I’ve been so lucky to attend the last three of four total UN Open Source Week Conferences at the United Nation Headquarters in New York City. The event has grown from about 50 people in the inaugural year to over 1400 attendees this year.
Here are some of my key takeaways from the event:
- The UN is all in on open source, but their technical staff include only 500-600 people. They need help from the broader open source community and hope to have 500,000-600,000 contributors all helping to address the many needs outlined in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Global Digital Compact. Apparently, the UN has 6 official languages, but open source is becoming the 7th language.
- Kush Varshney from IBM told great stories and discussed “What does it mean to be free?” Does freedom mean anything without a community?
- One of my proudest moments was seeing two GW students (recent graduates, Ben Yimaj and Satya Phanindra Kalaga). Ben helped organize the 4-day UN Hackathon at the beginning of the conference. Everytime I said I was from GW, people asked me if I knew Ben and then they sang his praises. I was fortunate to watch Satya on a panel and his thoughtful consideration and research expertise shined. One audience member called out Satya’s idea that “a community is a moat” as a brilliant phrase that helps emphasize the importance of community in enabling secure and trustworthy open source projects. These GW students and many others give me optimism for our future.
- The collaborative and helpful nature of open source people is exceptional. Thanks to Megan Forbes, Vessela Ensberg, Will Gearty, Rodrigo Silva Ferreira, and so many others for giving me practical recommendations that I’m excited to implement to help get over hurdles in my various projects.
- Sujata Tibrewala from Cisco gave me a hopeful challenge in her talk about social media. The algorithms are trying to maximize profit and research shows humans will click on negative news over positive news. Can we as individuals reprogram the algorithm by being more intentional about where we direct our attention? I’m going to try to click on more positive stories and skip the negative click-bait and maybe if we all do this we can evolve humanity to be more joyous and less fearful. Worth a try.
Well, that was all just from the final day of the conference. Here is a quick recap of the three other days.
- Open Source x AI - Do you want a handful of unregulated billionaire CEOs following a colonial, extractive playbook, to decide how we use AI? No, then Open Source AI is the way forward if we want to focus on empowering humans rather than displacing them. Credit to Kush Varshney for his clear statements that I am paraphrasing.
- CURIOSS Academic OSPOs - Amazing work being done across our network. Morane Gruenpeter and Juanita Gomez shared the exciting work they are doing measuring the impact of Open Source. The GW OSPO is about to start the last year of our Sloan grant. Sustainability is the challenge. I see the amazing work being done and the amplifying, compounding effect we have by working together and connecting between universities and with our students, faculty and staff to share opportunities. But how do we convince our leadership in this time of budget cuts and austerity that funding these organizations is critical to the future of our universities and our societies.
Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) - I love all the discussions regarding open source as critical infrastructure. Governments are realizing how much they rely on open source and they are starting to fund it. I also love this quote from Roberto Di Cosmo from the Software Heritage Foundation, “We do miracles, up to a certain point!” This is in response to the great work Software Heritage is doing archiving all software, but noting that AI is dramatically increasing the amount of code being generated and something has to give.
- OSPOs for Good - This is how the UN Open Source Week started. I have learned first hand the value of OSPOs for enabling organizations to collaborate, innovate, and deliver positive impacts. In my opinion if your Country, University, or Company does not have an OSPO then you are at risk of falling behind. I’ll paraphrase Sachiko Muto who said it well - OSPOs have unlocked the ability of companies to collaborate, now they are unlocking and enabling governments and universities to collaborate.
If you made it this far then you might be one of those amazing people who are truly passionate about open source and making the world a better place. If we aren’t connected already, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Finally, I want to end with some fairly simple actions inspired by Addie Cobb. Things you can do to help nudge us all forward.
Improve your open source repo
- Update your readme to identify which SDGs your project is addressing - Next year we hope to demo our UN SDG Classifier project to help scale this work (new contributors are welcome).
- Add a funding file to make it easier for sponsors to give you money.
- Add a Citations.cff file to make it easy for people to cite your project - Use cff init
- Endorse the UN Open Source Principles
- Choose hope and positivity over fear and negativity
- Call your family and connect with your community
Special thanks to Omar Mohsine, Mithusa Kajendran, Clare Dillon, Richard Littauer, the Sloan Foundation, and all the organizers for bringing a contagious energy and creating the space for all of the ideas and connections that strengthen and grow our diverse open source community.
This blog post was created by a human without any known AI assistance.