Designed for us: FOSSY Day 1
Matt uses hats as props in his talks. This is a great idea and more people should do it.
Within computer science, the free and open-source (FOSS) community has long provided an oasis for developers looking to protect the public good. The software that powers significant areas of our lives might be designed for us, understood by us, and tailored to our needs. Or… they might not. Open sourcing allows users to create something useful, then reap the benefits of collective intelligence (CI) as a decentralized community comes together to improve it. Bugs are found, features added, and UI smoothed. Win-win-win.
“GitHub is littered with good ideas that are impossible to use. You must make it easy for people to get started and advance.”
At least two generations of developers, entrepreneurs, and other industry pros have been raised in the FOSS spirit. I’m here in Portland with many of them at FOSSY, the first yearly conference of its kind.
Three Key Insights
Measuring community health
The engine that drives CI in open-source projects - is challenging. Usually, moderators rely on their intuition, which stretches thin when communities grow quickly. A new Linux Foundation project called CHAOSS lets moderators mix and match from their 80+ metric toolkit, getting down to an atomic level of detail. Measuring CI requires mapping individual interactions and collective outcomes, which is an incredibly complex process. I’m excited to poke into CHAOSS’s box and see how businesses can begin to spot CI at work.
The great pendulum inside the Oregon Convention Center
Accessibility
Just because a project is open-source does not mean people will see it. Clean documentation helps contributors not get lost, although convincing contributors to suggest new ideas can be tricky when an existing one looks “official.”
Not all that glitters is gold
Sometimes, open-sourcing backfires. The community may not be interested in improving your project, or collectives of bad actors may be more motivated to find and exploit them. Once you start augmenting abilities with AI, positive or negative effects grow faster. Choosing when to open-source is a careful cost-benefit analysis.
Three Faces of FOSSY
Volunteers help community members choose their own adventure for the week
Stefano Maffulli, executive director of the Open Source Initiative, hopes to help leaders understand what it means for AI to be open. He’s assembling an all-star team to overhaul the guiding principles of open-source AI. It's the first major update since the 2000s - and one of the decade's most influential moments in augmented CI (ACI).
Matt Yonkovit is the head of open-source strategy and growth at Scarf, an OSS analytics company. Besides wearing excellent hats, he is a passionate champion of open-source developers, working to help them grow their projects and connect with commercial users.
Dawn Foster directs data science at CHAOSS. She co-chairs the CNCF Contributor Strategy Technical Advisory Group and has given over one hundred (!) industry talks at OSS industry events. She’s a gifted strategist and communicator who builds bridges between communities.
A Session I enjoyed
I’m surprised by how many OSS advocates have writing backgrounds. Although I guess OSS projects live and die by how well they’re communicated to the public.
“Growing Open Source Adoption,” led by Matt Yonkovit and OSS consultant Emily Omier, was a hands-on workshop for improving adoption and engagement with open-source projects. Emily’s young daughter opened the session by encouraging everyone to imagine open-sourced puppies! We discussed applying commercial marketing and demand-generation techniques to open-source projects without compromising the OSS spirit. Good workshops provide time for deep thinking, so we regularly broke into writing. The toughest question, I thought, was, “Without this project, what would become impossible? What would no longer exist?”
Looking forward to tomorrow
Stefano Maffulli offers me a sneak peek of his workshop slide deck.
Two questions have been a real thorn in my side recently, and I’m finally in the right place to find some answers. First: how do we measure ACI, live, in organizations? Second: how can the OSS community have productive conversations about managing risks from dark collective intelligence? Maybe we’ll talk about it during “Open Source Insomnia: What Keeps Us Up at Night.”
