Hello, my name is Eduard Lucena, and Iām a system engineer. Currently Iām a collaborator in the Fedora Project, part of the Marketing team, with some issues to solve there, but with all the will to make things in the right way. Iām also part of the Join SIG inside the Fedora Project where we receive people that want to contribute and redirecting them to talk to the right group or team according on what they want to do as collaborator.
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Where do people find the time? 
I feel like Iām oversubscribed to everything and giving attention to nothing. Butā¦ here I am.
Iām a long-time user and advocate of Free / Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) and people were naive enough to pay me money to code for 43 yearsā¦
Sheltered and encouraged by academia, early exposure to DECUS et al, was the impetus for sharing code. I started using Linux in 1993.
After 37 years coding for a small group of researchers and academics at a university, I partnered with a friend who is a high school teacher, to try launching a worker-owned co-op, with main goal being to give an opportunity to his ātraditionally underservedā students who are caught in the Catch-22 of āYou need experience to get a job. You need a job to get experience.ā
Weāre a Linux, Django (Python), Nginx, PostgreSQL shop, though most of my work continues to be maintaining code I wrote before joining the co-op ā much of which is not Django.
I guess the main thrust of why I feel F/LOSS is so important comes back to my desire to work with students: If you want innovation, give people stuff they can break, learn from, fix, and then build anew.
Iām located in Brain-Washington, Disenfranchised City.
Although I still poke around with code, Iām finding myself moving back towards music. Iām also thinking about repairing my unicycle. (I once did a 35-mile trip on it.)
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Hello Everyone!
My name is Max I work for Plain Schwarz. We are an events company that acts as a non code contributor to Open Source projects. We are currently putting together the program for our next conference FOSS Backstage, which is a conference on governance, collaboration, legal and economics within FOSS. Iām excited to see what youāre all working on as it I think it will help us put on a great program in 2021.
If youāre interested in taking part you can have a look at our call for papers here: https://foss-backstage.de/news/send-your-ideas-call-participation-open-now Or if you have any ideas about what you would like to see at FOSS Backstage let me know.
Greetings from Berlin!
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Wilkommen, Max! Awesome to see self-described non-code contributors to OSS. Iām looking forward to FOSS Backstage, and hope to help contribute to it.
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Hi All
I am Thomas Markey. I am founder of fosshost.org a non-profit organisation that provides hosting services to free open source software projects and associated community groups that have a real life changing impact to our ecosystem.
I started the project in April this year after I realised that there was a lack of provision in the foss space for projects who could not afford or access distributed cloud computing.
We do not operate on a credit or free trial or short term basis we offer a long term home for more than 70 open source projects.
It is a real privilege to be allowed to join your community and extra thanks to Richard Littauer and Alison Yu.
Our mission statement is: Weāre on a mission to empower and support every free and open source software project. To go further, together. Our work never stops.
Please feel free to ask me any questions, I will be more than happy to answer them.
Thanks, Thomas Founder
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Welcome, Thomas! Thanks for the work you do.
Curious if you have a sustainable business model in place for yourselves going forward - or is it always going to be volunteer? Might be a topic for another thread.
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- Projects:
- Sustainability:
- Grew up with a strong contribution ethic, without recognising utility is not the same as value. Between my personal account and community account my projects get about 500 million downloads a month yet they only bring in a few dollars a month despite the full-time load they demand from my unpaid time. This usage-to-income ratio has gone on for over 15 years now, it lead me to philosophy and economics, it makes sense now. Interested in playing more sustainable games within open-source (such as flossbank, licensing experiments, or not solving alien issues unless paid or self-valuable), and disciplines to avoid the unsustainable traps (self-sacrificial faux-obligations to improve without compensation things you created but do not benefit from).
- Location:
- Digital nomad for most of my life for the benefits of self-heterodoxy and financial runway.
- Other:
- More details at https://balupton.com
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Kia ora, all.
Iām Dave Lane, from Christchurch, New Zealand. Iām a long time Free and Open Source Software advocate and developer. I originally moved from the US to NZ to work as a research scientist in the mid 1990s. The day I arrived, (having seen it in my postgrad UNIX lab in the US and knowing we couldnāt afford SGI machines at the Forest Research Institute (now Scion Research) in NZ) I first installed Linux on my work computer, and the rest is history. I left my research role because I found the organisation too capricious/precious about āIPā (my work was funded by the NZ taxpayer, but the organisation forced people to pay again, and tried to patent everything - not my preferred approach) and so I decided to start my own company. I ran Egressive, a small pure-play FOSS dev (specialising in Drupal implementations) and system integration shop (our work was copyleft licensed, unless upstream differed) from 1998-2012, when I sold it. I now work for the Open Education Resource Foundation as their Open Source Technologist.
Iām one of 2 full-time staff (and the only technologist). Weāre aiming to democratise higher education by creating an openly licensed university to provide very affordable opportunities for people in parts of the world where higher education is generally unavailable, particularly for women in the developing world. In our first year, weāve had people from at least 100 countries take our courses, more than half of whom identify as women.
The only tech requirement for learners is an internet connected device. Everything we do is open, mobile-friendly, runs on FOSS, and is licensed for re-use. Weāre lucky that we also all work remotely, so Covid19 hasnāt been a big inconvenience for us, but we did parley our experience into an initiative to help educators in the developing world move online, with some help from the Commonwealth of Learning and UNESCO among others.
Beyond my education work, Iām also a vocal advocate for doing things more openly in NZ (particularly education and govāt - Iām a champion for open software standards!) and have been involved in the NZ Open Source Society (an NZ registered charity) for many years, including 9 years as chair. Now serving as deputy chair (both are unpaid voluntary positions).
Something interesting about myselfā¦ hmm. Iām a closet herpetologist whoās chosen to live in a country with precious few herpsā¦ and Iāve been paid to dance for people.
I look forward to collaborating with you all!
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Hey there, yāall!
Iām Gina Helfrich ā currently I work as a Program Officer on the Global Tech team at Internews and Iām based in Austin, Texas, USA. I run a program called BASICS thatās specifically trying to intervene to make a positive impact on the sustainability of privacy and security focused open source projects.
Prior to Internews I was Director of Communications and Culture at NumFOCUS, where I worked closely with leaders of scientific software projects on the long-term sustainability of their communities and tools.
I occupy sort of a weird place in the community insofar as Iām not a developer and have never been a consistent contributor to any particular OSS project, but on the other hand Iāve been deeply involved in the OSS sustainability problem space for 5+ years now and have productive professional relationships with a lot of maintainers.
I arrived here via a MozFest panel and look forward to learning more!
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Hi everyone! My name is Zach and Iām the Founder at Exygy. As a certified B Corp, we use Design and Technology to improve lives.
One of our initiatives is Bloom Housing. Bloom is an open source web portal for folks to find and apply to affordable housing. We have implemented it in multiple jurisdictions.
While itās āopen sourceā itās just been us working on it to date, so we havenāt had need for much of a formal governance model. Weāre now starting to get interest from outside contributors and itās a good time for us to be thinking about more formal governance. Iām wondering if this community could point us at some exemplars that we could reference. Specifically, weāre looking for governance models that make sense for a small projects (weāll never be huge), and potentially ones that accommodate multiple types of contributing organizations (in our case, government, civil society, private sector, and funders).
I read through this āChoose a Governance Modelā post in the Governance Working Group of this community, which then landed me on CommunityRule. Itās super valuable, but weāre looking for something a layer down from where theyāre playing now: examples of governance models for actual open source projects similar to ours that we could start from.
Any suggestions welcome. Thank you all for creating and curating this community!
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Hi @zberke,
welcome! and thanks for sharing your situation with us 
You can find our advances on governance models in the tag governance of the forum. From there you can find references to resources such as:
- Governance Readiness Working Group, where we were discussing the questions/dilemmas that developers usually have to face when creating governance models.
- Governance Checklist, with the list of questions we identified
- Principles of Open Source Institutional Design Working Group, where we studied how Elinor Ostromās Principles might be applied to open source community design.
- Matrix questions+principles, which maps questions from the governance checklist with Ostromās principles
I think those points summarize the main advances we have been doing in the last months. We have now join forces and created the Governance Guidance Working Group.
All in all, itās true we donāt have an exhaustive list of examples of governance models, maybe because governance models are still not explicit in common projects 
(and that is something we are trying to address).
Would you help us to identify what could be interesting to create? Feel free to drop a message in the governance forum, so we can discuss it carefully 
Regards,
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Hello! My name is Anthony, I use the pronouns he/him.
Iām a programmer from New Jersey, and I found Sustain through my search for resources on how to grow and improve my community of developers!
Brief version: I help run the League of Extraordinary Foundry VTT Developers which was created to solve very specific-to-our-industry-and-platform problems. Foundry VTT is a commercial platform for playing roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons virtually, which has spawned a cottage industry of Patreon-funded artists and Patreon-funded open source plugin developers. I was very interested to read @jwfās origin story, because itās very similar to our challenges!
Iāve also recently begun volunteering with SPDX-legal to learn more about how they operate. I just reviewed my first new license proposal for them last week and I look forward to more opportunities to help SPDX with their mission.
I plan on being active in the conversation because I want to give back! The podcast in particular has given me countless insights into the work of sustainable community management and open leadership, and I plan to put those to action and reporting on our journey where relevant!
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Welcome @anthonyronda
The SPDX project is interesting because of its potential to improve license compliance across all open source projects. I always use their License-Identifiers.
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Hi @anthonyronda and welcome! I echo @GeorgLinkās appreciation for SPDXās work. I work at the UNICEF Office of Innovation on Digital Public Goods, and we adopted a while ago SPDX identifiers to standardize our our registry of digital public goods. I love it 
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@lacabra please be aware that SPDX lawyers erased the concept of Public Domain, which is releasing code to be unconstrained by copyright regulations, making it impossible to opt out from copyright laws. If you require SPDX, youāre essentially making it impossible to use projects like SQLite in your work, or in the work of UNICEF contractors.
Thanks @abitrolly. I would like to better understand what you are suggesting, because I am not sure I follow your argument:
- You mention that āSPDX lawyers erased the concept of Public Domainā. Can you provide context or links for this statement? I still see SPDX listing both CC-0 and The Unlicense which are essentially variations of a public domain dedication.
- The work of UNICEF does not require the use of SPDX identifiers anywhere. We do use SPDX identifiers in one of our projects. My understanding is that SPDX is an open specification/standard for anyone to use, but using it does not impose any restrictions where it is being used. Correct me if I am wrong on my understanding.
- UNICEF chooses to license their work from a number of open-source software and open content licenses. I suppose that your comments stem from the fact that this repo is licensed under the Unlicense, where we intentionally choose this particular license for the greater reuse of the (mostly) content stored in that repo. I would love to understand how choosing the most permissive license makes anything impossible downstream, as I am open to changing the license if that results in greater reusability.
Thank you! 
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@lacabra we can discuss the concept of public domain dedication vs licensing in a separate topic. It should be a basic human freedom / right to dedicate a work into public domain with no implied fears or questions asked. Lawyers I know could consult people why CC-0 is bad for code and why The Unlicense may not be suitable for art according to copyright law. But defending public domain as an alternative to copyright requires a different approach. Forcing people to choose SPDX for CC-0, Unlicense, WTFPL or any other license equivalent instead of opting out from copyright may leaves an impression that everybody is happy about the copyright, but that is not true. And as more projects include SPDX validators and ask for valid license identifiers, we dilute and lose the voice of people who would prefer the public domain to be a simple and convenient tool to release their work without the defaults of responsibility and legal knowledge that is imposed by the copyright law.