependent yeah yeah all those forms exist you sorry france is there something missing that you that you think or do you say okay there's enough there's a lot of things missing and that's why i was here today yeah but uh uh but the thing that you're talking about they all exist in some way or another so if you really want to find something new one of the new things that have been put forward in the last 10 years but they all all exist for many years before too is is a structured way of doing crowdfunding or something like that in which you get money directly from people who are interested in your objectives and that's yeah but loans are very there are there is a lot of scientific study on the small micro loans in the third world how destructive that they are so it is not a good example but the i think for instance frontier and this is a good example of an organization that is active on a worldwide level and which has a lot of independence because it only gets money from gifts yeah yeah and and then you get a powerful organization with a board of course many boards and all kind of structure but they will never take any money from any government because then they lose independence and but this is a good example of an organization which started very small is now very big and is having a lot of power also but has a lot of independence too yeah thanks for sharing that i see peter yon also in the chat kiss kiss bank bank allows for free donation crowd sourcing yeah um i am thinking i'm looking at the time yeah round up uh yes yes we can i will i will already stop the recording um and then you can still if there are questions left you can still answer them