Podcasts about open collective

Guests Ben Nickolls | Andrew Nesbitt Panelist Richard Littauer Show Notes In this episode of Sustain, host Richard is joined by guests Ben Nickolls and Andrew Nesbitt to discuss the ecosyste.ms project. They explore how ecosyste.ms collects and analyzes metadata from various open-source projects to create a comprehensive database that can help improve funding allocation. The discussion covers the importance of funding the most critical open-source projects, the existing gaps in funding, and the partnership between ecosyste.ms and Open Source Collective to create funding algorithms that support entire ecosystems. They also talk about the challenges of maintaining data, reaching out to project maintainers, and the broader implications for the open-source community. Hit the download button now! [00:01:58] Andrew and Ben explain ecosyste.ms, what it does, and how it compares to Libraries.io. [00:04:59] Ecosyste.ms tracks metadata, not the packages themselves, and enriches data via dependency graphs, committers, issues, SBOMs, and more. [00:06:54] Andrew talks about finding 1,890 Git hosts and how many critical projects live outside GitHub. [00:08:37] There's a conversation on metadata uses and SBOM parsing. [00:12:49] Richard inquires about the ecosystem.ms funds on their website which Andrew explains it's a collaboration between Open Collective and ecosyste.ms. that algorithmically distributes funds to the most used, not most popular packages. [00:15:45] Ben shares how this is different from previous projects and brings up a past project, “Back Your Stack” and explains how ecosyste.ms is doing two things differently. [00:18:59] Ben explains how it supports payouts to other platforms and encourages maintainers to adopt funding YAML files for automation. Andrew touches on efficient outreach, payout management, and API usage (GraphQL). [00:25:36] Ben elaborates on how companies can fund ecosyste.ms (like Django) instead of curating their own lists and being inspired by Sentry's work with the Open Source Pledge. [00:29:32] Andrew speaks about scaling and developer engagement and emphasizes their focus is on high-impact sustainability. [00:32:48] Richard asks, “Why does it matter?” Ben explains that most current funding goes to popular, not most used projects and ecosyste.ms aims to fix the gap with data backed funding, and he suggests use of open standards like 360Giving and Open Contracting Data. [00:35:46] Andrew shares his thoughts on funding the right projects by improving 1% of OSS, you uplift the quality of millions of dependent projects with healthier infrastructure, faster security updates, and more resilient software. [00:38:35] Find out where you can follow ecosyste.ms and the blog on the web. Quotes [00:11:18] “I call them interesting forks. If a fork is referenced by a package, it'll get indexed.” [00:22:07] We've built a service that now moves like $25 million a year between OSS maintainers on OSC.” [00:33:23] “We don't have enough information to make collective decisions about which projects, communities, maintainers, should receive more funding.” [00:34:23] “The NSF POSE Program has distributed hundreds of millions of dollars of funding to open source communities alone.” [00:35:47] “If you have ten, twenty thousand really critical open source projects, that actually isn't unachievable to make those projects sustainable.” Spotlight [00:39:35] Ben's spotlight is Jellyfin. [00:40:20] Andrew's spotlight is zizmor. [00:42:21] Richard's spotlight is The LaTeX Project. Links SustainOSS (https://sustainoss.org/) podcast@sustainoss.org (mailto:podcast@sustainoss.org) richard@sustainoss.org (mailto:richard@sustainoss.org) SustainOSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/) SustainOSS Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/tags/sustainoss) SustainOSS Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/sustainoss.bsky.social) SustainOSS LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/sustainoss/) Open Collective-SustainOSS (Contribute) (https://opencollective.com/sustainoss) Richard Littauer Socials (https://www.burntfen.com/2023-05-30/socials) Ben Nickolls LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamuk/) Andrew Nesbitt Website (https://nesbitt.io/) Andrew Nesbitt Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/@andrewnez) Octobox (https://github.com/octobox) ecosyste.ms (https://ecosyste.ms/) ecosyste.ms Blog (https://blog.ecosyste.ms/) Open Source Collective (https://oscollective.org/) Open Source Collective Updates (https://opencollective.com/opensource/updates) Open Source Collective Contributions (https://opencollective.com/opensource) Open Source Collective Contributors (https://opencollective.com/open-source) Open Collective (https://opencollective.com/) 24 Pull Requests (https://24pullrequests.com/) Libraries.io (https://libraries.io/) The penumbra of open source (EPJ Data Science) (https://epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10.1140/epjds/s13688-022-00345-7) FOSDEM '25- Open source funding: you're doing it wrong (Andrew and Ben) (https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5576-open-source-funding-you-re-doing-it-wrong/) Vue.js (https://vuejs.org/) thanks.dev (https://thanks.dev/home) StackAid (https://www.stackaid.us/) Back Your Stack (https://backyourstack.com/) NSF POSE (https://www.nsf.gov/funding/initiatives/pathways-enable-open-source-ecosystems) Django (https://www.djangoproject.com/) GitHub Sponsors (https://github.com/sponsors) Sustain Podcast-Episode 80: Emma Irwin and the Foss Fund Program (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/80) Sustain Podcast- 3 Episodes featuring Chad Whitacre (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/guests/chad-whitacre) Sustain Podcast- Episode 218: Karthik Ram & James Howison on Research Software Visibility Infrastructure Priorities (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/218) Sustain Podcast-Episode 247: Chad Whitacre on the Open Source Pledge (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/247) Invest in Open Infrastructure (https://investinopen.org/) 360Giving (https://www.360giving.org/) Open Contracting Data Standard (https://standard.open-contracting.org/latest/en/) Jellyfin (https://opencollective.com/jellyfin) zizmor (https://github.com/zizmorcore/zizmor) The LaTeX Project (https://www.latex-project.org/) Credits Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guests: Andrew Nesbitt and Benjamin Nickolls.

In this second part of our two-part series on New York Art Fair Week, William Powhida and Paddy Johnson discuss the standout artworks from Independent, NADA, and Spring Break. Despite the thin crowds and economic challenges explored in Part 1, there were notable works worth celebrating. The conversation highlights vintage game boards at Independent, playful Nancy Drew-inspired paintings at Spring Break, and meticulously detailed highway landscapes at NADA. Most significantly, we explore how the most politically relevant work happened outside the fairs, with an extended conversation of Mitchell Chan's "Insert Coins" – a deceptively simple video game installation that reveals itself as a devastating commentary on capitalism, cryptocurrency, and rigged systems. This piece, along with Open Collective's Ukrainian war karaoke installation, connected to the anxieties of the real world, in a way that seemed largely absent from the commercial fair venues. Relevant Links: Artists & Galleries Mentioned: Lisa Sanditz at Alexandre Gallery Ricco Maresca Gallery (vintage game boards) Eleanor Aldrich at Field Projects Eve Sussman and Simon Lee William Pope.L at Mitchell-Innes & Nash Namwon Choi at Pentimenti Gallery Megan Dominescu at Anca Poterasu Gallery Mitchell Chan's "Insert Coins" at Nguyen Wahed Guy Richard Smith at A Hug From The Art World Duke Riley & Jean Shin at In Praise of Shadows Lucia Hierro at Swivel David Molesky (banana paintings) Sophia  Lapres at Towards Gallery Ernesto Solana at NADA guadalajara90210 Julia Garcia at Hair + Nails Lars Korff-Lofthus at Entree Gallery Bill Abdale Magda Sawon, Postmasters Venues: Independent Art Fair NADA Fair (at Star-Lehigh Building) Spring Break Art Show 601 Artist Space (Open Collective exhibition) American Folk Art Museum

In this month's Network Call, Richard D. Bartlett and Jocelyn Ames host a session to map out network members' key hosting experiences, and surface some of the skills, insights and principles that helped them develop their hosting capacity.Listen in and participate yourself via the Mural boardDiscover the Microsolidarity Newsletter and subscribe hereTo join these calls, become a member via Open Collective for €3/month

Guests Caleb Connolly | Pablo Correa Gómez Panelist Richard Littauer Show Notes In this episode of Sustain, host Richard Littauer is joined by guests Pablo Correa Gómez and Caleb Connolly to explore the development and sustainability of postmarketOS, an open-source Linux distribution designed to extend the life of mobile devices. The team dives into the project's mission, governance, and the community-driven nature of its work. They discuss the challenges related to funding, primarily through grants and Open Collective donations, and the significance of upstreaming Linux kernel support to collaborate with other communities like Alpine Linux. The conversation also highlights the growth of the postmarketOS community, encouraging contributions from both technical and non-technical supporters, and the importance of comprehensive documentation. Additionally, issues of privacy, telemetry, and user support are examined, alongside the steps towards making postmarketOS more professional and economically sustainable. Press download now to hear more! [00:01:30] Pablo explains postmarketOS and its mission to empower people to have full control over their devices and promote sustainability. [00:02:12] Caleb talks about the governance of postmarketOS that started with a few contributors working on a package repository on top of Alpine Linux and overtime more maintainers were added. [00:03:59] There's a discussion on the structure of the team, how the community around hardware components forms sub-communities bases on common SOCs, and the focus on improving tooling and the ecosystem rather than building a product for end users. [00:06:29] Richard discusses the massive, refurbished phone market and asks about how postmarketOS fits into this ecosystem. Caleb shares their experience working on the OnePlus 6 phone and explains the technical process of making the device work on upstream Linux and the challenges of hardware enablement. [00:10:05] Pablo explains that the project is largely funded by volunteer work and Caleb describes the challenges in deciding which devices to prioritize for hardware enablement and how all hardware work so far has been done by volunteers. [00:14:09] On the importance of upstreaming, Pablo explains that postmarketOS works hard to contribute back to the Linux ecosystem rather that maintaining device-specific patches and postmarketOS is downstream to Alpine Linux but contributes much of its work upstream to maintain sustainability. [00:20:09] Richard asks about how the project builds shared context and onboards new developers and Pablo and Caleb explain how the project relies on its wiki page to provide extensive documentation and how the pmbootstrap tool makes it easier for new contributors to get started with porting new devices to postmarketOS. [00:25:01] Richard asks about telemetry and how the team tracks their impact. [00:25:39] Pablo talks about how they receive community feedback through events like FOSDEM and have seen an increase in donations, social media engagement, and community members. [00:28:39] Caleb reflects on the pros and cons of collecting telemetry, which could help guide development but may also create unwanted challenges by focusing too heavily on specific devices. [00:31:30] What are Pablo and Caleb most excited about for the next year? Pablo is excited about professionalizing the project, starting to pay contributors, and scaling the project's growth sustainably, and Caleb jokes about looking forward to the “pre-market OS.” Quotes [00:12:00] “We are trying to grow organically, bit by bit, and be able to pay people to do core things where volunteer work doesn't reach.” [00:15:06] “In the environment we live in, where you have X amount of code per update, it is totally unsustainable.” [00:16:18] “As a distro, we predominately put together the pieces that other people give us.” [00:19:13] “Downstream patches allow to experiment, but long term are a burden. That's the same for every project.” [00:19:22] “The sustainability goes beyond reducing waste and also goes into the social ecosystem and how we maintain projects.” [00:30:33] “We know we are not ready for end users, but we need to build the structure and economic support.” Spotlight [00:32:32] Richard's spotlight is DOSBox. [00:33:03] Pablo's spotlight is FOSDEM and the FOSDEM team. [00:33:57] Caleb's spotlight is processing.org. Links SustainOSS (https://sustainoss.org/) podcast@sustainoss.org (mailto:podcast@sustainoss.org) richard@sustainoss.org (mailto:richard@sustainoss.org) SustainOSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/) SustainOSS Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/tags/sustainoss) Open Collective-SustainOSS (Contribute) (https://opencollective.com/sustainoss) Richard Littauer Socials (https://www.burntfen.com/2023-05-30/socials) Caleb Connolly Website (https://connolly.tech/) Caleb Connolly-treehouse (https://social.treehouse.systems/@cas) Pablo Correa Gómez Website (https://postmarketos.org/core-contributors/#pablo-correa-gomez-pabloyoyoista) Pablo Correa Gómez LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/pablo-correa-gomez/) postmarketOS (https://postmarketos.org/) postmarketOS (Open Collective Contribute) (https://opencollective.com/postmarketos) Gnome Shell & Mutter (https://blogs.gnome.org/shell-dev/2022/09/09/gnome-shell-on-mobile-an-update/) postmarketOS Devices (https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices) Sustain Podcast-Episode 195: FOSSY 2023 with Denver Gingerich (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/195) Software Freedom Conservancy (https://sfconservancy.org/) FOSSY 2025:July 31-August 1 (https://2025.fossy.us/) linaro (https://www.linaro.org/) postmarketOS Wiki (https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices) pmbootstrap (https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Pmbootstrap) compost.party (https://compost.party/) pmbootstrap v3 by Caleb Connolly (https://connolly.tech/posts/2024_06_15-pmbootstrap-v3/) DOSBox (https://www.dosbox.com/) FOSDEM 2025 (https://fosdem.org/2025/) Processing (https://processing.org/) Credits Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guests: Caleb Connolly and Pablo Correa Gomez.

Summary In this episode, thought partner and podcast producer Nayantara Premakumar joins hosts Carolina and Vidhya to reflect and update listeners on our retreat and recent milestones. We share our struggles resisting racial/gendered capitalism through cooperative, decentralized, and transparent governance and ownership structures. This includes a discussion of fiscal sponsorship and technocratic tools for decision-making. We also highlight upcoming changes to the podcast, including efforts to tie together our personal, professional, and political analyses; to acknowledge the lands we've inhabited; and to explicitly prompt reflection and action. ⁠⁠Episode 5 transcript⁠ Notes 01:30: It was a post on NPOCunicorns | People of Color Nonprofit Professionals, not a Facebook ad 17:21: Is Fiscal Sponsorship Right for You? gets at some of our hesitation. See more on The May 13 Group PODCAST webpage. 21:03: While Caro took the lead on this effort, the list referred to here was actually compiled by the New Economy Coalition's Solidarity Economy Funding Library, which we think we became aware of through the Open Collective. Open Collective allows groups to raise and distribute money in a transparent, decentralized way. See more on the PODCAST webpage. 29:12: “Society at large” is meant to suggest everyday members of society who may not directly participate in the funded and evaluated programs—for example, will they benefit from reduced crime, etc. It is meant to drive a wedge between them and the underclass who do directly participate in funded and evaluated programs. See more on the webpage. 30:24: This understanding does not reflect the most recent research, such as The origins of SWOT analysis | ScienceDirect, which suggests that SWOT was developed by industries that profit by serving the U.S. military's imperial interests and the business model of never-ending war, but it was not necessarily developed by military institutions. It was, however, uncritically adopted by nonprofit organizations despite the nature and ostensible purpose of their work being entirely different. Of course, military responses do have their place (e.g., Black Panthers, Zapatista). 39:09: The expansion is not exactly exponential in that it does not reflect the change between 3 to the 4th power and 3 to the 3rd power. But the expansion is not linear because the increment of growth is not static or consistent—it continually increases. References ChainLink Studios SORA Podcast Learn about Vu Le and Community-Centric Fundraising Nonprofit Industrial Complex 101: A primer on how it upholds inequity and flattens resistance Exploitation | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Marx's Theory of Alienation | Richard Wolff on Economic Update; also see What Is Alienation? | Socialism 101 The Buffer Zone with Paul Kivel; also see Social Service or Social Change? | Paul Kivel and the book review The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Behind the Non-Profit Industrial Complex Dylan Rodríguez (He/Him) Strategy as engagement: What organization strategy can learn from military strategy | Science Direct New Economy Coalition A Historical Overview of Philanthropy, Voluntary Associations, and Nonprofit Organizations in the United States, 1600-2000 Beware the tyranny of structurelessness; see the original article, The Tyranny of Stuctureless Robert's Rules of Order; see also Roberta's Rules Basic concepts and principles | Sociocracy for All Lean Coffee The Fibonacci Sequence: Nature's Code; see also Golden Ratio for Art Beginners Pythagorean Theorem The May 13 Group PODCAST Episode 1: Who are we? Active, acute, overt physical genocide as distinct from—but related to—seemingly passive, chronic, and covert structural genocide Music “Inspired” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) ⁠⁠Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0⁠⁠ Contact us  Website:⁠⁠ https://themay13group.net⁠⁠⁠ LinkedIn Carolina: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carodela⁠⁠⁠ Vidhya: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/vidhyashanker⁠⁠

Guests Tracy Hinds | Ashley Williams Panelist Richard Littauer Show Notes On today's episode of Sustain, host Richard Littauer is joined by guests, Tracy Hinds and Ashley Williams, to discuss the structural inequities and funding issues in open source. The episode delves deep into the misaligned incentives in the open source community, how regulatory and policy awareness is growing, and the potential for government regulations to create opportunities for open source maintainers. The conversation also covers the roles of various open source foundations, the impact of large corporations, and the need for more effective advocacy and compensation avenues for contributors. Tracy and Ashley announce their involvement in a working group focused on the European CRA legislation, aiming to bridge gaps between maintainers and policymakers. Press download now! [00:02:22] Ashley responds to Richard's comment about everything being “totally screwed” in open source, but also points out misaligned incentives. She discusses the economic challenges of open source, such as the failure of sustaining efforts and its broader economic impact. [00:04:54] Richard mentions his other podcast “Open Source for Climate” which focuses on leveraging open source technology to combat the climate crisis. [00:06:10] There's a discussion about potential regulatory and policy changes affecting open source, highlighting the need for a more equitable system. Ashley delves into economic theories relating to open source, particularly the concept of externalities and potential regulatory solutions, and upcoming regulations like the software bill of materials. [00:10:05] Tracy stresses the importance of involving open source maintainers in policy discussions to avoid misrepresentation by larger organizations alone. [00:11:47] Richard and Ashley discuss the representations of open source interests in policy making, particularly the dominance of large companies and the potential exclusion of individual maintainers. [00:16:04] Ashley critiques many language-based foundations for their minimal contribution to ecosystem, using Node Foundation as an example of one that has been beneficial due to its library ecosystem, notably NPM. [00:17:35] Tracy acknowledges the efforts of the Python Software Foundation (PSF) and Open Collective in fostering ecosystems that support paid contributors, emphasizing the importance of these roles for sustainability. [00:19:50] Richard notes that while centralized support like AWS services vouchers are helpful, these foundations do not effectively facilitate crucial conversations between maintainers and governments regarding open source regulation and standardization. [00:21:52] Ashley reflects on her experience as the Individual Membership Director at the Node Foundation, discussing the challenges of representing a diverse community within open source projects and foundations. [00:24:45] Tracy mentions her role as the first community seat director on the board, highlighting the evolution and ongoing adjustments in community representation within foundation governance. Also, she discusses the importance of involving individual maintainers in regulatory discussions. [00:27:47] Tracy talks about the economic opportunities in open source, facilitated by platforms like GitHub Sponsors and Patreon, which help reduce barriers for maintainers seeking financial support for their projects. [00:29:20] Ashley puts a small spin on Tracy's optimistic view, noting significant opposition to the empowerment of small open source businesses, primarily due to corporate-dominated structures and antitrust-friendly environments in tech. She argues that open source has been consolidating. [00:33:29] Ashley fills us in on where you can follow her and their future discussions. She mentions a working group at the Eclipse Foundation focusing on CRA legislation, announcing an initiative to gather maintainer feedback on this legislation through a reading group. [00:35:42] Tracy mentions where you can find her online. Quotes [00:03:30] “We have open source – people who maintain open source don't really make a lot of money from it. Attempts to sustain open source have largely failed.” [00:06:24] “Every OSS hacker is also incentivized to be a lawyer.” Spotlight [00:36:32] Richard's spotlight is Jingna Zhang and her new social network, Cara. [00:37:25] Tracy's spotlight is the book, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software. [00:38:09] Ashley's spotlight is exercising for mental health. Links SustainOSS (https://sustainoss.org/) SustainOSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/) podcast@sustainoss.org (email) (mailto:podcast@sustainoss.org) richard@theuserismymom.com (email) (mailto:richard@theuserismymom.com) SustainOSS Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/tags/sustainoss) Open Collective-SustainOSS (Contribute) (https://opencollective.com/sustainoss) Richard Littauer Socials (https://www.burntfen.com/2023-05-30/socials) Tracy Hinds X/Twitter (https://x.com/hackygolucky?lang=en) Tracy Hinds Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/@hackygolucky) Sustain Podcast-Episode 135 featuring Tracy Hinds (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/guests/hinds) Ashley Williams Twitter (https://x.com/ag_dubs) Ashley Williams LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleygwilliams/) Sustain Podcast-Episode 145 featuring Ashley Williams (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/guests/williams) Open Source Initiative (https://opensource.org/) OSS for Climate Podcast (https://ossforclimate.sustainoss.org/) Eclipse Foundation (https://www.eclipse.org/org/foundation/) Jingna Zhang (https://www.zhangjingna.com/) Cara (https://cara.app/login) Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal (https://www.amazon.com/Working-Public-Making-Maintenance-Software/dp/0578675862) Sustain Podcast-Episode 51 featuring Nadia Eghbal (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/guests/nadia) Credits Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guests: Ashley Williams and Tracy Hinds.

Welcome to another episode of Screaming in the Cloud, where we're joined by Anthony Fu, a framework developer at Nuxt Labs and the creator of SlideDev. Anthony has diversified the way presentations are crafted by integrating coding directly into slide development. In this episode, Corey and Anthony discuss the benefits of using markdown to craft slides, the challenges associated with traditional presentation tools like Keynote, and the open-source contributions that have propelled the development of this innovative software. Anthony also shares his inspiration for creating a tool that streamlines and enhances the presentation creation process for both developers and non-developers.Show Highlights: (00:00) Introduction (03:13) The origins of SlideDev  (04:47) The challenges with traditional presentation tools and the advantages of using Markdown for slides(06:04) How SlideDev simplifies slide creation for presentations (07:01) Corey shares his surprise at the utility of SlideDev for non-frontend developers (09:56) Addressing the challenges of aligning text and images in presentations (11:09) Anthony discusses his design philosophy for SlideDev(15:14) Balancing feature requests and maintaining simplicity for SlideDev(16:38) Anthony explains the importance of community contributions to SlideDev (20:13) They discuss implementing new features into SlideDev's evolution(24:15) Anthony's insights into the open-source philosophy behind SlideDev (27:09) SlideDev's approach to redistributing sponsorships to support its dependencies through Open Collective(31:46) Corey mentions contributing to SlideDev's documentation to make it more accessible(33:41) Closing remarks & where to connect with Anthony About Anthony Fu:Anthony is a fanatical open sourceror. Core team member of Vue, Nuxt, and Vite. Creator of Vitest, Slidev, VueUse, UnoCSS and Elk. Working at NuxtLabs. Links referenced:Anthony Fu's Personal Website: https://antfu.me/Anthony Fu on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/antfu/?originalSubdomain=fr Anthony Fu on Twitter: https://x.com/antfu7NuxtLabs: https://nuxtlabs.com * Sponsor Prowler: https://prowler.com

Mike Perham is the creator of Sidekiq, a background job processor for Ruby. He's also the creator of Faktory a similar product for multiple language environments. We talk about the RubyConf keynote and Ruby's limitations, supporting products as a solo developer, and some ideas for funding open source like a public utility. Recorded at RubyConf 2023 in San Diego. -- A few topics covered: Sidekiq (Ruby) vs Faktory (Polyglot) Why background job solutions are so common in Ruby Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) Ractors (Actor concurrency) Downsides of Multiprocess applications When to use other languages Getting people to pay for Sidekiq Keeping a solo business Being selective about customers Ways to keep support needs low Open source as a public utility Mike Mike's blog mastodon Sidekiq faktory From Employment to Independence Ruby Ractor The Practical Effects of the GVL on Scaling in Ruby Transcript You can help correct transcripts on GitHub. Introduction [00:00:00] Jeremy: I'm here at RubyConf San Diego with Mike Perham. He's the creator of Sidekiq and Faktory. [00:00:07] Mike: Thank you, Jeremy, for having me here. It's a pleasure. Sidekiq [00:00:11] Jeremy: So for people who aren't familiar with, I guess we'll start with Sidekiq because I think that's what you're most known for. If people don't know what it is, maybe you can give like a small little explanation. [00:00:22] Mike: Ruby apps generally have two major pieces of infrastructure powering them. You've got your app server, which serves your webpages and the browser. And then you generally have something off on the side that... It processes, you know, data for a million different reasons, and that's generally called a background job framework, and that's what Sidekiq is. [00:00:41] It, Rails is usually the thing that, that handles your web stuff, and then Sidekiq is the Sidekiq to Rails, so to speak. [00:00:50] Jeremy: And so this would fit the same role as, I think in Python, there's celery. and then in the Ruby world, I guess there is, uh, Resque is another kind of job. [00:01:02] Mike: Yeah, background job frameworks are quite prolific in Ruby. the Ruby community's kind of settled on that as the, the standard pattern for application development. So yeah, we've got, a half a dozen to a dozen different, different examples throughout history, but the major ones today are, Sidekiq, Resque, DelayedJob, GoodJob, and, and, and others down the line, yeah. Why background jobs are so common in Ruby [00:01:25] Jeremy: I think working in other languages, you mentioned how in Ruby, there's this very clear, preference to use these job scheduling systems, these job queuing systems, and I'm not. I'm not sure if that's as true in, say, if somebody's working in Java, or C sharp, or whatnot. And I wonder if there's something specific about Ruby that makes people kind of gravitate towards this as the default thing they would use. [00:01:52] Mike: That's a good question. What makes Ruby... The one that so needs a background job system. I think Ruby, has historically been very single threaded. And so, every Ruby process can only do so much work. And so Ruby oftentimes does, uh, spin up a lot of different processes, and so having processes that are more focused on one thing is, is, is more standard. [00:02:24] So you'll have your application server processes, which focus on just serving HTTP responses. And then you have some other sort of focused process and that just became background job processes. but yeah, I haven't really thought of it all that much. But, uh, you know, something like Java, for instance, heavily multi threaded. [00:02:45] And so, and extremely heavyweight in terms of memory and startup time. So it's much more frequent in Java that you just start up one process and that's it. Right, you just do everything in that one process. And so you may have dozens and dozens of threads, both serving HTTP and doing work on the side too. Um, whereas in Ruby that just kind of naturally, there was a natural split there. Global Interpreter Lock [00:03:10] Jeremy: So that's actually a really good insight, because... in the keynote at RubyConf, Mats, the creator of Ruby, you know, he mentioned the, how the fact that there is this global, interpreter lock, [00:03:23] or, or global VM lock in Ruby, and so you can't, really do multiple things in parallel and make use of all the different cores. And so it makes a lot of sense why you would say like, okay, I need to spin up separate processes so that I can actually take advantage of, of my, system. [00:03:43] Mike: Right. Yeah. And the, um, the GVL. is the acronym we use in the Ruby community, or GIL. Uh, that global lock really kind of is a forcing function for much of the application architecture in Ruby. Ruby, uh, applications because it does limit how much processing a single Ruby process can do. So, uh, even though Sidekiq is heavily multi threaded, you can only have so many threads executing. [00:04:14] Because they all have to share one core because of that global lock. So unfortunately, that's, that's been, um, one of the limiter, limiting factors to Sidekiq scalability is that, that lock and boy, I would pay a lot of money to just have that lock go away, but. You know, Python is going through a very long term experiment about trying to remove that lock and I'm very curious to see how well that goes because I would love to see Ruby do the same and we'll see what happens in the future, but, it's always frustrating when I come to another RubyConf and I hear another Matt's keynote where he's asked about the GIL and he continues to say, well, the GIL is going to be around, as long as I can tell. [00:04:57] so it's a little bit frustrating, but. It's, it's just what you have to deal with. Ractors [00:05:02] Jeremy: I'm not too familiar with them, but they, they did mention during the keynote I think there Ractors or something like that. There, there, there's some way of being able to get around the GIL but there are these constraints on them. And in the context of Sidekiq and, and maybe Ruby in general, how do you feel about those options or those solutions? [00:05:22] Mike: Yeah, so, I think it was Ruby 3. 2 that introduced this concept of what they call a Ractor, which is like a thread, except it does not have the global lock. It can run independent to the global lock. The problem is, is because it doesn't use the global lock, it has pretty severe constraints on what it can do. [00:05:47] And the, and more specifically, the data it can access. So, Ruby apps and Rails apps throughout history have traditionally accessed a lot of global data, a lot of class level data, and accessed all this data in a, in a read only fashion. so there's no race conditions because no one's changing any of it, but it's still, lots of threads all accessing the same variables. [00:06:19] Well, Ractors can't do that at all. The only data Ractors can access is data that they own. And so that is completely foreign to Ruby application, traditional Ruby applications. So essentially, Ractors aren't compatible with the vast majority of existing Ruby code. So I, I, I toyed with the idea of prototyping Sidekiq and Ractors, and within about a minute or two, I just ran into these, these, uh... [00:06:51] These very severe constraints, and so that's why you don't see a lot of people using Ractors, even still, even though they've been out for a year or two now, you just don't see a lot of people using them, because they're, they're really limited, limited in what they can do. But, on the other hand, they're unlimited in how well they can scale. [00:07:12] So, we'll see, we'll see. Hopefully in the future, they'll make a lot of improvements and, uh, maybe they'll become more usable over time. Downsides of multiprocess (Memory usage) [00:07:19] Jeremy: And with the existence of a job queue or job scheduler like Sidekiq, you're able to create additional processes to get around that global lock, I suppose. What are the... downsides of doing so versus another language like we mentioned Java earlier, which is capable of having true parallelism in the same process. [00:07:47] Mike: Yeah, so you can start up multiple Ruby processes to process things truly in parallel. The issue is that you do get some duplication in terms of memory. So your Ruby app maybe take a gigabyte per process. And, you can do copy on write forking. You can fork and get some memory sharing with copy on write semantics on Unix operating systems. [00:08:21] But you may only get, let's say, 30 percent memory savings. So, there's still a significant memory overhead to forking, you know, let's say, eight processes versus having eight threads. You know, you, you, you may have, uh, eight threads can operate in a gigabyte process, but if you want to have eight processes, that may take, let's say, four gigabytes of RAM. [00:08:48] So you, you still, it's not going to cost you eight gigabytes of RAM, you know, it's not like just one times eight, but, there's still a overhead of having those separate processes. [00:08:58] Jeremy: would you say it's more of a cost restriction, like it costs you more to run these applications, or are there actual problems that you can't solve because of this restriction. [00:09:13] Mike: Help me understand, what do you mean by restriction? Do you mean just the GVL in general, or the fact that forking processes still costs memory? [00:09:22] Jeremy: I think, well, it would be both, right? So you're, you have two restrictions right now. You have the, the GVL, which means you can't have parallelism within the same process. And then your other option is to spin up a bunch of processes, which you have said is the downside there is that you're using a lot more RAM. [00:09:43] I suppose my question is that Does that actually stop you from doing anything? Like, if you throw more money at the problem, you go like, we're going to have more instances, I'll pay for the RAM, it's fine, can that basically get you out of these situations or are these limitations actually stopping you from, from doing things you could do in other languages? [00:10:04] Mike: Well, you certainly have to manage the multiple processes, right? So you've gotta, you know, if one child process crashes, you've gotta have a parent or supervisor process watching all that and monitoring and restarting the process. I don't think it restricts you. Necessarily, it just, it adds complexity to your deployment. [00:10:24] and, and it's just a question of efficiency, right? Instead of being able to deploy on a, on a one gigabyte droplet, I've got to deploy to a four gigabyte droplet, right? Because I just, I need the RAM to run the eight processes. So it, it, it's more of just a purely a function of how much money am I going to have to throw at this problem. [00:10:45] And what's it going to cost me in operational costs to operate this application in production? When to use other languages? [00:10:53] Jeremy: So during the. Keynote, uh, Matz had mentioned that Rails, is really suitable as this one person framework, like you can have a very small team or maybe even yourself and, and build this product. And so I guess from... Your perspective, once you cross a certain threshold, is like, what Ruby and what Sidekiq provides not enough, and that's why you need to start looking into other languages? [00:11:24] Or like, where's the, turning point, or the, if you [00:11:29] Mike: Right, right. The, it's all about the problem you're trying to solve, right? At the end of the day, uh, the, the question is just what are we trying to solve and how are we trying to solve it? So at a higher level, you got to think about the architecture. if the problem you're trying to solve, if the service you're trying to build, if the app you're trying to operate. [00:11:51] If that doesn't really fall into the traditional Ruby application architecture, then you, you might look at it in another language or another ecosystem. something like Go, for instance, can compile down to a single binary, which makes deployment really easy. It makes shipping up a product. on to a user's machine, much simpler than deploying a Ruby application onto a user's desktop machine, for instance, right? [00:12:22] Um, Ruby does have this, this problem of how do you package everything together and deploy it somewhere? Whereas Go, when you can just compile to a single binary, now you've just got a single thing. And it's just... Drop it on the file system and execute it. It's easy. So, um, different, different ecosystems have different application architectures, which empower different ways of solving the same problems. [00:12:48] But, you know, Rails as a, as a one man framework, or sorry, one person framework, It, it, I don't, I don't necessarily, that's a, that's sort of a catchy marketing slogan, but I just think of Rails as the most productive framework you can use. So you, as a single person, you can maximize what you ship and the, the, the value that you can create because Rails is so productive. [00:13:13] Jeremy: So it, seems like it's maybe the, the domain or the type of application you're making. Like you mentioned the command line application, because you want to be able to deliver it to your user easily. Just give them a binary, something like Go or perhaps Rust makes a lot more sense. and then I could see people saying that if you're doing something with machine learning, like the community behind Python, it's, they're just, they're all there. [00:13:41] So Room for more domains in Ruby [00:13:41] Mike: That was exactly the example I was going to use also. Yeah, if you're doing something with data or AI, Python is going to be a more, a more traditional, natural choice. that doesn't mean Ruby can't do it. That doesn't mean, you wouldn't be able to solve the problem with Ruby. And, and there's, that just also means that there's more space for someone who wants to come in and make an impact in the Ruby community. [00:14:03] Find a problem that Ruby's not really well suited to solving right now and build the tooling out there to, to try and solve it. You know, I, I saw a talk, from the fellow who makes the Glimmer gem, which is a native UI toolkit. Uh, a gem for building native UIs in Ruby, which Ruby traditionally can't do, but he's, he's done an amazing job at sort of surfacing APIs to build these, um, these native, uh, native applications, which I think is great. [00:14:32] It's awesome. It's, it's so invigorating to see Ruby in a new space like that. Um, I talked to someone else who's doing the Polars gem, which is focused on data processing. So it kind of takes, um, Python and Pandas and brings that to Ruby, which is, is awesome because if you're a Ruby developer, now you've got all these additional tools which can allow you to solve new sets of problems out there. [00:14:57] So that's, that's kind of what's exciting in the Ruby community right now is just bring it into new spaces. Faktory [00:15:03] Jeremy: In addition to Sidekiq, you have, uh, another product called Faktory, I believe. And so does that serve a, a similar purpose? Is that another job scheduling, job queueing system? [00:15:16] Mike: It is, yes. And it's, it's, it's similar in a way to Sidekiq. It looks similar. It's got similar concepts at the core of it. At the end of the day, Sidekiq is limited to Ruby. Because Sidekiq executes in a Ruby VM, it executes the jobs, and the jobs are, have to be written in Ruby because you're running in the Ruby VM. [00:15:38] Faktory was my attempt to bring, Sidekiq functionality to every other language. I wanted, I wanted Sidekiq for JavaScript. I wanted Sidekiq for Go. I wanted Sidekiq for Python because A, a lot of these other languages also could use a system, a background job system. And the problem though is that. [00:16:04] As a single man, I can't port Sidekiq to every other language. I don't know all the languages, right? So, Faktory kind of changes the architecture and, um, allows you to execute jobs in any language. it, it replaces Redis and provides a server where you just fetch jobs, and you can use it from it. [00:16:26] You can use that protocol from any language to, to build your own worker processes that execute jobs in whatever language you want. [00:16:35] Jeremy: When you say it replaces Redis, so it doesn't use Redis, um, internally, it has its own. [00:16:41] Mike: It does use Redis under the covers. Yeah, it starts Redis as a child process and, connects to it over a Unix socket. And so it's really stable. It's really fast. from the outside, the, the worker processes, they just talk to Faktory. They don't know anything about Redis at all. [00:16:59] Jeremy: I see. And for someone who, like we mentioned earlier in the Python community, for example, there is, um, Celery. For someone who is using a task scheduler like that, what's the incentive to switch or use something different? [00:17:17] Mike: Well, I, I always say if you're using something right now, I'm not going to try and convince you to switch necessarily. It's when you have pain that you want to switch and move away. Maybe you have Maybe there's capabilities in the newer system that you really need that the old system doesn't provide, but Celery is such a widely known system that I'm not necessarily going to try and convince people to move away from it, but if people are looking for a new system, one of the things that Celery does that Faktory does not do is Celery provides like data adapters for using store, lots of different storage systems, right? [00:17:55] Faktory doesn't do that. Faktory is more, has more of the Rails mantra of, you know, Omakase where we choose, I choose to use Redis and that's it. You don't, you don't have a choice for what to use because who cares, you know, at the end of the day, let Faktory deal with it. it's, it's not something that, You should even necessarily be concerned about it. [00:18:17] Just, just try Faktory out and see how it works for you. Um, so I, I try to take those operational concerns off the table and just have the user focus on, you know, usability, performance, and that sort of thing. but it is, it's, it's another background job system out there for people to try out and see if they like that. [00:18:36] And, and if they want to, um, if they know Celery and they want to use Celery, more power to Faktory them. Sidekiq (Ruby) or Faktory (Polyglot) [00:18:43] Jeremy: And Sidekiq and Faktory, they serve a very similar purpose. For someone who they have a new project, they haven't chosen a job. scheduling system, if they were using Ruby, would it ever make sense for them to use Faktory versus use Sidekiq? [00:19:05] Mike: Uh Faktory is excellent in a polyglot situation. So if you're using multiple languages, if you're creating jobs in Ruby, but you're executing them in Python, for instance, um, you know, if you've, I have people who are, Creating jobs in PHP and executing them in Python, for instance. That kind of polyglot scenario, Sidekiq can't do that at all. [00:19:31] So, Faktory is useful there. In terms of Ruby, Ruby is just another language to Faktory. So, there is a Ruby API for using Faktory, and you can create and execute Ruby jobs with Faktory. But, you'll find that in the Ruby community, Sidekiq is much widely... much more widely used and understood and known. So if you're just using Ruby, I think, I think Sidekiq is the right choice. [00:19:59] I wouldn't look at Faktory. But if you do need, find yourself needing that polyglot tool, then Faktory is there. Temporal [00:20:07] Jeremy: And this is maybe one, maybe one layer of abstraction higher, but there's a product called Temporal that has some of this job scheduling, but also this workflow component. I wonder if you've tried that out and how you think about that product? [00:20:25] Mike: I've heard of them. I don't know a lot about the product. I do have a workflow API, the Sidekiq batches, which allow you to fan out jobs and then, and then execute callbacks when all the jobs in that, in that batch are done. But I don't, provide sort of a, a high level. Graphical Workflow Editor or anything like that. [00:20:50] Those to me are more marketing tools that you use to sell the tool for six figures. And I don't think they're usable. And I don't think they're actually used day to day. I provide an API for developers to use. And developers don't like moving blocks of code around in a GUI. They want to write code. And, um, so yeah, temporal, I, like I said, I don't know much about them. [00:21:19] I also, are they a venture capital backed startup? [00:21:22] Jeremy: They are, is my understanding, [00:21:24] Mike: Yeah, that, uh, any, any sort of venture capital backed startup, um, who's building technical infrastructure. I, I would look long and hard at, I'm, I think open source is the right core to build on. Of course I sell commercial software, but. I'm bootstrapped. I'm profitable. [00:21:46] I'm going to be around forever. A VC backed startup, they tend to go bankrupt, because they either get big or they go out of business. So that would be my only comment is, is, be a little bit leery about relying on commercial venture capital based infrastructure for, for companies, uh, long term. Getting people to pay for Sidekiq [00:22:05] Jeremy: So I think that's a really interesting part about your business is that I think a lot of open source maintainers have a really big challenge figuring out how to make it as a living. The, there are so many projects that they all have a very permissive license and you can use them freely one example I can think of is, I, I talked with, uh, David Kramer, who's the CTO at Sentry, and he, I don't think they use it anymore, but they, they were using Nginx, right? [00:22:39] And he's like, well, Nginx, they have a paid product, like Nginx. Plus that or something. I don't know what the name is, but he was like, but I'm not going to pay for it. Right. I'm just going to use the free one. Why would I, you know, pay for the, um, the paid thing? So I, I, I'm kind of curious from your perspective when you were coming up with Sidekiq both as an open source product, but also as a commercial one, how did you make that determination of like to make a product where it's going to be useful in its open source form? [00:23:15] I can still convince people to pay money for it. [00:23:19] Mike: Yeah, the, I was terrified, to be blunt, when I first started out. when I started the Sidekiq project, I knew it was going to take a lot of time. I knew if it was successful, I was going to be doing it for the next decade. Right? So I started in 2012, and here I am in 2023, over a decade, and I'm still doing it. [00:23:38] So my expectation was met in that regard. And I knew I was not going to be able to last that long. If I was making zero dollars, right? You just, you burn out. Nobody can last that long. Well, I guess there are a few exceptions to that rule, but yeah, money, I tend to think makes things a little more sustainable for sure. [00:23:58] Especially if you can turn it into a full time job solving and supporting a project that you, you love and, and is, is, you know, your, your, your baby, your child, so to speak, your software, uh, uh, creation that you've given to the world. but I was terrified. but one thing I did was at the time I was blogging a lot. [00:24:22] And so I was telling people about Sidekiq. I was telling people what was to come. I was talking about ideas and. The one thing that I blogged about was financial experiments. I said bluntly to the, to, to the Ruby community, I'm going to be experimenting with financial stability and sustainability with this project. [00:24:42] So not only did I create this open source project, but I was also publicly saying I I need to figure out how to make this work for the next decade. And so eventually that led to Sidekiq Pro. And I had to figure out how to build a closed source Ruby gem, which, uh, There's not a lot of, so I was kind of in the wild there. [00:25:11] But, you know, thankfully all the pieces came together and it was actually possible. I couldn't have done it if it wasn't possible. Like, we would not be talking if I couldn't make a private gem. So, um, but it happened to work out. Uh, and it allowed me to, to gate features behind a paywall effectively. And, and yeah, you're right. [00:25:33] It can be tough to make people pay for software. but I'm a developer who's selling to other developers, not, not just developers, open source developers, and they know that they have this financial problem, right? They know that there's this sustainability problem. And I was blunt in saying, this is my solution to my sustainability. [00:25:56] So, I charge what I think is a very fair price. It's only a thousand dollars a year to a hobbyist. That may seem like a lot of money to a business. It's a drop in the bucket. So it was easy for developers to say, Hey, listen, we want to buy this tool for a thousand bucks. It'll ensure our infrastructure is maintained for the next decade. [00:26:18] And it's, and it's. And it's relatively cheap. It's way less than, uh, you know, a salary or even a laptop. So, so that's, that's what I did. And, um, it's, it worked out great. People, people really understood. Even today, I talk to people and they say, we, we signed up for Sidekiq Pro to support you. So it's, it's, it's really, um, invigorating to hear people, uh, thank me and, and they're, they're actively happy that they're paying me and our customers. [00:26:49] Jeremy: it's sort of, uh, maybe a not super common story, right, in terms of what you went through. Because when I think of open core businesses, I think of companies like, uh, GitLab, which are venture funded, uh, very different scenario there. I wonder, like, in your case, so you started in 2012, and there were probably no venture backed competitors, right? [00:27:19] People saying that we're going to make this job scheduling system and some VC is going to give me five million dollars and build a team to work on this. It was probably at the time, maybe it was Rescue, which was... [00:27:35] Mike: There was a venture backed system called IronMQ, [00:27:40] Jeremy: Hmm. [00:27:41] Mike: And I'm not sure if they're still around or not, but they... They took, uh, one or more funding rounds. I'm not sure exactly, but they were VC backed. They were doing, background jobs, scheduled jobs, uh, you know, running container, running container jobs. They, they eventually, I think, wound up sort of settling on Docker containers. [00:28:06] They'll basically spin up a Docker container. And that container can do whatever it wants. It can execute for a second and then shut down, or it can run for, for however long, but they would, um, yeah, I, yeah, I'll, I'll stop there because I don't know the actual details of exactly their system, but I'm not sure if they're still around, but that's the only one that I remember offhand that was around, you know, years ago. [00:28:32] Yeah, it's, it's mostly, you know, low level open source infrastructure. And so, anytime you have funded startups, they're generally using that open source infrastructure to build their own SaaS. And so SaaS's are the vast majority of where you see sort of, uh, commercial software. [00:28:51] Jeremy: so I guess in that way it, it, it gave you this, this window or this area where you could come in and there wasn't, other than that iron, product, there wasn't this big money that you were fighting against. It was sort of, it was you telling people openly, I'm, I'm working on this thing. [00:29:11] I need to make money so that I can sustain it. And, if you, yeah. like the work I do, then, you know, basically support me. Right. And, and so I think that, I'm wondering how we can reproduce that more often because when you see new products, a lot of times it is VC backed, right? [00:29:35] Because people say, I need to work on this. I need to be paid. and I can't ask a team to do this. For nothing, right? So [00:29:44] Mike: Yeah. It's. It's a wicked problem. Uh, it's a really, really hard problem to solve if you take vc you there, that that really kind of means that you need to be making tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in sales. If you are building a small or relatively small. You know, put small in quotes there because I don't really know what that means, but if you have a small open source project, you can't charge huge amounts for it, right? [00:30:18] I mean, Sidekiq is a, I would call a medium sized open source project, and I'm charging a thousand bucks for it. So if you're building, you know, I don't know, I don't even want to necessarily give example, but if you're building some open source project, and It's one of 300 libraries that people's applications will depend on. [00:30:40] You can't necessarily charge a thousand dollars for that library. depending on the size and the capabilities, maybe you can, maybe you can't. But there's going to be a long tail of open source projects that just, they can't, they can't charge much, if anything, for them. So, unfortunately, we have, you know, these You kind of have two pathways. [00:31:07] Venture capital, where you've got to sell a ton, or free. And I've kind of walked that fine line where I'm a small business, I can charge a small amount because I'm bootstrapped. And, and I don't need huge amounts of money, and I, and I have a project that is of the right size to where I can charge a decent amount of money. [00:31:32] That means that I can survive with 500 or a thousand customers. I don't need to have a hundred million dollars worth of customers. Because I, you know, when I started the business, one of the constraints I said is I don't want to hire anybody. I'm just going to be solo. And part of the, part of my ability to keep a low price and, and keep running sustainably, even with just You know, only a few hundred customers is because I'm solo. [00:32:03] I don't have the overhead of investors. I don't have the overhead of other employees. I don't have an office space. You know, my overhead is very small. So that is, um, you know, I just kind of have a unique business in that way, I guess you might say. Keeping the business solo [00:32:21] Jeremy: I think that's that's interesting about your business as well But the fact that you've kept it you've kept it solo which I would imagine in most businesses, they need support people. they need, developers outside of maybe just one. Um, there's all sorts of other, I don't think overhead is the right word, but you just need more people, right? [00:32:45] And, and what do you think it is about Sidekiq that's made it possible for it to just be a one person operation? [00:32:52] Mike: There's so much administrative overhead in a business. I explicitly create business policies so that I can run solo. you know, my support policy is officially you get one email ticket or issue per quarter. And, and anything more than that, I can bounce back and say, well, you're, you're requiring too much support. [00:33:23] In reality, I don't enforce that at all. And people email me all the time, but, but things like. Things like dealing with accounting and bookkeeping and taxes and legal stuff, licensing, all that is, yeah, a little bit of overhead, but I've kept it as minimal as I can. And part of that is I don't want to hire another employee because then that increases the administrative overhead that I have. [00:33:53] And Sidekiq is so tied to me and my knowledge that if I hire somebody, they're probably not going to know Ruby and threading and all the intricate technical detail necessary to build and maintain and support the system. And so really you'll kind of regress a little bit. We won't be able to give as good support because I'm busy helping that other employee. Being selective about customers [00:34:23] Mike: So, yeah, it's, it's a tightrope act where you've got to really figure out how can I scale myself as far as possible without overwhelming myself. The, the overwhelming thing that I have that I've never been able to solve. It's just dealing with billing inquiries, customers, companies, emailing me saying, how do we buy this thing? [00:34:46] Can I get an invoice? Every company out there, it seems wants an invoice. And the problem with invoicing is it takes a lot more. manual labor and administrative overhead to issue that invoice to collect payment on the invoice. So that's one of the reasons why I have a very strict policy about credit card only for, for the vast majority of my customers. [00:35:11] And I demand that companies pay a lot more. You have to have a pretty big enterprise license if you want an invoice. And if the company, if the company comes back and complains and says, well, you know, that's ridiculous. We don't, we don't want to pay that much. We don't need it that much. Uh, you know, I, I say, okay, well then you have two, two things, two, uh, two things. [00:35:36] You can either pay with a credit card or you can not use Sidekiq. Like, that's, that's it. I'm, I don't need your money. I don't want the administrative overhead of dealing with your accounting department. I just want to support my, my customers and build my software. And, and so, yeah, I don't want to turn into a billing clerk. [00:35:55] So sometimes, sometimes the, the, the best thing in business that you can do is just say no. [00:36:01] Jeremy: That's very interesting because I think being a solo... Person is what probably makes that possible, right? Because if you had the additional staff, then you might say like, Well, I need to pay my staff, so we should be getting, you know, as much business as [00:36:19] Mike: Yeah. Chasing every customer you can, right. But yeah. [00:36:22] Every customer is different. I mean, I have some customers that just, they never contact me. They pay their bill really fast or right on time. And they're paying me, you know, five figures, 20, a year. And they just, it's a, God bless them because those are, are the. [00:36:40] Best customers to have and the worst customers are the ones who are paying 99 bucks a month and everything that they don't understand or whatever is a complaint. So sometimes, sometimes you, you want to, vet your customers from that perspective and say, which one of these customers are going to be good? [00:36:58] Which ones are going to be problematic? [00:37:01] Jeremy: And you're only only person... And I'm not sure how many customers you have, but [00:37:08] Mike: I have 2000 [00:37:09] Jeremy: 2000 customers. [00:37:10] Okay. [00:37:11] Mike: Yeah. [00:37:11] Jeremy: And has that been relatively stable or has there been growth [00:37:16] Mike: It's been relatively stable the last couple of years. Ruby has, has sort of plateaued. Um, it's, you don't see a lot of growth. I'm getting probably, um, 15, 20 percent growth maybe. Uh, so I'm not growing like a weed, like, you know, venture capital would want to see, but steady incremental growth is, is, uh, wonderful, especially since I do very little. [00:37:42] Sales and marketing. you know, I come to RubyConf I, I I tweet out, you know, or I, I toot out funny Mastodon Toots occasionally and, and, um, and, and put out new releases of the software. And, and that's, that's essentially my, my marketing. My marketing is just staying in front of developers and, and, and being a presence in the Ruby community. [00:38:06] But yeah, it, it's, uh. I, I, I see not a, not a huge amount of churn, but I see enough sales to, to, to stay up and keep my head above water and to keep growing, um, slowly but surely. Support needs haven't grown [00:38:20] Jeremy: And as you've had that steady growth, has the support burden not grown with it? [00:38:27] Mike: Not as much because once customers are on Sidekiq and they've got it working, then by and large, you don't hear from them all that much. There's always GitHub issues, you know, customers open GitHub issues. I love that. but yeah, by and large, the community finds bugs. and opens up issues. And so things remain relatively stable. [00:38:51] I don't get a lot of the complete newbie who has no idea what they're doing and wants me to, to tell them how to use Sidekiq that I just don't see much of that at all. Um, I have seen it before, but in that case, generally, I, I, I politely tell that person that, listen, I'm not here to educate you on the product. [00:39:14] It's there's documentation in the wiki. Uh, and there's tons of, of more Ruby, generic Ruby, uh, educational material out there. That's just not, not what I do. So, so yeah, by and large, the support burden is, is not too bad because once people are, are up and running, it's stable and, and they don't, they don't need to contact me. [00:39:36] Jeremy: I wonder too, if that's perhaps a function of the price, because if you're a. new developer or someone who's not too familiar with how to do job processing or what they want to do when you, there is the open source product, of course. but then the next step up, I believe is about a hundred dollars a month. [00:39:58] And if you're somebody who is kind of just getting started and learning how things work, you're probably not going to pay that, is my guess. And so you'll never hear from them. [00:40:11] Mike: Right, yeah, that's a good point too, is the open source version, which is what people inevitably are going to use and integrate into their app at first. Because it's open source, you're not going to email me directly, um, and when people do email me directly, Sidekiq support questions, I do, I reply literally, I'm sorry I don't respond to private email, unless you're a customer. [00:40:35] Please open a GitHub issue and, um, that I try to educate both my open source users and my commercial customers to try and stay in GitHub issues because private email is a silo, right? Private email doesn't help anybody else but them. If I can get people to go into GitHub issues, then that's a public record. [00:40:58] that people can search. Because if one person has that problem, there's probably a dozen other people that have that same problem. And then that other, those other 11 people can search and find the solution to their problem at four in the morning when I'm asleep. Right? So that's, that's what I'm trying to do is, is keep, uh, keep everything out in the open so that people can self service as much as possible. Sidekiq open source [00:41:24] Jeremy: And on the open source side, are you still primarily the main contributor? Or do you have other people that are [00:41:35] Mike: I mean, I'd say I do 90 percent of the work, which is why I don't feel guilty about keeping 100 percent of the money. A lot of open source projects, when they look for financial sustainability, they also look for how can we split this money amongst the team. And that's, that's a completely different topic that I've. [00:41:55] is another reason why I've stayed solo is if I hire an employee and I pay them 200, 000 a year as a developer, I'm meanwhile keeping all the rest of the profits of the company. And so that almost seems a little bit unfair. because we're both still working 40 hours a week, right? Why am I the one making the vast majority of the, of the profit and the money? [00:42:19] Um, so, uh, I've always, uh, that's another reason why I've stayed solo, but, but yeah, having a team of people working on something, I do get, regular commits, regular pull requests from people, fixing a bug that they found or just making a tweak that. that they saw, that they thought they could improve. [00:42:42] A little more rarely I get a significant improvement or feature, as a pull request. but Sidekiq is so stable these days that it really doesn't need a team of people maintaining it. The volume of changes necessary, I can easily keep up with that. So, I'm still doing 90 95 percent of the work. Are there other Sidekiq-like opportunities out there? [00:43:07] Jeremy: Yeah, so I think Sidekiq has sort of a unique positioning where it's the code base itself is small enough where you can maintain it yourself and you have some help, but primarily you're the main maintainer. And then you have enough customers who are willing to, to pay for the benefit it gives them on top of what the open source product provides. [00:43:36] cause it's, it's, you were talking about how. Every project people work on, they have, they could have hundreds of dependencies, right? And to ask somebody to, to pay for each of them is, is probably not ever going to happen. And so it's interesting to think about how you have things like, say, you know, OpenSSL, you know, it's a library that a whole bunch of people rely on, but nobody is going to pay a monthly fee to use it. [00:44:06] You have things like, uh, recently there was HashiCorp with Terraform, right? They, they decided to change their license because they, they wanted to get, you know, some of that value back, some of the money back, and the community basically revolted. Right? And did a fork. And so I'm kind of curious, like, yeah, where people can find these sweet spots like, like Sidekiq, where they can find this space where it's just small enough where you can work on it on your own and still get people to pay for it. [00:44:43] It's, I'm trying to picture, like, where are the spaces? Open source as a public utility [00:44:48] Mike: We need to look at other forms of financing beyond pure capitalism. If this is truly public infrastructure that needs to be maintained for the long term, then why are we, why is it that we depend on capitalism to do that? Our roads, our water, our sewer, those are not Capitalist, right? Those are utilities, that's public infrastructure that we maintain, that the government helps us maintain. [00:45:27] And in a sense, tech infrastructure is similar or could be thought of in a similar fashion. So things like Open Collective, things like, uh, there's a, there's a organization in Europe called NLNet, I think, out of the Netherlands. And they do a lot of grants to various open source projects to help them improve the state of digital infrastructure. [00:45:57] They support, for instance, Mastodon as a open source project that doesn't have any sort of corporate backing. They see that as necessary social media infrastructure, uh, for the long term. And, and I, and I think that's wonderful. I like to see those new directions being explored where you don't have to turn everything into a product, right? [00:46:27] And, and try and market and sale, um, and, and run ads and, and do all this stuff. If you can just make the case that, hey, this is, this is useful public infrastructure that so many different, um, Technical, uh, you know, applications and businesses could rely on, much like FedEx and DHL use our roads to the benefit of their own, their own corporate profits. [00:46:53] Um, why, why, why shouldn't we think of tech infrastructure sort of in a similar way? So, yeah, I would like to see us explore more. in that direction. I understand that in America that may not happen for quite a while because we are very, capitalist focused, but it's encouraging to see, um, places like Europe, uh, a little more open to, to trialing things like, cooperatives and, and grants and large long term grants to, to projects to see if they can, uh, provide sustainability in, in, you know, in a new way. [00:47:29] Jeremy: Yeah, that's a good point because I think right now, a lot of the open source infrastructure that we all rely on, either it's being paid for by large companies and at the whim of those large companies, if Google decides we don't want to pay for you to work on this project anymore, where does the money come from? [00:47:53] Right? And on the other hand, there's the thousands, tens of thousands of people who are doing it. just for free out of the, you know, the goodness of their, their heart. And that's where a lot of the burnout comes from. Right. So I think what you're saying is that perhaps a lot of these pieces that we all rely on, that our, our governments, you know, here in the United States, but also around the world should perhaps recognize as this is, like you said, this is infrastructure, and we should be. [00:48:29] Paying these people to keep the equivalent of the roads and, and, uh, all that working. [00:48:37] Mike: Yeah, I mean, I'm not, I'm not claiming that it's a perfect analogy. There's, there's, there's lots of questions that are unanswered in that, right? How do you, how do you ensure that a project is well maintained? What does that even look like? What does that mean? you know, you can look at a road and say, is it full of potholes or is it smooth as glass, right? [00:48:59] It's just perfectly obvious, but to a, to a digital project, it's, it's not as clear. So, yeah, but, but, but exploring those new ways because turning everybody into a businessman so that they can, they can keep their project going, it, it, it itself is not sustainable, right? so yeah, and that's why everything turns into a SaaS because a SaaS is easy to control. [00:49:24] It's easy to gatekeep behind a paywall and it's easy to charge for, whereas a library on GitHub. Yeah. You know, what do you do there? You know, obviously GitHub has sponsors, the sponsors feature. You've got Patreon, you've got Open Collective, you've got Tidelift. There's, there's other, you know, experiments that have been run, but nothing has risen to the top yet. [00:49:47] and it's still, it's still a bit of a grind. but yeah, we'll see, we'll see what happens, but hopefully people will keep experimenting and, and maybe, maybe governments will start. Thinking in the direction of, you know, what does it mean to have a budget for digital infrastructure maintenance? [00:50:04] Jeremy: Yeah, it's interesting because we, we started thinking about like, okay, where can we find spaces for other Sidekiqs? But it sounds like maybe, maybe that's just not realistic, right? Like maybe we need more of a... Yeah, a rethinking of, I guess the, the structure of how people get funded. Yeah. [00:50:23] Mike: Yeah, sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to think at a higher level. You know, we, the, the sustainability problem in American Silicon Valley based open source developers is naturally going to tend toward venture capital and, and capitalism. And I, you know, I think, I think that's, uh, extremely problematic on a, on a lot of different, in a lot of different ways. [00:50:47] And, and so sometimes you need to step back and say, well, maybe we're, maybe we just don't have the right tool set to solve this problem. But, you know, I, I. More than that, I'm not going to speculate on because it is a wicked problem to solve. [00:51:04] Jeremy: Is there anything else you wanted to, to mention or thought we should have talked about? [00:51:08] Mike: No, I, I, I loved the talk, of sustainability and, and open source. And I, it's, it's a, it's a topic really dear to my heart, obviously. So I, I am happy to talk about it at length with anybody, anytime. So thank you for having me. [00:51:25] Jeremy: All right. Thank you very much, Mike.

This week's text is about all the art on the Underground, London's public transport network. A kind of love letter to it all, but also thinking about art's role in public life! Read on the website: thewhitepube.co.uk/art-reviews/art-on-the-underground Israel continues to commit horrific acts of violence and genocide against the Palestinian people, Gaza is still under blockade and potentially facing a ground invasion. Please email ur MP, if you haven't already, and ask them to call for a ceasefire & to stop the war in Gaza. ALSO! on the subject of art x public transport: Banner Repeater is an artist-led contemporary art space & artists' publishing archive, they're based on platform 1 at Hackney Downs station -- at the moment they're doing some fundraising to cover running costs & repairs. You can buy an artist print, here's one of mine actually from back when i was an artist!!! -- very limited edition and rare! because the un-Publish project I did with them was my last project as an artist! If that's not ur bag, there are other prints available on their online shop. And if you'd rather just sling over a cute fiver and call it a day, they're taking donations on Open Collective. B/R are a non-profit and do some really cool work, & small orgs do not receive nearly as much public funding as they should! so **thank you** in advance for helping to support artist-led publishing! Finally, **thank you to Jessica Vaughan from Art on the Underground for taking the time to speak to me -- our interview was the basis for this text.** If you've never noticed the art on the underground -- AotU have got an ART MAP!!!, but you can also have a look through their project archive.

Back again with governance... part two! (See also: part one!) Here we talk about some organizations and how they can be seen as "templates" for certain governance archetypes.Links:Cygnus, CygwinMastodonAndroidFree Software Foundation, GNUSoftware Freedom Conservancy, Outreachy, Conservancy's copyleft compliance projectsCommons ConservancyF-DroidOpen CollectiveLinux Foundation501(c)(3) vs 501(c)(6)StitchtingFree as in FreedomLKML (the Linux Kernel Mailing List)Linus Doesn't ScaleSpritely Networked Communities InstitutePython and the Python Software Foundation, PyCon, the Python Package IndexPython PEPs (Python Enhancement Proposals), XMPP XEPs, Fediverse FEPs, Rust RFCsBlender, Blender Foundation, Blender Institute, Blender StudioBlender's historyElephants DreamMozilla Foundation and Mozilla CorporationDebian, Debian's organizational structure, and Debian's constitutionEFFOh yeah and I guess we should link the World History Association!

This is a mind-expanding episode! Cassandra Idris recently founded an organization built around neurodivergent brains at every level, and mutual aid for some of the most marginalized populations in Philadelphia.She speaks eloquently about mental health, being a trans woman and the inherent social betrayals in that experience, and how the system isn't going to pay us to bring it down. Because she's seen the systems from many perspectives (including from the inside as an HR professional), she has a detailed understanding of what it takes to create true change.One of those changes is to create more organizations by us and for us!If you'd like to learn more about the Philadelphia Mutual Aid collective, or donate, you can do that here. And if you're generally curious about how Open Collective works, that's here.You can connect with Cassandra on Instagram hereCassandra's SoundCloud (techno mixes)Transcript DocEmail Newsletter Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Guest Stuart Geiger Panelist Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! Richard is in Portland at FOSSY, the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference that is held by the Software Freedom Conservancy. In today's episode, we're joined by Stuart Geiger, and Assistant Professor at University of California, San Diego. Stuart shares his unique expertise on “invisible work” in the open source communities, discussing his research funded by the Digital Infrastructure Fund and emphasizing the importance of documenting and valuing such efforts. The conversation delves into the gendered aspects of invisible work, the intersection between capitalism and open source work, and the emotional impact of burnout in emotionally demanding and undervalued roles. Richard and Stuart also explore the motivations of open source practitioners, potential links between religious backgrounds and open source evangelism, and the intriguing implications of large language model AI in the open source world. Hit download now to hear more! [00:00:32] Stuart tells us his focus area and explains that he also studies a range of decentralized, volunteer-based, peer production communities. [00:00:57] Stuart was one of the first recipients of funding from the Digital Infrastructure Fund, aimed at researching the unseen aspects of open source software. [00:01:31] What does Stuart mean by “invisible work?” In open source projects they are things that aren't tracked on public code repositories. He shares that they have conducted over 50 interviews to learn more about the “invisible work”, and discusses the importance of documenting “invisible work.” [00:04:56] Richard and Stuart discuss the need for environmentally friendly alternatives to in-person meetings or conferences. Stuart suggests using tools like Open Collective to and the All Contributors project. [00:05:57] Richard asks if there are parallels between invisible work in open source and societal invisible work, particularly regarding women. Stuart affirms this and mentions that some of this labor can be gendered, especially work marked as more social. Richard and Stuart brainstorm a slogan to describe the transition from non-contributors to contributors in open source projects, so if you have any suggestions send an email. [00:08:48] The topic about the intersection between capitalism and open source work is brought up, and Stuart discusses burnout, explaining that if often occurs in professions that are emotionally demanding and undervalued. [00:11:29] Richard asks Stuart if open source practitioners see it as a calling. Stuart explains that some do while others are motivated by business necessity. [00:12:57] A question arises around the potential religious backgrounds of open source evangelists, and Stuart shares he has not specifically investigated this connection, though he has observed comparisons with political activism. [00:14:22] What is Stuart working on right now? He mentions exploring the implications of large language model AI in the open source world. [00:16:32] Find out where you can follow Stuart and his work online. Links SustainOSS (https://sustainoss.org/) SustainOSS Twitter (https://twitter.com/SustainOSS?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) SustainOSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/) podcast@sustainoss.org (mailto:podcast@sustainoss.org) SustainOSS Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/tags/sustainoss) Richard Littauer Twitter (https://twitter.com/richlitt?lang=en) Software Freedom Conservancy (https://sfconservancy.org/) Open OSS (https://openoss.sourceforge.net/) All Contributors (https://allcontributors.org/) Stuart Geiger Website (https://stuartgeiger.com/) Stuart Geiger Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=0AvWi3wAAAAJ&hl=en) Credits Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guest: Stuart Geiger.

Guest Aaron Wolf Panelist Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! Richard is in Portland at FOSSY, the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference that is held by the Software Freedom Conservancy. Join us on a captivating journey with guest Aaron Wolf, the co-founder of Snowdrift.coop, as he unravels the story behind the innovative crowdfunding platform for open source projects. From his initial resistance to founding something, through his eye-opening Linux experience and a friend's prompt to solve a pressing problem, Aaron details how he ended up creating Snowdrift.coop. Learn about the platform's unique funding model, the early challenges and progress made over a decade, and its exciting recent developments. Despite not being a programmer, but a music teacher, Aaron finds parallels between his profession and the open source world, while he passionately advocates for the open source process in other industries. Discover the ups and downs faced by Snowdrift, the challenges of running a campaign, its current standing as a debt-free entity with a dedicated team, and a recent major milestone is revealed. Download this episode now! [00:00:29] Aaron tells us about himself and being a co-founder, and how his friend encouraged him to act on a problem he was complaining about which is the lack of funding for public goods. He was frustrated with certain software limitations and desired improvements, which led to his idea for Snowdrift. [00:03:38] How does Snowdrift work? Patrons pledge to donate more to a project when others join the crowd that gives together, a method they call 'crowdmatching'. Aaron expresses his reluctance to start something like Snowdrift due to the complexities involved, but his friend convinced him to give it a shot. [00:04:47] Aaron talks about the challenges faced and progress made over the past 10 ten years, and the importance of early adopters. He also tells us he's not a programmer but a music teacher and discusses the similarities he sees between open source software and the process of creating music. [00:06:26] He talks about his frustration with the copyright system and how it hampers creativity, discusses his belief in the need for an open source process in other industries, like music education, and discusses the obstacles encountered when trying to use open source software and run Snowdrift as a co-op. He shares the Snowdrift gained early attention and interest but struggled to secure funding. [00:09:30] Aaron shares that despite difficulties, Snowdrift is debt-free, has a small, dedicated team, and 156 patrons with real money. [00:11:52] Richard and Aaron discuss the difficulties of applying for and giving grants. Aaron mentions they have not focused much on this aspect as it requires a lot of time and expresses that their work is still relevant and needed as it was 10 years ago. He also reveals a recent major milestone. [00:13:55] Aaron mentions their early effort in reviewing around 760 crowdfunding sites to understand the landscape. They found many people working on similar projects but not collaborating, leading to many of these projects disappearing after a few months. [00:15:31] Aaron highlights Open Collective as the closest to their own project, and mentions the benefits of Open Collective, including their legal foundation and handling of money, which Snowdrift has struggled with. [00:17:37] We hear about Aaron's talk on the nature of public goods and why coordination is necessary for their type of solution. [00:18:02] Find out where you can follow Aaron online. Links SustainOSS (https://sustainoss.org/) SustainOSS Twitter (https://twitter.com/SustainOSS?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) SustainOSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/) podcast@sustainoss.org (mailto:podcast@sustainoss.org) SustainOSS Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/tags/sustainoss) Richard Littauer Twitter (https://twitter.com/richlitt?lang=en) Software Freedom Conservancy (https://sfconservancy.org/) Open OSS (https://openoss.sourceforge.net/) Aaron Wolf social.coop Mastodon (https://social.coop/@wolftune) Aaron Wolf LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/wolftune/) Aaron Wolf Website (https://blog.wolftune.com/) Snowdrift.coop (https://snowdrift.coop/) Credits Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guest: Aaron Wolf.

Guests Ruth Cheesley | Josh Goldberg Panelist Richard Littauer Show Notes Note: Due to an issue with Gmail sending the edited podcast to spam (thanks, gmail), this is going out a bit late! Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. This is a special podcast and one of several in this series for GitHub's Maintainer Month. We're interviewing maintainers to ask them about their experience of open source and their experience of living as maintainers. Our first guest is Ruth Cheesley, a maintainer and community lead for Mautic, an open source marketing automation platform. Richard and Ruth dive into open source governance, community engagement, and organizing virtual conferences. Ruth shares how she reinvigorated the Mautic community, highlighting the importance of transparency and empowering community leaders, and she unveils her project focusing on governance and fundraising to ensure Mautic's sustainability. Our next guest is Josh Goldberg, a full-time independent open source developer who's contributed significantly to TypeScript. They discuss Josh's transition from TSLint to TypeScript-ESLint, his efforts to boost developer community efficiency, and the importance of fair compensation for maintainers. Also, there's a conversation on the governance proposal of TypeScript-ESLint and the challenges of fair funding. Hit download to hear more! [00:01:06] Ruth tells us about Mautic and the growing community. Also, the core team/leadership team is made up of team leads for each functional area and Ruth as project lead. [00:03:32] Ruth thinks of herself as a maintainer because she's instrumental in the project's direction and ongoing development. [00:04:21] We hear about a challenging time for Ruth when Mautic was first acquired by Acquia in 2019, she was brought in as community manger to navigate this change and was successful in regaining trust an keeping the project moving forward. [00:07:41] Ruth emphasizes the importance of transparency in building trust, and she encourages maintainers to empower their community members by providing opportunities for leadership and ownership. [00:08:57] What's been fun for Ruth? Organizing Mautic's first-ever conference which was an inclusive, multi-lingual event with over 300 attendees. [00:12:11] Ruth discusses her excitement about the independent project they're working on, focusing on governance and fundraising. She expressed her vision for Mautic to be among the top options when people consider marketing automation tools. [00:13:49] We find out Ruth's long-term career aspirations in open source and community management, and how enjoys the challenge of new tasks and strives to balance her routine administrative duties with more fulfilling tasks that bring her joy. [00:17:01] She advises community managers to keep working in public, even it feels like an echo chamber initially, as people are watching and learning how they can contribute to the project. She suggested that this approach prevents burnout and invites others to generously contribute their time and support to the project. [00:18:09] Find out where you can learn more about Mautic and Ruth on the web. [00:20:22] Josh Goldberg joins us and fills us in on his journey into open source. He discusses the transition from the TSLint project, a linter for TypeScript, to TypeScript-ESLint, a set of extensions on top of ESLint that allows linting of TypeScript code, improving the efficiency and reducing duplication between the ESLint and TSLint communities. [00:22:13] His work is primarily funded through the Open Collective platform and some individual sponsorship on GitHub, and ESLint also sponsors the TypeScript-ESLint project. [00:23:06] We learn about the co-maintainers that work on the team. He also tells us they are working on a governance proposal, involving a system that ranks contributions by points, aiming to encourage maintainers and contributors to keep contributing. [00:24:39] Josh mentions his role as an open source maintainer, which has turned out to be mostly DevRel. [00:25:42] We hear about sustainable funding, and one of the challenges Josh experiences is the necessity to ask for funding, but he sees it as a necessary part of maintaining an open source project that lacks corporate backing. [00:27:10] There's a discussion on sustainable funding and Josh explains how they have different definitions based on their life situations. [00:28:54] Josh tells us the work is primarily funded through the Open Collective platform and some individual sponsorship on GitHub. He also talks about the governance proposal, involving a system that ranks contributions by points, [00:31:51] Josh mentions his role as an open source maintainer, which he initially thought would be half DevRel and half coding, has turned out to be DevRel, and he enjoys interacting with users and networking but misses core coding work. [00:33:03] One of the challenges Josh experiences is the necessity to ask for funding. [00:33:56] Richard suggests the possibility of expanding the TypeScript ESLint team to include toles focused on fundraising and community building, and Josh loves this idea. [00:35:31] Find out where you can follow Josh on the web. Quotes Ruth: [00:04:04] “Maintainers are conductors of an open source project orchestra.” Josh: [00:31:57] “When I came into this, I thought it would half DevRel, half coding, but it's not. It's majority DevRel and I like that.” Spotlight Links SustainOSS (https://sustainoss.org/) SustainOSS Twitter (https://twitter.com/SustainOSS?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) SustainOSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/) podcast@sustainoss.org (mailto:podcast@sustainoss.org) SustainOSS Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/tags/sustainoss) Open Collective-SustainOSS (Contribute) (https://opencollective.com/sustainoss) Richard Littauer Twitter (https://twitter.com/richlitt?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) Ruth Cheesley Twitter (https://twitter.com/RCheesley) Ruth Cheesley Website (https://www.ruthcheesley.co.uk/) Mautic (https://www.mautic.org/) Mautic Leadership Team (https://www.mautic.org/mautic-leadership-team) Mautic Contribution (https://www.mautic.org/tag/contribution) Sustain Podcast- 2 episodes featuring guest Ruth Cheesley (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/guests/cheesley) Josh Goldberg Website (https://www.joshuakgoldberg.com/#contact) Josh Goldberg Twitter (https://twitter.com/joshuakgoldberg) TypeScript-ESLint Mastodon (https://fosstodon.org/@tseslint) Open Collective-typescript-eslint (https://opencollective.com/typescript-eslint) Learning TypeScript by Josh Goldberg (https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-typescript/9781098110321/) Credits Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guests: Josh Goldberg and Ruth Cheesley.

Kann man von einem Open-Source-Projekt seinen Lebensunterhalt verdienen?Martin Donath ist einer der wenigen Menschen im deutschsprachigen Raum, der über 100.000 USD mit Open Source Sponsorengeldern verdient. Mit seinem Projekt Material for MkDocs hat er das Sponsorware-Model erfolgreich implementiert und dies somit zu seinem Vollzeitjob gemacht.In dieser Episode stellt sich Martin unseren Fragen und wir sprechen über Open Source und wann die Maintenance eines Projektes wirkliche Arbeit wird, was Sponsorware ist, über den Churn von Sponsoren, Pricing-Strategien, Release-Zyklen, den Umgang mit internen Prozessen in Unternehmen, Platform-Risiken bei GitHub Sponsors und viele weitere Themen, die Open Source alles andere als eine schöne Grüne Wiese erscheinen lassen.Bonus: Was Material for MkDocs mit Stripe gemeinsam hat.Das schnelle Feedback zur Episode:

Listen along this month as Caleb Tenenbaum shares about his community-based meditation program, Community Village, Nicki and Jocelyn share about the Berlin Microsolidarity Project, and Abi gives us an update on the Network's very own Research Crew! Here are few further links mentioned in the call: Microsolidarity Summercamps! USA Europe Microsolidarity Practice Programs (June 6 - 15th) Learn the basic Microsolidarity concepts and connect & practice with other community builders! Registration is now open! If you're a microsolidarity practitioner you can become a member and join our calls by contributing a minimum of €3/month via our Open Collective

Guest Serkan Holat Panelists Richard Littauer | Leslie Hawthorn Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. Richard and Leslie are hosting today, and they're very excited to welcome our special guest, Serkan Holat, who's a Freelance Software Developer, with over 20 years of experience in researching finance, open source ecosystems, and digital public goods. He advocates for financing open source software with public money and setting up dedicated public funds called Agile Public Funds. Today, we'll discuss with Serkan, the need to allocate funds to support and publish critical open source software, the importance of sustainability on open source software, and the lack of understanding of the industry's risk profile. Also, Serkan gives us all the details on an experiment he recently started to increase awareness about using public money to finance open source. Download this episode to hear much more! [00:01:47] We start off with Serkan telling us how the tax cause is going. He proposes introducing an open source tax on proprietary software sales, with the revenue going to public funds for distribution to the open source ecosystem. [00:06:11] Serkan explains how he's watched the space grow, and he talks about the Digital Public Goods Alliance that recognizes open source software as a new type of digital public good, and the Sovereign Tech Fund. [00:08:35] Serkan tells us why there shouldn't be any obligations on the developers and what we should do. [00:10:23] We hear Serkan's thoughts on the Sovereign Tech Fund in Germany, an excellent initiative that he supports as a blueprint for other nations to follow, but scalability will become an issue. [00:12:39] Free Software Foundation Europe has a fantastic campaign. Serkan's explains the idea of using public sector collaboration. [00:13:56] There's a discussion on the challenges of implementing public sector collaboration and there's a suggestion of creating a social contract to increase funding for open source software. [00:16:43] What's wrong with the market we currently have? Serkan elaborates on this. [00:20:19] The conversation shifts to Richard, Leslie, and Serkan touching on the role of security in financing open source software, they discuss the allocations of funds to support and publish open source software, the need for sustainability in open source software, and the lack of understanding of the industry's risk profile. [00:28:41] Serkan shares his thoughts on how he's trying to convince software companies to produce open source software. [00:30:31] Richard wonders how a tax on proprietary software to help out open source communities, is going to lead to a more equitable environment, or all people building open source software. [00:32:45] Serkan advocates for the creation of public funds to finance the open source ecosystem, and he's been experimenting with this approach for the past 15 months. He chooses three projects from Open Collective each month and distributes money based on their criticality score. [00:34:11] Find out where you can follow Serkan and all his writings on the web. Quotes [00:02:51] “My proposal on that area is to introduce an open source software tax on proprietor software sales.” Spotlight [00:37:13] Leslie's spotlight is the Chaos Computer Club. [00:38:22] Richard's spotlight is the Feminist Bird Club, Northern Vermont chapter. [00:39:04] Serkan's spotlight is an announcement made by Minister Alexandra van Huffelen, at the EU Open Source Policy Summit 2023. Links SustainOSS (https://sustainoss.org/) SustainOSS Twitter (https://twitter.com/SustainOSS?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) SustainOSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/) podcast@sustainoss.org (mailto:podcast@sustainoss.org) SustainOSS Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/tags/sustainoss) Richard Littauer Twitter (https://twitter.com/richlitt?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) Leslie Hawthorn Twitter (https://twitter.com/lhawthorn?lang=en) Serkan Holat Twitter (https://twitter.com/coni2k?lang=en) Serkan Holat LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/serkanholat/) Serkan Holat Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/@coni2k) Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure by Nadia Eghbal (https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/research-reports/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/) Digital Public Goods Alliance (https://digitalpublicgoods.net/) Sovereign Tech Fund (https://sovereigntechfund.de/en/) Open Source Project Criticality Score-GitHub (https://github.com/ossf/criticality_score) Open source public fund experiment by Serkan Holat (https://dev.to/coni2k/open-source-public-fund-experiment-lc8) Ecosyste.ms (https://ecosyste.ms/) If it's public money, make it public code!-FOSDEM'23 (https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/public_money_public_code/) Public Money? Public Code! Free Software Foundation Europe (https://publiccode.eu/en/) Switch to open source alternatives in Munich (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux) Chaos Computer Club (https://www.ccc.de/en/) Northern Vermont Feminist Bird Club- Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/fbc.nvt/) Dutch Digitalisation Minister announces creation of an OSPO (https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observatory-osor/news/dutch-digitalisation-minister-announces-ospo-creation) Ministerial Address: Alexandra van Huffelen (YouTube) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTQEzKQFjXg&t=18080s) Credits Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guest: Serkan Holat.

Tune in here for a summary of this month's Microsolidarity Network Call! This month Community Alchemist Lana Jelenjev ran a skill share session on the Satir Change Model, while a 'network support' breakout room allowed space to chew on a proposal for collectivising the financial risks of running community events. Could we have a new network "micro-insurance" scheme in the works? LINKS to further info: Download the full Satir Model guide here. (Put MICROSOLIDARITY in the coupon code to get it for free) Learn more about Understanding Organisational Change from Lana! Check out her upcoming courses through The Hum. See the Doc outlining the new "micro-insurance" scheme here Your feedback and critical thinking is very welcome :) And, if you'd like to help get the ball rolling, we welcome any contributions you'd like to throw into the hat! Microsolidarity Summercamps! USA Europe Microsolidarity Practice Programs (June 6 - 15th) Learn the basic Microsolidarity concepts and connect & practice with other community builders! Registration is now open - click here! If you're a microsolidarity practitioner you can become a member and join our calls by contributing a minimum of €3/month via our Open Collective

Guest Dawn Wages Panelist Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. Today, Richard is very excited to have as his guest, Dawn Wages, who's the Python Community Advocate at Microsoft, Core Team Member for Wagtail, DjangoCon Organizer, and Director and Treasurer for the Python Software Foundation. We'll hear Dawn's journey into how she got involved with the PSF and as a Python Community Advocate at Microsoft, she explains how to become a PSF member, as well as the benefits, since they've made some changes recently. She explains where she falls on the ethical source divide and dives into the AntiRacist Ethical Source License, which is her niche. Also, she shares advice on how communities can be more sustainable at navigating conflict in their communities and reveals that we should lead with empathy. If you're looking at going to a conference this year, there's some great DjangoCon's and a PyCon going on that are worth checking out. Hit download now to hear more! [00:03:31] We hear how Dawn got involved with the PSF and how she became the Python Community Advocate at Microsoft. [00:05:23] Dawn shares why foundations in the open source space seem to continually have this community voting way of entering into the board, if she thinks it's healthy, and if she thought about it when she was working on Django's new process. [00:08:27] Both dollars and time are things which are often barriers to entry for DEI, so how does that help diversity, equity, and inclusion versus how it hurts it? Also, we hear about Wagtail and Torchbox and what they do. [00:11:40] Dawn mentioned that the PSF lowered the dollar amount and Open Collective, so now we hear the benefits it gives to an individual to become a member of the PSF, if that's something people should think about if they're working in Python, and if it's possible to join on behalf of the project and not their company. [00:13:30] We hear about a tool called, Fiscal Sponsoree, with the PSF. [00:14:50] Dawn fills us in on DjangoCon 2023, the financing structure for keeping Django going, how they think about sustainability in their community, and DjangoCon Africa 2023. [00:16:51] What does a sponsored chair do? [00:19:04] Richard wonders how Dawn thinks about the return on investment for her ultimate strategy, why these conferences, and what's the ultimate narrative arc for her seventh season open source Bajor story. Also, she explains why she's the treasurer. [00:22:56] Richard explains what the Ethical Source Movement is and wonders how Dawn holds the tension and where she falls on the ethical source divide. [00:24:37] We hear Richard's opinion on one of the problems with open source requiring a huge layout of upfront investment in hours and time and no guarantee that it will pay off, and the work being detrimental to mental health of people working on it. Dawn talks about the Anti-Racist License and explains the “PIES” check-in. [00:28:12] Dawn shares advice on how to help communities be more sustainable at navigating trauma and conflict in their communities without it becoming a drain on resources. [00:31:00] Listen here for a list of conferences you should go to that are Python and Django and where you can follow Dawn on the web. Quotes [00:08:58] “Open source is not accessible for everyone, and it's not a great method for everyone. It is people who have support elsewhere somehow.” [00:26:34] “I think there are tools we can use to be able to acknowledge the humanity of the individuals contributing, and being flexible and thoughtful about the goals we are trying to meet as a collective, and the goals the individual is trying to contribute or try to receive.” Spotlight [00:33:21] Richard's spotlight is his friend, Danielle Garber, who's a personal coach and makes amazing hand woven things. [00:34:08] Dawn's spotlight is Jeff Triplett, Director of PSF, and Coraline Ada Ehmke, lead organizer for the Organization for Ethical Source. Links SustainOSS (https://sustainoss.org/) SustainOSS Twitter (https://twitter.com/SustainOSS?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) SustainOSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/) podcast@sustainoss.org (mailto:podcast@sustainoss.org) Richard Littauer Twitter (https://twitter.com/richlitt?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) Dawn Wages Twitter (https://twitter.com/BajoranEngineer) Dawn Wages Website (https://dawnwages.info/) Dawn Wages Mastodon (https://mastodon.online/@fly00gemini8712) Python Software Foundation (https://www.python.org/psf-landing/) At The Root (https://attheroot.dev/) DjangoCon 2023 (Durham, North Carolina) (https://2023.djangocon.us/) DjangoCon 2023 (Edinburgh, Scotland) (https://2023.djangocon.eu/) DjangoCon Africa 2023 ( Zanzibar, Tanzania) (https://2023.djangocon.africa/) PyCon 2023 (Salt Lake City, Utah) (https://us.pycon.org/2023/) Sustain Podcast-Episode 75: Deb Nicholson on the OSI, the future of open source, and SeaGL (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/75) Wagtail (https://wagtail.org/) Torchbox (https://torchbox.com/) Fiscal Sponsorees (https://www.python.org/psf/fiscal-sponsorees/) AntiRacist Ethical Source License (https://github.com/AtTheRoot/ATR-License) Every Thread Handwoven (Danielle Garber) (https://www.everythreadhandwoven.com/) Jeff Triplett Website (https://jefftriplett.com/about/) Coraline Ada Ehmke Website (https://where.coraline.codes/) Credits Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guest: Dawn Wages.

Guest Hugi Ásgeirsson | Silona Bonewald | Marco Möller Panelist Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome back to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. Richard is at the State of Open Con 2023 UK in London, and he's excited to have his first ever in-person podcasts. Today, he has three guests joining him. His first guest is Hugi Ásgeirsson, who's the Strategy & Partnerships Director at Open Collective Europe. He talks about the differences and benefits between Open Collective in the US vs Europe. Richard's next guest is a Sustain favorite, Silona Bonewald, who's the Executive Director for IEEE SA Open. Silona dives into DE&I at conferences and how IEEE and SA Open help with Sustainability. Finally, Marco Möller joins the podcast. Marco is the Co-Founder and Managing Director at PIONIX. We'll learn how open source is helping sustain our environment, via EV Charging solutions powered by Open Source. Interested in finding out more? Hit play now and enjoy this episode. [00:01:12] Hugi explains how Open Collective Europe fits within Open Collective. [00:03:48] Why does tax structure matter for hosting Open Source projects? Hugi explains the benefits of funding via OCE vs other parts of the world. [00:07:16] If Hugi works for Open Collective Europe...as in the EU, why is he at a conference in the UK? We learn how 50% of all philanthropic donations in Europe happen in the UK. [00:08:34] Hugi discusses his favorite discussions heard at State of Open Con 2023 UK and the takeaways. One word… resilience. [00:13:14] Find out where you can follow Hugi and Open Collective Europe on the web. [00:16:11] Silona now joins Richard. Silona talks about if the sustainability of the ecosystem still depends upon individual members of large projects and corporation at these conferences. Does it help or hurt? [00:17:42] We hear about types of diversity and inclusion that's left out of the conferences. [00:20:40] Silona explains what IEEE and SA Open is, the differences, and her on-going work there. [00:26:29] Richard ask Silona how their platform lends itself towards a more sustainable, more diverse market or ecosystem of open source. [00:31:34] If you want to get involved, Silona gives us two sites you can check out (linked below). [00:32:07] Find out all the places you can follow Silona on the web. [00:33:45] Richard has on a different and special guest for us as the final interview of the conference, Marco Möller. Marco gives us his background and his links to Open Source. [00:35:35] Marco explains how EV Charging works, and how his company PIONIX fit in. [00:36:41] We learn how PIONIX, and their EV charging system is powered by open source and is the main contributor to EVerest. [00:40:46] Marco goes into LF Energy's (A Linux Foundation Project) involvement in PIONIX. [00:43:59] Richard is curious to find out more about PIONIX's investors. [00:49:33] Want to learn more about PIONIX, the repository, or Marco himself? He tells us where to find him on the internet. Links SustainOSS (https://sustainoss.org/) SustainOSS Twitter (https://twitter.com/SustainOSS?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) SustainOSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/) podcast@sustainoss.org (mailto:podcast@sustainoss.org) Richard Littauer Twitter (https://twitter.com/richlitt?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) Open Collective Europe (https://opencollective.com/europe) Hugi Ásgeirsson email (mailto:hugi@opencollective.com) Hugi Ásgeirsson Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/@aerugo) Hugi Ásgeirsson Twitter (https://twitter.com/aerugix) IEEE (https://www.ieee.org/) IEEE SA Open (http://saopen.ieee.org/) IEEE Computer Society Open Source Software Project Governance Working Group (http://sagroups.ieee.org/osspg) Silona Bonewald email (mailto:silona@silona.com) Silona Bonewald LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/silona/) Silona Bonewald Twitter (https://twitter.com/Silona) Silona Bonewald Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/@Silona) The Onion - Prague's Franz Kafka International Named World's Most Alienating Airport (https://www.theonion.com/pragues-franz-kafka-international-named-worlds-most-ali-1819594798) PIONIX (https://pionix.com/) PIONIX Article on TNW (https://thenextweb.com/news/linux-foundation-backed-everest-standarizes-ev-charging-protocols) LF Energy (https://www.lfenergy.org/) EVerest Project (https://www.lfenergy.org/projects/EVerest/) EVerest GitHub (https://github.com/EVerest) EVerest Mailing List (https://lists.lfenergy.org/g/everest) Marco Möller LinkedIn (https://de.linkedin.com/in/marco-m%C3%B6ller-049a1724) Credits Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guests: Hugi Ásgeirsson, Marco Möller, and Silona Bonewald.

“I think it's fundamental that we figure out a way of doing this. I think it's absolutely wrong and unfair that those who are about to leave this Earth are the ones making decisions for those staying on Earth. That doesn't make any sense. So, how do we do it? I am not the right person for doing policy. I'm a systems thinker, so I think about systems, but how we implement the policy for that, I don't know. I do know that philosophically we must include everyone who shares this planet with us in the decision-making process.It starts with different levels. It starts with how you react when you read something. It starts with each of us personally, how we behave and how we act on social media, and educating ourselves on misinformation and disinformation tactics to be able to see them and not be part of that hyper-reactionary movement where everything is like a disaster, or we react every time we feel like offended by everything.So I think this is like the same as it has been forever. This is not new. Centuries and centuries ago we had the same challenges. This all starts with how you behave. And so I think it starts there.And then I would say there are a lot of really good tooling that we can still use. If you remember, your generation has been so good at using tooling to hack and troll governments and politicians. And I am in awe. I mean, talk about hack the system. You are like the new Anonymous, and I love that. Like I am right there with you. I don't even use TikTok, but if you want me to use TikTok for something, I will. So just keep using social media to troll the trolls. I think that is a very important thing that you can do and occupy that space. And then lastly, build alternatives and support alternatives. We have distributed social media projects. We have New_ Public, which is this amazing group in the United States that is like designing public spaces and rethinking digital spaces and they're incredible. Support those projects. Support everyone who's building distributed mesh infrastructure. If there's a generation that is multiplayer, it is you guys. And so you need to play in all these different games at the same time and build the alternative while you are using whatever you have at your hands to make sure that we are pushing for our agenda.”Pia Mancini is a democracy activist, political scientist, open source sustainer, co-founder & CEO at Open Collective and Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation. She has worked in politics in Argentina as the Chief of Advisers and Deputy Secretary of Political Affairs, Government of the City of Buenos Aires and CIPPEC think tank. She has developed technology for democracy around the world and is a YC Alum, Young Global Leaders (World Economic Forum). She co-founded DemocracyOS & The Net Party (Partido de la Red).www.piamancini.comhttps://opencollective.comhttps://democracy.earthwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Pia Mancini is a democracy activist, political scientist, open source sustainer, co-founder & CEO at Open Collective and Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation. She has worked in politics in Argentina as the Chief of Advisers and Deputy Secretary of Political Affairs, Government of the City of Buenos Aires and CIPPEC think tank. She has developed technology for democracy around the world and is a YC Alum, Young Global Leaders (World Economic Forum). She co-founded DemocracyOS & The Net Party (Partido de la Red).“I think it's fundamental that we figure out a way of doing this. I think it's absolutely wrong and unfair that those who are about to leave this Earth are the ones making decisions for those staying on Earth. That doesn't make any sense. So, how do we do it? I am not the right person for doing policy. I'm a systems thinker, so I think about systems, but how we implement the policy for that, I don't know. I do know that philosophically we must include everyone who shares this planet with us in the decision-making process.It starts with different levels. It starts with how you react when you read something. It starts with each of us personally, how we behave and how we act on social media, and educating ourselves on misinformation and disinformation tactics to be able to see them and not be part of that hyper-reactionary movement where everything is like a disaster, or we react every time we feel like offended by everything.So I think this is like the same as it has been forever. This is not new. Centuries and centuries ago we had the same challenges. This all starts with how you behave. And so I think it starts there.And then I would say there are a lot of really good tooling that we can still use. If you remember, your generation has been so good at using tooling to hack and troll governments and politicians. And I am in awe. I mean, talk about hack the system. You are like the new Anonymous, and I love that. Like I am right there with you. I don't even use TikTok, but if you want me to use TikTok for something, I will. So just keep using social media to troll the trolls. I think that is a very important thing that you can do and occupy that space. And then lastly, build alternatives and support alternatives. We have distributed social media projects. We have New_ Public, which is this amazing group in the United States that is like designing public spaces and rethinking digital spaces and they're incredible. Support those projects. Support everyone who's building distributed mesh infrastructure. If there's a generation that is multiplayer, it is you guys. And so you need to play in all these different games at the same time and build the alternative while you are using whatever you have at your hands to make sure that we are pushing for our agenda.”www.piamancini.comhttps://opencollective.comhttps://democracy.earthwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“So I think this is like the same as it has been forever. This is not new. Centuries and centuries ago we had the same challenges. This all starts with how you behave. And so I think it starts there.And then I would say there are a lot of really good tooling that we can still use. If you remember, your generation has been so good at using tooling to hack and troll governments and politicians. And I am in awe. I mean, talk about hack the system. You are like the new Anonymous, and I love that. Like I am right there with you. I don't even use TikTok, but if you want me to use TikTok for something, I will. So just keep using social media to troll the trolls. I think that is a very important thing that you can do and occupy that space. And then lastly, build alternatives and support alternatives. We have distributed social media projects. We have New_ Public, which is this amazing group in the United States that is like designing public spaces and rethinking digital spaces and they're incredible. Support those projects. Support everyone who's building distributed mesh infrastructure. If there's a generation that is multiplayer, it is you guys. And so you need to play in all these different games at the same time and build the alternative while you are using whatever you have at your hands to make sure that we are pushing for our agenda.I think it's fundamental that we figure out a way of doing this. I think it's absolutely wrong and unfair that those who are about to leave this Earth are the ones making decisions for those staying on Earth. That doesn't make any sense. So, how do we do it? I am not the right person for doing policy. I'm a systems thinker, so I think about systems, but how we implement the policy for that, I don't know. I do know that philosophically we must include everyone who shares this planet with us in the decision-making process.It starts with different levels. It starts with how you react when you read something. It starts with each of us personally, how we behave and how we act on social media, and educating ourselves on misinformation and disinformation tactics to be able to see them and not be part of that hyper-reactionary movement where everything is like a disaster, or we react every time we feel like offended by everything.”Pia Mancini is a democracy activist, political scientist, open source sustainer, co-founder & CEO at Open Collective and Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation. She has worked in politics in Argentina as the Chief of Advisers and Deputy Secretary of Political Affairs, Government of the City of Buenos Aires and CIPPEC think tank. She has developed technology for democracy around the world and is a YC Alum, Young Global Leaders (World Economic Forum). She co-founded DemocracyOS & The Net Party (Partido de la Red).www.piamancini.comhttps://opencollective.comhttps://democracy.earthwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Pia Mancini is a democracy activist, political scientist, open source sustainer, co-founder & CEO at Open Collective and Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation. She has worked in politics in Argentina as the Chief of Advisers and Deputy Secretary of Political Affairs, Government of the City of Buenos Aires and CIPPEC think tank. She has developed technology for democracy around the world and is a YC Alum, Young Global Leaders (World Economic Forum). She co-founded DemocracyOS & The Net Party (Partido de la Red).“So I think this is like the same as it has been forever. This is not new. Centuries and centuries ago we had the same challenges. This all starts with how you behave. And so I think it starts there.And then I would say there are a lot of really good tooling that we can still use. If you remember, your generation has been so good at using tooling to hack and troll governments and politicians. And I am in awe. I mean, talk about hack the system. You are like the new Anonymous, and I love that. Like I am right there with you. I don't even use TikTok, but if you want me to use TikTok for something, I will. So just keep using social media to troll the trolls. I think that is a very important thing that you can do and occupy that space. And then lastly, build alternatives and support alternatives. We have distributed social media projects. We have New_ Public, which is this amazing group in the United States that is like designing public spaces and rethinking digital spaces and they're incredible. Support those projects. Support everyone who's building distributed mesh infrastructure. If there's a generation that is multiplayer, it is you guys. And so you need to play in all these different games at the same time and build the alternative while you are using whatever you have at your hands to make sure that we are pushing for our agenda.I think it's fundamental that we figure out a way of doing this. I think it's absolutely wrong and unfair that those who are about to leave this Earth are the ones making decisions for those staying on Earth. That doesn't make any sense. So, how do we do it? I am not the right person for doing policy. I'm a systems thinker, so I think about systems, but how we implement the policy for that, I don't know. I do know that philosophically we must include everyone who shares this planet with us in the decision-making process.It starts with different levels. It starts with how you react when you read something. It starts with each of us personally, how we behave and how we act on social media, and educating ourselves on misinformation and disinformation tactics to be able to see them and not be part of that hyper-reactionary movement where everything is like a disaster, or we react every time we feel like offended by everything.”www.piamancini.comhttps://opencollective.comhttps://democracy.earthwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“Well, it's difficult. At the height of our activism, like all of the democracy movements in the world that were happening altogether, there was this emerging moment where Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, Spain, and Chile...I think that we were kind of super in love at the time with the technology and the tools. Everything seemed very fresh and groundbreaking, but I think we were kind of naive in saying that a particular set of tools was really going to bring the change that we wanted to see without us really looking at the B side of it. All the tools that we were using are designed for virality. They're not designed for healthy public debate, not even generating consensus because that's not even the problem at this stage. We're so far away from that. They're not designed to bring out the best in us. They're designed to bring out the worst in us, and that's what pays off. So I think we missed that as a generation or as an activist group. We missed that. The tools that we were so smitten by were really producing this almost collateral damage to our civic tissue and our societies. And we are so far down that rabbit hole at the moment that I think there's so much we need to walk back in terms of the power platforms have lack of accountability these algorithms have.So I guess as I grew older, I came to realize that most of the challenges that we face are not necessarily technological. They are in part, but they're also very human, right? They're very much human challenges. And we need to build these digital public spaces in a very different way than we have done.”Pia Mancini is a democracy activist, political scientist, open source sustainer, co-founder & CEO at Open Collective and Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation. She has worked in politics in Argentina as the Chief of Advisers and Deputy Secretary of Political Affairs, Government of the City of Buenos Aires and CIPPEC think tank. She has developed technology for democracy around the world and is a YC Alum, Young Global Leaders (World Economic Forum). She co-founded DemocracyOS & The Net Party (Partido de la Red).www.piamancini.comhttps://opencollective.comhttps://democracy.earthwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“I think it's fundamental that we figure out a way of doing this. I think it's absolutely wrong and unfair that those who are about to leave this Earth are the ones making decisions for those staying on Earth. That doesn't make any sense. So, how do we do it? I am not the right person for doing policy. I'm a systems thinker, so I think about systems, but how we implement the policy for that, I don't know. I do know that philosophically we must include everyone who shares this planet with us in the decision-making process.It starts with different levels. It starts with how you react when you read something. It starts with each of us personally, how we behave and how we act on social media, and educating ourselves on misinformation and disinformation tactics to be able to see them and not be part of that hyper-reactionary movement where everything is like a disaster, or we react every time we feel like offended by everything.So I think this is like the same as it has been forever. This is not new. Centuries and centuries ago we had the same challenges. This all starts with how you behave. And so I think it starts there.And then I would say there are a lot of really good tooling that we can still use. If you remember, your generation has been so good at using tooling to hack and troll governments and politicians. And I am in awe. I mean, talk about hack the system. You are like the new Anonymous, and I love that. Like I am right there with you. I don't even use TikTok, but if you want me to use TikTok for something, I will. So just keep using social media to troll the trolls. I think that is a very important thing that you can do and occupy that space. And then lastly, build alternatives and support alternatives. We have distributed social media projects. We have New_ Public, which is this amazing group in the United States that is like designing public spaces and rethinking digital spaces and they're incredible. Support those projects. Support everyone who's building distributed mesh infrastructure. If there's a generation that is multiplayer, it is you guys. And so you need to play in all these different games at the same time and build the alternative while you are using whatever you have at your hands to make sure that we are pushing for our agenda.”Pia Mancini is a democracy activist, political scientist, open source sustainer, co-founder & CEO at Open Collective and Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation. She has worked in politics in Argentina as the Chief of Advisers and Deputy Secretary of Political Affairs, Government of the City of Buenos Aires and CIPPEC think tank. She has developed technology for democracy around the world and is a YC Alum, Young Global Leaders (World Economic Forum). She co-founded DemocracyOS & The Net Party (Partido de la Red).www.piamancini.comhttps://opencollective.comhttps://democracy.earthwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Pia Mancini is a democracy activist, political scientist, open source sustainer, co-founder & CEO at Open Collective and Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation. She has worked in politics in Argentina as the Chief of Advisers and Deputy Secretary of Political Affairs, Government of the City of Buenos Aires and CIPPEC think tank. She has developed technology for democracy around the world and is a YC Alum, Young Global Leaders (World Economic Forum). She co-founded DemocracyOS & The Net Party (Partido de la Red).“I think it's fundamental that we figure out a way of doing this. I think it's absolutely wrong and unfair that those who are about to leave this Earth are the ones making decisions for those staying on Earth. That doesn't make any sense. So, how do we do it? I am not the right person for doing policy. I'm a systems thinker, so I think about systems, but how we implement the policy for that, I don't know. I do know that philosophically we must include everyone who shares this planet with us in the decision-making process.It starts with different levels. It starts with how you react when you read something. It starts with each of us personally, how we behave and how we act on social media, and educating ourselves on misinformation and disinformation tactics to be able to see them and not be part of that hyper-reactionary movement where everything is like a disaster, or we react every time we feel like offended by everything.So I think this is like the same as it has been forever. This is not new. Centuries and centuries ago we had the same challenges. This all starts with how you behave. And so I think it starts there.And then I would say there are a lot of really good tooling that we can still use. If you remember, your generation has been so good at using tooling to hack and troll governments and politicians. And I am in awe. I mean, talk about hack the system. You are like the new Anonymous, and I love that. Like I am right there with you. I don't even use TikTok, but if you want me to use TikTok for something, I will. So just keep using social media to troll the trolls. I think that is a very important thing that you can do and occupy that space. And then lastly, build alternatives and support alternatives. We have distributed social media projects. We have New_ Public, which is this amazing group in the United States that is like designing public spaces and rethinking digital spaces and they're incredible. Support those projects. Support everyone who's building distributed mesh infrastructure. If there's a generation that is multiplayer, it is you guys. And so you need to play in all these different games at the same time and build the alternative while you are using whatever you have at your hands to make sure that we are pushing for our agenda.”www.piamancini.comhttps://opencollective.comhttps://democracy.earthwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“Even if the current system sucks, we still need to vote. That for me is something that I keep repeating. We cannot leave vacuums in the political system because someone else is going to fill them. So that for me is the number one thing. We change everything we want and work on change, but we need to make sure that the right people are voting or otherwise, it's going to be a lot harder. So we need to play both games, I guess. And then I think that we've had time to experience and experiment with these institutions for hundreds of years. And whenever we propose something new, there is this expectation that completely replaces what exists. And it always gets compared like, ‘Oh, but this happened, but…' We need to experiment. We need to be honest about this, and we need to say like, we don't know if we have unintended consequences. Like what I was saying before about our use of social media, we missed it. And so I think that we can, at the grassroots level, do a lot of experimentation and organizing kind of collectives that self-govern in different ways and use different tools and really experiment with what happens at a human level when certain technologies are used, when certain governance structures are used. So I think that's the game we will all need to play. It's twofold. On the one hand, we need to build a new system. And that makes the existing system obsolete. And we need to do this by finding sandboxes of political innovation and experimenting with political structures ourselves, but at the same time, we need to keep the pressure on the existing system to make sure that it doesn't go to hell. So it's these two things, that's our generational challenge."Pia Mancini is a democracy activist, political scientist, open source sustainer, co-founder & CEO at Open Collective and Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation. She has worked in politics in Argentina as the Chief of Advisers and Deputy Secretary of Political Affairs, Government of the City of Buenos Aires and CIPPEC think tank. She has developed technology for democracy around the world and is a YC Alum, Young Global Leaders (World Economic Forum). She co-founded DemocracyOS & The Net Party (Partido de la Red).www.piamancini.comhttps://opencollective.comhttps://democracy.earthwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Pia Mancini is a democracy activist, political scientist, open source sustainer, co-founder & CEO at Open Collective and Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation. She has worked in politics in Argentina as the Chief of Advisers and Deputy Secretary of Political Affairs, Government of the City of Buenos Aires and CIPPEC think tank. She has developed technology for democracy around the world and is a YC Alum, Young Global Leaders (World Economic Forum). She co-founded DemocracyOS & The Net Party (Partido de la Red).“Well, it's difficult. At the height of our activism, like all of the democracy movements in the world that were happening altogether, there was this emerging moment where Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, Spain, and Chile...I think that we were kind of super in love at the time with the technology and the tools. Everything seemed very fresh and groundbreaking, but I think we were kind of naive in saying that a particular set of tools was really going to bring the change that we wanted to see without us really looking at the B side of it. All the tools that we were using are designed for virality. They're not designed for healthy public debate, not even generating consensus because that's not even the problem at this stage. We're so far away from that. They're not designed to bring out the best in us. They're designed to bring out the worst in us, and that's what pays off. So I think we missed that as a generation or as an activist group. We missed that. The tools that we were so smitten by were really producing this almost collateral damage to our civic tissue and our societies. And we are so far down that rabbit hole at the moment that I think there's so much we need to walk back in terms of the power platforms have lack of accountability these algorithms have.So I guess as I grew older, I came to realize that most of the challenges that we face are not necessarily technological. They are in part, but they're also very human, right? They're very much human challenges. And we need to build these digital public spaces in a very different way than we have done.”www.piamancini.comhttps://opencollective.comhttps://democracy.earthwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“Well, it's difficult. At the height of our activism, like all of the democracy movements in the world that were happening altogether, there was this emerging moment where Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, Spain, and Chile...I think that we were kind of super in love at the time with the technology and the tools. Everything seemed very fresh and groundbreaking, but I think we were kind of naive in saying that a particular set of tools was really going to bring the change that we wanted to see without us really looking at the B side of it. All the tools that we were using are designed for virality. They're not designed for healthy public debate, not even generating consensus because that's not even the problem at this stage. We're so far away from that. They're not designed to bring out the best in us. They're designed to bring out the worst in us, and that's what pays off. So I think we missed that as a generation or as an activist group. We missed that. The tools that we were so smitten by were really producing this almost collateral damage to our civic tissue and our societies. And we are so far down that rabbit hole at the moment that I think there's so much we need to walk back in terms of the power platforms have lack of accountability these algorithms have.So I guess as I grew older, I came to realize that most of the challenges that we face are not necessarily technological. They are in part, but they're also very human, right? They're very much human challenges. And we need to build these digital public spaces in a very different way than we have done.”Pia Mancini is a democracy activist, political scientist, open source sustainer, co-founder & CEO at Open Collective and Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation. She has worked in politics in Argentina as the Chief of Advisers and Deputy Secretary of Political Affairs, Government of the City of Buenos Aires and CIPPEC think tank. She has developed technology for democracy around the world and is a YC Alum, Young Global Leaders (World Economic Forum). She co-founded DemocracyOS & The Net Party (Partido de la Red).www.piamancini.comhttps://opencollective.comhttps://democracy.earthwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Pia Mancini is a democracy activist, political scientist, open source sustainer, co-founder & CEO at Open Collective and Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation. She has worked in politics in Argentina as the Chief of Advisers and Deputy Secretary of Political Affairs, Government of the City of Buenos Aires and CIPPEC think tank. She has developed technology for democracy around the world and is a YC Alum, Young Global Leaders (World Economic Forum). She co-founded DemocracyOS & The Net Party (Partido de la Red).“So I think this is like the same as it has been forever. This is not new. Centuries and centuries ago we had the same challenges. This all starts with how you behave. And so I think it starts there.And then I would say there are a lot of really good tooling that we can still use. If you remember, your generation has been so good at using tooling to hack and troll governments and politicians. And I am in awe. I mean, talk about hack the system. You are like the new Anonymous, and I love that. Like I am right there with you. I don't even use TikTok, but if you want me to use TikTok for something, I will. So just keep using social media to troll the trolls. I think that is a very important thing that you can do and occupy that space. And then lastly, build alternatives and support alternatives. We have distributed social media projects. We have New_ Public, which is this amazing group in the United States that is like designing public spaces and rethinking digital spaces and they're incredible. Support those projects. Support everyone who's building distributed mesh infrastructure. If there's a generation that is multiplayer, it is you guys. And so you need to play in all these different games at the same time and build the alternative while you are using whatever you have at your hands to make sure that we are pushing for our agenda.I think it's fundamental that we figure out a way of doing this. I think it's absolutely wrong and unfair that those who are about to leave this Earth are the ones making decisions for those staying on Earth. That doesn't make any sense. So, how do we do it? I am not the right person for doing policy. I'm a systems thinker, so I think about systems, but how we implement the policy for that, I don't know. I do know that philosophically we must include everyone who shares this planet with us in the decision-making process.It starts with different levels. It starts with how you react when you read something. It starts with each of us personally, how we behave and how we act on social media, and educating ourselves on misinformation and disinformation tactics to be able to see them and not be part of that hyper-reactionary movement where everything is like a disaster, or we react every time we feel like offended by everything.”www.piamancini.comhttps://opencollective.comhttps://democracy.earthwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“So I think this is like the same as it has been forever. This is not new. Centuries and centuries ago we had the same challenges. This all starts with how you behave. And so I think it starts there.And then I would say there are a lot of really good tooling that we can still use. If you remember, your generation has been so good at using tooling to hack and troll governments and politicians. And I am in awe. I mean, talk about hack the system. You are like the new Anonymous, and I love that. Like I am right there with you. I don't even use TikTok, but if you want me to use TikTok for something, I will. So just keep using social media to troll the trolls. I think that is a very important thing that you can do and occupy that space. And then lastly, build alternatives and support alternatives. We have distributed social media projects. We have New_ Public, which is this amazing group in the United States that is like designing public spaces and rethinking digital spaces and they're incredible. Support those projects. Support everyone who's building distributed mesh infrastructure. If there's a generation that is multiplayer, it is you guys. And so you need to play in all these different games at the same time and build the alternative while you are using whatever you have at your hands to make sure that we are pushing for our agenda.I think it's fundamental that we figure out a way of doing this. I think it's absolutely wrong and unfair that those who are about to leave this Earth are the ones making decisions for those staying on Earth. That doesn't make any sense. So, how do we do it? I am not the right person for doing policy. I'm a systems thinker, so I think about systems, but how we implement the policy for that, I don't know. I do know that philosophically we must include everyone who shares this planet with us in the decision-making process.It starts with different levels. It starts with how you react when you read something. It starts with each of us personally, how we behave and how we act on social media, and educating ourselves on misinformation and disinformation tactics to be able to see them and not be part of that hyper-reactionary movement where everything is like a disaster, or we react every time we feel like offended by everything.”Pia Mancini is a democracy activist, political scientist, open source sustainer, co-founder & CEO at Open Collective and Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation. She has worked in politics in Argentina as the Chief of Advisers and Deputy Secretary of Political Affairs, Government of the City of Buenos Aires and CIPPEC think tank. She has developed technology for democracy around the world and is a YC Alum, Young Global Leaders (World Economic Forum). She co-founded DemocracyOS & The Net Party (Partido de la Red).www.piamancini.comhttps://opencollective.comhttps://democracy.earthwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Pia Mancini is a democracy activist, political scientist, open source sustainer, co-founder & CEO at Open Collective and Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation. She has worked in politics in Argentina as the Chief of Advisers and Deputy Secretary of Political Affairs, Government of the City of Buenos Aires and CIPPEC think tank. She has developed technology for democracy around the world and is a YC Alum, Young Global Leaders (World Economic Forum). She co-founded DemocracyOS & The Net Party (Partido de la Red).“Even if the current system sucks, we still need to vote. That for me is something that I keep repeating. We cannot leave vacuums in the political system because someone else is going to fill them. So that for me is the number one thing. We change everything we want and work on change, but we need to make sure that the right people are voting or otherwise, it's going to be a lot harder. So we need to play both games, I guess. And then I think that we've had time to experience and experiment with these institutions for hundreds of years. And whenever we propose something new, there is this expectation that completely replaces what exists. And it always gets compared like, ‘Oh, but this happened, but…' We need to experiment. We need to be honest about this, and we need to say like, we don't know if we have unintended consequences. Like what I was saying before about our use of social media, we missed it. And so I think that we can, at the grassroots level, do a lot of experimentation and organizing kind of collectives that self-govern in different ways and use different tools and really experiment with what happens at a human level when certain technologies are used, when certain governance structures are used. So I think that's the game we will all need to play. It's twofold. On the one hand, we need to build a new system. And that makes the existing system obsolete. And we need to do this by finding sandboxes of political innovation and experimenting with political structures ourselves, but at the same time, we need to keep the pressure on the existing system to make sure that it doesn't go to hell. So it's these two things, that's our generational challenge."www.piamancini.comhttps://opencollective.comhttps://democracy.earthwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“Even if the current system sucks, we still need to vote. That for me is something that I keep repeating. We cannot leave vacuums in the political system because someone else is going to fill them. So that for me is the number one thing. We change everything we want and work on change, but we need to make sure that the right people are voting or otherwise, it's going to be a lot harder. So we need to play both games, I guess. And then I think that we've had time to experience and experiment with these institutions for hundreds of years. And whenever we propose something new, there is this expectation that completely replaces what exists. And it always gets compared like, ‘Oh, but this happened, but…' We need to experiment. We need to be honest about this, and we need to say like, we don't know if we have unintended consequences. Like what I was saying before about our use of social media, we missed it. And so I think that we can, at the grassroots level, do a lot of experimentation and organizing kind of collectives that self-govern in different ways and use different tools and really experiment with what happens at a human level when certain technologies are used, when certain governance structures are used. So I think that's the game we will all need to play. It's twofold. On the one hand, we need to build a new system. And that makes the existing system obsolete. And we need to do this by finding sandboxes of political innovation and experimenting with political structures ourselves, but at the same time, we need to keep the pressure on the existing system to make sure that it doesn't go to hell. So it's these two things, that's our generational challenge."Pia Mancini is a democracy activist, political scientist, open source sustainer, co-founder & CEO at Open Collective and Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation. She has worked in politics in Argentina as the Chief of Advisers and Deputy Secretary of Political Affairs, Government of the City of Buenos Aires and CIPPEC think tank. She has developed technology for democracy around the world and is a YC Alum, Young Global Leaders (World Economic Forum). She co-founded DemocracyOS & The Net Party (Partido de la Red).www.piamancini.comhttps://opencollective.comhttps://democracy.earthwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Pia Mancini is a democracy activist, political scientist, open source sustainer, co-founder & CEO at Open Collective and Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation. She has worked in politics in Argentina as the Chief of Advisers and Deputy Secretary of Political Affairs, Government of the City of Buenos Aires and CIPPEC think tank. She has developed technology for democracy around the world and is a YC Alum, Young Global Leaders (World Economic Forum). She co-founded DemocracyOS & The Net Party (Partido de la Red).“Well, it's difficult. At the height of our activism, like all of the democracy movements in the world that were happening altogether, there was this emerging moment where Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, Spain, and Chile...I think that we were kind of super in love at the time with the technology and the tools. Everything seemed very fresh and groundbreaking, but I think we were kind of naive in saying that a particular set of tools was really going to bring the change that we wanted to see without us really looking at the B side of it. All the tools that we were using are designed for virality. They're not designed for healthy public debate, not even generating consensus because that's not even the problem at this stage. We're so far away from that. They're not designed to bring out the best in us. They're designed to bring out the worst in us, and that's what pays off. So I think we missed that as a generation or as an activist group. We missed that. The tools that we were so smitten by were really producing this almost collateral damage to our civic tissue and our societies. And we are so far down that rabbit hole at the moment that I think there's so much we need to walk back in terms of the power platforms have lack of accountability these algorithms have.So I guess as I grew older, I came to realize that most of the challenges that we face are not necessarily technological. They are in part, but they're also very human, right? They're very much human challenges. And we need to build these digital public spaces in a very different way than we have done.”www.piamancini.comhttps://opencollective.comhttps://democracy.earthwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Pia Mancini is a democracy activist, political scientist, open source sustainer, co-founder & CEO at Open Collective and Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation. She has worked in politics in Argentina as the Chief of Advisers and Deputy Secretary of Political Affairs, Government of the City of Buenos Aires and CIPPEC think tank. She has developed technology for democracy around the world and is a YC Alum, Young Global Leaders (World Economic Forum). She co-founded DemocracyOS & The Net Party (Partido de la Red).“Well, I think I face the same challenges that any man or woman would face in terms of trying to change an existing system. So there's a whole set of challenges that I think are common to everyone who's trying to disrupt the status quo and at the same time needs to engage with the status quo because we do live in a society where we play by certain rules and it is what it is.And so I think many of those challenges have to do with the nature of power and how power is conservative and power will do anything in order to stay in power. And the status quo will do anything and make itself look like anything that you want in order to stay in power. And they might change their spots a little bit here or there, but if you look deep enough, it's the same people. It's the same power.And so for me, that was the big challenge of realizing that we were facing power and power is conservative, and that's not the way to really achieve the change that we wanted to make. I wasn't patient enough for incremental changes. That's not what I'm interested in. So there's one set of challenges that I think is common to anyone in my position trying to do this. With regards to being a young woman, I mean, sure you face the same kind of sexist comments that you would face anywhere else that I face now as a woman CEO. The best thing I can do for that is just occupying the space and keep occupying the space and refusing to move away or let things like that stop me from engaging.”www.piamancini.comhttps://opencollective.comhttps://democracy.earthwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“Even if the current system sucks, we still need to vote. That for me is something that I keep repeating. We cannot leave vacuums in the political system because someone else is going to fill them. So that for me is the number one thing. We change everything we want and work on change, but we need to make sure that the right people are voting or otherwise, it's going to be a lot harder. So we need to play both games, I guess. And then I think that we've had time to experience and experiment with these institutions for hundreds of years. And whenever we propose something new, there is this expectation that completely replaces what exists. And it always gets compared like, ‘Oh, but this happened, but…' We need to experiment. We need to be honest about this, and we need to say like, we don't know if we have unintended consequences. Like what I was saying before about our use of social media, we missed it. And so I think that we can, at the grassroots level, do a lot of experimentation and organizing kind of collectives that self-govern in different ways and use different tools and really experiment with what happens at a human level when certain technologies are used, when certain governance structures are used. So I think that's the game we will all need to play. It's twofold. On the one hand, we need to build a new system. And that makes the existing system obsolete. And we need to do this by finding sandboxes of political innovation and experimenting with political structures ourselves, but at the same time, we need to keep the pressure on the existing system to make sure that it doesn't go to hell. So it's these two things, that's our generational challenge."Pia Mancini is a democracy activist, political scientist, open source sustainer, co-founder & CEO at Open Collective and Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation. She has worked in politics in Argentina as the Chief of Advisers and Deputy Secretary of Political Affairs, Government of the City of Buenos Aires and CIPPEC think tank. She has developed technology for democracy around the world and is a YC Alum, Young Global Leaders (World Economic Forum). She co-founded DemocracyOS & The Net Party (Partido de la Red).www.piamancini.comhttps://opencollective.comhttps://democracy.earthwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Imagine if the members of your group chat shared more than memes but also shared a bank account, or if the early users of a social media app helped decide how that app grew, made money, and moderated content. How does the group make decisions and make sure everyone is heard? Who decides how the money is spent? These are some of the questions Friends with Benefits (FWB), a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) has had to answer. Baratunde talks with FWB Mayor Alex Zhang about DAOs, online community-building, and Web3 to find out if the way we citizen online can positively affect how we citizen IRL.   SHOW ACTIONS Internally Reflect - How we shape the spaces we inhabit Take a moment and think about your relationship to the digital spaces you spend time in. This could be social media, gaming, or a group chat. Where do you feel like an active participant, where you set the terms and tone of the environment? Where do you feel passive, like someone else is  in charge? How might you change that relationship?  Become more informed - Web3, squads, and digital public spaces We can create a healthier culture of democracy through web3 beyond starting and joining DAOs. If you're new to this world, the New York Times' has a great primer on Web3. Once you've read that, take a deep dive into the history of “Squads”— a form of social and economic organizing that is shifting power and social dynamics away from an individualistic society. If our conversation with Alex made you curious, check out our episode with Eli Pariser from New_Public. We go deep on how to better design digital public spaces.  Publicly participate - Sharing power and setting culture in groups You're likely a part of a group, a tenants or homeowners association, a parent group, a committee at work. The next time you're at one of your meetings, take note of how the group makes decisions. Who speaks? Who is silent? What areas are open to input? What is considered off-the-table? Is there even an agenda!? Over time see if you can identify the kind of culture the group has: chaotic? Deferential?  Can you find any opportunities for the group to make that culture more small-d democratic, by rotating speaking or leadership roles, or openly acknowledging how decisions are made and how that might shift? We don't need to find new groups and spaces to practice this democracy thing—let's start where we are.   SHOW NOTES Check out our episode with Taiwan's Digital Minister, Audrey Tang for more on quadratic voting, and our episode with Pia Mancini, cofounder of Open Collective, a platform empowering collectives and mutual aid groups with new transparent, decentralized financial tools. Read Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber.  Find How To Citizen on Instagram or visit howtocitizen.com to join our mailing list and find ways to citizen besides listening to this podcast!  Please show your support for the show by reviewing and rating. It makes a huge difference with the algorithmic overlords and helps others like you find the show! How To Citizen is hosted by Baratunde Thurston. He's also host and executive producer of the PBS series, America Outdoors as well as a founding partner and writer at Puck. You can find him all over the internet.    CREDITS How To Citizen with Baratunde is a production of iHeartRadio Podcasts and Rowhome Productions. Our Executive Producers are Baratunde Thurston and Elizabeth Stewart. Allie Graham is our Lead Producer and Danya AbdelHameid is our Associate Producer. Alex Lewis is our Managing Producer. John Myers is our Executive Editor. Original Music by Andrew Eapen and Blue Dot Sessions. Our Audience Engagement Fellows are Jasmine Lewis and Gabby Rodriguez. Special thanks to Joelle Smith from iHeartRadio and Layla Bina. Special thanks to our citizen voices Tania F., Ned K., Sara H., and Janine D.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Guest Joel Wasserman Panelists Richard Littauer | Justin Dorfman Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. Our guest today has been on this podcast before, and we are super excited to have him back on. Joining us is Joel Wasserman, co-founder and Founder of Flossbank and Software Engineer at Google. Today, we'll find out what happened to Flossbank and what's happening next as Joel tells the story of how the idea of Flossbank came about, and the challenges and lessons he's learned along the way. He goes in-depth about the need for funding, the ginormous difference between an open source author and an open source maintainer, and diversity in open source. Download this episode now to hear more! [00:01:23] What is Flossbank? [00:05:59] Onboarding can be difficult, and Joel fills us in on some lessons he's learned. [00:09:53] Richard brings up a point of finding the right person, and wonders what issues Joel had was because he was the middleman or something else, and if it's hard to find money for any project in open source. Joel mentions Nadia Eghbal's book as the best book he's ever read on the open source ecosystem. [00:12:58] Justin talks about a blog post Joel wrote last June on “The Flossbank Attempt,” where he made a comment “don't hesitate to reach out,” and he tells us what other projects are actively asking him for advice. [00:15:20] We hear what Joel thinks of the benefits of GitHub sponsors and Open Collective are in comparison to his and why they're able to garner some money, and his thoughts on that part of the ecosystem. [00:18:26] Joel tells us if there will be any sort of government grants going down the dependency tree and if he's thought about that kind of money coming into the system and if there are benefits. [00:22:26] We hear what Joel thinks about the idea the maybe Flossbank was never going to work because there's isn't as much altruism in the world from companies and that he's asking for something that's impossible. [00:29:38] Joel talks about payment mechanisms and something cool they did with Flossbank, working with a company called Coil that uses Interledger. [00:32:13] Joel details his realistic and optimistic view on people wanting to invest in open source and getting money off it, and about diversity in open source. [00:38:50] Find out where you can follow Joel on the web. Quotes [00:05:04] “What we didn't know and what we quickly found out is that a lot of companies want to have a relationship with the maintainer they are donating to.” [00:06:21] “Small companies, startups, are acutely aware of the open source they rely on.” [00:18:53] “People just take it for granted and they say, “Well, why should I fund it if the next person isn't funding it?” [00:22:48] “There's a ginormous rarely spoken difference between an open source author and an open source maintainer. An author chooses to put that license up. An author has given no promise to working on this, to securing it toward making sure that other companies get what they want, bug fixes, future maintenance, making sure their dependencies, no guarantees.” [00:24:00] “Open source maintainers are what I'm advocating to get paid and open source maintainers are the ones who are keeping code up to date, making sure it's secure, making sure the dependencies are up to date, making sure the dependencies are secure, those people are putting in work.” [00:28:09] “Maintainership is work. It's a triage of bugs, a triage of feature requests, it's actual improvements to a package, it's a long-term commitment, it's a dramatically different persona and role than author.” [00:32:26] “You should be giving to your entire open source dependency tree because you don't know what you depend on, or you don't know what maintainer needs that money to do their work, to keep their package secured, to keep their package up to date until it breaks.” Spotlight [00:39:01] Joel's spotlight is Nadia Eghbal's book, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software. [00:40:01] Justin's spotlight is the Open Technology Fund. [00:40:19] Richard's spotlight is the book, Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society in The Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein. Links SustainOSS (https://sustainoss.org/) SustainOSS Twitter (https://twitter.com/SustainOSS?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) SustainOSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/) podcast@sustainoss.org (mailto:podcast@sustainoss.org) Richard Littauer Twitter (https://twitter.com/richlitt?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) Justin Dorfman Twitter (https://twitter.com/jdorfman?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) Joel Wasserman Twitter (https://twitter.com/joel_wasserman_) Flossbank (https://flossbank.com/) Sustain Podcast-Episode 58: Joel Wasserman on Flossbank and Sustainability Giving Back to Dependencies (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/58) Feross-Introducing ‘funding' experiment (https://feross.org/npm-install-funding/) [Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal](https://www.amazon.com/Working-Public-Making-Maintenance-Software/dp/0578675862/ref=sr11?crid=2KZZFJPGJ6QPN&keywords=nadia+eghbal&qid=1675632306&sprefix=nadia+eg%2Caps%2C118&sr=8-1) The Flossbank Attempt by Joel Wasserman (https://medium.com/@joelwass/the-flossbank-attempt-de9d8ecc1dcf) Sustain Podcast-Episode 148-Ali Nehzat of thanks.dev and OSS Funding (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/148) Sustain Podcast-Episode 152-Dudley Carr and Wes Carr on StackAid (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/152) thanks.dev (https://thanks.dev/home) Stackaid (https://www.stackaid.us/) Coil (https://coil.com/) Interledger Foundation (https://interledger.org/) Open Technology Fund (https://www.opentech.fund/news/open-technology-fund-announces-free-and-open-source-software-sustainability-fund/) Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society in The Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein (https://sacred-economics.com/) Credits Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guest: Joel Wasserman.

Guest Ali Nehzat Panelists Richard Littauer | Justin Dorfman Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. Get ready for an exciting guest today as we welcome, Ali Nehzat, who's a Software Engineer with a preference for embedded systems and Founder of thanks.dev. Ali's been around for a while, and he realized that the open source ecosystem needs some help, and his focus is specifically on the OSS funding problem. Today, we'll learn more about Ali's story of why he started thanks.dev, what motivated him, people that inspired him through his journey, and he reveals his mission for OSS developers. But it doesn't stop there! Ali dives into different aspects he's experimenting for funding, he tells us how payouts are supported so developers get paid, and how he's planning on making this more sustainable. Download this episode now to find out more! [00:02:53] We find out the difference between thanks.dev and the other platforms, and Ali tells us his story about being motivated by Brian Carlson from the Node.js community, who's behind node-postgres. [00:08:13] Ali talks about thanks.dev's approach with helping to convince people to give money to open source. [00:11:20] We hear the tools that thanks.dev offers to its engineers to help them figure out how to sell giving back to open source. [00:14:07] After having conversations with OSPO companies, Ali explains how everything is a learning experience currently with thanks.dev, and he states the reason for thanks.dev not getting involved with code of conduct right now and what the mission is. [00:17:51] Licensing landscape is brought up by Ali and the conversations happening around it. [00:20:51] Ali fills us in on the insightful conversations he had with Joel Wasserman who really helped him in his journey, as well as other people, with thanks.dev, as well as some ideas to solve the funding with open source and make sure thanks.dev is sustainable going forward. [00:23:05] As far as projects go, Ali tells us who's he's worked with to get more funding. [00:26:06] Justin wonders if there's any papers Ali's read dealing with the complexities and edge cases, he explains how he would like to publish blog posts he wrote, and the testing and the experiments he's been doing, and the impact Duane O'Brien from Indeed has made. [00:29:28] Richard brings up payment payouts and wonders how Ali is making sure the money actually gets to the developers and that helps the sustainability of those projects. [00:33:50] Ali is currently not getting a salary for this, but he tells us how fundraising through family and friends helped him, and how he's planning to make this sustainable for him. [00:35:37] Find out where you can follow Ali on the web. Quotes [00:03:20] “Currently, thanks.dev is focusing on an experiment if you make it super easy for companies to donate to their dependency trees, what would be the outcome of that?” [00:04:41] “When I got interested in the funding space and in the challenges that open source maintainers face, it was actually all motivated by Brian Carlson in the Node.js community, who's the person behind node-postgres.” [00:06:35] “It's not just funding, it's project management and it's community management. There's a whole array of other problems that can be attacked.” [00:09:12] “When I hit that barrier, the approach I took was to add a line item to my invoices for the OSS ecosystem.” [00:22:02] “The biggest learning is that to solve the funding problem in open source, you have to look at it from the perspective of the marketplace.” [00:23:50] “Then there's a whole cohort of donors on GitHub and Open Collective that are engineering managers that are going to their own organizations and getting donations done and figuring out the motivations and actions behind these people.” [00:26:52] “The input that Duane O'Brien has had on thanks.dev has made such a huge impact.” Spotlight [00:37:32] Justin's spotlight is CodeMirror. [00:38:19] Richard's spotlight is Atom. [00:39:04] Ali's spotlight is Brian Carlson. Links SustainOSS (https://sustainoss.org/) SustainOSS Twitter (https://twitter.com/SustainOSS?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) SustainOSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/) podcast@sustainoss.org (mailto:podcast@sustainoss.org) Richard Littauer Twitter (https://twitter.com/richlitt?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) Justin Dorfman Twitter (https://twitter.com/jdorfman?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) Ali Nehzat LinkedIn (https://au.linkedin.com/in/ali-nehzat-75428a7) Ali Nehzat Twitter (https://mobile.twitter.com/nehzata) thanks.dev Twitter (https://mobile.twitter.com/thanks_dev) ali@thanks.dev (mailto:ali@thanks.dev) thanks.dev (https://thanks.dev/home) Sustain Podcast-Episode 58: Joel Wasserman on Flossbank and Sustainably Giving Back to Dependencies (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/58) Sustain Podcast-Episode 96: Chad Whitacre and how Sentry is giving $150 to their OSS Dependencies (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/96) Sustain Podcast- 2 episodes featuring guest, Duane O'Brien (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/guests/duane-obrien) Sustain Podcast-2 episodes featuring guest, Nicholas Zakas (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/guests/zakas) CodeMirror (https://codemirror.net/) Atom (https://atom.io/) Brian Carlson-GitHub (https://github.com/brianc) node-postgres (https://github.com/brianc/node-postgres) Credits Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guest: Ali Nehzat.

TODAY'S GUEST   Pia Mancini is a co-founder and CEO at Open Collective, a chair of the Democracy Earth Foundation, and a democracy activist who helped create the DemocracyOS platform and launched a Net Party in Argentina.   Her TED Talk, about upgrading democracy for the internet era, has exceeded a million views and helped reshape the conversation around the meeting place of democracy and the internet. She is a Y Combinator alum, a young global leader at the World Economic Forum, and she's also Roma's mum.   EPISODE SUMMARY   In this conversation we talk about: Her journey from empowering citizens in the political process to empowering collectives to self-fund and self-govern Her vision for a more inclusive and expansive digital democracy The tension between idealism and the realities of life, politics, and system   We also discuss: How do we, as individuals, create a system and an environment that affects change? How can we use technology to upgrade democracy? How do we trust ourselves and each other?   There is no more important discussion, I believe, than how our new technologies should be used and woven into the fabric of our public life. And how to move from chaotic, even destructive populism, to a constructive model of participation and empowerment. My conversation with Pia is one of the most fascinating conversations, in an ongoing series of design conversations we've lined up for you on design for democracy, social change, and positive impact.   TIMESTAMP CHAPTERS   [2:48] Life During Covid [10:26] Early Influences [20:54] Upgrading Democracy [30:23] DemocracyOS and Liquid Democracy [38:07] The Dream of a Borderless and Equal World [46:24] Net Party and the Clash with Reality [53:33] Maintaining Hope and Motivation [58:40] Building a New Narrative [1:03:55] A Transition to an Open Collective [1:21:14] A Sermon of Inspiration   EPISODE LINKS Pia's Links

Guest Nicholas Zakas Panelists Richard Littauer | Justin Dorfman Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. Our guest today is a returning guest that we've had on before. We are excited to have joining us, Nicholas Zakas, who's one of the maintainers on ESLint, which is a tool that helps you find and fix problems in your JavaScript code. Today, we'll learn all about ESLint, the maintainers, contributors, and how they get paid. Also, we'll find out the success behind ESLint, and a post about sponsoring dependencies that Nicholas wrote on his blog. Go ahead and download this episode now to learn more! [00:02:23] Nicholas tells us all about ESLint, their maintainers that work on the project, and how many people have contributed to the project on GitHub. [00:07:29] Nicholas tells us how maintainers get paid as part of his governance strategy. [00:10:04] Justin asked about the fact that ESLint not only pays contributors, but also pays downstream dependencies. [00:12:04] Richard wonders where all the money comes from that gave ESLint this huge surplus, and Nicholas explains how they raised so much and what it is about ESLint that makes that possible. [00:16:10] We hear some reflections from Richard as he congratulates Nicholas and makes some important points about the success of ESLint. [00:20:19] Nicholas fills us in on the OpenJS Foundation Project. [00:23:57] Richard talks about a blog post Nicholas wrote on his blog about sponsoring dependencies, and Nicholas explains the difference between large charismatic projects and smaller projects and how he sees the role of large projects in funding the smaller ones. [00:31:41] We hear what ESLint did with sponsoring dependencies, and Nicholas tells us about some projects that they wanted to support financially, but turned them down. [00:38:06] Find out where you can follow Nicholas and ESLint online. Quotes [00:07:43] “Everybody on the team, the committers, reviewers, technical steering committee, gets paid an hourly rate for their contributions.” [00:07:53] “Contributions can be anything that contributes to the project, reviewing issues and pull requests, attending meetings, helping people on discord, helping people on GitHub discussions, and if people ever go to conferences or meetings representing the team, they can also charge for that.” [00:10:15] “We made a decision the beginning of last year that it was time to start supporting our dependencies.” [00:12:28] “I do think we are lucky in a lot of ways that we've had champions inside of companies who were working within their company to get ESLint's support.” [00:13:13] “In the beginning, we were hesitant to start spending the money because we didn't know how reliable that source of income would be, and we were worried we wouldn't be able to pay a living wage.” [00:21:25] “Being in a foundation is one type of a reputational check mark that an open source project can get.” [00:26:15] “I think OpenSSL is a great example of [the funding problem]. It's a foundational piece of internet infrastructure.” [00:28:31] “We went on backyourstack.com and started looking for the projects that we were depending on that had Open Collective pages and said, as a project, what is good for open source in general, is also good for ESLint.” [00:29:20] “Open source, in general, is this collective of projects that are built on top of projects that are built on top of projects that are built on top of projects, and we have no problem giving that recognition when we're talking about what the project is built upon.” Spotlight [00:39:47] Justin's spotlight is the new book, What if? 2 by Randall Munroe. [00:40:31] Richard's spotlight is David Troupes, Buttercup Festival comic strips. [00:41:03] Nicholas's spotlight is the book, WebAssembly: The Definitive Guide by Brian Sletten Links SustainOSS (https://sustainoss.org/) SustainOSS Twitter (https://twitter.com/SustainOSS?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) SustainOSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/) podcast@sustainoss.org (mailto:podcast@sustainoss.org) Richard Littauer Twitter (https://twitter.com/richlitt?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) Justin Dorfman Twitter (https://twitter.com/jdorfman?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) Nicholas Zakas Twitter (https://twitter.com/slicknet) Nicholas Zakas GitHub (https://github.com/nzakas) ESLint (https://eslint.org/) ESLint Twitter (https://twitter.com/geteslint?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) ESLint GitHub (https://github.com/eslint/eslint) ESLint-Open Collective (https://opencollective.com/eslint) Sustain Podcast-Episode 101: Nicholas Zakas and ESLint (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/guests/zakas) Sponsoring dependencies: The next step in open source sustainability (Human Who Codes Blog) (https://humanwhocodes.com/blog/2022/06/sponsoring-dependencies-open-source-sustainability/) Sustain Podcast-Episode 117: Mike McQuaid of Homebrew on Sustainably Working on OSS Projects (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/117) Sustain Podcast-Episode 126: GitHub Maintainer Month with Mike McQuaid of Homebrew and Nina Breznik of DatDot (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/126) BackYourStack (https://backyourstack.com/) Securing Open Source Software Act of 2022 (Sustain) (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/t/securing-open-source-software-act-of-2022/1098) What if? 2 by Randall Munroe (https://xkcd.com/what-if-2/) David Troupes-Buttercup Festival comic strips (Patreon) (https://www.patreon.com/buttercupfestival) WebAssembly: The Definitive Guide by Brian Sletten (https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/webassembly-the-definitive/9781492089834/) Credits Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guest: Nicholas Zakas.

Hailing from Argentina, Pia Mancini is a democracy activist and technical project leader. She came to public attention with her co-founded DemocracyOS software. With a background in coding and political theory, Pia is on a mission to modernize political institutions in the Internet age. Devising the future of decentralized communities is one of her passion projects, and a topic near and dear to my heart. Let us discover in this episode how best to give our political systems a smart upgrade. The floor is all Audrey & Pia's! | The episode is licensed by CC4.0 | ▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁

Many of the world's most successful businesses began as someone's good idea. But the path from startup to conventional financial success typically involves going public, prioritizing shareholders' interests, and ultimately selling to a giant conglomerate whose intentions are far from the original mission of the business's founders. In this episode, Laura interviews guests who say this conventional path of success is desperately in need of an overhaul. Why must new and innovative ideas come to market through old and undemocratic platforms? What if rather than selling out, successful businesses became community assets that put ownership and governance in the hands of workers and even consumers? Could a startup become a means of building community wealth, economic justice, and accountability over our technology? Our guests explain how.  (note:  legacy show, repost) Guests:Pia Mancini, Co-Founder & CEO, Open CollectiveLauren Ruffin, Co-Founder, CruxNathan Schneider, Assistant Professor of Media Studies & Director Media Enterprise Design Lab, University of Colorado Boulder We do not accept advertisements or government funding.  We are independent movement media for the people, and funded by the people!  Become a member by making a one time donation or make it a monthly contribution at https://LauraFlanders.org/donate 

All the way from New Zealand, Alanna Irving visits the SnapCast to talk about her work with Open Collective, a legal and financial toolbox for grassroots groups. Open Collective is a fundraising + legal status + money management platform for your community. We talk about: Open Collective Foundation's work as a 501c3 fiscal sponsor The Open Collective software and what it's enabling for nonprofits worldwide Open source tech as shared common infrastructure, instead of funding and building siloed tools for nonprofits and the communities they support OC's plans to do an exit to community and exploring how we can be owned and governed by our wider community of stakeholders We welcome support of the Nonprofit SnapCast via Patreon. We welcome your questions and feedback via The Nonprofit Snapshot website.

In this Breaking Changes, Postman Chief Evangelist Kin Lane welcomes Pia Mancini, Co-Founder and CEO at Open Collective. Pia talks about the future of the open-source business model and technology at the intersection of open-source and social justice. Mancini defines what is coming next for open-source and lays the foundation for a future that benefits everyone worldwide.

Panelists Richard Littauer | Justin Dorfman | Ben Nickolls | Amanda Casari Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. Today's episode is all panelists, no guests, and our conversations are focusing on the question, “What does sustaining open source actually mean?” Each of the panelists share their opinions, give feedback, and tell stories around sustaining open source. We'll also learn the origins of SustainOSS, the definition of a “sustainer,” and we hear about the OSCA Sustain Community Report 2022 that recently came out and gave Justin chills just reading it. Go ahead and download this episode now, and if you have any thoughts you would like to share, please email us! [00:01:30] Justin gives us the backstory of how Sustain started. [00:06:14] Since Ben came up with the definition of a “Sustainer” he goes in depth what it means. [00:10:05] Amanda poses a question when we think about sustaining, how do we think about helping with graceful endings and exits? [00:17:42] Richard tells us sustaining is figuring out and having an ecosystem level approach of what open source is, and what's needed now. Justin shares a story about Chad Whitacre changing the game when it came to donating to open source. [00:20:53] Ben takes the conversation away from money and talks about Open Collective and finding a way to sustain the work without money. [00:22:47] Richard brings up the environmental sustainability of open source as an entire thing and how the environmental cost of training AI is massive. [00:26:04] Richard mentions he finds interesting what sort of conversations happened on an ecosystem level between all the participants and all the stakeholders, and Amanda expresses a concern she has. Richard and Amanda talk about giving honor to people who do honorable things. [00:29:45] We hear some open questions from Richard about what he thinks is what sustaining means now, and Amanda talks about the concept around open source sustainability that a lot of people are focusing on. Quotes [00:09:51] “Forking is not a threat, it's a promise.” [00:11:36] “The whole sustainability thing is about a combination of incentives and market failures.” [00:13:24] “Two researchers from South Africa have been looking at contributions to internet standards over the past twenty years from across the world, largely from within Africa, and they've seen a massive peak in 2005, and then it'll die off.” [00:16:24] “Open source is a jellyfish and jellyfish of course have many eyes.” [00:29:34] “Honoring people for their work and giving them visibility, making sure that they're seen is a great step forward that we can all be working on because that's definitely a gap that still exists.” [00:31:06] “The xkcd comic showing digital infrastructure as one small person in Kansas is great, but it ignores every other block in that comic. Who is funding the blocks in those comics, who has governance to it, who was maintaining it, what are their intentions, and what is their final destinations that they want to be going to?” Spotlight [00:36:48] Justin's spotlight is recognizing a Non-Code Contributor, Erin McKean and his newsletter that comes out a couple times a month. [00:37:11] Ben's spotlight is Play Monikers. [00:37:59] Amanda's spotlight is the Elevator Saga game. [00:38:40] Richard's spotlight is Nicole Kelner, who's a climate artist. Links SustainOSS (https://sustainoss.org/) SustainOSS Twitter (https://twitter.com/SustainOSS?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) SustainOSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/) podcast@sustainoss.org (mailto:podcast@sustainoss.org) discourse@discourse.sustainoss.org (mailto:discourse@discourse.sustainoss.org) Richard Littauer Twitter (https://twitter.com/richlitt?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) Justin Dorfman Twitter (https://twitter.com/jdorfman?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) Ben Nickolls Twitter (https://twitter.com/BenJam?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) Amanda Casari Twitter (https://twitter.com/amcasari?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) Sustain 2021 Event Report (https://sustainoss.org/assets/pdf/Sustain-In-2021-Event-Report.pdf) SustainOSS Report 2017 (with definition of “sustainer”) (https://sustainoss.org/assets/pdf/SustainOSS-west-2017-report.pdf) OSCA-Sustain Africa 2022 Community Report (https://blog.oscafrica.org/sustain-africa-2022-community-report) Sustain Podcast-Episode 96: Chad Whitacre and how Sentry is giving $150k to their OSS Dependencies (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/guests/chad-whitacre) Sovereign Tech Fund (https://sovereigntechfund.de/en) Fuligo septica (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuligo_septica) The Non-Code Contributor Newsletter by Justin Dorfman (https://www.getrevue.co/profile/tncc) Play Monikers (https://www.playmonikers.com/) Elevator Saga (https://play.elevatorsaga.com/) Elevator Saga-GitHub (https://github.com/magwo/elevatorsaga) Nicole Kelner Twitter (https://twitter.com/NicoleKelner) Credits Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/)

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It takes a lot of hard work to get small-scale commons started, especially with complications of managing money, budgets, and tax and legal compliance. These challenges have gotten easier since the rise of Open Collective, a nonprofit platform that acts a kind of commons-enabling infrastructure. In this episode, Alanna Irving, Chief Operating Officer of Open Collective, explains the challenge of "hacking organizational structures with our values," the benefits of distributed leadership, and the confidence that comes from managing risk together.

In this episode, Martin & Jahed sit down with Pia Mancini, co-founder and CEO of Open Collective. In the conversation, we explore Pia's early work broadening access to democratic governance and starting a digital-first political party in Argentina, borderless democracy, commons-based projects, and the future of Open Collective as a community-owned project as it explores Nathan Schneider and co-authors vision for exit-to-community. Here are the show notes: Pathways for Open Collective's “Exit to Community” Early musings on "Exit to Community" for Open Collective How to upgrade democracy for the Internet era (TED Talk) Exit to Community: A Primer Steward Ownership