is giving us a talk about the importance of eating vegetables in our day, the famous
Saturday program from the UK. And this sort of health information is very important for
us. And you can see that I have not been following it since the pandemic, but I hope to learn
a lot today. Thank you very much. Thank you for me here. And today I'm going to talk about
a project that we're using in the world-class community to develop the open source system
and increase the usage of the users. And Jesus Amelio, I work as a software engineer at Automatic,
but I am working full-time in the open source project, okay, inside this FIFER Future Initiative.
So I want to ask a question as a start. Would you work for free? No. Yeah, we're in open
source conference, so this is a very tricky question. We work for free a lot of time.
And we do free work with our family, with our community, church, and so on. Okay. And
of course, in the IT world, we do a lot of free software. I like a lot this XCAD, this
CD comic, because it shows all the modern digital infrastructure maintained by a random person
in Nebraska has been, thanks to the maintenance, is 20,000 free, and of course, for free. And
this is a joke, this is a trick, but this is the real. Do you remember the love for you
problem you have in 2021? It has a, okay, it's a critical book. It causes a lot of security
problems. It's rated with a 10 in a scale between 0 and 10, so it's very dangerous problem.
And as you can see in Twitter, the developers were granted for work that they are not paid
for for a future they are dislike yet need to keep with the back and work compatibility
concerns. And they are not making money. They was not making money by this. In fact, if you
take a look to the gift who have the sponsors for these users, one of the maintenance has
one sponsor and the other one has 50 sponsors. Of course, they are working as a service in
a full time company. So finally, we have a report, a security analysis report saying that 88%
of the open source software contain components with no activity in the last two years and
containing components that were not in the last version. So the question is, is this
sustainable? No. Of course, it isn't. So we need to look for how to make money for these
open source companies. I'm going to explain how the difference in the companies are making
money in the open source software. So one of the types of this financial is the donation.
For example, when you, the developer of UGS is making a full time, is making a full time
developer with the gift have a sponsors. In the security, in the security, you can get
rewards if you find a book for a company, but a lot of times these security searches
sell in the black market through the third day fines. The core funding, for example, to
develop the WP CLI, the World Press CLI, the developer create a core funding at Kickstarter
before start developing the tool. Another projects are internal projects because, for
example, Rust from the Mozilla Foundation, go from Google or RAT from Facebook. These
were internal projects that become open source projects and now are used by a lot of different
people. Some companies are making out of money. For example, RAT are making out of money with
the consulting service and they are developing a lot of open source to achieve this consulting.
There are a few foundations, for example, the Apache Foundation that get out of money from
contributors and they pay for the first two tours for some developers and so on. Or, for
example, the PHP Foundation that get money from different companies, for example, from
my company, Automatic and they hire developers to work on the next versions of PHP.
Some companies like Automatic are making money with a SaaS model at Wolpes.com,
Nextcloud has a similar approach. They have an open source project and you can install your
own service but if you don't want to do this, you can use the SaaS product. Or, for example,
a large-level forge that have a very good open source PHP framework and you can use for free
but if you can manage your service in an easy way, you can use this product. Some companies
have dual license so if you are going to develop an open source product, you can use
this library for free but if you can include in a closed source software, you need to pay
not open source license. Another approach is the open core. For example, it's the approach that
MySQL develops. They create an open source product and they have a proprietary product
they sell. It's the same approach with GitLab. Some companies are getting external funding. For
example, MariaDB has made, get 270 million in different venture capital rounds before
become public, offering a sample and gains that has get 84 million dollars in different venture
capital rounds. And finally, of course, there are out of different approaches but finally,
to be hired by a company. An example of this is my example inside the Fight for a Future project.
Okay, so let's start about the Fight for a Future initiative.
And first, I'm going to start explaining economic, economic theory. It's called the
tragedy of the commons. It's a very simple economical theory that we can make a similarity with
the open source projects. Imagine a field, a public field where four farmers has their own
cows and everything is okay. They have their cows in this field and they cancel the milk and so on.
Everything is okay. But when they, one farmer said, okay, I'm making good money with one cow.
Let's buy another one because with this new cow, I can get more money. Okay. And the other
farmers, of course, said, okay, the other farmer is making good money with the two cows. So I'm going
to buy another cow. So one day we have a lot of cows in this public field and one day the field
broke. The cows died and the farmers are broke. This is very similar that we have,
that happens in the open source projects because we have a lot in a lot of open source projects.
We have a lot of people making a lot of money with these products but they are not giving back
anything to the project. Of course, you know a lot of different things like this in the open source
projects. Okay. This Five for the Future Initiative started in the work in Europe
2014 in Sofia, Bulgaria. Do you know what's our work camp? It's something like a group
of people in the work camp. We have three major work camps in the US, Europe, and Asia,
a lot of in the small cities. Okay. And one day we have some questions
answered by Matt Müllermer, the co-founder of the work project. And one of these questions,
they talk about the return of the company. So they ask that you have a lot of companies that
are making a lot of money with workers but they don't give back any money to the project. Okay.
So two days later Matt wrote an interesting post in the blog and I'm going to read
two paragraphs about this to introduce the Five for the Future project. Okay. The first one is,
I think a good rule of thumb that we scale with the community as it continues to grow is that
organizations that want to grow the workers by and not just in the piece of it should dedicate
five percent of the people to working on something to do with coal. Be development,
documentation, security support, forums, theme reviews, training, testing, translation, whatever
it might be that has moved workers mission forward. And the second interesting paragraph is,
it's a big commitment but I can think of a better long-term investment in the health of
workers overall. I think it will look incredibly modest in high-side. The rate is probably the
bare minimum for a sustainable ecosystem avoiding the tragedy of the commons. Okay. So I introduced
before this problem related with this. I think the five percent rule is one of that a lot of
soft projects and companies should follow at least if they want to be private at the cataphrone now.
This was an idea as a goal and if you know something about the workers project,
I think it was a very good initiative. Okay. So let's talk more about this.
This five percent encouraged to the individual contributors and organizations to contribute
five percent of their resources to the workers development. If you want to take more information,
you can go to workers.org slash five but I'm going to explain a lot more about the project now.
So what's a contribution? The open source worker project is split in 22 different projects. So it's
very impossible that you don't can fit in one of these projects because
if you are a developer, you can code in something, you can translate. If you are not an English native
speaker, you can go the translation of your language. We have 2008 different languages
translated. We have a variety of support forums. We have documentation. We have learning videos
design community, accessibility people, marketing people, community that are going to have
different meetups and work comes around the world. We have TV people that lost the videos
from these events to workers.tv. We can have people contributed to hosting initiative to
create documentation for this. And finally, we have the open business photos that tries to get
all the open source photos in one place. So I'm sure that you can contribute at least to one of these
initiatives. Okay, so once we know how we can contribute, how we can place the time, we can do
this as individual contributors or sponsored by a company. In the first situation, it's very simple.
You go to your workers profile and said, okay, I am a sponsor. No, so I am the video contributor.
I'm going to spend five hours per week in this community core hosting team. So now this is
public in your profile claiming that you are dedicating five of weekly hours to these different
teams. And in your profile, in your public profile, you have an activity. For example, this is my
public profile and said that I create these translations. I close a ticket in the MetaFract.
I close a pull request and so on. So we have a history of your contributions. We don't have
the work policy. We don't have people taking a look at what people are contributing. This is an
honor code. Okay. And you can be sponsored by a company. This is my situation. For example,
you can see here automatic is sponsoring 109 people full time or part time to the open source
project. It's a week near 4,000 hours. A lot of hours. And we have 111 companies sponsoring
people. Okay. From one hour and automatic is the company with most hours. Okay. This is from two
years ago, but it's the current situation. We have automatic as the company with most contributors
and we have a lot of companies like Joas, GoDaddy, HumaMaid and so on with contributions. What is
the perfect situation? This will be the perfect situation with around 10 big companies contributing
a lot to the open source project and small companies, small agencies contributing 5 hours,
10 hours. This is 5%. Which companies are in the project? We have companies. We have companies like
Google or Joas. Joas is a CEO company and we have a lot of hosting companies because the hosting
companies is making a lot of money with the WordPress installations. Okay. But we have, as I said,
before we have 181 companies, mainly companies focused on the WordPress ecosystem. Okay.
Okay. Well, should you contribute? Let's see it.
You're going to develop a lot of skills because you're going to work with a lot of talented
contributors around the world. You're going to build your own portfolio, mainly at WordPress.org
and at GitHub or on other platforms. This is very interesting if you are looking for a job because
the quitters can see your profile and if you want to get more customers, it's a good initiative.
And you're going to know a lot of people because you are going to interact with them
in different ways. And this is important because probably in one year or two years you want to
change your job and probably you made a contact in this networking
in a polygons community, in our forums and so on. This is a typical path for a contributor and
this was my path. You start as a regular user for the CMS, then you become a casual contributor,
then you become a pleasure contributor and finally you become a leader on a
aspect. Of course, you can stop in one of these steps. For example, in my situation,
I started, I started using in 2006, installing a WordPress for my own blog. I come from to
to WordPress. Then in 2014, eight years later, I started translating in Spanish.
Later, I started translating to another language. It's called Galician. It's in the northwest of
Spain and I continue translating a lot. So I became a casual contributor to a press contributor
because I do a lot of translations and I become a validator for this language. I get
very involved in the world project and one guy from automatic ping me, send me.
Look at this. These are very interesting work that I think it fits with your profile. And now I'm here.
Okay, so this is another way of becoming a start as a regular user and now I am one of the experts
in the Polyglots team. Okay, why should a company contribute because you can pay to people to
contribute to the open source project? Because you can grow your talent pool into ways.
You can identify and recruit new talent. Of course, if you are involved in the project,
you are going to make networking with a lot of people and these people
in the future could be your employees. And of course, you can upskill your organization talent.
Some people from your company are involved in the open source company. They are going to improve
the knowledge. They are going to keep a date with the project's direction. Of course, if you are
involved in some projects of the open source project, you are going to get information about the way
of the project. You can take decisions aligned with your needs or your client's needs.
And finally, you can gain credibility. Of course, if you can set to one of your customers that you
are one of the main contributors to the open source project, so you can get clients with this
approach. Finally, I'm going to give a few tips for individual contributors and for companies.
I'm going to start with the individual contributors.
First of all, find your team. Maybe you are from Italy, so you can start translating to Italy.
You are a developer. You can start solving some PRs. You have a lot of knowledge about the
plugins. You can reply questions in the forums. There are a lot of things, and I'm sure you can
fit in one or more of these teams. Then read the docs. Nobody reads the docs, but we have very
good docs. We have a contributor handbook. We have a few video courses about contributing in the
WordPress, and each team has a handbook. In this handbook, you have all the information you need to
contribute from the beginner to the expert user.
It's very important to connect with the committee because we are working
usually from our houses or offices in our remote approach. So we have
weekly meetings through Slack, and we have Slack channels to coordinate all the works
between the teams. It's very, very important to get this communication, this connection with
the old people from the community. It's important to create a contributor habit because if you
don't set this hour, this half hour to contribute, you are not going to have time in your day to
day to contribute. It's very important to start slow with a very long-term commitment. This is a
marathon, not 100 meters long. You know that people when they start to go to the game, they start
training two hours a day, they stop doing this in two weeks.
Okay, and tips for the company contributions. Set the strategy for the future. This is very
important because you should have a strategy aligned with your market.
Identify your goals, much than with your employer skills because if you don't have
employees with these skills, it's impossible to align this with your goals, of course.
And it's very interesting to work on having path contributions.
Allocate weekly time. This is very important because we always have a project that we
need to release tomorrow, and if we don't allocate this time, we're not going to
work on this future project. Any of the company's could be interesting to think about
building a contribution team. I'm not talking about full-time workers, but you can have
five people working two or one or two hours a week in different teams. It could be very
interesting to get more visibility in the different teams, the different 22 teams.
Maybe it's interesting to hire full-time contributors, but of course you need to be a big company to do this.
And finally, this 5% is aspirational. It's okay to work 1%, 2%, but the focus of the
FIFO Reputure Initiative is to contribute back to the project. This is the key point.
And now I am going to read your questions.
How do you manage the specification of what should be done because there is a huge list of
things waiting to be fixed, and how do you manage the priorities and the specification?
Okay. He asked me how we manage the priorities of the work we do. Of course, if we have a book in
production of things like this, this is the priority of the work, but then we have weekly
meetings to focus on the work for this week. And we have a three-year plan to work on the...
I'm talking about my team, the Polygos team. We have a three-year plan to work on this.
Okay. And of course, we share all this work with the community using a post. For example, when we
want to work on new initiative, we talk about this internally. And then we write a post to
share this with the community, get feedback, and develop it or don't develop it. For example,
a few months ago, we realized that we have a very high queue of translations. And when I said a very
high queue, we have some language with half a million of strings to review. Okay. So it's
impossible to review by hand. So we talk internally that it will be interesting to use the AI to review
these queues. We write a P2, it's a post to share this information with the community,
and get feedback. And the community said, no, we don't want... we don't need this AI review. So
we stop this development. Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Who can you manage that the specification are made at first in a way that could be useful to other
people? And of course, people may have an additional liar to pick local question, dedicated
to local question. So how to manage that generic aspect of usability by others?
Okay. He asked me how we manage these specifications from our customers. I work in the
Polyglos team. Our customers are the open source contributors that made the translations. Okay.
This is very important to know. So we try to do all our work in public, in GitHub
use issues, in GitHub docs, and so on, and in post. So we try to discuss all this in public
and get the feedback from them with the 10,000 feet level of specifications. Okay. So we want
this, we don't want this, and when we are working on the developing, we share with them some
skin shows and things like this to get feedback from them. But it's important to know that our
customers, our hints are the open source contributors. People that are using their free
time trying to translate work to their own language. Okay. This is my current situation
that I'm working on this particular team. Yeah.
So it's really intriguing to see. So a lot of open source projects track after the fact
how people contributed. But I think the specialty about the fight for the future is that people
pledge and they set up an entirely different psychological motivation. Did you do any tracking
of whether that, how that changed contribution metrics or not the trajectory or anything?
He asked me if we have any metrics around the change between the, when we activate the pledge
for the hours each contributor is working on. We don't have this data. In fact, it's an honor code
contribution. So you can pledge for 40 hours each week. And if you don't do anything work,
you don't have the police say, hey, you pledge 40 hours and you do any work.
I don't mean that that per person tracking, but I mean that before the fight for the future program
for the future program in general, and before and after how it changed that contribution dynamic.
No, we don't have any data.
Somebody started to work on this. So we've got somebody who's actually currently trying to prove
that fact that they're working. So there will be more exploring. I can connect with a person
I can definitely see that it probably proved. Yeah, it probably like it's two times or three times.
You probably have an impressive number of the end because it probably helped.
I'm sure we have increased the number or in that we don't have this. We don't have these numbers.
Yeah. So in the spirit of the joined open source forces here for others
Sorry.
In the spirit of the joined open source
open website alliance here for other CMS communities who are looking to improve their
contributions from individual developers or from corporations. Yeah. Do you have since you've
been doing this for 10 years with the fight for the future, do you have any things that you would
do differently if you were to start to deliver it fresh? Wow.
This is a very good question. She asked me if we start now from scratch if we change anything.
I'm not sure because I'm not working this
542 future program, but I'm not involved in the people in the team that
work to manage all this project. Mainly, I will start getting data from the first day.
This I think this is a very key point because now for example we have
data like the number of transitions you did, the PRs you add, you comment, you close, things like
this, but we don't for example if you are a designer it's hard to track your work.
So I think we can have a lot of work to improve this.
Thank you.
The concept of peer pressure is something that could be more incorporated or
made a bit easier. Who's like free loader and have like not just one company that's pointed
out but like kind of make it a yeah you're not very nice to the community.
I'll step close to the microphone because I'm allowed, but I would contend that negative peer
pressure, it feels really dangerous and in the spirit of being constructive, the Drupal communities
tried several versions of rewarding contribution and contribution credits through pushing people's
appearances, list positions in searches and so on which has also resulted in a lot of gaming
contributions into how many poll requests can I break something into. So humans are humans,
but I think given everything else going on in the world we should encourage
positive encouragements rather than you know.
What I mean is mostly like fake pledges for somebody wants to go to the top by pledging a lot
and then that other people can assure that the pledging conforms to what they actually do.
For sure, for sure that I mean and as a marketer I'll admit it you know numbers are way better than
like we have to know what the effect is right because at some point we have to know
if what we are spending money on is producing anything like the result that we want.
The gamification approach is very tricky because currently we are creating a new feature to be
able to create transition events and when we are trying to create the functionalities we
get a lot of gamification that the end user can do this to be in the top of the list. So
this is very, very tricky and we know that we have some users, very active users that are going to
try to gamify the solution. Yeah.
Right.