FOSSY 2023

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A brief history and introduction to the XMPP protocol and its use for beginners with a background in programming but no protocol experience. If you are new to XMPP or want to better understand the other presentations in the XMPP track, this is the place to start! This talk will include an overview of the federation and routing model used by XMPP, specific protocol examples, coverage of the initial handshake and security model of XMPP, and common uses and extensions used by the XMPP community. It will provide background information that can be used by those new to the XMPP protocol to more fully understand the rest of the XMPP track.

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Now in its 30th year, the FreeBSD Open Source Operating System is one of the oldest, largest, and most successful open source projects, with a long history of innovation. It is a free Unix-like operating system descended from Research Unix via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as “Berkeley Unix.” Known for its reliability, stability, and advanced networking and performance, FreeBSD also provides an opportunity to dive into the workings of a complete operating system as well as the chance to collaborate with a welcoming and inclusive community in a flat development model. In this track, we would like to begin with a brief “Introduction to FreeBSD” presentation followed by a hands-on, getting started workshop. The workshop portion will cover setting up FreeBSD with a desktop environment and how to get a web browser installed. Next, we’ll walk through the FreeBSD Jail system for managing separate FreeBSD environments within an existing FreeBSD install that allows folks to isolate programs from one another. The goal of the workshop is for everyone to leave with their own FreeBSD virtual machine that they can continue to learn on/develop on.

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Data centers are a crucial part of any IT organization that still needs on premise hosting. Running a datacenter requires attention to power, cooling, networking, rack space, cabling among many other aspects. But how does running AArch64 in a data center differ from traditional x86? This session will discuss the differences between AArch64 and x86 in the scope of hosting it in a data center. Long are the days of just sticking raspberry Pi’s in a rack!

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There's been an explosion in the space of language models, generative AI, and other machine learning related to natural language. Going "beyond the headlines", this talk shows how to leverage open source libraries in Python to work with text and image content, from the perspective of an author, editor, or illustrator. We'll look at how to leverage advanced and "AI-adjacent" tooling such as language models, data annotation, graph technologies, interactive visualizations, etc., for assisting creators to understand the content better and collaborate more effectively. For example: What are the themes discussed? Who are the characters? What are the relationships between the characters? Where was concept "XYZZY" first introduced? Did the "Blarg" character actually purchase a quantum transmogrifier before its first use in the story? How do the themes within the content map to the beats in the story arc? What is the "concept density" per chapter, in terms of the pace of new ideas being introduced? How can language models help suggest or refine the prompt engineering used for illustrating a story? Where are illustrations needed? These approaches apply in the production of fiction, as well as games, movie scripts, plays, documentaries, and various non-fiction as well. We'll review an example: development of an ebook in the style of Japanese Light Novels (a cli-fy novel "Latent Space") where artists experimented with collages using components from generative AI, prompts needed to be tracked, themes images needed to be aligned with text themes, and so on. Python provides a wide range of available tooling (`spaCy`, `argilla`, `huggingface`, `pyvis`, and so on) as well as data infrastructure tooling to support content work at scale.

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Though open source maintainers have many different goals, most of those goals depend on growing the project’s usage and community engagement. As projects get larger, they are able to attract new contributors and new funding opportunities, allowing maintainers to fix bugs and add features more quickly. A larger, more engaged community of users also decreases the risk that an open source project will be abandoned, creating a virtuous cycle of trust as more organizations feel comfortable using the project in mission-critical applications. Whether a project is a hobby side project or backed by a Fortune 10 company, growth matters. This half-day workshop is for any maintainer who cares about their projects’ growth, both in terms of number of users and engagement of existing users. Attendees will learn about the strategies and tactics to increase downloads, active user base, project stickiness, and community engagement. Topics we will explore include but are not limited to: Project positioning & messaging Non-slimy marketing techniques Collecting and acting on user feedback DevRel activities and optimization Keeping users happy via support, fixes, and education Tracking and measuring project growth Community management Attendees will leave with concrete ideas for how to accelerate their projects’ growth.

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Plom is a system for giving tests on paper, but marking and returning them online. Several commercial and proprietary solutions for online exam marking exist, but are prohibitively expensive for academic institutions with small budgets, and collect and/or use students' data in ways that may be objectionable. Plom, however, is Free and Open Source Software licensed under the AGPL-v3, and gives users full control over the marking process and student data. Plom has been in use in the Mathematics Department of the University of British Columbia since October 2018, and is still under active development. Our current goal is to scale-up the project so it can be easily adopted by other departments across UBC and at other institutions. This presentation will be an overview of the current state of the Plom system and instructions on how to use the software or contribute to the project.

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The XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) is a community-governed non-profit organization. It has been at the helm of the XMPP ecosystem for more than two decades. During this period, the internet and how we communicate online has changed beyond recognition. This talk is about how XMPP adapted to change, and the role that the XSF played in its continuity. We will also discuss the benefits, challenges and sustainability of open ecosystems and open networks. The second half of the talk will focus on the XMPP network. Any successful network will attract spam and abuse as it grows, and XMPP is no exception. Unfortunately, open networks are at a natural disadvantage here compared to proprietary platforms. We will share the various kinds of abuse we've seen on the XMPP network, and what the community has done to tackle each of them.

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ARM is the up and coming computing technology, an open platform that competing CPU architectures, with many manufacturers building systems from the size of a stamp to datacenter servers with 256cores stuffed in only 2RUs. There is a wide variety of ARM systems and operating systems that can run on these platforms. But despite all of this diversity, you still have binary compatibility across all the systems. The same Operating system that runs on a small 4-core Raspberry PI can also run on an ARM system in the cloud powered by a high-density 128-core Ampere processor. In this session, learn not only what you can run on ARM, but also the scale of the applications and its data storage. You will also see how easy it is to move to ARM.

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Learn programming in a fun way with Music Blocks! This workshop will get you started with the basics of Music Blocks visual programming, as well as introduce you to some inspirational projects that combine computation and music in a beautiful, authentic way. For the best experience, please bring your laptops! “All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.” — Monk “Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.” — Leibniz Music Blocks is a Visual Programming Language and collection of manipulative tools for exploring musical and mathematical concepts in an integrative and fun way.

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Come explore how to use an entirely open source pipeline to make games! We will discuss why one might choose an open source pipeline in the first place, including issues of source code accessibility, licensing, and ease of use. Everything from game engine to asset creation is completely possible with open source software by using tools such as Blender, Krita, Meshroom, Bespoke Synth, and more. As a case study, we will talk about how to use Godot to make a VR based game on a large rotating space station, touching on general pipeline, making Godot addons, character controllers, and VR complications.

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Transitioning from a closed-source codebase to an open source model of contribution can present significant challenges. This talk aims to showcase the strategies implemented by our team to navigate this transition successfully. Furthermore, we will delve into the benefits we discovered by embracing community involvement in the development process. Space Station 13 stands out as one of the largest open source game development communities, attracting thousands of individual contributors over the course of a decade. Through active player participation, Space Station 13 has transformed into a collaborative development community where anyone can make their mark on the game. Players-turned-contributors are the forefront of development, constantly adding more unique features (and bugs). These efforts have resulted in a high velocity of 10-20 contributions per day, underscoring the power of open source and community development on a large scale. In this talk, I will focus on the Goonstation flavor of the game, examining the development community’s progression after open-sourcing the codebase in 2020. By sharing the strategies we employed to better connect with and hear from our community, I aim to provide insights into the growth and management of a thriving development community with a focus on player contributions. Additionally, I will cover our failures along the way, highlighting the lessons we gleaned from the things we tried that ultimately just didn't work out for us. By delving into both successes and failures, this talk aims to provide a comprehensive retrospective on the process of transitioning from a closed-source model to a community-developed open-source one. Attendees will gain practical knowledge on fostering community involvement, managing collaboration at scale, and navigating the unique dynamics of open-source game development.

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A point-of-view journey through the evolution of the Jabber/XMPP ecosystem from about 2004 and how it was affected by various major events such as: Google Talk, the decline of traditional IM services, the Nokia N900, the smartphone era, the rise of new chat services, and more. Learn how the extensability of the protocol comes into play as the world changes. See how one community's long-term changes may be similar to what you see in your own freedomware community. Hear the exciting opportunities we are now presented with, and how we might all work together for a more user-empowered future of communications technology.

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UniTime was born from a collaborative research project many years ago and has always strived to move both the course timetabling and the student scheduling research communities forward.  With the help of Apereo sponsorship we have done this by being one of the organizers of the 2019 International Timetabling Competition. By leveraging the community of UniTime users to gather the benchmark data sets for that competition, more real world data is now available and actively being used for the next generation of research. This presentation will discuss thoughts on how other open source projects could use this approach.

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Data Centers are one of the largest consumers of energy in the US, accounting for 6% of all power generated in 2019. As DCs continue to grow, this energy consumption is becoming increasingly unsustainable. Despite this, the energy usage of legacy x86 processors have not been a priority. While some producers have started to talk about including energy efficiency in their future projects, this transition is slow and years away. Urgent action is needed to address climate change and the solution is available today and easier than you might think: switching to OCI's Ampere A1 instances. This talk will explore the benefits of a cloud native architecture and its ability to combat climate change by reducing energy consumption in data centers.

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Ampere Computing has grown in the public cloud by 297% over the last year, combined with AWS’s Graviton, ARM64 server instances have grown over 23%. Yet, the first one came out over 10 years ago. Why the explosion in growth today? Environmental concerns? Language support? Tools? Awareness? What still needs to happen to continue this growth? Join us for a panel discussion about the status of ARM64 Servers and their future in the data center.

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Crossword puzzles are a fun pastime enjoyed around the world. Last year at GUADEC, the GNOME Crosswords app was introduced with much fanfare. Part of this app is a crossword editor that gives you the tools to create your own crosswords. Over the past year, we’ve been trying to get a free-software crossword community off the ground. This talk will go through some of the various types of crosswords, their history, and their differences. It will cover the steps of how and how to create puzzles using Crosswords. We will cover hints on how to build grids and hopefully inspire people to try their hand at creating more crosswords we can all enjoy.

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Jupyter has a well-deserved reputation for being a research tool. The same properties that make it well suited for research make it a powerful tool for hands-on teaching. Whether it is abstract math, computer science, software development, physics, or many other subjects, Jupyter can be a powerful tool for teaching with integrated hands-on exercises. The talk will show how JupyterLab can be used both for assigning independent work as well as to help follow along with traditional frontal teaching. It will cover concrete examples from math, software development, and physics, to show how to put it into practice. The talk will also cover how to export Jupyter notebooks in a way suitable for students to download them and how to use Jupyter to grade work assigned as notebooks.

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A brief introduction into how I got into XMPP, a dive into some security vulnerabilities I’ve found over the years, and an in depth look at my focus in XMPP, connectivity! After all, none of the UX or whiz bang shiny things matter at all if you can’t get connected or stay connected to the network. We’ll cover some of my connectivity related XEPs, 0368 (Direct TLS), 0467 (QUIC), 0468 (WebSocket S2s). Then we’ll head deep into the internals of xmpp-proxy, a forward+reverse proxy and general connectivity library for XMPP, written in Rust, including a few of the projects that use it so far, like Converse-Tauri. If we have time at the end after any questions we might get into my next semi-secret project based on xmpp-proxy to further enable people to connect via XMPP.

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Opencast is an open-source video recording and distribution system specifically designed for academic institutions and organizations that want to capture, process, and distribute educational video content. It provides tools and services for recording conferences, presentations, classes, and other events in video format and then processing and distributing the resulting content in various formats. Opencast offers features such as automatic video and audio capture, metadata management, content indexing, basic video editing, and integration with learning management systems (LMS) and media repositories. It allows educational institutions to create online video content libraries and facilitate access through digital platforms. It has been deployed in more than one hundred Higher education institutions and has a vibrant ecosystem of tools. Recently the community has developed a new video portal (Tobira) an updated player focusing in accessibility (Paella Player), a new personal recorder, and an updated video editor. Being an open-source platform, Opencast also enables collaboration and customization according to the needs of each institution. It also has an active community of developers and users who contribute to the ongoing development and improvement of the system. In my talk I will present the new & updated capabilities of the system, and I will argue about how important is to have an Open Source video platform specially targeted for lectures.

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Join us for an in-depth discussion about Red Hat's recent announcements concerning Red Hat Enterprise Linux led by Bradley M. Kuhn with of a panel consisting of benny Vasquez of Alma, Jeremy Allison of CIQ/Rocky, Jim Wright of Oracle.

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FOSS users generally have fall into three relationships with FreeBSD: They've heard of it and never tried it. They used it LONG ago, or they use it for every application they can. This talk follows Michael's journey using GNU/Linux and FreeBSD, with stops at OpenBSD, and NetBSD along the way. The unique features of FreeBSD range from subtle to obvious, and have arrived at a slow but steady pace that has allowed it to stay remarkably consistent but ever advancing over its thirty year history. These features include a permissive license, an exemplary network stack, multiple packet filters, the Jail container, the bhyve and Xen hypervisors, and the UFS and ZFS file systems. FreeBSD's consistency makes it a delight to work with and operate, with changes consistently adding value, rather than delivering change for change's sake. This approach has allowed user to develop "muscle memory" that can genuinely last decades. This talk will provide an overview of FreeBSD's compelling features big and small.

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Open source businesses commit themselves to building both a vibrant community of open source users as well as a profitable customer base. Sure, the open source project can drive commercial adoption,but the profile and needs of open source users are fundamentally different from the profile and priorities of a good commercial customer. If, as an open source business, you want to effectively grow both community use and revenue, you need to understand the profile, needs and pain points unique to their open source software users as well as the profile, needs and pain points unique to their commercial customers — and understand how the two profiles both overlap and diverge. In this talk, Emily Omier will show attendees how to position their open source project and commercial product(s) so that each one has a unique message and clearly defined ideal user profile, while also developing an umbrella positioning and narrative for the entire company. Attendees will leave with a framework for how to work out the positioning for both open source and commercial products, as well as an understanding of why it matters and what to do once they’ve figured out the positioning basics.

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Somewhere between hardware and software, is firmware. It was originally called that precisely because it straddled those two worlds. Yet most firmware is no longer firm, it's more like tofu and exists in firm, semi-firm, and soft states. Current FSF policy that allows proprietary firmware is based on burned-on-chip, write-once firmware from a few decades ago. Most firmware today is field-upgradable and closer to software. This talk will discuss how the modern state of "firm"ware demands new free software policy, and start a discussion on what that policy could be.

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Open source sustainability is a frequently mentioned topic. We need to "keep it going for the long haul", develop a "sustainable business model", and occasionally even "sustain sustainability conversations". There's even a conference about it. It happened on Wednesday. But the entire discussion falls down upon close scrutiny. What does sustainability mean for open source? Does it apply to the licenses, to particular projects, to users, to the ecosystem? How do we understand the community health of open source on a temporal spectrum? Why "sustain" in the first place, and for what, and for whom? And what's at risk if we're not sustainable? Proprietary code eating the world? Burn-out? AI? All of us moving to San Francisco and working for ad tech, even though the rent is too darn high? I've held hundreds of conversations about sustaining open source over the past few years. I want to share the limits of the term, where it doesn't fit our abstractions, and how some of the models we use to understand open source sustainability could be updated or improved. This is a talk for skeptics. It's also a talk for dreamers - because without understanding where the gaps are, it's near impossible to bridge them. My hope is that this talk can show how we can start doing that, together.

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Maintaining an open source project is hard work that often extends out over several years, and maintainer burnout is common within open source projects. It can be hard for already overworked maintainers to balance the day to day work required to keep the project running while investing in activities to increase future sustainability. The good news is that we have best practices, resources, and templates available to make it easier for maintainers and projects to build a contributor strategy that leads to a strong and growing community for an open source project over the long term. This talk will help you apply those resources in your project. This talk will have several major sections. 1) Discussion about the major factors that impact contributor growth. 2) Developing and executing on a long-term contributor growth strategy, including governance, new contributor onboarding, and mentoring. 3) Using contributor ladders to promote contributors into leadership positions as more maintainers to share the workload can reduce maintainer burnout over time. 4) Metrics for measuring project sustainability. The audience will walk away with a better understanding of how to grow their contributor base and build a community around their open source project.

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This project aims to bridge the gap between technological advancements in Knowledge Management (KM), E-Learning (EL), and emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), and Augmented Reality (AR), and the lack of skilled users able to create 3D content and establish best online practices for VR/AR content teaching and sharing. Our solution is a student-centric e-content development platform based on the Pre-Freshman Accelerated Curriculum in Engineering (PACE) program's Virtual Interactive Learning, Training, and Performance platform (VILTA). The PACE program, with a strong track record of promoting student advancement and retention (with a 55% four-year graduation rate and a 24% advanced STEM degree completion rate). PACE was established in 1987 as a face to face on campus program. The vision of the PACE program is to motivate and inspire students to obtain an advanced STEM degree. This program has evolved into a semi-immersive and entirely remote learning experience, PACE VILTA. This evolution motivates the application of open-source software to transform PACE VILTA into a comprehensive student-centric e-content development platform. By integrating AI with KM and EL on this platform, we aim to automate knowledge extraction, categorization, and distribution. The platform will be designed to personalize EL content, adapt to individual learners' pace, and enable precise assessments. VR and AR technologies will be introduced via gaming tools into an open-source Learning Management System (LMS) creating immersive, interactive, and contextual EL environments. An open-source metaverse, a unique feature of this platform, will facilitate e-content usage and sharing. The LMS's built-in controls will track students' progress through the e-content development cycle, ensuring alignment with the implemented e-content framework. This platform will serve as a testing ground for various e-content frameworks, simplify e-content creation with VR and AR tools, and promote collaborative constructivism learning. By enabling the integration of diverse investigative techniques, the platform targets the improvement of active learning models, encourages innovative e-content frameworks, and provides a medium for validating learning principles, theories, and concepts. The proposed research will focus on these dynamic integrations, anticipating comprehensive insights into the innovative amalgamation of AI, VR, and AR with KM and EL, powered by open-source software. The findings will extend the body of knowledge, suggest future research directions, and provide valuable guidelines for organizations and educational institutions seeking to improve their KM and EL initiatives through open-source innovation. The primary objective of this research is to foster advancements in Knowledge Management (KM) and E-Learning (EL) systems worldwide. It aims to make these systems not only economically feasible but also versatile and easily accessible to a broad spectrum of users. The anticipated influence of this study is extensive, encompassing a wide range of learners, from students at Morgan State University to those in K-12 education, adult learners, and participants in industry training programs. Furthermore, it aspires to have a transformative impact on governmental agencies across the globe, further broadening the reach and applicability of its findings

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The tech company you've joined wants to give you a laptop for your work. Yay! But they offer only Macs. Or if they offer Linux, they refuse to support it. What do you do? This talk discusses strategies to help your companies accept and support Linux in development and administrative environments. if your company refuses to allow Linux on the "Desktop", what numbers can you put together to show how Linux is a better option? How do you show that Linux is cost-effective for users who are comfortable with it? If your company will purchase a Linux laptop for your work, but refuses to support it internally, what do you do? How do you set up a community where you work where you can support each other?

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Copyleft is a tool to help give everyone the right to modify and fix the software they use. It has proven effective in many situations, giving us projects like OpenWrt, and growing various FOSS communities like Linux immensely. However, copyleft is not the thing that software freedom advocates ultimately want - rather, it is one way of achieving it, and works to varying degrees depending on the copyright and other laws of the country you happen to reside in. Early writing on software freedom tended to focus on copyleft as the solution but, as we enter what many call a post-copyright age, fueled by AI startups and other dubious businesses, we need new tools to ensure that people's right to modify and fix the software they use is protected for current and future generations. This talk will explore some of the foundations of software freedom and how we can re-think the ways that these foundations are upheld through law and social norms.

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It's hard to be consistent with Free/Open Source practices, and it's a particular kind of hard when it's your role in the project to guide other people toward such consistency. In this session we'll share some compassion and then some ideas of how we can actually get together as a community of practice. And then we'll do some practice demos together! In putting energy toward working on our practices together, we center the importance of Open Knowledge sharing and building communities for those and of those whose work includes enabling others to be successful in using and contributing to FOSS. We help ourselves fix our own leaky roofs, make shoes for our own friends and family, and help return time to everyone’s days. To engage in practice in this session, we'll explore a perspective on how to read and use the Open Source Way, the guidebook for community management. Written by a diverse group of more than a dozen FOSS expert practitioners, the guide extrapolates and distills knowledge of not just what to do and how to do it, but also why to do it. The chapters and checklists are ready to use and/or modify, and Karsten will chop and mix them live in the session. How can this help you use the guidebook and practices? Whether you are leading or guiding a Free/Open project, an engineering team, or any group of humans looking to be successful working within FOSS projects, you are facing the need to teach and reteach (and reteach…) the same information and practices. People need to know what to do, how to do it, and where to do it, while you hope you get them to understand a smattering of why it all matters in the short time you have their attention. This practice demo follows 3 steps to take the detailed and specific practices in the guidebook, and remix them to fit your education and practice needs. The contributors you support then have a tool to guide them in successfully creating, building, and maintaining their FOSS projects.

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It’s common knowledge that many open source projects are underfunded. We think one reason for this is that the open source world is doing a bad job of asking for the money that it deserves. By telling the right organizations exactly why and how we want them to financially support our work, OSS projects can be compensated for more fairly, and result in a healthier open source ecosystem. In this talk we will review our experiences at React Flow of making our MIT Licensed library financially sustainable. This includes: - Insights from user research about why our subscribers pay us - Inner workings of our thin-crust open-core model - How we used patterns from the SaaS world to more directly ask companies for money - How slow, intentional growth of our team lends to financial sustainability We hope that folks leave this talk with practical methods to ask for money in their own OSS projects, as well as insights into the role of money (and the lack thereof) in the open source ecosystem.

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NetBSD isn't commonly used in a visible way today, even though a smorgasbord of modern devices are leveraging NetBSD silently and opaquely. If you would like to harness the relevant and useful capabilities of NetBSD, then a good place to start is sending all of your packets through NetBSD on your home internet connection. This talk will cover, as it pertains to a home server environment, the basic setup of a modern NetBSD installation; package management; npf, the NetBSD packet filter; and IPv6 considerations.

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Skilled, effective mentorship on open source research projects can provide an opportunity for faculty and researchers to identify and bolster the work of hidden gems – including talented and driven students who never considered graduate school as part of their career trajectory. Since 2018, the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS), and more recently the UCSC OSPO, has been matching talented student contributors with mentors and their open source research projects. Starting as a mentor organization for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and then expanding mentoring efforts to include additional sponsors within the Open Source Research Experience (OSRE), the team at UCSC has worked to seed open source communities across multiple University of California (UC) campuses by bringing in new contributors to UC research projects. This presentation will look at what the OSRE team has learned from these hands-on mentoring efforts, and propose practical ways these types of programs can be replicated elsewhere to support the work of more academic open source ecosystems. To further highlight how programs like these can have real-world impact on students and open source communities, the discussion will feature the story of UCSC PhD student Jayjeet Chakraborty, who first came to the attention of the UCSC mentors through the GSoC program then developed into a key contributor to a CROSS incubator project, and was ultimately recruited into the computer science PhD program at UCSC. The presentation will explore Jayjeet's evolution through these roles, and how his experience can provide inspiration for engaging and empowering contributors, and assist with improving a project’s long-term impact and sustainability. The session will also focus on how this approach could be used to strengthen the pool of contributors supported by the OSRE and similar programs, including innovative ways of bringing open source education and relevant training to a broader cross-section of students.

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Collecting and using metrics from your open source projects for business purposes is often required for the growth of your business. Navigating the ethical landscape of usage data collection in open source software presents complex challenges that businesses often grapple with, relating to privacy, security, community, and compliance. This talk, drawing from our hands-on experience as practitioners, aims to shine a spotlight on these multidimensional concerns. The discussion will investigate the responsible handling of personally identifiable information, best practices for data storage and collection, and the pivotal role of user consent. Emphasizing community engagement and transparency, we will share our learned best practices, proposing a more accountable framework. The objective is to create a more data-driven OSS community while also fostering a greater understanding of best practices to promote safer, ethical usage data collection.

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Working with and building communities can feel like you are always short of resources - money, time, energy, and motivation - but there's a resource you can invest in your community that you already have in abundance. Injecting this resource into your work will increase participation, improve results, and support the longevity of your work. It will even make you happier every time you use it. You will never run out of it, and in fact the more you give away, the more you are likely to get. It's appreciation! We all know thanking and acknowledging the people who contribute to our projects, events, and communities is important. But how many times can we say the words "thank you" before they start to feel empty or like a rote checking of a box? Sharing appreciation effectively is a skill you can improve and a simple habit you can build into your interactions that can have dramatic impacts. In this session we will start by considering the (sometimes unexpected!) ways expressing appreciation more often and more effectively can improve any community you are a part of, including your person happiness. We'll then break down what makes a good compliment or thank you, and you'll get a few simple templates you can use right away. Finally, we'll talk about how to make appreciation a routine, reflexive part of your professional and personal life that you can take with you and pay forward.

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Come listen to the tale of how I and a small team of Scout Leaders from Australia developed and delivered a weekend course that took 11-15-year-old young adults from knowing almost nothing about networking or code, to being able to follow along and build their own website, complete with static HTML, CSS, and then transitioning to a simple Python Flask app, requiring nothing more than a web browser and Visual Studio Code on the student computers. I'll cover how we gave each student full root access to their own "server", through to how we built the course material to be a manageable learning curve over such a tight timeline, the challenges we faced with content delivery, and ideas for improvements before we run our next course.

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In this panel and facilitated discussion, we’ll gaze cautiously into the abyss and confront the realities and possibilities that keep us up at night. We’ll share our concerns and fears together, shine a little light for one another to help us on our journeys, and carry forward having named the beasts that haunt us. We may not be able to solve all that ails us in this session, but through naming them and creating shared understanding, we hope that our communities of practice will be better prepared to support one another. Flashlights, spooky stories, and actual insomnia are optional.

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Unfortunately, not every team or organization views open source license compliance as something that should be prioritized. Some perceive it as a costly inconvenience that gets in the way of development efficiency and product quality. The good news: While it’s impossible to change opinions overnight, our experience supporting compliance initiatives for numerous open source projects and companies has made clear that the right mix of messaging, processes, and strategies can make a difference. Join FOSSA Head of Product Kenaz Kwa and Chief Advocate Aaron Williams in this session as we highlight learnings from working with engineering leaders who have won over compliance skeptics. We’ll share information that you can use to help make compliance more of a priority across your organization, including: Strategies for successfully implementing compliance policies - How and why simplicity is often the right approach to a compliance program - Underappreciated benefits of a compliance-minded culture - The real risks of non-compliance - How to reduce engineering time spent on compliance - Why it’s important to pay attention to community licenses We’ll also discuss how to apply these takeaways to specific areas where compliance skepticism manifests, like when organizations: - Are reluctant to create policies governing license compliance - Are reluctant to dedicate the resources (engineering time and/or automation) to manage license compliance - Have compliance policies in place — but certain teams are unable or unwilling to implement them Attendees will come away from the session with new tactics, messaging, and insights that you can present to colleagues to make the case for prioritizing compliance initiatives.

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Bring your questions about OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD to find out about how they compare and which one is right for you!

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Open source maintainers and developers should never feel guilty about building a business around their projects. It is entirely possible to create a thriving open source business without sacrificing your community or your values. In this talk, we will reveal how, by sharing best practices, stories, ideas, and invaluable advice collected over the past seven years from some of the brightest founders, executives, and leaders in the open source space. We will explore the challenges of building and growing an open source business, focusing on the transformation of free users into satisfied paying customers. With insights drawn from 20 years of experience and conversations with hundreds of business executives, maintainers, and product owners, we will discuss the best practices, metrics, and processes that can help drive growth and adoption in the open source space. Join us as we delve into the unique nature of selling open source and how it differs from traditional business models. We will emphasize the importance of differentiating your paid-for offerings from freely available software, and guide you on how to navigate the open source landscape to build a sustainable, scalable, and profitable business around your project – all while fostering a strong community that supports both your commercial and technical objectives.

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An anti-pattern is a process which seems appropriate, but has more bad consequences than good ones. Many companies who are trying to run their open source efforts in the same way that they would manage projects internally are suffering from having their internal best-practices become open source anti-patterns. While the code quality of the technical work is generally unaffected by these, they can have a chilling effect on community growth, health, diversity, and sustainability. In this talk, I'll discuss some of the common mistakes that "corporate" open source efforts make in their own open source projects and in their attempts to contribute to the upstreams they depend on. This session might give you some tips as to why your Pull Requests are not getting answered and why your open source projects are still entirely built by your internal development team.

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Engaging students in free and open source software (FOSS) projects is educationally rewarding, however experience shows that it is challenging for both students and faculty. Engagement in FOSS fosters students’ technical, professional and personal development in ways that "class-size" projects cannot. Students can study and interact with large, complex, real-world software artifacts, tools, and development processes central to modern software development and in high demand. They can observe and practice professional skills including communication, collaboration, critical thinking, question asking, and technical writing. In addition, growing evidence suggests that a context of social good, such as in FOSS projects with humanitarian goals (HFOSS), may attract more women and other underrepresented student groups to computing. However, these advantages come with a number of practical and cultural challenges. Work in FOSS communities is often less structured, even chaotic, as compared to traditional academic assignments. The content and timing of community responses to student inquiries and contributions may not align well with student background or assignment due dates. Assignments created around a project can be rendered quickly obsolete as the project evolves. As a result, faculty doing this work have found it difficult to transition students from classroom activities to participating in open source projects “in the wild.” This talk will present our work on two intermediate steps, HFOSS Kits and Education-Oriented HFOSS Projects, designed to bridge the gap between classroom activities and student participation in FOSS “in the wild.” An HFOSS kit is a snapshot of an active HFOSS project’s artifacts (code-base(s), issues, documentation, communications, etc.), taken at a particular point in time and packaged with student learning activities, an instructor guide, and a containerized development environment. Using a snapshot that is independent of the live project creates an authentic environment, while enabling the creation of reusable educational activities and providing a more comfortable space for students to experiment and learn. Using a containerized development environment minimizes startup time, allows automated context-sensitive feedback, and the simulation of community interaction. Education-Oriented HFOSS Projects, have real clients and are consciously designed and managed to facilitate faculty and undergraduate student engagement. Some examples managed by our team include LibreFoodPantry, FarmData2, Open Energy Dashboard, and Open Circuits. These are ongoing projects that continue across semesters and welcome outside participation. They are often humanitarian in nature and connect to causes or communities that align with institutional mission and student experiences. They use modern technologies but are architected, scoped and managed to facilitate student learning, support specific curricular goals, accommodate academic schedules, and understand that these objectives will slow project development. As entire new cohorts of students engage each term, particular attention is paid to onboarding, including documentation at the appropriate level and fully containerized development environments that make the process as easy as possible. We have talked about these approaches at computing education conferences and are excited to hear different perspectives on our approaches from FOSS practitioners and educators in this community. Thus, significant time will be allocated for feedback and discussion with the audience.

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Join this in-promptu meeting to share your thoughts on what it means for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning systems to be "open". The Open Source Initiative will host this lunch break to hear from the FOSSY participants what they think should be the shared set of principles that can recreate the permissionless, pragmatic and simplified collaboration for AI practitioners, similar to what the Open Source Definition has done.

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Come to this discussion to find out how you can get more involved in using or contributing to BSD Unix.

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Zig is a free and open source software project backed by Zig Software Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. It sustainably funds 4 people full-time. The project is active and has a rapidly growing user base. I'll share briefly about the story of how it came to be, and then focus the presentation on what lessons I think are transferable to others looking to make similar ventures, make note of which things might be unique to ZSF in particular, and share some other observations I've made along the way, as I dipped my feet into business. In particular this talk will focus on the practical aspects of running a non-profit for a software project.

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In this session, Ann Schlemmer, CEO of Percona, will share her experiences and insights on the trade-offs of being a bootstrapped, customer funded company vs taking outside capital. We will go over: Advantages and disadvantages of customer funding and bootstrapping, including flexibility, control, and scalability Benefits of leveraging the power of an open source community Strategies to attract and retain customers and generate sustainable revenue streams Lessons learned from Ann's journey leading a customer-funded and bootstrapped business Questions from the audience for further discussion and exploration of the topic This presentation will particularly interest entrepreneurs, small business owners, and anyone interested in alternative funding models for open source startups. The audience will leave with a better understanding of the pros and cons of bootstrapping and customer funding, as well as actionable steps to make the most of these strategies.

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Integration of an Academic Open Source Program Office (OSPO) as a Research Software Engineering (RSE) group within a university environment offers a distinctive approach to fostering open source collaboration and enhancing research software engineering practices. The utilization of students as developers within such a program highlights their unique contributions, benefits, and the challenges involved. The growing recognition of research software as a fundamental component of the scientific process has led to the establishment of both academic OSPOs and RSE groups. These groups aim to enhance software engineering practices within research projects, enabling robust and sustainable software solutions. The integration of an OSPO into an RSE group within a university environment provides an intriguing fusion of open source principles and research software engineering expertise. Engaging students as developers in an OSPO-RSE group brings numerous advantages. It provides students with valuable experience in real-world software development, enabling them to bridge the gap between academia and industry. By actively participating in open source projects, students can refine their technical skills, learn industry best practices, and gain exposure to collaborative software development workflows. Involving students in open source projects enhances their educational experience. They have the opportunity to work on meaningful research software projects alongside experienced professionals, tackling real-world challenges and making tangible contributions to the scientific community. This exposure to open source principles and practices fosters a culture of innovation, collaboration, and knowledge sharing. This approach also raises questions. How can the objectives and metrics of success for an academic OSPO-RSE group be defined and evaluated? What governance models and collaboration mechanisms are required to balance the academic freedom of researchers with the community-driven nature of open source? How can the potential conflicts between traditional academic practices and the open source ethos be effectively addressed? How can teams balance academic commitments with project timelines? These questions highlight the need for careful consideration and exploration of the organizational, cultural, and ethical aspects associated with an OSPO acting as an RSE group within a university. Leveraging student developers in an OSPO-RSE group also presents challenges that need careful consideration. Students may have limited experience in software engineering practices, requiring mentoring and guidance to ensure the quality and sustainability of the research software they contribute to. Balancing academic commitments with project timelines and expectations can also be a challenge, necessitating effective project management strategies and clear communication channels. Furthermore, the ethical considerations of involving students as developers in open source projects must be addressed, ensuring the protection of intellectual property, respecting licensing requirements, and maintaining data privacy. The involvement of students as developers within an OSPO-RSE group offers valuable benefits. The effective integration of students in this context requires thoughtful planning, mentorship, and attention to ethical considerations. This talk will examine the experience of the Open Source with SLU program to explore the dynamic role of student developers in an OSPO-RSE program and engage in discussions on best practices, challenges, and the future potential of this distinctive approach to research software engineering within academia.

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Engaging in the AI ecosystem can be a daunting task. There are multiple options to start engaging, but no one gives you a clear path to some level of success. There are stories of advanced math or massive computing required; there must be an easier way. Or, in another way to describe it, we all don’t need to develop Microsoft Word, but it’s essential to know how to use Microsoft Word. In this talk, I’ll be walking through an Open Source project called Caikit which is an Open Source wrapper around multiple AI portions of the ecosystem, so you can see the flexibility that it can give you. We will start with a simple whistle-stop tour of how to understand the AI space then how to access public Open Source models. Then we will move over to my laptop live demoing the Caikit via local containers and cached models to show how easy it is to play with it locally. From there, we will take the demo to the cloud and show a way to deploy it to OpenShift and be able to have an API that can respond with said model(s). Walking out of this room, you’ll see how easy it can be with Open Source software; with a little effort on your computer and downloading some Open Source models, you can start leveraging AI with confidence.

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Each open source community is different and therefore requires different metrics for data-driven decisions about building and supporting it. What makes it so tricky is that everyone pays attention to different aspects of communities. In this talk, we will explore what metrics are available to look at communities and to track the impact of changes we make as we build and support them. We will look at real-world examples of how metrics have been used to build and support open source communities. This is based on conversations in the CHAOSS Project, an open source community that defined metrics and developed software to get these metrics. This talk will share what we have learned in the CHAOSS Project about having metrics for open source communities. Once the right metrics have been decided on, both technical and organizational challenges need to be overcome, which we discuss how to do. This is an interactive session. The three sections of the talk introduce the topic to everyone. The majority of the time will be available for discussion among the participants.

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In an ideal world, students would graduate from college with a comprehensive understanding of open source and an ability to contribute to an open source community in some significant way. In reality, while all students know about open source and most students use open source products, very few students have much understanding of open source. Students do not know how large open source is, they have no idea that open source can be a career, and little awareness of the tools and processes that make open source communities successful. This presentation will present results of surveys that exemplify the very shallow student understanding of open source. Improving open source education would benefit both students and open source communities. Student benefits from open source participation include exposure to an evolving, complex software system, development of professional skills, improved technical skills, better understanding of team-based development in a distributed environment and more. Open source communities can also benefit from student participation. Students can relieve more experienced developers from routine tasks such as bug verification and documentation, and they have added incentive to participate due to class requirements. In addition, students can be supported by academic infrastructure so that they are not relying solely on the OSS community for learning. Finally, open source education will help ensure a continuing flow of professional developers into open source projects. In order to prepare students for open source, students must learn about open source culture, tools, and processes.. Unfortunately, many schools are not teaching even basic open source tools such as version control, issue trackers, and CI/CD pipelines, and only a small number of schools are covering open source processes or culture. How can educators better prepare students for open source by incorporating these necessary skills and information into an undergraduate program? This talk will discuss the gap between undergraduate computing education and open source community expectations, the reasons for this gap, and approaches for bridging the gap.

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We often hear that the main thing FOSS needs to be successful is more money. But what concrete steps would we take if we had money? Who should we give it to and what should they spend it on? Bring your ideas to this Q&A hosted by two FOSS business leaders, who have seen what money can (and can't) do for FOSS. We will briefly describe our experiences, and then open it up for discussion to dive into actionable plans for using money to improve software freedom, through non-profit, worker co-operative, and/or for-profit endeavors.

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When most people hear the word “governance” they think of formal documents like bylaws and big questions like “who calls the shots?” While those elements can be important, governance is actually much more common than that. It’s part of any project’s everyday work - but, like many unacknowledged dependencies, many people only notice when there’s a critical bug. This talk will introduce a basic framework for thinking about governance as well as a few common governance models in open source. Then, we’ll talk about a few of those ‘critical bugs’ that projects face and how a governance lens can help us fix them. We’ll discuss: - maintainer burnout - growing new community leaders - roadmapping and other kinds of technical decision-making - formalizing and transitioning governance structures Audience members will walk away with a new appreciation for governance and a suite of tools, ideas, and resources that they can use to help their open source projects flourish.

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The Usable Software Ecosystem Research (USER) project was initiated by Superbloom Design and funded by the Sloan Foundation. It explores how Scientific & Research open- source software teams understand, consider, and undertake usability and design opportunities in their projects. Through a variety of design research methods such as literature reviews, semi- structured interviews, surveys, and ecosystem mapping, the research aims to obtain a better understanding of: 1. How norms in academic, science, and/or open- source working environments affect the choices teams make around their users and different kinds of design interventions. 2. How team dynamics and trust affects those choices. 3. What teams would need to be interested in or able to prioritize usability and design in their work. In this short talk, we'll give an overview of our findings but specifically zoom in on the ways in which Scientific and Research OSS (S&R OSS) contributors/teams leverage community spaces, interactions and documents to make user-informed choices about how to make their documentation and tools better. There will then be a critical review of how design research trained individuals might iterate and improve on these practices to make usability and design even better in S&R OSS.

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Join us for an engaging Right to Repair panel discussion with experts in the field! We'll talk with activists Kyle Wiens of iFixit, Juan Muro of Free Geek, Hilary Shohoney of Bonneville Environmental Foundation, and Denver Gingerich of Software Freedom Conservancy about current topics in Right to Repair and how they impact free and open source software communities, from participating in the "1201 process" for Digital Millennium Copyright Act exemptions with the US Copyright Office, to strategies that might work to increase Right to Repair legislation and bringing lawsuits to compel companies to respect consumers' rights."

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While there are many ways that projects can define and measure what health means to their communities, this talk will focus on maintainers as they serve critical roles in the development, leadership and governance of their projects. As burnout continues to be a growing issue across roles, industries and communities, losing maintainers within small communities can have significant impact on the sustainability of that project. This talk will discuss methods and metrics that could signal overloaded and overworked maintainers. While metrics alone cannot fix this problem, they may help to identify potential issues so your community can adjust before it's too late.

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Form follows function in writing: you compose a postcard to your Gran in a particular voice, attorneys draft contracts using specialized terms and grammatical structures, marketing pros formulate content with specific language to sell products, and you probably should write in a distinct way when the topic is open source. In this session, Kyle will go over some unique writing challenges presented by open source projects and how to overcome them to be inclusive and accurate in your communication. This session will dive into how seemingly innocuous terms and grammatical structures embed meaning that may be sending subtle, unintended messages. Additionally, time will be spent discussing how to select and use style guides to concretely establish a consistent voice and approach for both general writing and technical documentation.

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Join us for an unconference session on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). For this session, we have no topics prepared because we are following an unconference format. This means that we will have participant-driven discussions. Participants can offer to host a small-group discussion on a topic they care about; no expertise is required, only personal experience and interest. After the small-group discussions, we will have report-outs to all participants to share what we learned with everyone. Everyone can participate to their level of comfort and is not required to share experiences or talk. This session is open to everyone.

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Following an explosion of growth in open collaboration in solving the world’s most urgent problems related to the 2020 global Covid-19 pandemic, open source software moved from mainstream to the world's main stage. In 2022 the United Nation’s Digital Public Goods (DPG) Alliance began formally certifying open source software as DPG; the European Union wrote open source into their road map; both the EU and the US began crafting Cybersecurity legislation in support of secure software - not targeting OSS as a specific concern but rather protecting and investing in it as critical to its own and its citizens’ interest. OSI has recognized these important seachanges in the environment, including unprecedented interest in open source in public arenas. Stefano Maffulli’s briefing will provide an overview of important trends in Open Source Software in public policy, philanthropy and research and talk about a new initiative at OSI designed to bring open voices to the discussion.

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Open Education sustainability requires significant, stable public funding. Education is a public good and the production, reuse and revisions of educational resources - and the software to host and share them - should be publicly funded and openly licensed to ensure educational opportunities for all. The Open Science movement is increasingly looking toward more equitable models for open access research; it is looking to move away from expensive subscription fees and article processing charges (APCs). One possible model is "Diamond Open Access," a model for ensuring inclusive and equitable access to both read and submit research articles to community-driven, academic-led and -owned open access journals. Cable will explore what “Diamond Open Education” might look like. What are the barriers to Diamond OE? What if funding currently spent on expensive commercial educational resources and software were redirected to support the creation and stewardship of quality OER and FOSS in every discipline, in every grade level in multiple languages? Join us.

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Everyone makes use of the existing open source mirroring systems that are present to download their favorite bit of FOSS, be that Video Lan Client, Libreoffice, or your favorite Linux distribution. There are a lot of entities that donate these resources into the community from Universities, to ISPs. The reasons why entities put forth this effort varies a lot, but ultimately they all share the want to help make it easy, and accessible, to acquire FOSS. In early 2022 Kenneth Finnegan approached John 'Warthog9' Hawley with an idea "hey we should build up a new public mirror for the internet exchange since the one that was there seems to have left". Once completed, Kenneth asked another question which set in motion much bigger things "what if we made mirrors out of $20 surplus thin clients?" which has turned into a cluster of 29 machines in a number of countries on 4 continents. This is a story of how FOSS mirroring works, the idea that was had behind the Micro Mirror (MM) project and how this helps the FOSS community from end to end, and what projects and users can do to help the entirety of the mirroring infrastructure out there.

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Wikidata and OpenStreetMap are collaborative open data projects that contain structured data for real world places and things. Adding links between the projects makes the data more useful, but doing this by hand is laborious. I've written a software tool that automates much of the process. Editors of OpenStreetMap can use my software to search for a place or region, generating a list of candidate matches from Wikidata, which can then be checked and saved to OpenStreetMap. Linking the two projects isn't without controversy. They use different licenses which raises questions about what information from one project can be copied to the other. In the presentation I will give details of a new version of the editing tool. I will talk about the benefits of linking, the process of finding matches, the community response - including the controversy - and how people can get involved.

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FreeBSD's 30th birthday offers an opportunity to look back and examine why this open source operating system has not only endured, but thrived across many organizations and use cases for so long. While open source projects are born out out different circumstances, FreeBSD certainly grew from a mold of its own. The path the project took has everything to do with its longevity and why, 30 years after it launched, you'll find FreeBSD code helping power everything from your content on Netflix to your games on PlayStation. This talk will cover the roots of the Berkley Software Distributions, the project's approach to shared leadership, the benefits of remote development, and the ways FreeBSD has cultivated a strong community through open communication, consistent documentation, and an inclusive culture. We'll wrap up by taking a look forward for the next 30 years and how you can contribute to the future of FreeBSD.

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This session offers rapid talks by and for researchers. These short talks will provide brief insights into free and open source software development, use, and communities, as well as questions we need to be asking ourselves as community members and researchers.

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A common complaint in higher education has been that departments would consider open source options when purchasing software, but nobody ever bids into the formal procurement processes that public sector bodies are obliged to run. This response makes clear a fundamental mis-conception about how to approach the acquisition of open source; a competitive procurement process is in most cases inappropriate because no product purchase is being made. Instead a different kind of commitment of time and resources is required to adopt open source, and to facilitate decision making about that, a different kind of evaluation process is also required. This talk will outline the kinds of evalution processes that should be used by higher education to acquire open source solutions, and how such processes can actively enhance commercial procurement practices if that is the eventual route taken. It will also cover what kinds of information open source projects should be providing to enable easy options evaluation and decision making.

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All good Open Source developers and communities know that you have to address the issues. No one will show interest in contributing to an Open Source project if it doesn't address potential bugs, security issues, or feature additions to its repository. This is well understood by the Open Source community as part of the ethos which has driven the success of open as an innovation modality and spurred its growth into new technological areas such as AI/ML, Open Hardware, and others. However, many of today’s most popular Open Source licenses do not adequately address patent risk for Open Source projects. As patent risk is a challenge that must be addressed, this presentation will discuss the key tenets around patent non-aggression in Open Source, key patent-related risks, and the best practices that Open Source projects should consider moving forward to “address the issue”. Key Takeaways: o Ways patent litigation risks are rising & ways to reduce these risks o The relevance of patents and their future value in the “Open Work” economy o Challenges for the Open Source community as it expands into new technologies and encounters new patent-related threats o Best practice solutions to mitigate these challenges

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Research Data Management (RDM) skills are “must-have” skills required of any researcher in any discipline. Recent advances in digital technology have introduced new practices in Open Science and Research Integrity, requiring researchers to continuously develop their skills in systematic ways. This session uses a maturity model represented by rubrics and accessed via an open source e-Portfolio to develop RDM skills in new researchers. The rubrics identify specific skills required to plan for, organize, analyze, publish, and share research data. The e-Portfolio (developed using the Karuta Open Source Portfolio, a project of the Apereo Foundation, https://www.apereo.org/projects/karuta) invites new researchers to provide multimedia evidence demonstrating their RDM skills and accomplishments and to receive feedback on their progress from mentors. The Academic Data and Innovation Unit at Kyoto University is currently developing three types of RDM rubrics for new researchers based on the RDM maturity model and the RDM guide for researchers developed by the California Digital Library: 1. RDM Basic Skills Rubric 2. Discipline-Specific RDM Skills Rubrics 3. Interdisciplinary RDM Skills Rubric for Innovation By pairing these rubrics with the open source ePortfolio system of “Apereo Karuta”, we are creating a program to better prepare new researchers at Kyoto University and other universities in Japan for the emerging RDM requirement of publishing and sharing data along with research results.

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Drupal—an open source CMS—turned 20 years old recently, and has grown from a small student hobby project to an enterprise-grade digital experience platform running ~3% of the Internet. This talk will explore the many lessons learned (most of them the hard way ;)) in navigating an international open source developer community through various scalability challenges. Topics covered will include: * Contributor On-Boarding: Some clever and participatory ways to help new folks bootstrap quickly and feel included * Community Health: How to account for—and encourage—contributors stepping away? How to develop new leadership to take their place? * Project Sustainability: How to incentivize commercial sponsorship of open source contributions without selling your soul * Governance: What pain points emerge as you scale, what strategies help solve them, and how to “right size” your solutions to not cripple your ability to get things done * When Sh*t Hits The Fan: How do you handle a project fork? What if you need to remove a high profile contributor? Been there, done that; let my trauma be your guide. ;) * Community Bootstrapping: What if you’re *not* a project with 100K+ contributors and 2M+ users? How do you build your first 100 / 1,000 / 100K?

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The Apereo Incubation program’s mission is to assist open source software projects in adopting sustainable practices. Attendees will take away strategies implemented by Apereo in Higher Education open source projects, with governance strategies, understanding incubation, evaluation of a project, and guidance of its progress. This session is for those who are interested in nurturing and/or implementing best practices in their own open source software projects and forming supportive connections within this open source community.

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The OpenETC is a community of educators, technologists, and designers sharing their expertise to foster and support open infrastructure for the British Columbia advanced education sector. The OpenETC provides free open source educational technology services to teachers and students at post-secondary institutions in British Columbia, Canada. Operating since 2016 via a unique cooperative-style model of “contributions, not contracts” inspired by the platform cooperative movement, the OpenETC offers more than services, but also provides a community space for advancing our flavor of “Free Range Open EdTech.” In this session we will discuss how the OpenETC uses open source software to encourage technological autonomy for both educators and students, and how working at the level of the whole province helps smooth out resourcing disparities between institutions, most especially during the pandemic. We will us examples from our community to illustrate how the community-based services and supports we offer support the development of digital literacies and skills among educators and students as well as the sharing of open educational resources, and how our use of open source software has proven to be a catalyst that sparks bigger conversations within the BC post-secondary system about the role of technology in teaching and learning. We will also reflect on the governance model that we use, and some of the challenges and opportunities that have presented themselves over the 7 years that we have been operating.

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Originally borne out of a desire to use only FOSS, my refusal to carry a smartphone, or a cell phone of any kind in most situations, is perplexing to many. While this decision provides many benefits, including increased ability to focus, quality time with friends and family, and an effective opt-out from real-time location tracking, it is not widely accepted by society. This talk will explore some of the ways that society has evolved over the past two decades that make it much more difficult for people who make certain technology-related choices, and how we can be more accepting of people who make different choices than us, not just with phone usage, but in other FOSS-related areas and beyond.

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Open Source Software (OSS) is no longer a “weekend warrior’s endeavor". Over the last 20 years, the OSSecosystem composition has changed drastically. OSS is nowfundamental to company operations–not only for the code thatthey depend on, but also for their role in an ecosystem towhich they actively contribute. This is a paradigm shift from the early days when OSS was viewed as a threatthat commoditized software to today where individuals andcompanies work symbiotically. From large technology companies to startups, companies are participating in the OSS ecosystem by open-sourcing their technology and sponsoring projects through funding or paid developer time. However, our understanding of the OSS ecosystem is rooted in the “old world” model where individual contributors sustain OSS projects. In this talk, we will discuss our findings on what motivates companies to contribute to OSS, the multifaceted ways they contribute to OSS, and the lessons learned. We hope these findings help nudge more companies to participate in the OSS ecosystem and continue to foster a symbiotic OSS and company relationship, ultimately creating a sustainable open- source community. Join us!

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This talk is an emphasis on the importance of open and inclusive collaboration, and a call to action to ensure balance, diversity and sustainability of the global open source ecosystem. Open source is currently living through its own hype cycle with new projects and foundations popping up on a daily basis. This phenomenon is great, as it shows the popularity and adoption of the concept. And this phenomenon is harmful, as it creates a fast paced environment that leaves people, who try to participate, with a false idea of what open source is or a bad experience. This session will explore the struggles of the current, rapidly growing open source ecosystem, with a focus on diversity and inclusion, and invites everyone in the audience to participate in providing solutions to them. Do you have an experience where you didn’t feel invited to participate? At the same time, there are also examples to follow. Do you have one to share? The audience will learn about a new initiative called Community Blueprint, which highlights issues, suggests solutions and introduces good practices through individuals sharing their open source experience. Bring your story to share!

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Free and open-source software has become critical infrastructure for many sectors, including academic research, industry, governments, non-profits, activism, and more. In this talk, I share findings and insights from our research team’s mixed-method research into the social and technical maintenance of free and open-source software. This is based on interviews with maintainers and stakeholders across a wide variety of FOSS projects, as well as quantitative analyses of code repositories. In particular, I discuss the often-invisible and non-technical work that maintainers do to support their projects as they grow and scale. The work of maintaining these projects is no small feat, particularly given the many different kinds of work expected of maintainers. This is especially the case for projects that achieve “catastrophic success” in being relied upon by more and more users and institutions. Maintainers must maintain not only code, but a community around that code. These communities are constantly changing, and maintainers can find themselves needing to mediate competing visions of how the project ought to operate and where it may go in the future. I particularly focus on the invisible work of scaling projects and managing projects as they grow – not just in terms of their own size, but also in terms of their integration within complex and ever-changing networks of other FOSS projects and ecosystems, corporate and academic user-institutions, foundations and funders, and other stakeholders. This work is often quite different to the more-visible software engineering work that maintainers do early in their projects. There is often little training or resources for community-based work, which is often not tracked or made visible in the way software engineering work is. I discuss how this invisible work can impact maintainers' mental health, with many cases of burnout arising from maintainers finding themselves overwhelmed with their expanded roles. Invisible work also intersects with other relevant issues to the sustainability of FOSS projects, including funding models, corporate relations, project governance, and diversity & inclusion. I conclude with recommendations for FOSS maintainers, contributors, funders, end-users, institutional users, and other stakeholders in the broad ecosystems supported by FOSS.

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The UNICEF Office of Innovation Venture Fund collaborates with innovators on the ground in UNICEF programme countries to build and test new solutions at the pace required to keep up with the rapidly evolving challenges facing children. The UNICEF Venture Fund makes $50–100K early stage investments in technologies for children developed by UNICEF country offices or companies in UNICEF programme countries. By providing flexible funding to early-stage innovators, it allows UNICEF to quickly assess, fund and grow open source technology solutions that show potential to positively impact the lives of vulnerable children. Digital public goods (DPG) are open-source software, open data, open AI models, open standards, and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices, do no harm by design, and help attain the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This definition is operationalised through the DPG Standard, a set of nine indicators that is used to determine whether a solution is a digital public good. Once a solution is recognised as a digital public good it is discoverable on the DPG Registry. In this talk, we will explore the challenges and learnings from guiding companies to embrace Open Source and become sustainable digital public goods (DPGs). We will discuss how UNICEF promotes Open Source methodologies and culture within its portfolio companies and the broader community. Attendees will gain insights into the strategies and best practices that UNICEF uses to overcome challenges in Open Source adoption and work toward long-term viability of DPGs.

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Do you like being outdoors? Do you have a favorite animal or plant? Come learn how to use FOSS tools to track down and photograph your favorite creatures! This presentation will cover a set of FOSS tools I use to locate ocean creatures in the Oregon coast's tidepools. I'll share some of the photographs I've taken, and the FOSS tools used to create those photographs. Along the way, I'll talk about the limitations of these FOSS tools. I'll note when these tools start to touch proprietary software and proprietary assets. I'll also note the tools that modify the GPL v3 license, and the developer's reasoning behind those modifications. Tools covered: - iNaturalist - a citizen science tool for recording nature sightings and location data. iNaturalist is licensed under the permissive MIT license. iNaturalist allows people to upload photos under a variety of licenses, including both copyleft Creative Commons license and restrictive copyright licenses. - OpenStreetMap Android app (OSMAnd) - a great way to trek to the right location in remote areas with no cell signal. OSMAnd is licensed GPL v3. I will mention the proprietary Microsoft Earth OSM map overlay for viewing satellite imagery. - XTide 2 - a tide prediction tool. This tool uses a modified GPL v3 license with licensing restrictions to not use in ocean navigation, and disclaimers about extreme weather impacting tide predictions. - Darktable - a DNG photo editing tool that is licensed GPL v3. I will mention that some camera models may not be supported because you need extract the camera's color matrix using proprietary tools.

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Carnegie Mellon University's (CMU) CloudLab (https://cloudlab.cmu.edu/) is an example of the growing movement toward automated science -- the "practice of scientific research without the need for significant human intervention" (https://cbd.cmu.edu/about-us/what-is-automated-science.html). This recent piece in Science describes another automated science facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory focused on "recipes" for materials used in batteries. In some cases, these facilities are built for start-up or private companies that explicitly do not want to share their trade secrets, proprietary information, etc. The opportunity at hand with CMU's CloudLab is redesigning and re-engineering the workflows to be more open and conducive for cooperation within and perhaps beyond the walls of a university. Working with the originators and CMU leadership of CloudLab, the CMU OSPO has identified important questions regarding this redesign and re-engineering process including the different types of artifacts with varying degrees of possible IP issues, workflows connecting software and hardware artifacts, and questions regarding interoperability with external systems. Perhaps most interestingly, this work affirms a phrase stated by Josh Greenberg from the Sloan Foundation regarding "rolling wall of openness" rather than a binary view of open or closed with the prospects of embargoes in a new context. This talk will outline these issues and proposed approaches for addressing them with an objective of engaging the broader community who will eventually encounter similar issues at various institutions including universities.

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​​In the evolving landscape of the digital world, the Right to Repair movement has made substantial strides towards restoring consumer control and promoting sustainable practices when it comes to our devices. Coming off a breakthrough year with numerous legislative breakthroughs, it's important that we understand the building blocks of our campaign's success and look to the challenges that lie ahead, particularly in the realm of free and open-source software (FOSS). So far, 2023 has seen governors in three states sign Right to Repair bills into law: a consumer electronics focused bill in New York, a Minnesota law that improved upon the New York bill and added in enterprise electronics, and a first-of-its kind Colorado law targeting tractors and other farm equipment. We'll talk about the problems that those bills solve, the industries that we still need to address, and our plan to make translate those state-level victories into nationwide change. All this progress didn't occur overnight. We'll explore the strategic and tactical building blocks that contributed to the success of the Right to Repair movement, and dissect the combination of advocacy, legislation, and public education campaigns that were instrumental turning our policy ideas into concrete change. The conversation will then shift to discuss the next push for this movement: breaking free from the confines of proprietary software. As our focus expands from hardware to software, the talk will illuminate the importance of FOSS in establishing full ownership of devices and how FOSS can help bridge the gap between physical and digital repairability. In particular, we'll discuss the infrastructure that we need to build—coalitions, research, legal arguments, and engineering capacity—and the incremental steps we need to take to bring about our vision, all with an eye toward the model that the Right to Repair movement has established. Finally, this talk will address the role of the FOSS community in pushing for the same level of success as the Right to Repair movement. It will shed light on how the community needs to rethink and intensify its efforts to promote open-source software, ensure user freedom, and counter the monopolistic practices of proprietary software developers. Suggestions will be offered for actionable steps that the FOSS community can take to leverage their resources, foster collaborative innovation, and drive significant change in this space. This talk promises to offer a holistic view of the Right to Repair movement, its intersection with FOSS, and a call to action for the open-source community. By looking at where we've been, where we stand, and where we need to go, we can chart our path into the next frontier for our digital rights and ownership.

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There is a huge academic community of researchers focused on FOSS but much of this work has little impact in the communities that could benefit the most from it. How can you, as FOSS community members and leaders, get the most out of research? How can you find relevant research or researchers, assess research quality, or figure out what to do with research results once you find them? In these interactive, workshop-style session, experts will help practitioners learn to search, select, and unpack research. Additional topics will include publications, journals, and academic conferences FOSS practioners should pay attention to, partnering with academic researchers, as well as practical techniques for how to apply research to your own work.

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The free software movement is not an isolated community—it exists within political, social, and economic systems. Its concepts, models, abstractions were and continue to be built through the cultural lenses of its founders and subsequent creators and maintainers; its structures were inherited from spaces inaccessible for many. To promote true transformation within the free software space, we need to avoid the traps of reductionism and dogmatism by adopting a new approach: systems thinking. We'll examine the problems with conventional thinking in FOSS, discussing how it fails the most vulnerable, and work towards new strategies for change.

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Often it’s easier to keep your codebase in alignment than it is to forge lasting agreement within your open source community about how best to move forward. You’re not alone — we all face the challenge of getting the human beings in your community onto the same page. Join us for a conversation about how to make your community’s governance as inclusive, open, transparent, and thoughtful as it can be. Along the way, you’ll hear stories about how the Sakai LMS OSS Community intentionally transformed its governance processes and the work we’ve still got in front of us. You’ll also explore an approach for looking carefully at the organizational health of your own OSS community.

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Knox Makers in Knoxville, TN is the area's premier hackerspace. In existence for almost 12 years, it boasts over 325 members and its base operations are fully supported by membership dues. It also has a commitment to open hardware and software, running all of its tools, behind the scenes operations, and teaching classes exclusively with FOSS. In this talk, Tracy will talk about why Knox Makers has chosen open source, some of the technologies they use, and what the challenges are to this commitment.

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Open source projects that emerge from within institutions of higher education are notably different from those with corporate roots or even founded by individual developers or communities. Indeed, higher education's open source projects most align with the movement's original mantra of "scratching a personal itch" when compared to other projects developed to support commercial interests or ventures. This session will present the unique motivations, attributes, practices, and principles found in academically oriented and research-driven free and open source software projects and, thus, how development, community, governance, funding, and all the other requirements to grow and maintain a project successfully differ from many of today's most notable--non-educational--projects and communities. While this session will reference software projects specifically, attendees with experience with other open educational initiatives will recognize a common theme and, thus, find applicable takeaways applicable to their own work.

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With the upheaval of Twitter many folks have been forced to wonder what would happen if their platform were taken away. Will all of your witty Tweets be lost to time or attributed to someone else? What about your Swarm check-ins, Instagram stories, and other social shares? And why do we have to decide which walled garden to post our thoughts in? The IndieWeb has been growing since 2013 and strives to create an alternative to content silos and the 'corporate web'. This is achieved through creating a single source of truth for your content and identity aka a personal domain. There are three core concepts that are important to understanding this movement: 'Your content is yours' not FB/Twitter/etc, 'You are better connected' by pushing to multiple services, and 'You are in control' of the content, format, and permanence of your links. Let's explore what a small-web might look like, discuss questions of content ownership, and see what steps one has to take to join the IndieWeb, together!

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Where do non-profit boards come from? Who serves on them and why? More importantly, if you are on a board or you are setting up a board, how do you make sure you get great people who will serve your mission and keep your organization healthy and growing? While there's no one grand plan that fits every organization, there is a large body of knowledge on this topic. Board members are at their best when they feel supported and have a clear sense of purpose. This talk will go through the different kinds of non-profit boards, long-term strategies for success and some ways to course correct when it feels like things could be better.

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Those of us pursuing or performing Open Work in Industry, Academia and Government face common challenges around getting support for, incetinization of and credit around Open Work practices. The problems of “Invisible Work” needing to demonstrate ROI and KPI for non software engineering efforts, getting evaluated for “invisible work.” Etc. Though there are shared issues across these sectors, the language and processes are often different, leading to difficulty in identifying and applying best practices from one sector to the other. This session will discuss the common challenges and related best practices in each sector and seek common ground in addressing them

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In this session, we will explore the impact of open standards and their absence on interoperability and vendor lock-in within higher education. When there is a lack of standards, vendors and open source projects must develop custom integrations for different systems. However, without these standards, these integrations may break whenever a connected system undergoes an upgrade. Standards allow for innovation. A prime example is LTI, which originated from open source and has facilitated seamless integrations with Learning Management Systems (LMS). Additionally, we will discuss some of the standard bodies that govern widely adopted standards in the field.

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Interested in chatting about governance challenges faced by your open source project or open source as a whole? Join us for an informal discussion of topics such as defining your governance, resisting corporate influence, technical decision making, and whatever governance challenges have been on your mind.

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PostmarketOS is a "sustainable, privacy and security focused free software mobile OS that is modeled after traditional Linux distributions". PostmarketOS protects users' rights on one of their most personal devices. However, https://postmarketos.org warns that it is "for Linux enthusiasts". For the last 3 years, Anjan has been using Sxmo with postmarketOS as his primary mobile device. In this talk, Anjan shows how he does his mobile computing using a Xiaomi Poco f1 (SDM845 device) and why he can't imagine using a different OS for his phone.

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A code of conduct makes a community’s norms and values explicit and enforceable. Governance makes decision-making mechanisms transparent and accountable. A license makes the conditions of adoption and reuse of the community’s work explicit and legally binding. What’s missing is a kind of “connective tissue” bringing norms, governance, adoptions, and use together into a cohesive whole. Social contracts are all around us, and have always been a natural part of our communities. They're an important part of how we ensure that general expectations of human behavior are met. The Open Social Compact (OSC) is a new social governance tool for digital communities. It's used to establish unique "citizenship models" for digital communities, supported by a robust ethical framework that promotes just, equitable, and pro-social outcomes for everyone who participates.

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Right to repair advocates built a grassroots movement around a problem that everyone has. For free software to go mainstream, we need to reach people where they're at. Let's discuss strategies that will work for any social movement. What social movements have been effective, and why? What tactics have worked particularly well? When has the internet rabble been best activated to agitate for political change? What problems do people have with the technology in their lives? What small, incremental FOSS-friendly steps forward are possible now? The internet of things is made up of outdated linux distros riddled with vulnerabilities. How can we solve this? How can we incentivize hardware manufacturers to contribute to FOSS communities?

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Neighborhoods that prepare for emergencies and disaster situations save lives, reduce the severity of injuries and trauma and reduce property damage. Police and emergency personnel often live outside the communities they serve, making citizen response crucial. Open data and open source tools are crucial to community safety - but perceptions around “usability” and “user friendliness” are still obstacles to wider adoption. The Resiliency Maps project, launched in San Francisco, aims to build a city-wide map that: *Makes use of existing open data and open source tools (including OpenStreetMap, Field Papers, QGIS) *Stores information about assets and hazards * Can be printed and stored offline * Can be added to or edited by people across the city to provide information specific to their neighborhood * Does not require a stable group of technical administrators * Creates a replicable process that other cities can use to build their own maps I’ll share insights from our collaboration with the SFFD NERT (Neighborhood Emergency Response Team) program as well as from mapathons in the U.S. and Italy.

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There is a growing interest in university-based open source software, and broader questions of Open Work. as reflected by many trends in research, education, and translation including the development of university open source programs offices (OSPOs) and discussions related to other research outputs under the framework of open work. Richard Littauer from SustainOSS will facilitate this session seeking input from those working on or interested in university open source. What topics related to university open source are of most interest? What gaps exist, particularly relating to barriers for advancing university open source? What resources needs to be developed? What other questions are relevant? The feedback from this session will help re-launch the SustainOSS Academia working group.

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We've discussed and dissected how we can piggyback on the success of the Right to Repair movement to advance FOSS and take back control of the software in our stuff. Dialogue is important—but we'll need to take action to cement our ideas into concrete, lasting change. In this workshop, we'll discuss some of the first steps needed to build an effective campaign and equip attendees with the basic organizing and advocacy skills needed to start building a movement.

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Your data are essential to your life, your agency, and your future. Come learn how to save, serve, and safely share your data at home with a smorgasbord of FOSS. I'll cover rapid setup and basic use of tools such as Traefik, Nextcloud, Wallabag, Jellyfin, and more. With these powerful and private services at your disposal you can collaboratively edit documents in realtime online, stream music and video, and future-proof your digital assets. This talk pairs well with a soon-to-be released book of the same topic and title. Both the book and talk are about self-hosting FOSS, were created with FOSS, and *are* FOSS themselves (open source, free to copy, free to modify and redistribute).

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Meeting the strong demand for computing professionals will require attracting and retaining more students in computing degree programs. Women and people of color are significantly underrepresented among computing students, and these groups provide an opportunity to both create a more equitable discipline and meet the need for more computing graduates. In order to attract more of these students, computing educators must improve the quality, appeal and student success rate in computing degree programs. This presentation discusses an education effort that helps to address this challenge by expanding the community of faculty incorporating Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) into computing education. HFOSS education provides a collaborative environment that supports active learning with real-world tasks. Students gain both technical and professional skills while also acquiring a first-hand understanding of the potential for computing to have both social relevance and positive societal impact. The ability of computing to “do good” has been shown to attract women and other underrepresented groups into computing disciplines. The project is intended to have broader impact in the following areas: a) improving student retention and expanding appeal to women and underrepresented groups; b) providing real-world learning of professional and technical skills in a complex, authentic environment that prepares students for professional practice; c) extending understanding of the impact of HFOSS pedagogy and approaches on student and instructor role and identities; and d) increasing student understanding of the potential of computing to improve the human condition and in student awareness of professional responsibility. Initial work has included several surveys of undergraduate students (209 and 360 participants) that indicate women and underrepresented groups are more strongly motivated by the humanitarian nature of HFOSS projects. The presentation will include results of these surveys and discussion of HFOSS education as an approach to making computing more diverse while also advancing student knowledge of open source.

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Maintainers all over the world are loaded. They're loaded with tech debt, support requests, and a million things to do each and every day. In this talk, we'll learn about actionable strategies for lightening their loads. And the beauty of the situation: they'll never see it coming. A lot of open source talks end with "Contributing to open source is great. Good luck." So now what? That's where this talk comes in. If you know a coder willing to contribute but not ready or able, then this talk is for you. We do this 'one last job' before I retire, and we'll be rolling in the green stuff. That's right. We're talking open source commits on GitHub 🟩. Join the crew. This is one heist you won't want to miss.

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In the world of open source software (OSS) development, attracting and retaining motivated developers is key to a project's sustainability and long-term survival. Many of us recognize the lack of diversity in OSS projects and the barriers that individuals from underrepresented groups face, but what can we do to retain diverse contributors? In this talk, I will present two evidence-based dashboards to help attract and retain diverse contributors. The first dashboard provides a set of real-time insights to track community turnover and diversity, and focuses on gender and affiliation diversity. The second dashboard determines contributors’ survivability likelihood in the project. These dashboards can empower project leaders to assess the diverse state of their projects and take relevant action to promote diversity in their projects

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Event planning encompasses a huge range of people, vendors, timelines, communication channels and cultural norms. The use of free software therein, takes an interesting role as both activism and pragmatism. This talk will focus on the use and challenges of trying to plan my wedding with my fiancée with as much free software as possible. Lessons we learned in trying to understand the wedding software space, replacements to common proprietary tools, challenges faced by both proprietary and free software, and how we can make advocacy more streamlined when dealing with people outside the software freedom movement.

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This keynote celebrates an important milestone 13 years in the making: Outreachy surpassed 1000 interns with its current round of internships! To deliver the celebratory keynote, some of the members of the Outreachy organizers (Anna e só, Karen Sandler and Sage Sharp) will be on stage to reflect on the program's evolution, its successes and the people who have made it possible. We invite all FOSSY attendees to come to the keynote session to celebrate with us!

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We are living in a digital era where vast amounts of data is constantly being generated, evaluated, and updated. As a result, the need for enterprises to keep up with this pace has grown and we are rapidly moving towards a more data-driven society. With the help of AI/ML technology, we have the power to make knowledgeable data driven decisions and effectively identify new trends and patterns, leading to more creative solutions and innovative approaches to problem-solving. In light of the recent advancements in AI, particularly in predictive modeling, we now have a powerful tool at our disposal to quickly consume and analyze vast amounts of data. By using open source time series forecasting ML models like ARIMA and Prophet, we can provide more accurate predictions and insights in real-time, enabling organizations and teams to streamline processes and increase efficiency, improve and manage customer risk, and adapt to changing market conditions. In this talk we will discuss: 1. Open Source tooling for building predictive ML models (Python, Jupyter, MLFLow) 2. Time series forecasting techniques 3. Tips for managing ML workflows and model interpretations Attendees will leave this talk with a deeper understanding of predictive ML models and how open source can empower us to be more data driven.

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Igalia is an open source tech co-op success story. We have been around for 22 years; we have 140 members. We play an essential role in several open web platform projects such as Chromium/Blink, WebKit (WPE & WebKitGTK), Firefox and Servo. We have contributed to GNOME / GTK+ / Maemo, WebKit / WebKitGtk+ / JSC, Blink / V8, Gecko / SpiderMonkey projects, amongst others. The reason we started as a co-op and the reason the focus of our work is Free and Open Source software are one and the same. Both are implementations of our values, in a word: egalitarianism. In this talk you will hear a bit about our history. We will focus on how we found our FOSS business niche and how we grew from a few friends to 140 people in more than 25 countries all the while maintaining our flat organization structure. You will learn what it's like to participate in a company that is run by an Assembly, the decision making body that includes every Igalian, instead of a hierarchy of bosses. We hope that this talk will expand the limits of your imagination on what a company can look like, and that next time you think about starting your own company or looking for a new job, you consider a co-op!

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Containers! Orchestrators! Service Mesh! Serverless! PodSecurity! You've heard all the hype from the many, many projects that call themselves "Cloud Native", but what does it all mean? Why would you want to use any of this, and what tools do you actually need, and why does the CNCF have over 150 projects? Welcome to the Cloud Native Taqueria, where your questions will be answered. In this talk, we will give you a whirlwind orientation tour of Cloud Native technologies through the metaphor of the Burrito Bar, from Kubernetes to Istio to Tekton to Knative. We'll explain each part of the stack, and why you might or might not want to use it, and how to figure out what your options are. With guacamole and sour cream. You'll complete this talk with a better understanding of the Cloud Native universe and what things you want to learn more about.

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The promise of the Internet was a federation of cooperative services and users around open protocols. Ironically most of the essential services we use today -- including authenticating identity -- rely on large, proprietary, centralized services. Users ought to be able to share messages and files securely with one another without relying an a third party such as Google or Facebook. Ideally we ought to be able to securely authenticate with service providers anonymously in order to truly prevent becoming the product of surveillance capitalism. The traditional X.509 Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) has demonstrated weaknesses due to centralization. Mitigations such as Certificate Transparency only partially address these weaknesses. The Web of trust based on Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) in theory offers a truly decentralized identity solution. However, in practice, broad success of PGP in identity has been stymied by overwhelming complexity, excruciatingly poor user experience design, and difficulty in integrating the required software with popular email providers. There is promising W3C standards work in the areas of Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials, yet implementations often depend on proof-of-work based crypto or token exchanges with asymmetric ownership and control. What's more DID resolution (anchoring in non-repudiation framework) is often either closed or left as an exercise for the reader. The purpose of this talk is to highlight the challenges in open source identity and brainstorm approaches which leverage the best parts of the Web of trust and the W3C standards work while preserving the values the FOSS community holds dear.

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What is the secret for maintainers to sustain newcomers in their communities? Many maintainers know about adding a CONTRIBUTING.md file to their project, but is this enough to effectively support and integrate newcomers into your project? In this session, Elizabeth Barron and Justin W. Flory will provide a baseline for newcomer onboarding in today’s landscape and a close look at the CHAOSS and Fedora projects as real communities of practice. While CONTRIBUTING.md files provide potential contributors with information and support to join the community, they have certain bounds. A poor onboarding experience can actually work against you and turn them away before their first contribution. Building an effective and inclusive onboarding process is crucial to ensuring a healthy open source community. In this talk, you will learn about: - establishing a baseline for what “newcomer onboarding” means in today’s open source landscape - implementing actionable steps to ease onboarding for newcomers and maintainers - two communities and their next steps for improving the contributor onboarding experience. Elizabeth and Justin will represent the CHAOSS Project and the Fedora Project as participants, maintainers, and leaders in the communities and how experiments with newcomer onboarding led to lessons learned and the growth of the contributor ecosystem.

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This talk will provide guidance on how to get started with using vcluster in production. Users may have worked with vcluster for dev / test / preview environments but there are other use cases for vcluster including production environments. We will take a look at some of the considerations such as network policies and security, as well as autoscaling and other features available in cloud providers. There will even be demos! vcluster is Virtual Kubernetes Clusters that run inside regular namespaces. Virtual clusters have their own API server which makes them much more powerful and better isolated than namespaces, but they are also much cheaper than creating separate "real" Kubernetes clusters. If you are hitting the scalability limits of k8s because you are running a large-scale multi-tenant cluster, you can now split up and effectively shared your clusters into vclusters.

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Agaric is a worker-cooperative—one person, one vote. Agaric builds websites with free software and a central goal of our work is to empower people to have control over their technology and content. As much as possible contribute our code back to the community. Agaric uses Drupal and has contributed to a plethora of Drupal modules and documentation. Some highlights of our current work and projects we are involved in are Drutopia and Visions Unite. Drutopia (https://drutopia.org/) is a Drupal distribution for organizations to be able to coordinate and share their work publicly. Drutopia is controlled by its users and therefore they are not disempowered and at the mercy of proprietary service providers who can take away service, raise prices, change terms and services and abuse user data. Another project Agaric is involved in developing is Visions Unite (https://visionsunite.gigalixirapp.com/about). Vision Unite seeks to provide a neutral infrastructure for conversations and coordination to extend to many more people, as equals, than it traditionally has. Visions Unite uses sortition (random selection of participants) as a tool for participants to choose what messages are distributed to groups they represent so that quality information and ideas are surfaced in a democratic manner. Through sortition we avoid giving power to people who seek to concentrate it in their hands and instead equally spread decision making power throughout the network of participants.

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Especially since 2020, numerous organizations and companies have sought to make the language used in their marketing, everyday communication, and their code more inclusive. There are numerous logistical hurdles, especially when there are thousands if not tens of thousands of artifacts that need changing. But one of the biggest hurdles is getting investment in the changes beyond your DEI team, which is key to making inclusive language become the norm. One way to increase investment is to open source your glossary of terms to modify and their replacements. This talk will discuss the lessons learned from using this approach at Canonical, from initial planning to an established process. A transparent, collaborative approach can turn conflict into constructive dialogue, reduce the load on understaffed DEI teams and groups, and organically broaden the scope of your efforts. In addition to the talk, there will be time for discussion.

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The Update Framework (TUF) is an Open Source Framework used to secure software repository. OK, that's great. But what does that look in practice? A repository is just storage that is accessible to anyone other than you. Think about a shared Google folder. That's a repository. For software development, that's a database, an AWS S3 bucket, or even just a directory on disk. This talk will walk you through the steps to implement TUF on a typical data store you may use on a regular basis. Then we will see how TUF ensures the consumers of that data can verify your identity and the freshness of the things you share.

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There are over 5 trillion megabytes of data on the internet, and private information and data from phones and laptops are all over the internet. We often tend to accept the privacy policies of various websites without even looking and hence causing a transfer of information to the world. However, some websites and platforms allow you to anonymize your personal information and still allow these websites to make inferences and analyze the data via Data anonymization. Using this capability of securing and ensuring almost encrypting personally identifiable data in a dataset, we can make the data live in the open source world. Such is the concept of Homomorphic Encryption, it allows us to eliminate the tradeoff between data usability and privacy, and keep it safe, secure, and private even in the most untrusted environments, like public clouds or external parties. In this session, we will cover what is Homomorphic Encryption and how this can change the outlook on Open Source Data. We will also demonstrate the intersection of AI and how holomorphic encryption can enable multi-party data sharing.

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In this presentation, we will share how to incrementally adopt Arm64 as a deplopyment architecture for parts of your Kubernetes applications using heterogeneous Kubernetes clusters, node tagging, and multi-architecture containers to take advantage of the best hardware platform for your application.

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Snowdrift.coop is a nonprofit cooperative run by an international team driven by a common goal: To dramatically improve the ability of ordinary people to fund public goods – things like software, music, journalism, and research – that everyone can use and share without limitations. We've continued to shovel the path towards that future without the use of proprietary tools. Come hear about our project and journey, assisting us in clearing the final feet!

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There are some concerns that AI could pose a threat to FOSS. For example, some worry that AI could be used to create proprietary software that is more powerful and efficient than OSS. Additionally, others worry that AI could be used to automate the development of FOSS, which could lead to a decline in the number of people willing to contribute to open source projects. However, there are also a number of ways in which AI can be used to help sustain open source. For example, AI can be used to: * Automate tasks: AI can be used to automate a number of tasks currently performed by humans, such as writing unit tests. This can free human developers to focus on more creative and strategic work. * Improve quality: AI can improve the quality of FOSS by identifying and fixing bugs as well as security vulnerabilities. * Attract new contributors: AI can attract new contributors to open source projects by making it easier for people to get involved. For example, AI can generate documentation and tutorials and then be improved by contributors to fix hallucinations. Overall, AI has the potential to both help and hurt open source. However, if used correctly, AI can be a powerful tool for sustaining and improving open source software.

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For years, building containerized applications on a desktop machine could be summed up as: “simple/open/extensible: pick two.” Finch, an open source project established in 2022, aims to make containerized development all three. In this session, first attendees will be introduced to the project and how it can be used to both simplify and speed up their development workflows. Then it will dive into the other open source project that Finch integrates to create a modern, easy-to-use containerized application development system, along the way, we'll touch on Finch's upstream-first development model. Finally, we'll talk a little bit about where Finch is going in the future.

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Birds of a feather discussing building and enabling capacity within institutions of higher education though open initiatives. Join us to share how you and your institution are supporting and promoting (or would like to) the development and use of free and open source software, open educational resources, open content, open research, open access and journals, or any other FOSS initiative in highered.

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Do you really know what a co-op is? Come to learn what it means to be in business cooperatively and why the co-op business model is unique the world over. And what (if anything) that has to do with Open Source software.

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Organizations rely on computer software to aid in the accurate and timely analysis of data. Open source software (OSS) is becoming more prevalent in all organizations from academia to industry to government. Utilizing Python with proprietary compute power (e.g., SAS Viya) enables users of all levels to apply advanced analytics, data visualizations, and complex statistical modeling capabilities to aspects of the analytics lifecycle, producing descriptive and predictive data artifacts. This session will provide an overview of OSS with proprietary compute power as it pertains to business organizational analysis, the analytics lifecycle, and it gives participants a better understanding of how to leverage software for higher quality decision making.

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Come discuss your challenges and victories in mentoring new open source contributors! Mentoring and internship programs are now common in open source. From Google Summer of Code and Outreachy, to programs run by individual open source communities, internships are every where. Yet these internship and mentoring programs are often run in silos, with little knowledge sharing across open source communities. This group discussion session aims to break down silos between different mentoring and internship programs. Attendees are invited to bring their triumphs and challenges to discuss with others. Topics of discussion may include: - successfully advertising internship programs - challenges in finding mentors - how to craft meaningful internship projects - issues with paying interns around the world - dealing with community backlash to diversity internships - the rise of ChatGPT use among internship applicants - when trolls apply for your internship program - avoiding mentor burn-out - creating a path for interns to become community leaders This discussion will be tailored to the attendees who come to this talk. Bring your challenges and victories to share!

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Corrupted build environments can deliver compromised cryptographically signed binaries. Several exploits in in critical supply chains have been demonstrated in recent years, proving that this is not just theoretical. The most well secured build environments are still single points of failure when they fail. In 1984, Ken Thompson presented "Reflections on trusting trust" which described an attack on a build toolchain that would be impossible to detect through source code review ... in the decades since, what has been done to actually mitigate these types of attacks? Work in the Reproducible Builds and Bootstrappable Builds communities has been progressing steadily in recent years, and can be used to significantly reduce the risks of "Trusting Trust" and other supply chain attacks, by making it possible to independently review not only the end result, but the entire toolchain used to build a given artifact. This talk will focus on the state of the art from several angles in related Free and Open Source Software projects, what works, current challenges and future plans for building trustworthy toolchains you do not need to trust. https://reproducible-builds.org https://bootstrappable.org

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The advent of large scale machine learning models has exacerbated the ongoing problem of resource and infrastructure management for ML practitioners. How can a data scientist, who has little or no DevOps knowledge, train and deploy models that require compute clusters with dozens or hundreds of nodes and GPU resources? In this talk, Michael Clifford will discuss how members of Red Hat’s Emerging Technologies team leverage two open source projects, Ray and Open Data Hub, to simplify their distributed training and cloud based resource allocation for their team. We will cover: * An overview of Open Data Hub and Ray * A detailed discussion on how we’ve integrated Ray with Open Data Hub to improve the user experience for developing large machine learning models * A demonstration of a real-world use case where Ray is used to accelerate an AI/ML workload on Open Data Hub * A discussion on the open source project developing this work to improve ML workflow tooling in the cloud, project CodeFlare By the end of this talk, attendees will have a better understanding of how to build high-performance and scalable AI/ML systems.

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Many developers are excited about dev containers, but until now, people needed to use a managed service like Codespaces or Gitpod to feel that dev container magic. DevPod is a new open source tool that allows users to launch dev containers with any infrastructure that they have available. DevPod uses a provider model like Terraform's, and there are currently providers for many different infrastructures, like local Docker daemons, Kubernetes, AWS, and several other cloud providers. It's also possible to develop providers if you don't find one that fits your needs. While you can choose the infra you want to use with DevPod, you don't have to manage it. DevPod handles the lifecycle of the infrastructure it runs on, and it can even suspend cloud resources automatically to save on costs. DevPod uses the open devcontainer.json standard, so it's compatible with VS Code and many other IDEs, as well as tools like Codespaces. We'll look at how DevPod works and get into a quick demo that showcases how it can help developers and teams standardize their dev environments.

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There are multiple types of open source governance models that are suitable for larger institutions, organizations, and communities. In the democratically run open source organization, the question of ‘who is entitled to vote’ arises. This problem is known as the ‘boundary problem’ within political philosophy [Whelan,1983]. The principle of affected interests, loosely stated as “Those who are affected by a decision making process, should have input into that decision making process.” is one way to approach this problem. Given the affected interests principle, the short answer to “Who is entitled to vote” within an open source organization is the contributors and users. But as soon as we answer the voting entitlement question, several other questions concerning the boundary problem arise, such as: 1) Should the votes of contributors be weighted based on contribution size?; 2) Should the vote of the user be implicit, i.e., should the user’s vote be based on consumption or the market?; 3) What constitutes a contributor or user?; and 4) Who gets to initially decide the answers to all of these questions? While discussion of whether to even be a democratically run organization is covered elsewhere [Ellerman, 1990], the difficulty associated with answering questions are used as disincentives against democratizing in general and against democratizing open source organizations specifically, so we will address them here.

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“Conflu” and “con crud” are nothing new to people who attend in-person conferences, and the tendency to come home sick has long been treated as unavoidable, and as an acceptable risk. The COVID-19 pandemic put a finer point on the health risks of in-person events, and presents executives, leaders, and organizers with a choice: Do we seize this opportunity to better understand our duty of care and run more inclusive events? Or do we fall back on a status quo that calcified inequities and excluded people with disabilities, chronic illness, caregivers, and those who live with them? The choice is clear. We aim to rise to the challenge of running safer and more inclusive events. Let’s draw on the lessons we learned as community leaders and influencers pushed Codes of Conduct into the mainstream, and raise the bar together – again. In this presentation, we will explore lessons learned amid the pandemic, dive deep on the evolving practice of Health and Safety policies, and prepare our communities for a world racked by the climate crisis in which contagious diseases are growing in number and frequency. Take heart: this talk is a hopeful one. Attendees will leave with a vision of a more inclusive future, mental models to navigate newfound complexity, and good examples to draw on for events of every size and shape.

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This talk tells a story of FOSS as it is centered in current trends of world-affairs, for FOSS is not merely technical coding. It is a social contract. One of FOSS' most important possibilities might be countering perverse incentives in today's internet financing models. With the current model, privacy, democracy and supply-chain security are risked. Yet no matter what solutions are feasible, the goal of this talk is to broaden our perspectives out onto the world at large. The first step is outlining some contemporary problem policy-issues (such as privacy, encryption, democracy, walled gardens, inter-cultural warfare, social profiling, online moderation and left-right divides). Then the second step is outlining potentials for strategic leverage points, places where FOSS and its related co-operative ecosystems might make large positive contributions to our futures. Software is at the center of a broad range of topics and ethical concerns affecting every facet of human and non-human life. The stakes are large, but there are so many places to make a positive difference: civil infrastructure, human-scale interactions, the four freedoms (to use, study, alter and share FOSS), the fediverse, supply chain audits and especially the feasibility of co-operative service models that address questions of ownership and control beyond licensure.

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In this session, we will delve into strategies for development environments when production is running in Kubernetes. Those include local dev with Docker Compose, local dev with Kubernetes, and remote dev with Kubernetes, and their effects on the SDLC. Attendees will gain insights on: - Pros and cons of each development approach. - How to align their K8s dev environment with their team's unique needs. - Strategies for optimizing workflows with the right Kubernetes development environment choice. We'll also discuss the benefits and challenges of coding and testing in production-like environments and examine potential obstacles to using remote Kubernetes environments directly. By the end of the session, attendees will be empowered with the knowledge and tools to seamlessly transition their local development to prod-like environments in the world of K8s.

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Curious about containers? There’s a new generation of containers on the scene, Podman! Supporting secure, rootless containers for Kubernetes microservices, it was designed and built with the cloud in mind. Benefitting from the lessons learned out in the open from Docker, this next generation of containers will quickly become a trusted daily driver in your dev workflow. Covering what you need to know as an end-user from the UI to the backend, sharing a real world use case leveraging Podman for open source observability workshops https://o11y-workshops.gitlab.io. Paige will share how Podman and the adorable seal mascots Caitlín, Maighréad and Róisín have transformed her local development!

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Join co-op representatives as they swap stories, compare notes, discuss tactics and problems with each other, and answer any questions you have about what it's like to work with free software in a co-op--a relative rarity--in the tech industry.

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AI workloads and data pipelines are rapidly growing in their demand for computing power. Accelerated computing can help maximize our ability to not just run AI models, but also maximize how quickly we can capture and extract useful information from data sources. Until recently, accelerated programming has been focused on proprietary programming models, but this is changing. oneAPI is an open, cross-industry, standards-based, unified, multiarchitecture, multi-vendor programming model that allows you to write code and target all accelerators - GPUs, CPUs and FPGAs. oneAPI is already used to accelerate AI frameworks. With oneAPI it is also possible to write accelerated data processing code to rapidly capture and transform your data. This talk will provide examples of how oneAPI enables performant data processing, how the project is organized and the open governance model. We will also discuss the oneAPI community. You should expect to come away with a sense of what oneAPI is and fresh ideas on what new capabilities it enables.

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We all know how powerful Kubernetes is when it comes to orchestrating cloud infrastructure. So how can we use it to automate higher-level tasks, like upgrades, snapshots, or data migrations? Using tools like Kubebuilder and Operator SDK, we can leverage core k8s building blocks to safely automate these "Day 2 Operations." In this talk, I will first provide a brief overview of operator mechanics before taking a deep dive into a sample use-case: managing database snapshots and restores. I will explore key design decisions behind the API objects that are used to model the problem, followed by a discussion of how Kubebuilder and Operator SDK can help us write an operator to manage the complete snapshot lifecycle using familiar tools like yaml and kubectl. By the end of the talk, the audience should feel more comfortable around custom operators, and may even be inspired to automate some their own operations!

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The lifecycle of data projects is involved. Responsibility for data, properly storing and retrieving data, scalably processing data… it can be a bit much. This talk will focus on a later-stage of the data lifecycle: serving data visualizations and analysis with sustainability in mind. About a year ago, our team had to pick which tool we wanted to use to serve data visualizations and metrics to stakeholders. We had a laundry-list of requirements, some being deal-breakers while others were nice-to-haves. Our final verdict was a project that fit specific needs for us as a data science team, but in the process of choosing, we piloted a diverse variety of other alternative projects. The framework for this talk is simple: introduce a collection of stand-out data visualization projects and discuss the pros and cons of each as we see them for a variety of use cases. All considered projects are open source. They will be introduced in ascending order of interface complexity- and perhaps descending order of customizability. For example, the first project provides the user with a UI for doing data analysis- a later project will require a Python back-end. The intended take-away of this talk is to provide attendees with a survey of projects that could serve them, and to shortcut the attendees own path toward finding a solution that works best for their team, minimizing platform-churn and saving time.