For my first week at Scality as the Technical Community Manager, I was lucky enough to join the yearly Open Source Leadership Summit hosted by the Linux Foundation. Around 400 leaders of the open source community met to “drive digital transformation with open source technologies and learn how to collaboratively manage the largest shared technology investment of our time.”
Here are some interesting insights into the three days event in Half Moon Bay.
Open Data is as important as open source
The movement that becomes more and more prominent with the advancements in machine learning technologies. The idea is that data should be shared freely, used and redistributed by anyone. It should not be personal data, of course, or contain information about specific individuals. Many impressive tools for machine learning (like TensorFlow) were open sourced which is great but the real value for machine learning is data. Even if many valuable datasets are carefully guarded secrets in big corporations, lots of good is coming from governments, research institutions and corporations like Mozilla. In the spirit of growing interest in machine learning solutions, open data seems to be a younger brother to open source.
Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud are real
I was curious about what these world-class leaders and thinkers have to say on the future of the cloud and cloud storage. The most powerful comment I heard was from Sarah Novotny, program manager for Kubernetes Community: “Multi-cloud is something that people want nowadays”. The more I thought about it, the more obvious it became: multi-cloud is absolutely essential to preserve freedom and avoid vendor lock-in, to give an opportunity to the open source community to implement great ideas. Nobody wants to have a single-vendor.
On that note, a surprising discovery was The Permanent Legacy Foundation. They have a small but dedicated team working to provide permanent and accessible data storage to all people, for all time. It is a nonprofit organization and they use storage services on multiple public clouds to lower the cost (as they store your data forever) and stay flexible to archive precious memories for the next generations to come. An interesting use case and a business model that is between a charity (like Internet Archive) and a for-profit company (like ancestry.com).
Open source is made of people
Linux Foundation’s Executive Director announced CommunityBridge, a platform created to empower open source developers, the individuals and organizations who support them to advance sustainability, security, and diversity in open source technology. It’s a big step to support people who want to contribute but don’t know where to start or don’t have an opportunity. CommunityBridge provides grants and access to world-class specialists to help people contribute to open source communities, grow and innovate together. Go check it out.
More food for thoughts from fellow community managers
As a community manager, I want to foster a strong and healthy community for Zenko. The Summit was a goldmine for ideas about what can be done better to sustain a happy, engaged community. Four most important nuggets of wisdom I gathered:
- Diversity means strength – we have to make sure that clear routines and nurturing environment are established for our communities to strive.
- Transparency and openness is the key – plans and roadmaps are open and every opinion in the community is heard and taken into consideration.
- Anyone can contribute – anything new or existing members want to bring to the table is important and appreciated.
- The future is in open source communities – the number of people involved as members with diverse expertise from all over the world grows every day, collaborating and creating together, it’s a fascinating place to be in right now.
The location was a treat!
The Ritz Hotel right on the coast in Half Moon Bay. You can check out more beautiful pictures on the Linux Foundation website. That was a great three days at the beginning of my Zenko journey. Now you’ll see me more regularly on this and other channels! Let’s create some exciting things together!
Images © Linux Foundation – (CC BY-NC 2.0)
