[00:00.000 --> 00:08.660]  So, yeah, today, I'm going to be talking to you about sustaining free and open-source
[00:08.660 --> 00:14.320]  software, exploring community, financial, and technical practices.
[00:14.320 --> 00:17.680]  I was trying to go for the longest title possible.
[00:17.680 --> 00:19.160]  Do you think it's long enough?
[00:19.160 --> 00:20.400]  Probably a little bit longer.
[00:20.400 --> 00:21.960]  Okay, so my name's Abby.
[00:21.960 --> 00:24.520]  I do run open-source maintainer programs at GitHub.
[00:24.520 --> 00:29.280]  I'm also an organizer for Sustain OSS, and I care lots about maintainers, about the
[00:29.280 --> 00:33.720]  open-source ecosystem, so I'm really excited to talk to you about that today.
[00:33.720 --> 00:39.520]  So before I dive in, I do want to say thank you to all of these names, all these handles.
[00:39.520 --> 00:45.800]  About a week ago, I tweeted about this talk, but also just asking for examples of sustainable
[00:45.800 --> 00:48.480]  open-source, and all of you really came through.
[00:48.480 --> 00:53.920]  There was a lot of responses, a lot of things to think about, and, yeah, it really changed
[00:53.920 --> 00:57.600]  how I was thinking of this talk, so it actually gave me more work, but I think it was worth
[00:57.600 --> 00:58.600]  it.
[00:58.600 --> 01:01.720]  You'll get to hear some insights from all of these people today.
[01:01.720 --> 01:04.200]  So thanks, especially if your name's up here.
[01:04.200 --> 01:05.880]  You're the best.
[01:05.880 --> 01:08.520]  So here's what we're talking about today.
[01:08.520 --> 01:13.240]  So it is my first time at FOSSTEM, so, yeah, thank you so much to the organizers for having
[01:13.240 --> 01:14.240]  me here.
[01:14.240 --> 01:15.920]  Yeah, it's been really fun.
[01:15.920 --> 01:17.960]  I've really been enjoying this conference.
[01:17.960 --> 01:22.280]  Everyone told me it was going to be really cold, but I think they forgot that I'm Canadian,
[01:22.280 --> 01:27.840]  and this is really nice weather, so it's great here, so I don't know what I'm talking about,
[01:27.840 --> 01:30.920]  but yeah, so I do want to share a little bit about myself, my background, and why I care
[01:30.920 --> 01:35.800]  so much about FOSSTEM, and then we'll go into sustaining FOSSTEM, and spoiler alert, I do
[01:35.800 --> 01:40.320]  think maintainers are a huge part of this, and then from there we'll look at those three
[01:40.320 --> 01:44.280]  lenses around how we can be sustainable through community, through financial, and through
[01:44.280 --> 01:46.720]  technical practices.
[01:46.720 --> 01:47.720]  So first some background.
[01:47.720 --> 01:54.080]  It's a picture of me and my grandma, my Lola, also my little brothers there.
[01:54.080 --> 01:57.320]  There are pictures of me and just my grandma, but I really liked this one, even though my
[01:57.320 --> 02:01.640]  brother is stealing the show, I don't know, it's fun, and I like how big my eyes look
[02:01.640 --> 02:08.240]  with my glasses, it's cute, but I started my career writing open source software at the
[02:08.240 --> 02:12.320]  Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, so this was really meaningful work for me, because
[02:12.320 --> 02:16.960]  my grandmother, my Lola, she had passed away from cancer, so this idea that I was helping
[02:16.960 --> 02:21.840]  someone else's grandma, someone else's Lola, was really powerful, and it was really, yeah,
[02:21.840 --> 02:26.280]  really meaningful work, but the longer I was in academia, the more I realized how often
[02:26.280 --> 02:31.360]  scientists maybe fudge their data a little bit, or not share parts of their data, just
[02:31.360 --> 02:35.400]  that they can get published, or they can get the best results, and get tenure or get that
[02:35.400 --> 02:41.040]  funding, and this was all happening at the expense of real innovation, so I was really
[02:41.040 --> 02:45.400]  outraged at that, that's when I got really into open science, especially using open source
[02:45.400 --> 02:49.920]  and open data to help us find the best innovations, because I do think if we're sharing and we're
[02:49.920 --> 02:54.160]  building upon each other's work, that's how we'll do the best in the world.
[02:54.160 --> 02:59.400]  So since then, my career has gone from maintaining open science tools to teaching open source
[02:59.400 --> 03:04.360]  best practices, and now at GitHub, I'm supporting the maintainers in this new world.
[03:04.360 --> 03:07.960]  I started about six months ago, so I'm still a bit new, actually seven months, I counted
[03:07.960 --> 03:08.960]  the other day, yeah.
[03:08.960 --> 03:13.520]  So I'm going to be sharing some of these experiences as we go through the talk.
[03:13.520 --> 03:19.920]  All right, so now, sustaining FOSS, again, supporting maintainers, so I did frame this
[03:19.920 --> 03:25.240]  talk about sustainability, around sustainability, I do like, I think there's a lot of conversation
[03:25.240 --> 03:29.680]  happening in that space, I do think it's important, but after that tweet and like the responses
[03:29.680 --> 03:35.440]  I was getting there, I realized, I care a lot about project resilience, and how projects
[03:35.440 --> 03:41.080]  are able to survive over time, so a slight shift, but I think it helped me really think
[03:41.080 --> 03:47.600]  about how are projects resilient and strong and able to withstand troubles that come their
[03:47.600 --> 03:48.600]  way.
[03:48.600 --> 03:54.960]  So to me, the biggest factor that affects software's ability to continue is maintenance.
[03:54.960 --> 03:58.400]  In this changing tech landscape, if something isn't maintained for a while, it will really
[03:58.400 --> 04:00.160]  quickly become outdated.
[04:00.160 --> 04:04.240]  So I really like this quote from Toby Longel.
[04:04.240 --> 04:09.320]  He's an open ecosystem strategist, and this quote says, in open source, the maintainers
[04:09.320 --> 04:13.760]  working on the source code are the scarce resource that needs to be protected and nurtured.
[04:13.760 --> 04:17.080]  And we're missing a bit of context where he's talking about the commons, and I'm a little
[04:17.080 --> 04:22.800]  bit too jet-lagged to have a commons and public good conversation right now, but I do think
[04:22.800 --> 04:26.680]  this is an important framing, and I think it's important to be thinking about maintainers.
[04:26.680 --> 04:31.200]  I know Nadia Agbaal in her book, Working in Public, she also frames this problem as the
[04:31.200 --> 04:36.280]  resource is the maintainer's attention and trying to get their time, but I really like
[04:36.280 --> 04:40.640]  this framing around the person itself of a maintainer, and really what can we be doing
[04:40.640 --> 04:46.720]  to support maintainers, so then we are best supporting resilient open source.
[04:46.720 --> 04:50.160]  So this aligns a lot with what I've seen in movement building, where there's a lot of
[04:50.160 --> 04:55.240]  investment in raising up new leaders so that the movements can continue, and we also see
[04:55.240 --> 04:59.200]  this in corporations where people are always like, there's a lot of leadership training.
[04:59.200 --> 05:03.160]  Leaders are really important in communities, and it's the same for open source.
[05:03.160 --> 05:06.000]  Maintainers are really important for these communities.
[05:06.000 --> 05:11.160]  So if we look at supporting maintainers, we're going to look at these three lenses, and you
[05:11.160 --> 05:16.040]  don't have to address your project with all three of those lenses at once, and that's
[05:16.040 --> 05:19.040]  why I made an event diagram, but we're going to look at these three.
[05:19.040 --> 05:22.400]  So the first is on the community lens with succession planning.
[05:22.400 --> 05:24.840]  This one might not be as intuitive, so I'm going to dive into that a little bit more
[05:24.840 --> 05:26.340]  soon.
[05:26.340 --> 05:30.720]  The next one in pink is the financial side, so paying maintainers, and this is what we've
[05:30.720 --> 05:35.600]  heard a lot about lately, getting money to them, and the third one in blue is on the
[05:35.600 --> 05:38.840]  technical side, making it just easy to use and get started.
[05:38.840 --> 05:43.320]  So really supporting maintainers by taking away some of the maintainer burden, but also
[05:43.320 --> 05:47.720]  if a project is suddenly unmaintained, making it easy for someone to just take it and then
[05:47.720 --> 05:50.120]  run with it.
[05:50.120 --> 05:55.560]  And then just looking at the overlap pieces, say you have the pink and the blue, you have
[05:55.560 --> 06:01.840]  the financial piece and the technical piece, but you don't have that community piece.
[06:01.840 --> 06:05.280]  That's often like corporate open source, especially if they're not really investing
[06:05.280 --> 06:09.960]  in the community, and I think that's still valid and still fine, and this way it's okay
[06:09.960 --> 06:14.160]  because they can just pay new maintainers to come on board usually.
[06:14.160 --> 06:17.640]  So you don't really need all three of them to be completely sustainable.
[06:17.640 --> 06:21.440]  And then if you have just the green and the blue, so the community side and the technical
[06:21.440 --> 06:27.160]  side, but not that financial piece, that's like maybe a hobby project.
[06:27.160 --> 06:32.680]  I also really like how the open source archetypes, they have one, this is a report that was put
[06:32.680 --> 06:37.760]  up by Open Tech Strategies in Mozilla, they have an archetype called single maintainer
[06:37.760 --> 06:38.960]  houseplant.
[06:38.960 --> 06:42.640]  So if you're just like a maintainer by yourself, just like watering your little plant, you don't
[06:42.640 --> 06:47.160]  really need funding, funding might actually just hurt the project, but if it doesn't need
[06:47.160 --> 06:49.400]  that much maintenance, that's also fine.
[06:49.400 --> 06:53.720]  And then the last piece there, where you have the pink and the green, so you have the financial
[06:53.720 --> 06:58.440]  piece, you have the community piece, but really it's technically like it's just hard to get
[06:58.440 --> 07:01.280]  started, hard to use.
[07:01.280 --> 07:05.200]  That's often specialty libraries where you need like a really deep expertise in something
[07:05.200 --> 07:06.480]  to get involved.
[07:06.480 --> 07:11.040]  So those communities tend to have like very few maintainers that are very specialized,
[07:11.040 --> 07:17.520]  and they're still able to sustain over time, but they have other pieces to help with that.
[07:17.520 --> 07:21.960]  And you can probably survive with just one of these three, but I didn't map out all of
[07:21.960 --> 07:23.680]  them, it's a lot of things to map.
[07:23.680 --> 07:28.400]  All right, so the first one we're going to dive into is that succession planning, it's
[07:28.400 --> 07:30.480]  the community practices.
[07:30.480 --> 07:35.040]  So I did take this term from the corporate world, so companies often like look at succession
[07:35.040 --> 07:40.080]  planning to make sure that their companies will survive over long periods of time.
[07:40.080 --> 07:44.720]  And also you don't need to have this in open source, like BDFL is a model that we've seen
[07:44.720 --> 07:51.280]  many successful open source projects with BDFLs, but I do think that like tech is relatively
[07:51.280 --> 07:55.720]  new and open source is even newer, and that we're only starting to see people retire or
[07:55.720 --> 07:58.960]  we're starting to see people like get tired of maintaining packages and just delete them
[07:58.960 --> 08:00.120]  all.
[08:00.120 --> 08:04.880]  So I think we'll be thinking more about succession planning as we're seeing this natural churn
[08:04.880 --> 08:08.920]  of people go through the ecosystem.
[08:08.920 --> 08:12.640]  And I did have a conversation after that, I am really glad I tweeted about this talk.
[08:12.640 --> 08:18.040]  I should have said I set a goal earlier at the end of last year, it's a tweet every day,
[08:18.040 --> 08:22.240]  I just wanted to push myself to do something, and I would not have tweeted that if I didn't
[08:22.240 --> 08:23.240]  have that goal.
[08:23.240 --> 08:26.280]  I like to just sort of work on things on my own, but I'm glad I did that, so I'm working
[08:26.280 --> 08:28.040]  a little bit more open.
[08:28.040 --> 08:33.640]  But I did have a conversation with Deb Goodkin, she's the executive director of FreeBSD,
[08:33.640 --> 08:39.000]  and she pointed me towards this quote from Kirk McCusick, he's one of the original core
[08:39.000 --> 08:46.720]  maintainers for FreeBSD, but he says, a successful project has to be able to change the leadership,
[08:46.720 --> 08:52.480]  otherwise leadership becomes dead wood, which leaves the project rudderless.
[08:52.480 --> 08:58.080]  And that was Kirk writing this, so it's really small on my screen, he's writing just a piece
[08:58.080 --> 09:03.480]  on building and running an open source community, the FreeBSD project.
[09:03.480 --> 09:08.680]  But I do think this view of succession planning is helpful when thinking about the community,
[09:08.680 --> 09:11.940]  and it's really helpful for large communities where it can be really overwhelming working
[09:11.940 --> 09:17.200]  with everyone, but if you're prioritizing succession planning, then you know where you
[09:17.200 --> 09:20.600]  can have the most impact for your community long term.
[09:20.600 --> 09:26.160]  So an example I'll talk about, I think the easiest way to bring in succession planning
[09:26.160 --> 09:30.040]  is when you're selecting who to mentor in your project.
[09:30.040 --> 09:36.000]  So I like to suggest these three criteria, so that you're selecting people who are most
[09:36.000 --> 09:39.440]  likely to become leaders within your project.
[09:39.440 --> 09:44.360]  So first is mission aligned, they actually care about this work and want it to succeed.
[09:44.360 --> 09:48.960]  So I know you've probably seen many people come to your project that are more extractive,
[09:48.960 --> 09:51.800]  they don't care as much about the mission, but they just want something from the project,
[09:51.800 --> 09:53.280]  they just want to get something out of it.
[09:53.280 --> 09:57.360]  They're still good to have in the community, you can still welcome them, I just wouldn't
[09:57.360 --> 10:00.800]  invest a ton of time in them if you're mentoring people.
[10:00.800 --> 10:03.520]  So first make sure they're mission aligned, they're there, because they actually want
[10:03.520 --> 10:06.520]  the project to be there long term.
[10:06.520 --> 10:12.640]  Second available, do they actually have the time and resources to contribute?
[10:12.640 --> 10:15.520]  And it's great that we have these mentorship programs where they can get paid for their
[10:15.520 --> 10:19.320]  time, so this does open the door for more people.
[10:19.320 --> 10:23.000]  But if someone really wants to be part of this project, but then they don't have the
[10:23.000 --> 10:27.880]  time, I wouldn't also invest that time into mentorship unless they get that time, or unless
[10:27.880 --> 10:32.560]  you get the funding to help support their time or whatever is needed there.
[10:32.560 --> 10:36.000]  And then the third one there is willing to learn from whoever is mentoring them.
[10:36.000 --> 10:40.760]  So you might notice I didn't put skills needed, I know some projects will add skills as a
[10:40.760 --> 10:45.640]  different set of criteria, but I think it's much easier to find someone who's just willing
[10:45.640 --> 10:47.520]  to learn those skills that they need.
[10:47.520 --> 10:51.280]  And there will be a lot of project knowledge that you'll need to transfer on to them as
[10:51.280 --> 10:54.080]  a new maintainer.
[10:54.080 --> 10:58.360]  Yeah, but I would add anything that really can't be taught.
[10:58.360 --> 10:59.360]  You can put there.
[10:59.360 --> 11:03.360]  Yes, I think that's what I had for this side.
[11:03.360 --> 11:05.360]  All right, so I'm going to look at this case study.
[11:05.360 --> 11:09.000]  So this is work that I did at Mozilla, and I was running Mozilla Open Leaders.
[11:09.000 --> 11:13.680]  And each of these dots is a project that went through our training process.
[11:13.680 --> 11:15.760]  And yeah, so it was a mentorship program.
[11:15.760 --> 11:20.240]  So when they entered, they had to apply, and we would give them questions based on that
[11:20.240 --> 11:22.000]  criteria I shared before.
[11:22.000 --> 11:27.520]  So the mission for this program was really about strengthening open projects and communities
[11:27.520 --> 11:28.520]  around the world.
[11:28.520 --> 11:32.160]  So you'd ask some questions around what does openness mean to you, or why do you want to
[11:32.160 --> 11:37.880]  work open to see if they were mission aligned, or did they just come to get some training?
[11:37.880 --> 11:42.880]  We asked questions around what do you hope to learn from a mentor, how do you learn best?
[11:42.880 --> 11:48.840]  And then also made sure that they understood, hey, we want 10 hours of your week each time.
[11:48.840 --> 11:50.740]  And really setting those expectations.
[11:50.740 --> 11:56.440]  So by setting those expectations, we set quite a high bar for people coming through.
[11:56.440 --> 12:00.360]  But I think if we hadn't set that, and we were just getting people who maybe wanted
[12:00.360 --> 12:04.480]  to be mentored, they may not have been willing to give that 10 hours.
[12:04.480 --> 12:07.200]  But setting them up front lifted that bar.
[12:07.200 --> 12:13.880]  So we got more people that were really excited about the mission and wanted to help.
[12:13.880 --> 12:14.880]  Yeah.
[12:14.880 --> 12:19.240]  Oh, yeah, so then doing that really helped with some incredibly high retention rates.
[12:19.240 --> 12:22.960]  So especially at the beginning, you'll see the orange dots are the people that came back
[12:22.960 --> 12:23.960]  and mentored others.
[12:23.960 --> 12:27.000]  So they actually did become leaders within the community.
[12:27.000 --> 12:30.920]  So our retention rate was as high as 85% in the early days.
[12:30.920 --> 12:37.520]  It gets lower as you scale, because it is harder to keep that quality up over time.
[12:37.520 --> 12:41.680]  And then even after the program finished, so we did spin down this program, we spent
[12:41.680 --> 12:48.160]  one more round decentralizing it, and just working with past graduates to run 10 community
[12:48.160 --> 12:49.360]  led projects.
[12:49.360 --> 12:53.840]  And many of those are still running today, and they continue to mentor hundreds of students,
[12:53.840 --> 12:56.280]  not students, projects a year.
[12:56.280 --> 13:00.640]  And when I last checked, they've collectively raised over a million dollars from funders
[13:00.640 --> 13:03.680]  like NASA and the C.C. Chanzakaburg Institute.
[13:03.680 --> 13:06.320]  And I haven't checked in about a year, so it might be more now.
[13:06.320 --> 13:10.280]  But it's exciting just to see, even though I wasn't running this anymore, this mission
[13:10.280 --> 13:11.280]  was still going on.
[13:11.280 --> 13:15.200]  There's people still learning about open source in their fields.
[13:15.200 --> 13:20.240]  And I was going to make one more slide with all the people doing this, but I was very
[13:20.240 --> 13:23.760]  tired today when I was making slides, so I didn't make one for that.
[13:23.760 --> 13:24.760]  Okay.
[13:24.760 --> 13:26.760]  All right, so succession planning.
[13:26.760 --> 13:29.440]  So just a couple of notes.
[13:29.440 --> 13:33.240]  Adding a selection step and criteria will really help you prioritize who you're going
[13:33.240 --> 13:35.080]  to invest time in.
[13:35.080 --> 13:37.360]  And you just can't mentor everyone.
[13:37.360 --> 13:40.840]  There's a lot of people that will want your attention in an open source project, but this
[13:40.840 --> 13:45.960]  is a nice way to sort of filter, so that you're prioritizing for the long-term success of
[13:45.960 --> 13:48.600]  your project.
[13:48.600 --> 13:52.040]  Another place where succession planning can be helpful is when you're thinking about
[13:52.040 --> 13:56.000]  faucets incubated at a company, or like corporate open source.
[13:56.000 --> 14:03.520]  So if, especially if there's open source happening at a company that's not part of the core business,
[14:03.520 --> 14:07.800]  it might be time to think about where that project will go next in terms of succession
[14:07.800 --> 14:08.800]  planning.
[14:08.800 --> 14:11.840]  So a couple examples, maybe that will still spin out into foundation.
[14:11.840 --> 14:16.400]  So an example is the REST project, so that was at Mozilla for a very long time, but they
[14:16.400 --> 14:21.400]  spent out now they're at the REST foundation, or partner with other companies for shared
[14:21.400 --> 14:22.400]  governance.
[14:22.400 --> 14:26.080]  So the example I put there was Kubernetes, which was at Google, but now it's part of
[14:26.080 --> 14:31.240]  the shared infrastructure, so a lot of the big tech companies have this shared governance
[14:31.240 --> 14:35.360]  over this shared infrastructure that they all use.
[14:35.360 --> 14:37.480]  Okay.
[14:37.480 --> 14:41.480]  Their circle was the pink one, PayMaintainers, yay.
[14:41.480 --> 14:50.560]  So some financial practices, oh yeah, I'm a huge fan of GitHub, I work at GitHub, but
[14:50.560 --> 14:55.400]  a lot of times when a project joins a foundation, you won't necessarily get money directly to
[14:55.400 --> 14:56.400]  the maintainers.
[14:56.400 --> 15:00.920]  You'll get a lot of support, like ecosystem support, but I am so glad that there's companies
[15:00.920 --> 15:06.960]  like this and products like this, like GitHub sponsors, like Thanks Dev, they're here, yay.
[15:06.960 --> 15:12.160]  StackAid, open source collective, Tidelift, there's so many different groups just helping
[15:12.160 --> 15:15.880]  money get directly to maintainers, which is amazing, and I'm glad we're seeing so many
[15:15.880 --> 15:16.880]  of them.
[15:16.880 --> 15:22.280]  I actually saw this tweet from Justin Dorfin this morning when I was still making my slides.
[15:22.280 --> 15:26.920]  He wrote, if you told me 10 years ago we would have multiple businesses building services
[15:26.920 --> 15:31.080]  to help sustain open source projects, I would have been skeptical, can't imagine the next
[15:31.080 --> 15:32.080]  10.
[15:32.080 --> 15:36.320]  So I completely agree with Justin, it's great seeing so many of these.
[15:36.320 --> 15:41.160]  So just to share a little bit more about GitHub sponsors, there's this explore page.
[15:41.160 --> 15:46.320]  So if you go there, you'll see the projects that your account depends on, and which ones
[15:46.320 --> 15:50.800]  are eligible for sponsorship to make it a little bit easier for you to sponsor projects.
[15:50.800 --> 15:54.920]  And one of the first projects that I worked on when I joined GitHub was this maintainer
[15:54.920 --> 15:59.320]  month sponsorship where we had half a million dollars, and we distributed that to across
[15:59.320 --> 16:03.320]  all of our dependencies, just evenly across everyone who had sponsors turned on.
[16:03.320 --> 16:08.880]  So it's really fun seeing everyone get their 500 bucks as part of maintainer month.
[16:08.880 --> 16:11.280]  And that's going to be part of the actual product soon.
[16:11.280 --> 16:16.040]  So bulk sponsorships are coming out, so it'll be much easier for you to just upload a list
[16:16.040 --> 16:22.600]  of maintainers that you want to give money to, and then it will spread it out.
[16:22.600 --> 16:26.400]  And then just a little bit more about paying maintainers, the funding landscape has changed
[16:26.400 --> 16:29.320]  dramatically in this past year or so.
[16:29.320 --> 16:31.440]  There's far more money available in open source.
[16:31.440 --> 16:35.720]  So the open source collective saw a 30% increase in payment to maintainers.
[16:35.720 --> 16:39.520]  And there's a lot more emphasis on securing the supply chain, especially after the Biden
[16:39.520 --> 16:45.320]  administration's announcement with that executive order on improving the nation's cyber security.
[16:45.320 --> 16:49.160]  And then this is an NSF grant and the pathways to enable open source ecosystem.
[16:49.160 --> 16:51.960]  There's just so much more money going into open source.
[16:51.960 --> 16:54.120]  I only highlighted like two of them there.
[16:54.120 --> 16:55.800]  There's a lot.
[16:55.800 --> 17:01.400]  So it's great that money's there, but how do we actually set projects up in a way that
[17:01.400 --> 17:04.200]  will give ongoing support to maintainers?
[17:04.200 --> 17:09.520]  And this is a really complicated question, especially if there's multiple maintainers
[17:09.520 --> 17:13.240]  on a project, like how do we do this equitably, which maintainers get paid?
[17:13.240 --> 17:15.000]  I'm not going to answer that here.
[17:15.000 --> 17:20.360]  Again, I'm far too jet-lagged for that, but we do have some models that I think we can
[17:20.360 --> 17:26.760]  follow and we can learn from that seem to work for supporting certain types of open
[17:26.760 --> 17:27.760]  source projects.
[17:27.760 --> 17:29.760]  I am really excited for the GitHub Accelerator.
[17:29.760 --> 17:33.000]  I think they're gearing up for their first cohort right now.
[17:33.000 --> 17:34.840]  Applications closed at the end of last year.
[17:34.840 --> 17:39.120]  But talking to Nathan, she's really interested in just seeing these new models arise.
[17:39.120 --> 17:43.040]  But I'm going to talk about just three models that we have today.
[17:43.040 --> 17:44.040]  I grouped a few things.
[17:44.040 --> 17:47.960]  I don't know if you can tell, but I'm a really big fan of the rule of three, so I will tell
[17:47.960 --> 17:50.080]  you things in threes.
[17:50.080 --> 17:52.320]  But the first is tips and donations.
[17:52.320 --> 17:58.560]  So this can be going to an individual or the donations can be going to a foundation.
[17:58.560 --> 18:02.960]  The second is getting hired at a company to do open source, and this is when the project
[18:02.960 --> 18:07.040]  is not governed by that company, it's governed outside, but they're paying you to do open
[18:07.040 --> 18:08.040]  source.
[18:08.040 --> 18:11.360]  And then the third one is that the company actually does open source and they're governing
[18:11.360 --> 18:14.400]  it, and then you're part of helping that.
[18:14.400 --> 18:17.920]  So I'm going to go through these three and talk about some examples, and sometimes when
[18:17.920 --> 18:21.080]  it works really well and maybe doesn't.
[18:21.080 --> 18:26.080]  So the first one with the tips and donations, again, it can be to a foundation or an individual.
[18:26.080 --> 18:28.880]  This works really well for visible projects.
[18:28.880 --> 18:35.760]  View is an example that's gotten a lot of sponsorship and donations, but I haven't used
[18:35.760 --> 18:40.520]  really good at that marketing, and view is a project that many developers use.
[18:40.520 --> 18:43.200]  It's very top of the stack.
[18:43.200 --> 18:44.200]  It's not really hidden.
[18:44.200 --> 18:50.360]  So people make a cognitive decision to use view, which helps make a decision to sponsor
[18:50.360 --> 18:51.360]  view.
[18:51.360 --> 18:56.880]  The second is content creators, Caleb has written a lot about how he's able to sustain
[18:56.880 --> 19:01.920]  a career just on GitHub sponsors donations, and a lot of that is he's creating content
[19:01.920 --> 19:03.920]  around the open source that he's building.
[19:03.920 --> 19:08.520]  So it's more of a Twitch stream model where people are excited to see, and he's a really
[19:08.520 --> 19:10.760]  good marketer, I think.
[19:10.760 --> 19:13.640]  So it's great that people are able to work like that.
[19:13.640 --> 19:19.640]  I also don't think that an open source maintainer has to also be a marketer.
[19:19.640 --> 19:23.720]  There has to be a way that we can get money to those people that don't naturally have
[19:23.720 --> 19:26.440]  Caleb's gift for marketing.
[19:26.440 --> 19:29.920]  And then the third is maintainers in lower cost of living areas.
[19:29.920 --> 19:34.040]  So I actually interviewed COVID Goyle, I'll go to the next slide.
[19:34.040 --> 19:36.080]  So here's a little clip.
[19:36.080 --> 19:38.800]  So I interviewed COVID Goyle and Carlos Becker.
[19:38.800 --> 19:42.560]  COVID maintains caliber and Carlos maintains a go-releaser.
[19:42.560 --> 19:47.880]  Yusuf Victor was also in this panel, but he didn't talk about this topic, so he's there.
[19:47.880 --> 19:50.160]  But if you watch it, you can see him.
[19:50.160 --> 19:54.440]  But both of them agreed that the strength of the US dollar really helped.
[19:54.440 --> 19:57.080]  So Carlos is in Brazil, COVID's in India.
[19:57.080 --> 20:02.160]  And COVID was saying, by moving from the US to India, he was actually able to sustain
[20:02.160 --> 20:04.960]  himself full time on the open source donations.
[20:04.960 --> 20:06.620]  He actually has a really cool story.
[20:06.620 --> 20:11.400]  He talked about how when he was in grad school, his parents would give him some pizza money.
[20:11.400 --> 20:15.200]  And then something happened with a credit card, and it stopped working, so he was like,
[20:15.200 --> 20:19.320]  well, what if I just turn on sponsorships, this is before sponsors existed.
[20:19.320 --> 20:24.600]  So he just turned on like a little PayPal donate button on caliber, and he started getting
[20:24.600 --> 20:27.120]  sponsorships, and people started donating.
[20:27.120 --> 20:30.440]  And then he was able to have that pizza money, they grew to be a little bit more than pizza
[20:30.440 --> 20:31.440]  money.
[20:31.440 --> 20:35.400]  And then when it came time, when he and his wife both finished grad school and they were
[20:35.400 --> 20:39.160]  thinking about what to do next, COVID was like, oh, maybe I can just do this full time
[20:39.160 --> 20:41.160]  because they were going to move back to India.
[20:41.160 --> 20:42.160]  And he was able to.
[20:42.160 --> 20:46.520]  So I think that's a really cool story, just how certain projects are able to survive off
[20:46.520 --> 20:47.520]  of donations.
[20:47.520 --> 20:49.960]  But I'll say it's a little tricky.
[20:49.960 --> 20:57.680]  All right, the second one is getting hired at a company to do free and open source software.
[20:57.680 --> 21:01.640]  So this is a great way for a company to have a direct line to the project, where they actually
[21:01.640 --> 21:04.680]  are paying for a maintainer to work on it.
[21:04.680 --> 21:08.280]  And it's great for the project to just have maintainers stably employed.
[21:08.280 --> 21:13.120]  So the example I put here was, this is Keeley Hammond, she works at Slack, and she's an electron
[21:13.120 --> 21:14.520]  maintainer.
[21:14.520 --> 21:18.600]  And I like this Read Me project piece on her, so I encourage you to go read it.
[21:18.600 --> 21:23.000]  But she just talks about being an electron maintainer and working at Slack and just how
[21:23.000 --> 21:26.560]  she's bringing in more of these non-code contributions.
[21:26.560 --> 21:27.720]  And we see this model happen a lot.
[21:27.720 --> 21:31.960]  I think Electron is the one that I'm highlighting here.
[21:31.960 --> 21:37.400]  But you do have to depend on that company to continually be sponsoring these folks.
[21:37.400 --> 21:42.400]  And the third one is that the company does free and open source software on their own.
[21:42.400 --> 21:47.720]  So if there's a few ways, this is a very sparse slide I'm just realizing.
[21:47.720 --> 21:52.040]  So if it's part of their core business model, I think Next.js and Vercel is a great example
[21:52.040 --> 21:56.640]  of this, where Vercel sells the hosting services so that it's just really easy for you to deploy
[21:56.640 --> 21:59.640]  your Next.js apps.
[21:59.640 --> 22:03.880]  And then I also grouped consulting services as part of this company does FOS.
[22:03.880 --> 22:08.600]  I know some people consult individually, a lot of people set up a company to do the consulting.
[22:08.600 --> 22:13.400]  So companies will hire you for your expertise on that project.
[22:13.400 --> 22:15.240]  And then you can sustain yourself that way.
[22:15.240 --> 22:20.680]  So again, from the Twitter thread, the Janus or Janus, I didn't learn how to pronounce that,
[22:20.680 --> 22:27.600]  the WebRTC server, they're able to sustain themselves through this consulting business.
[22:27.600 --> 22:32.760]  And that works when you're, again, when you're high enough on the stack, that people will
[22:32.760 --> 22:35.760]  realize they're using you.
[22:35.760 --> 22:41.760]  All right, so yeah, just to overview of what we talked about, these are the three models
[22:41.760 --> 22:43.400]  that I think work today.
[22:43.400 --> 22:46.920]  But I still think we need more models.
[22:46.920 --> 22:51.040]  I know talking to Nathan with that GitHub accelerator, she likes to ask that question,
[22:51.040 --> 22:54.160]  where is the Etsy model for open source?
[22:54.160 --> 23:00.920]  Where are the people who just create and then are able to get paid for doing that?
[23:00.920 --> 23:04.600]  It's hard with open source, because software isn't a thing that you can just take, but
[23:04.600 --> 23:08.160]  I'm hoping that this accelerator will help us explore that question and maybe try to
[23:08.160 --> 23:10.600]  figure out a nice model for that.
[23:10.600 --> 23:16.240]  All right, and that third lens was the technical practices.
[23:16.240 --> 23:19.200]  Just make it easy to use and get started with your project, technically.
[23:19.200 --> 23:21.720]  Again, this helps the maintainer burden.
[23:21.720 --> 23:26.000]  Maintainers won't have to walk you through getting your environment set up and everything.
[23:26.000 --> 23:30.120]  But also, yeah, if the project is suddenly unmaintained, ideally someone can just pick
[23:30.120 --> 23:33.200]  it up and go.
[23:33.200 --> 23:36.400]  So a few things, the best practices.
[23:36.400 --> 23:42.320]  The first three I actually took, I was consulting with the UNICEF venture fund, and this is
[23:42.320 --> 23:46.640]  actually a requirement for people to graduate from their incubator.
[23:46.640 --> 23:49.000]  They need to have documentation for everything.
[23:49.000 --> 23:56.800]  They need to have greater than 80% code coverage for tests and have CI CD involved.
[23:56.800 --> 24:00.240]  And the cloud developer environment, just making it easy for people to get started without
[24:00.240 --> 24:03.680]  having to figure out their local machine, I think, makes a big difference.
[24:03.680 --> 24:08.200]  Okay, so we're going to go through each of these again.
[24:08.200 --> 24:15.920]  With documentation, I know I already coded Kirk McCusick, but when I asked Deb, like,
[24:15.920 --> 24:21.080]  what did FreeBSD do really well early on that led to where it is today?
[24:21.080 --> 24:25.680]  And Kirk's response, he gave me a huge list, but one of them was emphasize documentation
[24:25.680 --> 24:26.920]  from the start.
[24:26.920 --> 24:32.000]  So making sure you're documenting things, really important.
[24:32.000 --> 24:36.640]  The next piece for testing in CI CD, again, it's just so much easier for people to come
[24:36.640 --> 24:39.040]  in and contribute to your code if there are tests.
[24:39.040 --> 24:41.880]  They can realize when something is broken.
[24:41.880 --> 24:45.160]  It's easier for you as a maintainer to know when you can merge something in or when you
[24:45.160 --> 24:46.160]  shouldn't.
[24:46.160 --> 24:50.760]  And then this is just a little gift showing how nice it is to have this all integrated
[24:50.760 --> 24:57.320]  using GitHub actions where everything is just all there together with your code.
[24:57.320 --> 25:01.120]  And then the last one, that cloud developer environment, I think Codespaces has been really
[25:01.120 --> 25:03.520]  nice for this.
[25:03.520 --> 25:07.880]  And you can just use the green button, we missed it in the animation, but then it launches
[25:07.880 --> 25:11.440]  this cloud IDE and then you're just right in the code right away.
[25:11.440 --> 25:16.160]  And now that Codespaces is offering 60 hours free every month for each individual, this
[25:16.160 --> 25:20.640]  is a great way for people to start coming into your project.
[25:20.640 --> 25:24.040]  And I was going to bring some of these business cards so you can talk to Craig.
[25:24.040 --> 25:27.880]  So Craig, he loves open source.
[25:27.880 --> 25:33.000]  Again I am jet lagged and I forgot these business cards at this event venue for later today.
[25:33.000 --> 25:36.160]  But you can take a picture of this if you want to talk to Craig.
[25:36.160 --> 25:37.720]  That's the link.
[25:37.720 --> 25:43.200]  And he's more than willing to help you get Codespaces set up so that individuals can
[25:43.200 --> 25:46.040]  just come to your project and get started quickly.
[25:46.040 --> 25:52.280]  All right, so just an overview, supporting maintainers through these three lenses, for
[25:52.280 --> 25:57.200]  the community side, their succession planning, from the financial side, paying them, from
[25:57.200 --> 26:01.320]  the technical side, making it really easy to use and get started.
[26:01.320 --> 26:07.720]  So if you are interested in any of these conversations at Sustain, I am one of the Sustain OSS organizers,
[26:07.720 --> 26:12.120]  we do have a conversation every other Friday where we talk about topics like this.
[26:12.120 --> 26:16.080]  So a lot of the information I got was from those conversations, so you can go to Sustain's
[26:16.080 --> 26:19.240]  discourse over there.
[26:19.240 --> 26:23.960]  But I also run GitHub's open source maintainer program, so if you want to talk about this
[26:23.960 --> 26:29.160]  with other maintainers, we do have a private maintainer community that we are just relaunching
[26:29.160 --> 26:30.600]  some new programming.
[26:30.600 --> 26:36.080]  So if you go there, you can request an invitation to the community and get involved.
[26:36.080 --> 26:40.400]  So huge thanks to everyone, I really appreciate being here.
[26:40.400 --> 26:44.960]  You can find me, I'm AbbeyCabs on GitHub and Twitter, I'm also on Mastodon.
[26:44.960 --> 26:55.840]  And yeah, thank you so much for having me.
[26:55.840 --> 26:58.240]  I'll now take questions.
[26:58.240 --> 26:59.240]  Thank you, Abigail.
[26:59.240 --> 27:01.400]  We have questions for Abigail.
[27:01.400 --> 27:05.040]  Just raise up your hands so I can get the mic over to you.
[27:05.040 --> 27:06.040]  Thank you.
[27:06.040 --> 27:10.960]  As I was preparing, I was like, oh, this will be easier if I have a long question period.
[27:10.960 --> 27:16.240]  But now I'm realizing I'm really tired, so please be nice to me with your questions.
[27:16.240 --> 27:17.240]  Hi.
[27:17.240 --> 27:21.600]  Thanks for the talk.
[27:21.600 --> 27:24.640]  So you are talking about ways to become a maintainer.
[27:24.640 --> 27:31.560]  There is another way that you don't talk about, which is working at a company and then convincing
[27:31.560 --> 27:39.240]  your CEO to open source your, for example, your core business.
[27:39.240 --> 27:48.520]  And so if I was CEO of a company, how would you convince me to switch to open source?
[27:48.520 --> 27:50.400]  Oh, all right, yeah.
[27:50.400 --> 27:55.000]  So you're saying that the other way to survive as open source project is to convince your
[27:55.000 --> 27:57.600]  company to run an open source business.
[27:57.600 --> 27:58.600]  Indeed.
[27:58.600 --> 27:59.600]  Yeah.
[27:59.600 --> 28:02.280]  So there's a lot of advantages to working open.
[28:02.280 --> 28:03.280]  I've talked about them before.
[28:03.280 --> 28:07.520]  I don't have them all written here, but big ones is like better products when you have
[28:07.520 --> 28:13.920]  a diverse community contributing, especially if your company isn't representing the diversity
[28:13.920 --> 28:17.120]  of the audience that you're working for or serving.
[28:17.120 --> 28:18.320]  Having that, that's good.
[28:18.320 --> 28:23.280]  Reduce production costs if you're sharing it across a big group.
[28:23.280 --> 28:25.600]  And also reduce support costs.
[28:25.600 --> 28:31.120]  And if your community is answering each other support questions, that's another way for
[28:31.120 --> 28:33.160]  reducing costs.
[28:33.160 --> 28:35.120]  And what's the other one?
[28:35.120 --> 28:41.360]  Also, if you want to be a de facto standard or if you want to be a platform by giving
[28:41.360 --> 28:46.680]  something away for free, more people will adopt it and then you can become that platform.
[28:46.680 --> 28:49.840]  So we see that with Android.
[28:49.840 --> 28:55.000]  So those are a few of the reasons I'd give off the top of my head, too, but it would
[28:55.000 --> 28:59.480]  depend a lot on what company I'm talking to and what their priorities are.
[28:59.480 --> 29:03.560]  And it's tricky to find a good business model that works with open source, but when you
[29:03.560 --> 29:06.480]  do, it's beautiful.
[29:06.480 --> 29:07.720]  Thanks a lot.
[29:07.720 --> 29:14.080]  What would you answer to someone saying, I'm not going to open source my code because
[29:14.080 --> 29:18.360]  I fear that people will be stealing it?
[29:18.360 --> 29:20.680]  Sorry, can you repeat?
[29:20.680 --> 29:23.600]  You don't want to open source your code because...
[29:23.600 --> 29:28.440]  People would be stealing it and copying basically your product.
[29:28.440 --> 29:30.680]  Oh, because you don't want to be copied?
[29:30.680 --> 29:31.680]  Yeah, exactly.
[29:31.680 --> 29:32.680]  You don't want to be stolen?
[29:32.680 --> 29:35.120]  Yeah, that is a tricky one.
[29:35.120 --> 29:39.560]  You could license it less permissively, instead of someone copies it, they'll have to license
[29:39.560 --> 29:42.120]  it the same way.
[29:42.120 --> 29:43.120]  You're answering really...
[29:43.120 --> 29:44.680]  You're asking tough questions.
[29:44.680 --> 29:49.640]  I asked for easy ones, but no, this is important.
[29:49.640 --> 29:56.160]  I say, yeah, you have to structure your business in a way where it doesn't matter if someone
[29:56.160 --> 29:57.320]  takes your code.
[29:57.320 --> 30:01.800]  So like the example I gave with Next.js and Vercel, like Next.js, anyone can take that,
[30:01.800 --> 30:08.280]  anyone can run it and do it themselves, but they're selling the server time and that computing
[30:08.280 --> 30:10.360]  time.
[30:10.360 --> 30:13.520]  So it doesn't matter to them if it gets copied.
[30:13.520 --> 30:16.400]  But I don't know, copying stuff, that's more innovation.
[30:16.400 --> 30:20.320]  It's better for the world often, so thank you.
[30:20.320 --> 30:21.320]  Thanks a lot.
[30:21.320 --> 30:24.680]  Any easier questions?
[30:24.680 --> 30:32.520]  There's a couple.
[30:32.520 --> 30:33.520]  You're next.
[30:33.520 --> 30:34.520]  Hi.
[30:34.520 --> 30:39.560]  Do you think GitHub itself will be open source in the future?
[30:39.560 --> 30:41.880]  Do I think GitHub itself will be open source in the future?
[30:41.880 --> 30:47.400]  I know that...Is this recorded?
[30:47.400 --> 30:48.400]  Yes it is.
[30:48.400 --> 30:49.400]  Yeah, I know...
[30:49.400 --> 30:50.520]  I'm sure it's fine if I say this.
[30:50.520 --> 30:55.480]  I know with Thomas Domke, he's the CEO of GitHub, he said in the past, like, what's stopping
[30:55.480 --> 30:59.680]  us if we open source GitHub right now, we just wouldn't be able to handle all the contributions
[30:59.680 --> 31:01.240]  and all the community coming in.
[31:01.240 --> 31:04.600]  I think that's one of the big reasons why they're not doing it.
[31:04.600 --> 31:09.760]  I wouldn't rule it out, maybe eventually, but yeah, our business model doesn't really...
[31:09.760 --> 31:13.360]  Yeah, the code itself, it's not there.
[31:13.360 --> 31:17.320]  It's more the hosting and the CI CD code spaces, things like that, where they're generating
[31:17.320 --> 31:18.320]  the revenue.
[31:18.320 --> 31:19.960]  Oh, and co-pilot now, yeah.
[31:19.960 --> 31:20.960]  Okay.
[31:20.960 --> 31:21.960]  Thank you.
[31:21.960 --> 31:22.960]  Thanks.
[31:22.960 --> 31:23.960]  Hard questions again.
[31:23.960 --> 31:24.960]  I hope it's okay.
[31:24.960 --> 31:25.960]  I said that.
[31:25.960 --> 31:27.480]  I'm sure no one will report me.
[31:27.480 --> 31:29.480]  Oh, this person was next.
[31:29.480 --> 31:30.680]  Okay.
[31:30.680 --> 31:31.680]  After that.
[31:31.680 --> 31:32.680]  Okay.
[31:32.680 --> 31:33.680]  Hi.
[31:33.680 --> 31:36.440]  Thanks for the talk.
[31:36.440 --> 31:42.280]  What would be your approach of sustaining a conference app, like the FOSSTEM one, which
[31:42.280 --> 31:51.280]  is only available for a weekend and then people do other things over the year, and yeah, like,
[31:51.280 --> 31:53.240]  how do you go about this?
[31:53.240 --> 31:55.480]  How would I go about sustaining a conference like FOSSTEM?
[31:55.480 --> 31:58.840]  I think FOSSTEM has done a really good job sustaining itself.
[31:58.840 --> 32:01.560]  It's grown so much, 8,000 people.
[32:01.560 --> 32:04.560]  It's just amazing to see the community come together and people get really excited about
[32:04.560 --> 32:07.880]  it.
[32:07.880 --> 32:10.720]  I don't know if I do anything that much differently.
[32:10.720 --> 32:14.960]  I think if, from what you said with how it happens only once a year, are you thinking
[32:14.960 --> 32:19.600]  about like getting, keeping people engaged through the year, then I might think start
[32:19.600 --> 32:25.840]  doing more online things in between as touch points or having more local things so people
[32:25.840 --> 32:30.160]  can have like their FOSSTEM in their city, the local meetups, just to keep people engaged
[32:30.160 --> 32:31.160]  over time.
[32:31.160 --> 32:35.760]  But I don't know, FOSSTEM seems to be going really strong unless there's something I don't
[32:35.760 --> 32:38.760]  know.
[32:38.760 --> 32:46.920]  Thank you so much for a great talk.
[32:46.920 --> 32:53.920]  I was a little bit surprised when you mentioned in the discussion about how to sustain a project
[32:53.920 --> 33:00.600]  financially that there was the case example of a person that moved to India and was able
[33:00.600 --> 33:04.440]  to sustain itself by working on FOSST, which is fantastic.
[33:04.440 --> 33:11.040]  But you used the word surviving, which seemed a little, yeah, it just surprised me because
[33:11.040 --> 33:16.400]  I think everybody can agree that people that maintain full-time FOSST projects, which is
[33:16.400 --> 33:23.960]  the infrastructure of a lot of the world, of IT really, should be, well, we all hope
[33:23.960 --> 33:30.320]  that one day we'll be able to pay these people a reasonable salary for their efforts and
[33:30.320 --> 33:32.560]  not just surviving.
[33:32.560 --> 33:37.400]  Now with that said, like you say, it's tricky to find business models that can financially
[33:37.400 --> 33:39.240]  sustain these projects.
[33:39.240 --> 33:43.160]  And GitHub is a company that has done so much for open source and plays such an important
[33:43.160 --> 33:48.080]  role and it also has enabled a lot of funding to start to arrive to maintainers.
[33:48.080 --> 33:57.960]  Now do you think that GitHub is now done finding new ways to find new models to sustain developers
[33:57.960 --> 34:04.400]  or is the conversation with GitHub still open where we could provide further feedback and
[34:04.400 --> 34:10.320]  provide novel ideas to tackle the business model of how to tackle the problem?
[34:10.320 --> 34:12.440]  Is GitHub open to new ideas?
[34:12.440 --> 34:15.400]  Yes, GitHub is open to new ideas.
[34:15.400 --> 34:17.280]  Actually join that private maintainers group.
[34:17.280 --> 34:21.320]  I think that would be really interesting avenue to have those kinds of conversations.
[34:21.320 --> 34:25.400]  And I think one of the big reasons why the GitHub Accelerator was set up was to help
[34:25.400 --> 34:28.360]  us try to find these models in better ways to pay people.
[34:28.360 --> 34:32.480]  Because like you said, I probably shouldn't have used the word surviving, but it's nice
[34:32.480 --> 34:36.320]  that COVID was able to do that, but that shouldn't have to be the norm.
[34:36.320 --> 34:42.360]  There's no way we could make all the open source maintainers live in India.
[34:42.360 --> 34:45.120]  I'm sure it's nice there.
[34:45.120 --> 34:48.080]  But yeah, there has to be a better way that we can actually sustain these people.
[34:48.080 --> 34:50.560]  So I think there's still a missing link.
[34:50.560 --> 34:54.680]  So I think you've identified there's still this missing piece and I don't really know
[34:54.680 --> 34:55.680]  the answer.
[34:55.680 --> 34:57.960]  There are people having these conversations and we're definitely open to hearing your
[34:57.960 --> 34:58.960]  thoughts.
[34:58.960 --> 34:59.960]  Thank you very much.
[34:59.960 --> 35:00.960]  I have a question.
[35:00.960 --> 35:01.960]  Oh, yeah?
[35:01.960 --> 35:08.360]  Yeah, you did talk about, I'll just have, my question would be a follow up like similar
[35:08.360 --> 35:14.200]  to what he just said about the financial maintenance of open source practitioners.
[35:14.200 --> 35:16.080]  So like, do you guys have a mechanism?
[35:16.080 --> 35:21.520]  How do you determine how do you reward somebody that is doing, like that is maintaining an
[35:21.520 --> 35:22.760]  open source platform?
[35:22.760 --> 35:26.680]  Like, how do you determine how much he should be rewarded?
[35:26.680 --> 35:28.840]  Sorry, what was the question?
[35:28.840 --> 35:32.680]  Like, how do you determine how much should someone be rewarded?
[35:32.680 --> 35:35.040]  Oh, how to determine how much someone is worth?
[35:35.040 --> 35:41.160]  Yeah, how he's rewarded, like for his involvement in an open source project.
[35:41.160 --> 35:42.160]  Yeah, yeah.
[35:42.160 --> 35:46.360]  Yeah, because like, for example, you might think like you have two people from different
[35:46.360 --> 35:51.480]  locations all contributing the same amount of hours, but then end up receiving different
[35:51.480 --> 35:54.000]  paycheck at the end of the month.
[35:54.000 --> 35:55.000]  Yeah.
[35:55.000 --> 35:56.000]  Yeah, no.
[35:56.000 --> 36:01.400]  And I think just the question for everyone, how do you, like if you have multiple maintainers,
[36:01.400 --> 36:03.480]  how do you know how much money should go to each person?
[36:03.480 --> 36:06.600]  And I think that's a really big question today.
[36:06.600 --> 36:09.760]  And I wasn't prepared to answer that in this talk.
[36:09.760 --> 36:13.920]  But I think, no, I've definitely heard of some projects where like one person is maybe
[36:13.920 --> 36:16.600]  in India, the other person's in North America.
[36:16.600 --> 36:20.920]  And then if they pay them evenly, the cost of living is so different.
[36:20.920 --> 36:21.920]  It just causes issues.
[36:21.920 --> 36:25.240]  Or like if one person started the project and they're still getting paid, but they're not
[36:25.240 --> 36:28.320]  an active maintainer anymore, like what happens there?
[36:28.320 --> 36:29.840]  There's a lot of open questions like that.
[36:29.840 --> 36:31.840]  And I think that really depends on the project.
[36:31.840 --> 36:34.080]  It really depends on the project governance and dynamic.
[36:34.080 --> 36:36.960]  It's really, that's a human, human problem.
[36:36.960 --> 36:37.960]  Yeah.
[36:37.960 --> 36:38.960]  But I agree.
[36:38.960 --> 36:40.240]  That is a big problem today.
[36:40.240 --> 36:43.400]  And it's a big problem for open source.
[36:43.400 --> 36:45.400]  How much time do we have?
[36:45.400 --> 36:46.400]  Okay.
[36:46.400 --> 36:47.400]  Okay.
[36:47.400 --> 36:51.280]  So this might be the last question, I think, yeah.
[36:51.280 --> 36:52.760]  I'll come here.
[36:52.760 --> 36:53.760]  Yeah.
[36:53.760 --> 36:54.760]  Hi.
[36:54.760 --> 36:56.840]  I'm a member of several organizations.
[36:56.840 --> 37:00.080]  And we are dealing with, in all of them, we are dealing with the same problem.
[37:00.080 --> 37:02.600]  We have new members coming in every year.
[37:02.600 --> 37:04.880]  And there is nobody to give them orders, basically.
[37:04.880 --> 37:09.480]  They would be very happy to help, but nobody tells them how.
[37:09.480 --> 37:14.240]  How can we get these people who are basically acting as middle managers for these organizations?
[37:14.240 --> 37:15.240]  Oh, man.
[37:15.240 --> 37:16.240]  Yeah.
[37:16.240 --> 37:19.200]  If you're in an organization, you have new people coming in, but then no one is telling
[37:19.200 --> 37:21.400]  them what to do or how to help.
[37:21.400 --> 37:25.200]  I think that's where establishing mentors is really important.
[37:25.200 --> 37:32.760]  And just finding people in your community already that's willing to onboard others.
[37:32.760 --> 37:37.480]  So that's why I really like programs like GSOC, Google Summer of Code, because it's
[37:37.480 --> 37:42.240]  good for bringing in the newcomers, but it's also good at finding mentors in the community.
[37:42.240 --> 37:44.840]  And this might be the first time they're stepping up in leadership.
[37:44.840 --> 37:48.360]  So that's a nice incentive, because they get a little bit of a kickback from Google also
[37:48.360 --> 37:50.240]  for mentoring.
[37:50.240 --> 37:53.480]  And they get the Mentor Summit and things like that.
[37:53.480 --> 37:57.520]  So yeah, I would think about it that way.
[37:57.520 --> 37:58.680]  What can you do to encourage mentors?
[37:58.680 --> 38:00.600]  It might be making a role for it.
[38:00.600 --> 38:05.320]  It might be giving them special titles and giving them some fancy thing.
[38:05.320 --> 38:06.320]  I don't know.
[38:06.320 --> 38:08.880]  A special dinner depends on what your community likes.
[38:08.880 --> 38:09.880]  Yep.
[38:09.880 --> 38:10.880]  Thank you.
[38:10.880 --> 38:11.880]  Cool.
[38:11.880 --> 38:13.360]  I think that's all for time.
[38:13.360 --> 38:15.880]  I'm around, so you can come chat with me.
[38:15.880 --> 38:20.120]  I did bring stickers and buttons, so you're welcome to come up here and get some.
[38:20.120 --> 38:24.480]  I have slightly less than I had for my talk this morning, where I accidentally gave far
[38:24.480 --> 38:25.640]  too much away.
[38:25.640 --> 38:28.240]  But this is how much is here.
[38:28.240 --> 38:29.240]  So thanks, everyone.
[38:29.240 --> 38:30.240]  It was great chatting with you.
[38:30.240 --> 38:45.320]  Thank you.