Interview with Edward Silverton, maintainer of the Universal Viewer project.

What’s the origin of the Universal Viewer?

In 2012 I was contracted by Digirati to work on the “Wellcome Player” for the Wellcome Library in London, a unified viewer for all of their digital catalogue items (high-res deep-zoomable images, audio/video, PDFs), which allowed people to download content, embed it, share it, and read associated metadata.

It became clear that open-sourcing the Wellcome Player could have many benefits, like receiving pull requests with improvements and boosting public engagement, which is what the project and the Wellcome Library are all about. So we did.

Open sourcing the software was another way of boosting public engagement, which is what the project itself was all about.

Shortly after, the British Library, across the road from the Wellcome Library, got in touch. They wanted something similar, but needed it to use a new (at the time) web standard called IIIF (the International Image Interoperability Framework), which allows the GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) to share their content in an interoperable way.

Within 6 weeks we had a functioning “Universal Viewer”, which was also open sourced in the spirit of giving back to the community. The project has now been going for around 7 years and has been widely adopted by other libraries and museums.

What’s your backstory?

I had a small company in Brighton that worked primarily in Adobe Flash. Over the course of several years we developed a powerful open source codebase that became something similar to Unity, with its own visual editor.

But Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash post was ultimately a death knell, which was a bummer. We’d built up all this value in a proprietary, non-standard system, which was dead almost overnight. I decided then to work with open source and open standards, and really pursued IIIF as a focus.

We’d built up all this value in a proprietary, non-standard system, which was dead almost overnight. I decided then to work with open source and open standards.

In the present day, I work at Mnemoscene, which I co-founded with my partner Sophie Dixon, focused on creating immersive experiences. VR right now is a bit similar to the Flash situation back then, with so much invested in a closed platform, Unity. We use Unity and like it a lot, but also use WebVR wherever applicable, specifically Mozilla’s amazing A-Frame. We’re currently working on extending the Universal Viewer’s 3D capabilities for Morphosource, to include object annotation and volumetric visualisation using A-Frame. Initial experiments have been extremely promising.

Our philosophy is to make everything as interoperable and reusable as we can.

IIIF is all about data interoperability, but we also have opportunities to make interoperable software components. We’re investigating how to use the Web Components spec to componentise the Universal Viewer, specifically using stenciljs. This is cool because it frees us to use these components with any frontend framework. If you’ve got one development team using Angular and another using React, they can both use the same components. It’s another way to break down silos. Our philosophy is to make everything as interoperable and reusable as we can.

Why did you start fundraising for UV?

There were a lot of necessary tasks requiring developer time that were not getting funded, and a lot of that fell on me. I had to keep up with GitHub issues and answer people’s questions on Slack. It was becoming a burden. As a small company we can’t always afford to travel to all the big IIIF conferences and things like that, which started to become a drag on the project.

There were a lot of necessary tasks that were not getting funded, and a lot of that fell on me.

My time was all booked out with paid project work, which I need to make a living. We tried to get bug fixes into the backlog of funded projects here and there, but each project has a very strict agenda and they have funding for precisely that. We were finding that certain parts were atrophying.

We needed a way to make the project sustainable and keep our users happy. As a typical open source project, we don’t have a paid licensing model, but we knew we needed to raise money to catch issues falling between the cracks.

What’s made your Open Collective successful?

I set up the UV Open Collective a while back and got a few backers, but it didn’t really take off until we created the Steering Group. If you become a sponsor at $100 a month or more, you get a Steering Group seat and can help decide how the funds are spent.

It didn’t really take off until we created the Steering Group. If you become a sponsor at $100 a month or more, you get a seat.

I started putting feelers out with key stakeholders, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. Then it was a case of securing the first commitment. It reminds me a bit of that video of a music festival where a guy is doing a weird dance. Then one guy comes over and joins him, and pretty soon everyone is joining in. You need to find that second guy to join your weird dance. In our case, that was the National Library of Wales. They became our first institutional sponsor, and that made it OK for other libraries to get on board.

You need to find that second guy to join your weird dance. In our case, that was the National Library of Wales.

There can be a rivalry between institutions, but Open Collective is neutral turf. It’s all about the project, not particular sponsors. People want to cooperate, and Open Collective provides a space to do that more effectively.

The Steering Group is really working for us. We have a monthly call where we look at pull requests and the issue backlog, do administrative stuff, and work on the roadmap. It’s made decision-making more equitable, and there’s a renewed sense of excitement about the project’s future. I intentionally did not become chair in order to decentralise power, and our current chair, Sara Weale at the NLW, is doing a fantastic job.

Our users have a vested interest in this project being sustainable, and I have to make my own livelihood sustainable, too.

We’re now agreeing on quarterly goals and devising “community sprints” — the first of which we recently completed successfully, to fix pain points around the tree menu, a complex part of the application that had a lot of bugs and unaddressed edge cases.

Sustainability is central to everything. Our users have a vested interest in this project being sustainable, and I have to make my own livelihood sustainable, too. I’ve now got a good balance between admin and bug fixing, paid for through Open Collective, and exciting paid projects from institutions. It’s very nice to work on new stuff while also knowing that the project is looked after.

What’s next for the Universal Viewer?

So far, it’s only me invoicing the Open Collective. I’m trying to figure out how to expand that beyond myself. I’d love to get more sponsors on board and use that funding to attract more maintainers. We held our first conference last year and it went very well. Perhaps future conferences can be subsidised by the Open Collective, to enable things like getting a designer to create the promo materials.

I’m trying to figure out how to expand the project beyond myself.

I’ve considered paid issue bounties, but those relationships can be fleeting. I suspect I’d spend as much time reviewing a bounty pull request as just doing it myself. But maybe I could budget that in, and over time a person would need less and less review time. As it goes on and complexity increases, it gets harder to onboard new people .You’ve got to take cultivating the connections you make seriously, or you could end up with a bunch of funding but no capacity to keep up with growth of the project.

Documentation is another big one. Project budgets rarely want to pay for documentation, only features. That’s a bit of advice I have for open source maintainers: take documentation seriously. If you can get Open Collective funding going early on and channel it into documentation, you can avoid the big gap we have now.

That’s something the Steering Group is looking into. Our ideal would be to migrate different components to be completely standalone, with their own tests, that are documented and can be reused and integrated. But it’s going to take some time to get there.

Maybe there’s someone out there who would enjoy working on this project with us. Our community is growing. The door is open.

If you’re interested in supporting Universal Viewer, contribute to the Collective or the codebase, or get in touch.

Solving open source funding by giving sponsors a seat at the table was originally published in Open Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Join a Maintainer Support Group

While open source is inherently collaborative, maintainers can sometimes feel isolated. We’re connecting the humans behind the code, to support each other’s learning and growth, personally and professionally. Join us!

Maintaining the Maintainers: Open Source Peer Support Group

Coming soon: Back Your Entire Stack

Back Your Stack is a great way to discover dependencies and support them financially. But you had to do it one by one. Now, companies will be able to make one regular financial contribution and we’ll automatically distribute the funds to all their dependencies. Stay tuned for more news about this soon!

Brand Revamp

As you can see, we have a new logo!

Next up: our own website, coming soon! We’ve also changed our URLs:

• Our Collective (where we track our transparent budget) is at opencollective.com/osc.
• The OSC host page is now at opencollective.com/opensource

Survey Results: What Core Contributors Want

The feedback you gave us in our recent survey is helping set OSC’s priorities. Everything we’re doing relates to what you told us is important.

What Core Contributors Want

Widening the OSC Umbrella

Now welcoming more Collectives worldwide who are building open source beyond code — like meetups, user groups, advocacy initiatives, and conferences. To support this, we’ve expanded our fiscal hosting acceptance criteria and updated our Terms of Fiscal Sponsorship accordingly.

The Open Source Collective’s widening umbrella

Latest OSC Board Update

Our board meeting minutes are transparent, including financial info.

Open Source Collective Update #3

SustainOSS Update

There have been lots of exciting outcomes from the last few years of the SustainOSS conferences. Now the community is discussing where to go next.

Pro tips you should know:

1. Link Github and your Collective: using the Sponsor button on your repo, configured in the FUNDING.yml file in your .github folder.
2. Zapier integration: Make new expenses and updates in your Collective trigger actions in 1000s of apps.
3. Open Collective Design is offering special deals to open source Collectives for logos, brand work, and websites.

News and Opportunities from the Open Source Collective was originally published in Open Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Collective Page Redesign

We are making massive improvements to the design of Collective pages. We’d love your feedback before we roll it out.

To preview, append V2 to the end of any Collective URL.
Examples:

• https://opencollective.com/babel/v2
• https://opencollective.com/cryptpad/v2
• https://opencollective.com/decoupled-days/v2

Share your feedback!

Maintaining the Maintainers: join an open source peer support group

In our recent survey of core contributors, more than half said they would like to participate in maintainer peer support opportunities. So, we’re kicking it off! Interested? Find out more and sign up.

Maintaining the Maintainers: Open Source Peer Support Group

The Open Source Collective’s widening umbrella

To support open source beyond just code, OSC is now fiscally hosting even more projects who are building the ecosystem worldwide, like meetups, advocacy initiatives, and conferences. Learn more.

The Open Source Collective’s widening umbrella

Featured Collective: Witchcraft

Interview with Brooklyn Zelenka, blockchain engineer, functional programming & math wizard, community builder, and founder.

Witchcraft: the magic of math, functional programming, and community

💡 Pro Tips!

1. Link Github and your Collective: using the Sponsor button on your repo, configured in the FUNDING.yml file in your .github folder.
2. Zapier integration: Make new expenses and updates in your Collective trigger actions in 1000s of apps.

Introducing Open Collective Design

Did you know the designers behind Open Collective are actually a Collective, based in Guadalajara, Mexico? Now they are opening up to working with all Collectives. If you need a logo, brand help, or a website, get in touch with them!

Open Collective Design

News & Inspiration

📝 Latest update from the Open Source Collective board, who shares meeting minutes transparently.

🤔 Open Collective is clarifying its strategy as a platform and a company. Weigh in here if you’d like to add any thoughts.

🕹️ Welcome to new a Collective, Rust Analyzer — an experimental compiler frontend for the Rust programming language.

⏭️ Thought provoking article from Steve Klabnik: What comes after “open source”.

⚡Late last year, Google announced Chrome’s Web Framework & Tools Performance Fund. We’re thrilled to say the funds are being distributed on Open Collective, starting with a $10k contribution to Bundlesize.

Tweets that make us proud

Participants contributing to @opencollect bounty program. Ways to give back to the community #opensource #OSCAPH #osca #opensource

 — @oscafrica

Help us fully fund the @parceljs core team! Thanks to a new @opencollect feature, you can now sponsor @JasperDeMoor and @mischnic's work on Parcel directly! 😍 Jasper: https://t.co/t07YoEaipA Niklas: https://t.co/HIvHKoObH4

 — @devongovett

Monthly Leaderboard

Top Sponsors
Consider this when deciding where to work!
TIBCO $12,000
Marfeel $10,316
Chrome $10,000
Trivago! $10,000
Facebook $5,860
Airbnb $5,376
Clay $3,100
ZEIT $3,000
Mendix $3,000

Top Collectives
by new backers
Webpack +49
Core-js +47
Babel +39

Top New Collectives
by donations
Electron Summit NYC $5,200
QueerJS €1,970
Make a Mark Baltimore $1,615

Open Collective Update—July 2019 was originally published in Open Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Open Source Community has taught us important things about collaborating between peers and achieving great things together.

A lot of people trying to solve a problem together is, in fact, the foundation of what we call creativity. It’s the capacity to see something from numerous vantage points, increasing the chances to succeed.

That’s why I find it weird that the design world sometimes feels so closed, as if only an elite few can participate in creating ‘good design’. In the internet era, we can accomplish more by combining our efforts. Design has the potential to bring people together.

What is Open Collective Design?

Open Collective Design is a Collective of its own in the Open Collective family. We aim for the decentralization of design solutions and the production process, inside Open Collective and in the world.

We bring the same open source ethos as Open Collective as a whole, and as the many Collectives as the platform, but applied to the world of design.

Open Collective Design has been delivering design solutions for the Open Collective platform and its related initiatives from the start, in a fast-paced, iterative way. We are the people behind design across the platform.

Now, we are gradually opening up. Our strategy is to foster connections between all the players in the community, including other Collectives, organizations, and individuals. We are ready to work with all kinds of groups, beyond Open Collective Inc.

Our mission is to help Open Collectives through design.

Our design offerings

• Provide high-quality design solutions that help Collectives develop their brands, inspire their contributors, and raise financial contributions more effectively.
• Foster and encourage a community of designers to contribute through tasks of different sizes and complexity.
• Produce or supervise design-related projects, in order to assure better results for any design deliverable.

Our skills

• Interface design (UI)
• User experience (UX)
• Branding and graphic design
• Content strategy
• User research
• Design research and documentation

About the Team

We are a small team based in Guadalajara, Mexico 🇲🇽 working first as a part of the Open Collective team, and now as a co-op of people with different practices, ideas, and perspectives.

We’re here to help our beautiful ecosystem grow. 🖤

Need design help? Want to talk? Shoot us an email!

Open Collective Design was originally published in Open Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Open Source Collective, home of 1300+ open source projects on Open Collective, is starting peer-support calls for maintainers, where the people behind open source can connect with and learn from others who understand what they’re going through. In our recent survey of core contributors, more than half said they would like to participate in maintainer peer support opportunities.

So, we’re kicking it off! Interested? Sign up here.

Why are we doing this? Because while open source is inherently collaborative, maintainers can sometimes feel isolated.

Open Collective provides a way for open source maintainers to receive funding, but we want to serve needs beyond just money.

We want to reach out to the humans behind the code.

Maybe you got started hacking on a problem out of curiosity, but now it’s grown into a whole library or a complex tool. Or maybe you’ve become responsible for documentation, onboarding, and support requests, while trying to make sure no one gets overextended, including yourself. You might feel pressure to ensure the project remains relevant and doesn’t succumb to inertia or entropy.

The vast majority of open source maintainers are doing this work alone, either through geographic separation from other contributors, being the sole person holding build keys, or because they are the sole developer on the project.

Psychologically, this can be taxing. Developers do a lot of things to combat isolation: take time off to unwind, go to conferences, or connect to others on IRC or Twitter. All of these are good options. But it might not be enough, especially if you’re taking on big questions like funding and sustainability, long-term strategy, community management, and relationships with sponsors.

We see a huge opportunity here. Preventing maintainer burnout is important to the whole ecosystem, the health of which is a big focus for us. Plus, maintainers can help one to another grow and learn, professionally and personally.

We’re going to host an initial call to hear what participants want, and then we decide how often and in what format to continue. It might be monthly open calls for everyone, smaller groups in the same time zone, or other approaches depending on what we hear from you, the maintainers.

This initiative is being hosted by Alanna Irving, Executive Director of the Open Source Collective, Richard Littaur from Maintainer Mountaineer, and Henry Zhu from Babel and the Maintainers Anonymous podcast.

Sound good? Sign up here.

Maintaining the Maintainers: Open Source Peer Support Group was originally published in Open Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Open Source Collective (OSC), a non-profit serving as fiscal host for 1300+ open source projects on Open Collective, wants to support groups around the world who are building the open source ecosystem in diverse ways, beyond just code. So we’re widening the umbrella and clarifying our acceptance criteria.

Up to now, OSC has mainly focused on projects who are directly building open source software, and accepted other open-source-related groups, like meetups, advocacy initiatives, and conferences, only by exception. Now we want to be more inclusive.

US-based open source meetups and related groups can be hosted by the Open Collective Foundation, but there hasn’t been good fiscal hosting solution for international Collectives in regions without other active hosts (like Open Collective Europe). OSC’s scope is worldwide, so we want to open our umbrella wider to include these groups.

Here are the updated sections of the policy:

What types of projects do you accept?

We can accept any open source project, in any language, anywhere in the world. We can also accept open source related meetup groups, conferences, and advocacy, research, and awareness initiatives.

If you are an open source project with at least 100 stars on GitHub and at least two contributors, you will very likely be immediately approved.

What if we’re not on GitHub or not focused on building a codebase?

If you don’t fit 100 GitHub stars requirement, we will consider your application on a case by case basis, considering the following criteria:

• Projects who don’t have their code repo on GitHub should show equivalent traction to the 100 stars requirement, whether through GitLab stars, evidence that the project is a dependency of other open source projects, or similar social validation.
• User groups and should have at least 50 members and be able to demonstrate a genuine history of community activity (forum, events, publications, etc).
• Your project must be directly related to open source (in general, or a specific open source project or area), not proprietary technology or any other topics.
• If there’s a codebase at the heart of your project, it should be under an open source license.
• If you are producing non-code content as a main activity, it should be licensed under Creative Commons or other copyleft framework.
• Meetups or small event groups should have organized at least 2 events previously. You should be able to show where your community coordinates online and a history of activity. As further evidence, you agree to send photo/video documentation of your first event since joining Open Source Collective after it happens.
• Conferences and larger events will be assessed on a case by case basis and may require specific risk assessment by our board. No expenses will be paid in advance of those funds being in the Collective budget (e.g. paying a venue hire fee ahead of the ticket sales that are meant to pay for that).
• You understand that all agreements between your Collective and third parties, such as venue hire, employment contracts, speaker fees, etc, require explicit written permission in advance, since as fiscal sponsor the agreement is legally between the third party and Open Source Collective.

You can see all the details on the Open Source Collective’s host page and in our Terms of Fiscal Sponsorship Agreement.

If your group fits the criteria above and you want to raise and spend money transparently, apply to create a Collective now!

The Open Source Collective’s widening umbrella was originally published in Open Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Open Source Collective is a 501(c)(6) non-profit organization the serves as a fiscal sponsor to over 1,300 open source projects on Open Collective. We believe in transparency, so we’re publishing regular recaps of what happens in our board meetings. For more details, like who’s on the board and a detailed transparent budget, please see our Collective page.

Recent Financials

(rounded)

Balance: $129,565

Income
April: $15,050
May: $10,875
(mainly from host fees)

Expenses
April: $3,550
May: $4,700

• $2,500/mo for Executive Director role (Alanna)
• $1,000 toward animated explainer video (coming in July)
• $1,560 to accountants (catching up on old invoices + annual accounts)

Financial process improvements

We have started using Xero to help track manual payments arriving in the bank account by direct transfer (not via Open Collective platform), and for invoicing. Will help us apply funds to Collectives quicker.

We’ve turned on the bank transfer payment method for Open Source Collective as an experiment. If users select it, they will be sent bank transfer info. It creates a pending order in the system which we can mark as paid when the funds arrive.

We are looking into more options for handling funds, including Stripe invoices (to automate incoming bank transfers) and prepaid credit cards for Collectives to use on expenses when fees are prohibitive.

Back Your Entire Stack

Work underway on a new subscription offering, where companies sign up to financially support their entire open source stack, and we distribute the funds. We want to offer a badge for sponsors to their participation.

Fiscal hosting policy

The ‘party line’ is that OSC only hosts groups directly producing open source software. But in practice, there have been a number of exceptions made, such as SustainOSS and the Sydney Drupal Users Group, which are open source related but focused on events.

We need a clear policy specifying how wide we can open the OSC umbrella. For example, Drupal groups outside the US who host events and conferences want to come on board, but it’s not clear if we can host them.

How do we manage and assess risk? Conferences are riskier, but we have had some groups run events already without issues. Maybe meetups are OK, but what is the boundary between a ‘meetup’ and a ‘conference’?

This also pertains to our activities with Open Source Community Africa, whose groups we are hosting, and other similar groups in Africa who want in.

The Next Billion Creators: Open Source Community Africa.

The board felt they did not have enough information to make decisions at this time, so Pia and Alanna will be pulling together a board paper in the next couple weeks, breaking down what the terms of fiscal sponsorship as written allow, and what questions we need to answer.

SustainOSS

We are progressing our idea to decentralize SustainOSS and invite local champions to host events in their city, with support from us with a toolkit, promo help, fiscal hosting, etc. Need to clarify whether we can host international SustainOSS event groups in OSC. We have a SustainOSS planning meeting next week.

Industry Survey on Open Source Support

We have developed a questionnaire about financial support of open source, which we want to send to open source liaisons and advocates at companies, or CTOs if they don’t have such a role, the help establish some norms. We have hired someone to compile a small database of about 100 contacts in the top tech companies, and Pia will follow up with calls for more detailed discussions with those who are willing.

Tax form project budget

We are required to collect W9 or W8 BEN/E tax forms from everyone who invoices over $600. Currently we are doing this more or less manually, getting people to scan and email them in, and it’s not working. We missed a bunch of forms in 2018. So the OC engineering team is building an automated system that will allow users to submit their forms online and track which user accounts need a form and which have or don’t have one on file.

Right now Open Source Collective is the only fiscal host that needs this feature, as the others mainly pay expense reimbursements, not invoices. So it makes sense that the budget for the project from from OSC instead of general OC inc. funds.

Decision: OSC will pay the ~$4,000 budget for the new tax form system.

Branding project update

Waiting on Open Collective Design to come through with some options for the board to give feedback on. Hopefully will have something to show soon.

Maintainer support calls

We’ve decided to move forward with an initial maintainer support call, in partnership with Richard from Maintainer Mountaineer. He is working on a guest post for our blog to announce this soon. We’ll start with one call and ask people who attend what they would like out of future calls and what format that they think works best. Henry has been advising on this as well.

Check in on survey priorities

What Core Contributors Want

We’re not really addressing the top priorities from the core contributor survey in a direct way, but we are making indirect progress.

• Back Your Entire Stack will hopefully reduce the need for Collectives to market themselves; instead they will get funding from companies who have them as a dependency.
• We are always working in the background to bring in more sponsors.
• We tried to host an event to bring maintainers and sponsors together in person around JSconf EU, but it didn’t pan out due to lack of someone local who could host it. We’ll try to have such an event in the future but it’s not currently prioritized. Justin thinks Stackshare could be a potential co-host.
• We’ll ask about sponsors’ desire to connect personally with maintainers when we do the industry survey and followup conversations.

We intend to check back in on this next meeting to see if we need to refocus, or if our prioritization of work is paying off.

Previous update

Open Source Collective Update #2

Open Source Collective Update #3 was originally published in Open Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What was your journey to your current work?

I studied music theory and composition originally. Unbeknownst to me, it had the same prereqs as computer science. I learned category theory, linear algebra, and a smattering of techniques. They didn’t tell us what they were called at the time, but later as a programmer I realized what they were.

I worked as a graphic designer for a few years after music school and wound up at a startup. They needed me to do a little programming, and I found I was better at that than graphic design. I was surrounded by functional programmers there, and open source, so I got involved in both right out of the gate. Because of my background and interests, I ended up learning a lot of straight up computer science and fell in love with Haskell.

Later, I met some people involved in Elixir, and I was surprised to find it was missing a number of things that I expected. So, partly to scratch my own itch and partly as a teaching tool, I started working on the Witchcraft project, which is now six libraries however many modules, and did conference talks and all this other stuff along the way.

Has your music and design background affected your programming?

Programming absolutely scratches the same part of my brain as music composition. Instead of writing instructions for an instrumentalist, you’re writing it for a computer, but the parallels are very clear. All but one person in my composition cohort (who became a professor of music) are now programmers, because it was a crash course in that way of thinking.

There’s a beauty to the more math-y styles of programming. You start thinking more in terms of geometry, pictures, and graphs, than in lines of code. You start to see how things flow and work, because you have more control and you understand how different pieces follow rules.

Instead of writing procedural or imperative programs, where the computer just follows the steps you give it, you can get closer to the way people actually think. Because math is universal, it’s a nice bridging language between people and machines.

Because math is universal, it’s a nice bridging language between people and machines.

Why open source?

Remember, my original career path was going to be ‘starving artist’! I’m intrinsically motivated: it’s less about a huge salary and more about interesting work. I also enjoy the community aspect of scratching my own itch and then sharing with others as a collaborative experience.

These days, I run my own company and we open source everything, but even at previous jobs I was always advocating for open sourcing our work so others didn’t have to go through the same pain. Software duplication is essentially free, so why have fifty people writing the same thing? It feels more efficient to be open source.

I was always advocating for open sourcing our work so others didn’t have to go through the same pain. Software duplication is essentially free, so why have fifty people writing the same thing?

What’s your startup about?

It’s called Fission. There are a lot of distributed and peer-to-peer technologies just emerging, like blockchain, Ethereum, IPFS, and WebAssembly. They have advantages over how we do things today, but are hard to use because they are still very new. We want them to be accessible to everyone, not only people who are already in that little sliver of tech.

Fission makes it easy for developers to write a front-end without having to write a back-end. Instead of having to write your own database, host it, and build your own login system, users can own their own data and identities (self-sovereign identity).

We’re still in the early stages, but work has started. In the next couple weeks we’ll be releasing a Heroku add-on for IPFS.

What is Witchcraft?

Functional programming has been around since the beginning, at least since the late 1940s. It’s a more mathematical approach with more types of abstraction. We can take certain patterns and code them in a library. Instead of having to memorize or recreate them, you can just use what’s in the library and it works.

Because you have more abstraction, you can write more general code that will work in more contexts and do more kinds of things. Elixir as a language is very pragmatic. But it was missing some of the standard things from functional programming.

Because you have more abstraction, you can write more general code that will work in more contexts and do more kinds of things.

I run a couple meetups, one of which is Vancouver Functional Programmers. There’s a strong Ruby community here, so people were interested in learning both Elixir and some terms and concepts they hadn’t heard of before.

I figured, let’s merge the two needs and rewrite these concepts in Elixir, open source it, and use the documentation as a teaching tool along the way. I wanted to get people interested in this style of programming, to help them write more reusable and reliable code, and to spread these concepts over time.

I figured, let’s open source it and use the documentation as a teaching tool along the way.

What has been built with Witchcraft?

There are a few libraries that have been built on top of Witchcraft, because it has some patterns that are really good for error handling. You don’t have to constantly check for problems when you make a request to another server; you can just pretend like everything was correct and handle error checking at the end.

Because the abstractions are more structured, and they follow certain principles and laws, it makes it easier to write really solid software. A large multi-national bank is writing part of their stock trading platform with Witchcraft. I know of a couple consultancies using it in client work as well.

I’ve personally used Witchcraft in a number of projects, both in-house and for clients when I used to run a consultancy. For the most part, it’s all deep in the internals of the server, in everything from dashboards to financial transactions to blockchain. It’s pretty widely applicable, being low level, but on the math side.

You do a lot of outreach work—why?

If people don’t know about something, then they’re not going to do it. They need to be familiar with the concepts, and a lot of these techniques aren’t standard yet. We’re seeing a general industry shift from pure object-oriented programming toward functional programming, but it still requires some evangelism.

Community outreach for Witchcraft has primarily been through the Vancouver functional programming community, and through quite a few conference talks and keynotes I’ve given over the past few years.

I also run meetups to help bridge people just entering the industry with people who’ve been there for a while. They provide a place for people to talk about their work and interests, connect with other people, work on side projects, and just get excited about new things.

One of the meetups, Code & Coffee, is very broad and general. It has unintentionally worked as a feeder. People come in through that and end up at a functional programming meetup or a workshop on Witchcraft and Elixir, and then start adopting these technologies in their work. That’s always fun to watch.

We’re seeing a general industry shift from pure object-oriented programming toward functional programming, but it still requires some evangelism.

What led you to start fundraising for Witchcraft?

I became aware of Open Collective a few years ago, through people involved in Feathers, Javascript project with a successful Collective and a large community. They’ve done a very good job getting and engaging contributors.

I looked at how well they were doing, and wondered why I would even bother with fundraising for my obscure little side project. But eventually I just decided to go for it and created a Collective. It took 5 minutes to set up, and within a couple days I had several backers. To my surprise, there were people supporting us who I had never interacted with before. People started Tweeting it out. Now when I go to conferences, I get asked about “this Open Collective thing on your repo”.

I wondered why I would even bother with fundraising for my obscure little side project. But eventually I just decided to go for it. It took 5 minutes to set up, and within a couple days I had several backers.

Witchcraft has always been a labor of love. If I wanted to improve documentation, or get a logo designed, or host extra resources, that was coming out of my pocket or my time. And I only have so many resources as an individual. Sometimes people volunteer their skills. Like my friend who did the logo — it was very nice for a professional designer to do that. But that’s not always possible.

There have been times where I’m too busy to look at the docs or respond to a feature request. Me and the other regular contributors all have other projects and day jobs. Our Collective budget gives us the ability to promote our work, pay for hosting, get stickers printed, and helps with travel to conferences.

We really want Witchcraft to be accessible to everyone, and that means a lot of documentation and examples. It’s very much a production library, but it’s also meant to educate people about how to do these things in any language. We’ve already put a lot of effort into that, but we’d like to expand on it. It would be amazing to be able to hire a professional technical writer.

I only have so many resources as an individual…. Our Collective budget gives us the ability to promote our work, pay for hosting, get stickers printed, and helps with travel to conferences.

What’s your fundraising strategy?

Even the relatively small amount we’ve raised since starting our Collective a couple months ago is amazing: $1,100 is $1,100 that we didn’t have last year. Our strategy is to grow the budget over time through direct outreach. GitHub has recently turned on a “funding.yml” option, so we can point people at Open Collective from our repo, which is pretty great.

In contrast, the GitHub Sponsors model is just about funding individuals. I would like to see this project outlive my personal involvement. Ten years from now I may still be building stuff for Witchcraft, but there will probably be other people interested in taking over at some point. If the funding and the Collective can outlive me, that’s a huge win. Everyone should really be looking to see how they can grow a community beyond themselves.

I would like to see this project outlive my personal involvement…. Everyone should really be looking to see how they can grow a community beyond themselves.

What have you learned about leading communities?

Over the years, I’ve been involved in various kinds of community activism, open source projects, and meetups. I’ve seen how getting burned out and dropping off the face of the earth for six months isn’t good for anyone.

We need what my co-founder at Fission calls “ego death”: let go and make it about the work, not being the hero. Making source code available but keeping a death-grip on the project is not what peer-based community production is about. Everyone in the community should be able to participate.

For projects to live beyond burnout, or the founder getting an interesting job, or whatever it is, you need to get other people involved.

Let go and make it about the work, not being the hero. Making source code available but keeping a death-grip on the project is not what peer-based community production is about.

Any thoughts about open source sustainability?

My previous venture was trying to solve sustainability in the Ethereum community, primarily through grants. There was a lot of money around the Blockchain space. But as soon as crypto markets hit hard times, all the grants dried up. The mentality immediately slipped into “What can this do for me?”

Sustainability for open source is very challenging because of the Tragedy of the Commons: everyone thinking everyone else should be funding it instead of themselves. It’s like figuring out who should pay for the roads that everyone uses. Unless it’s mandated by the government, it’s hard to get individuals to step up.

People think, “I’m just one person in a small startup. Microsoft, Apple, and Google should be funding this, not me.” And yeah, they should! Big tech companies run their business largely on open source. Amazon is essentially grabbing and reselling open source projects. It would be nice to see more support.

Sustainability for open source is very challenging because of the Tragedy of the Commons: everyone thinking everyone else should be funding it.

Sustainability really means being able to afford — in funds, time, and effort — to continually improve a project ad infinitum. Large important projects like Linux can have their own foundation and resource finding more donations. Small projects don’t have that. There are some things people can do with licensing, but it’s a hard problem.

I don’t have the answer, but I think Open Collective is helping a lot. It’s enabling us to crowdfund a large number of projects that people use and care about. It has a layer of discoverability. You can go there looking to support some open source projects and explore. You can throw some money in even if you don’t have a lot of time and energy to contribute.

Open Collective is helping a lot. It’s enabling us to crowdfund a large number of projects that people use and care about.

What’s your fundraising advice for others?

There are two Collectives from the Elixir community that are already active, Witchcraft and the Nerves Project. These two are on opposite ends of the spectrum: Nerves is a surprisingly slick tool for making hardware programming much easier, while Witchcraft is about hardcore math. It would be great to see the rest of the Elixir spectrum filled in with Collectives, too.

Most open source projects are just people volunteering their time on evenings and weekends, who are at risk of burnout. Helping them grow their projects beyond the limitations of their own time is really important. It’s critical to survive past the 6-month horizon you can see now, to that 5 year horizon further on.

Part of the reason why Witchcraft has been successful is good documentation, outreach, and productizing it with a logo and design. I’m lucky to be surrounded by people who can contribute those skills, or to have them myself. Getting funding through a Collective could enable other projects to do these things.

Set up a Collective. It’s easy. It takes 5 minutes. Tweet it out. Get as many people on board as possible, and make sure your backers get recognition. Just go for it.

Helping maintainers grow their projects beyond the limitations of their own time is really important.

Go along to one of Brooklyn’ meetups in Vancouver, and support Witchcraft!

Witchcraft: the magic of math, functional programming, and community was originally published in Open Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Thoughts on Github Sponsors, Babel case study, funding via ethical ads, new Zapier integration, open source in Africa

Our thoughts on Github Sponsors

CEO Pia Mancini’s response to GitHub’s new Sponsors feature, why she welcomes it, and key ways Open Collective is different.

In summary, Open Collective is unique because it’s:

1. Open Source: It’s pretty straightforward: we serve the open source community, so our code is free and open.
2. Fully Transparent: Everyone can see where the money comes from and where it goes, in every Collective.
3. Built for Projects: Fund the community, not the individual. The Collective can continue even if the original founder moves on.
4. Fiscal Sponsor: No need to create a legal entity or handle taxes. That’s is a pretty big deal.

Read the full post:

On Github Sponsors

Pro tip: Link the Sponsor button on your Github repo directly to your Open Collective! Configure it in the FUNDING.yml file in your .github folder. Learn more

🤖 Beep boop whirrr… don’t forget about Open Collective Bot! 🤖
Prioritize issues raised by backers and get new backers right in Github!

Highlight: Our Friends at CodeFund

CodeFund is an open source platform that helps fund maintainers, bloggers, and builders through non-tracking ethical ads. They are doing great work in our community!

Sign up your Collective

Note: we also receive a referral fee from CodeFund

New: Zapier Integration

Now available for Beta preview!

Use this invite link to give it a try. Currently, new expenses and new updates can trigger actions in 1000s of apps Zapier supports. Which notifications would you like to see added?

Featured Collective: Babel

Babel’s rise to financial sustainability: Making a living making open source

Interview with Henry Zhu, core maintainer of Babel and explorer of the human side of open source. A couple years ago, Babel was a project everyone was using but not many were funding. Now it’s enabled Henry to leave his day job to work on open source full-time.

Babel’s rise to financial sustainability

Software Below the Poverty Line

Andre Staltz has crunched the numbers, revealing the stark reality of open source sustainability.

Read the full article

The Next Billion Creators

Open Source Community Africa

We met Samson last year at SustainOSS London and were taken by his passion for all things open source + Africa! We’re thrilled that Open Collective is supporting his community. Learn more

Season of Docs

Applications now open! Selected technical writers will receive a stipend to work with us for three months.

Our Season of Docs FAQ

News & Inspiration

🌈 Google Chrome is still taking applications for their Web Frameworks & Tooling performance fund. Grants will be disbursed through Open Collective. Apply by June 20 if you have ideas!

💸 Jacob Rockowitz on how Webform is enabling sponsorship of features through their Open Collective: “Sharing my process for handling paid feature requests will hopefully clarify how organizations can sponsor a feature for other Drupal and Open Source projects.”

🤝 We were a proud sponsor of the recent Maintainerati event in Berlin. Check out this summary of reflections from the experience.

🤔 CodeFund shares The Open Source Conundrum: How Do We Keep the Lights On? Thoughts behind Open Source funding need to change if open source is to remain sustainable well into the future.

🏊🏽 Antirez keeps it real with The Struggles of an Open Source Maintainer: “I totally understand people struggling a lot to stay afloat once their projects start to be popular. This blog post is dedicated to them.”

🈺 Webform is offering Office Hours: “No one wants to provide free support, yet everyone wants to know an open source project is supported…. Sponsor office hours provide tangible and more reliable support for the Webform module.”

🌿 All Contributors is a bot that makes it easier to recognize all kinds of contributions, not just code, in your README.

Tweets that make us proud

Monthly Leaderboard

Top Sponsors
Consider this when deciding where to work!
Logitech $50,000
Cloudflare $18,000
Shopify $14,000
Handshake $10,000
Trivago! $10,000
InfoTrax $7,188
Facebook $6,850
Creative Tim $6,777
Airbnb $5,376

Top Collectives
by new backers
Webpack +61
OBS Project +46
Women Who Code +40

Top New Collectives
by donations
Extinction Rebellion Hackney
Taskbook
Node Serialport

Open Collective Update — June 2019 was originally published in Open Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Helping drive the open source movement

I met Samson last year at SustainOSS in London and was so taken by his energy and drive and passion for all things open source + Africa! He is one special guy and I am thrilled that Open Collective has been functional in supporting his community and enabling others to do so.

How did you get involved in the OSS community?

It started as an effort from the One Laptop Per Child Project in Nigeria, late 2009 and I was about 10 when I got my first Linux machine (Sugar Desktop Environment on top Fedora). I started learning Python, and I wrote my first application for the Sugar Desktop. Some part of me wanted to do more, so I started contributing to the Sugar Labs community with bugs report/fixes, advocacy and was elected to become a board member of the Sugar Labs community.

So for the past seven years; I have been speaking at technology conferences and meetups, teaching and consulting around ed-tech with various organizations. Even helping to organize meetups around OSS.

Amazing. I heard you’ve been the youngest mentor in GSOC, is that right?

Yes. I outgrew Google Code-In contest after finishing high school at age 15, so I became a Google Code-In mentor for about two years before joining Google Summer of Code as one of the youngest mentors and the youngest to attend the GSoC summit.

Changing the perception of Africans from just billion users to the Next Billion Creators.

Tell me about OSCA, who are you, what are you trying to achieve?

Open Source Community Africa (OSCA) is for open source lovers, enthusiasts, advocates 🥑 and experts within and across Africa with the sole aim of increasing the rate of credible contributions by Africans involved in the sphere of technology to open source projects both locally and globally, changing the perception of Africans from just billion users to the Next Billion Creators.

We are going to support this mission with;

OSCA chapters:

Since we want to reach out to Africans, we need to be in different cities across Africa. The chapter aims to bring the people together to discuss how open source can help the communities, personal development, and how they can give back to the community. This will be the heart of OSCA as it will help bring up advocates who will eventually become leads for their cities. Allowing monthly meetups, members can meet to promote educational materials to enable enthusiasts to understand how open source culture works.

Open Source Festival:

This is going to be an annual regional event(conference) which will bring open sourcerers (open source contributors) together to about everything open source, attracting members and non-members of OSCA.

Projects:

We believe that to make Africans creators, we will need to give them the platform to create and contribute to open source projects.

We believe that what will make OSCA standout from other open source movements will be about the strong push for members projects and contributions to projects. We believe that to make Africans creators, we will need to give them the platform to create and contribute to open source projects. We are going to work with different open source projects to make sure that Africans can easily contribute to the projects they use daily. This will be as a result of the OSCA chapter success.

(Stay tuned for news on the Open Collective + OSCA Collaboration for paid bounties during their meetups)

How do you see the OSS ecosystem developing in Africa? How is it evolving in Nigeria in particular?

The technology ecosystem is multiplying every year. This shows how dedicated people within the ecosystem are improving every day to make sure there is some level of success. Existing open source outreach programs from top companies are also multiplying as more people are aware of OSS. Check out for example the Forloop community and the Ingressive Campus Ambassadors.

Nigeria is one of the fastest growing countries, not just in the economy but also around technology. The ecosystem in Nigeria is fantastic because every year, there is something remarkable happening. There is a lot of communities in Nigeria that support open source movement and Nigerians so far are getting really close to the open source community and getting jobs centered around OSS.

What are your wildest dreams for this community?

My dreams are to have OSCA meetups in all countries in Africa, foster the open source culture across cities, seeing people from Africa attending global conferences to speak and advocate for open source. The rapid growth of the number of pull requests to open source projects and donations to OSS projects they depend on. Having the most active OSS community across and within Africa.

What do you need? How can others help?

The OSCA community is multiplying across African cities, and so we need help with funding to support the local OSCA meetups financially, more partnerships from open source projects and companies that have support OSS as we believe that more collaboration from existing open source projects will help make us expand more significant and better.

Thank you Samson!

Dear reader, you can:

❤ Fund OSCA on open collective: opencollective.com/osca

❤ Attend a meetup: announced in twitter.com/oscafrica and opencollective.com/osca#events

❤ Join a project: github.com/oscommunityafrica

Meeting Samson @ SustainOSS was so inspiring and I can’t wait to see the results of our growing OSCA + Open Collective partnership.

The Next Billion Creators: Open Source Community Africa. was originally published in Open Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.