Contributing (with) civil servants
This is a modal window.
The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported.
Formal Metadata
| Title |
| |
| Subtitle |
| |
| Title of Series | ||
| Number of Parts | 637 | |
| Author | ||
| License | CC Attribution 2.0 Belgium: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
| Identifiers | 10.5446/52476 (DOI) | |
| Publisher | ||
| Release Date | ||
| Language |
Content Metadata
| Subject Area | ||
| Genre | ||
| Abstract |
|
00:00
Open sourceBoris (given name)Goodness of fitMeeting/Interview
00:19
Civil engineeringProjective planeMeeting/Interview
00:34
QuicksortMeeting/Interview
00:50
BitMeeting/Interview
01:06
BitMereologyMeeting/Interview
01:23
CodeMereologyType theoryOpen sourceBitScaling (geometry)Multiplication signMeeting/Interview
01:51
Standard deviationCodeProjective planeTable (information)NeuroinformatikMeeting/Interview
02:24
Different (Kate Ryan album)View (database)Term (mathematics)Uniqueness quantificationMeeting/Interview
02:52
CodeStandard deviationStability theoryInformation securitySelf-organizationDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Meeting/Interview
03:11
Standard deviationEuler anglesPerspective (visual)Different (Kate Ryan album)Ring (mathematics)Lecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
03:46
Standard deviationCodeData structureEuler anglesSelf-organizationCASE <Informatik>Focus (optics)Meeting/Interview
04:10
Standard deviationCodeMathematicsMetropolitan area networkDependent and independent variablesEuler anglesTerm (mathematics)Meeting/Interview
04:35
Standard deviationTerm (mathematics)Projective planeOpen sourceGroup actionSelf-organizationMeeting/Interview
04:54
CodeSelf-organizationDirection (geometry)Software maintenanceData managementEuler anglesMeeting/Interview
05:38
Standard deviationInclusion mapCodeAdditionMixed realityMathematicsOpen sourceProjective planeTerm (mathematics)Meeting/Interview
06:21
Term (mathematics)MereologyMeeting/Interview
06:36
Set (mathematics)Software developerEuler anglesDifferent (Kate Ryan album)SoftwareBuildingMeeting/Interview
06:54
CodeBuildingTerm (mathematics)Decision theoryMultiplication signSoftware maintenanceMeeting/Interview
07:13
CodeDecision theoryMultiplication signSelf-organizationProduct (business)Order (biology)Meeting/Interview
07:33
CodeGroup actionDecision theoryGoodness of fitMereologySelf-organizationData managementProjective planeMeeting/Interview
07:51
AdditionProjective planeData managementMeeting/Interview
08:22
Software developerBitDistanceDecision theoryMeeting/Interview
08:51
Data managementSelf-organizationQuicksortShape (magazine)Meeting/Interview
09:17
Shape (magazine)Open sourceQuicksortMixed realityProjective planeMeeting/Interview
09:36
Meeting/Interview
09:59
CodeDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Moment (mathematics)Row (database)Euler anglesProduct (business)Physical lawDatabaseProjective planeMereologySelf-organizationQuicksortArithmetic meanSoftware developerFigurate numberUniqueness quantificationMeeting/Interview
11:31
CodeDirection (geometry)Civil engineeringVapor barrierMeeting/Interview
12:03
Insertion lossConstructor (object-oriented programming)NeuroinformatikMeeting/Interview
12:27
CodeMathematicsCivil engineeringTerm (mathematics)Open sourceState observerQuicksortMeeting/Interview
12:52
Context awarenessSelf-organizationRight angleAdditionMeeting/Interview
13:43
Order (biology)Arithmetic meanCodeSelf-organizationPoint (geometry)NeuroinformatikPhysical lawCivil engineeringMeeting/Interview
14:22
CodeMereologyGame theoryRight angleOpen sourceProjective planeMeeting/Interview
14:52
CodeTelecommunicationProjective planeVirtual machineService (economics)Meeting/Interview
15:18
Instance (computer science)1 (number)Group actionLatent heatCASE <Informatik>BitOptical disc driveMeeting/Interview
15:35
Group actionQuicksortLatent heatImplementationCASE <Informatik>Projective planeInstance (computer science)Meeting/Interview
15:53
Physical lawOperator (mathematics)Meeting/Interview
16:15
CodeData conversionProjective planeSelf-organizationProduct (business)MereologyMeeting/Interview
16:55
QuicksortSelf-organizationProjective planeProduct (business)Meeting/Interview
17:17
Self-organizationState of matterDifferent (Kate Ryan album)MereologyCivil engineeringOpen sourceProjective planeConnected spaceEvent horizonMeeting/Interview
18:34
Element (mathematics)Meeting/InterviewComputer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:11
Good morning and welcome to my talk in the Community Deaf Room. I'm quite excited to be here in the Community Deaf Room.
00:22
And I want to talk to you about something which is really near and dear to my heart, which is, like, how can we have civil servants and public workers coming to our communities and add something valuable to all of our projects.
00:43
So in this talk, I want to briefly sort of explain who these people are, what makes them different from other community contributors, and how we can welcome them, and also what we can get from them.
01:04
So, briefly, what I want to talk about first is the benefits of having these public sector contributors in, then who they are, and with that also maybe a bit like how to deal with them,
01:21
what you can do to sort of get them to be a part of your community or to enable them to be more effective inside of your community, and maybe a bit of what you can do right now. So why do we want people from the public sector to be part of our open source communities?
01:41
Well, first of all, I think that in open source communities we usually are used to having two types of contributor. On one end, the corporate contributor who is contributing on behalf of their company or corporation, and on the other end of the scale, there's the individual contributor,
02:03
and that's the contributor that is contributing on their own behalf because they have their own thing to solve or because they love contributing to this project. And I think that public sector employees and people that work for the public have a third kind of interesting interest to bring to the table.
02:24
They're kind of a third kind of contributor. So what makes those contributors different? I think there's a bunch of different features in there, and it's not that other contributors might not have this, but it's definitely unique values that they can bring
02:40
that others often don't really have in the same way, and in that way they can enrich our communities. And I think that starts with having contributors to codebases that have a long-term view inherently built into their practice.
03:00
Public sector organizations and people that work in the public sector, they have different requirements on things like stability and security, and they are often slower, and that's definitely true. However, they're often also more thoughtful.
03:23
They often approach things from a more careful perspective. They're in an industry that doesn't know disruption in the way that startups have it because they provide the infrastructure for society, and you can't just disrupt what happens there.
03:43
So they bring a different kind of attitude. And with that, they bring a focus for structure that is different. A lot of these organizations have been maintaining crucial infrastructures for many, many years,
04:01
in some cases even one of the organizations we work with for 750 years, and so they bring a different attitude to that. Many of the people that work in the public sector are people that are really passionate about helping the world and helping improve things.
04:22
They're often also really passionate about change, but their role in that is a more long-term responsible role, and with that, they bring a different attitude. But these are people that are really experienced in maintaining long-term infrastructures,
04:42
and that is something that we can use to our benefit in all of our open source projects. Another thing that's important to know about these people and why it might be worth adding them to our group is that they work in organizations which have politics at the top.
05:05
And now, what does that mean? Well, fundamentally, for the people that are working there, it means that every four or five years, management and the direction of what they're doing is going to fundamentally change. And that brings an attitude which demands of them that if they build solutions,
05:28
that those solutions are maintainable for a longer term, because it might be an unknown whether it is possible to provide the maintenance for a solution during its lifetime, because it might be that a solution is built,
05:43
and then politics deprioritizes its maintenance, but the solution is still required to keep running. So, public servants, public workers are a great addition to our communities, and they can really add a very meaningful diversity, I believe.
06:01
I think that in addition to the individual and corporate contributors, having public institutions in that mix can be a way to make all of our open source projects more stable and more sustainable in the long term, as well as change the tone in that way, also the susceptibility to problems that a lot of our communities have.
06:32
So, who are these public sector people that we can make part of our communities? Well, they are people that, some people that we're already used to having inside of our communities,
06:45
like developers and designers. But expect these developers and designers that work in the public sector to come with a very different set of restraints and attitudes towards building and maintaining software.
07:02
Some good, some bad. Some of the good things might be that they have built in an extra attention to things like accessibility and long term maintenance. Some bad things is that they might spend more time and it might be more difficult for them to make quick decisions.
07:24
As well as then, in the public sector what we see is that it often takes a lot more people together in order to create a solution. And a lot more decisions need to be taken by a larger group of people. And so, when public sector organizations might join your project and public sector people might join your project,
07:46
also expect, and I think this is really a good thing, that part of their management might be involved. Their management might be active on GitHub issues, as we've seen in some of the projects that we're engaged with.
08:06
They might be commenting on user stories. They might be looking proactively for ways in which they can resource their additions to the project and see what they can add.
08:27
And that also means that they will be critically involved. And they might not always understand all the technical insights and outsides. But they will try to be critically involved.
08:41
Which also comes to, on the developers and designers side, it might lead to them being a bit more distant and being often a bit more like, oh, this is maybe something that my manager should look at and something that I cannot make an immediate decision about. Apart from that, something that we're eager to see at the Foundation for Public Code, but also I think, like personally is quite exciting,
09:06
is the possibility for policymakers and policy advisors to get involved. People that actually work with the political side, as well as these working organizations, to sort of shape the way that they act and the way that they are positioned in the world.
09:24
And by adding these policymakers to our mix, which you can see happen in more political open source projects, like DCD, more console, that might be quite interesting.
09:41
They can add another kind of contributor that can really think about more grounded, sometimes more ethical things to the mix. And that can be really interesting for them. Granted, all of these people will be more interested in policy things.
10:03
They'll also be more interested in a lot of legal compliance kind of things. Companies might be like, oh yeah, sure, compliance with this and this law is something that we'll figure out after we've built a product. And for public organizations, that is fundamentally different.
10:22
For public organizations, putting a record on an active and removing it once a month is fundamentally different from actually removing it at a certain moment. And most countries have laws that sort of like demand deletion of certain records in databases.
10:43
And then deletion also really means deletion. And with those kind of different restraints come a different attitude and a different way of critical thinking that can also really add a lot of value to our communities. So what could we do in our existing communities and projects to help these public
11:08
people come in and be a part of the development and add their special unique features? Well, this is very much something that I'm also very much looking for and still working on.
11:20
And I really hope that I'll be able to collaborate with hopefully many of you to figure out how we can make this happen well. But there are some thoughts I have that might be interesting to sort of like get started thinking in that direction and that might help you come up with ways to make it happen.
11:47
One thing that we found out is that an important barrier to entry for many code-based communities, for people that work in the public sector, especially those that are public workers or civil servants,
12:06
is the CLA, or the constructions in which contributors lose ownership over their contributions. Because in many countries it is illegal for public workers to change the ownership of the things that they produce.
12:27
The United States has specific requirements on how public work is licensed. And on the other hand, civil servants like British civil servants simply cannot change the copyright of their work.
12:47
Copyright and the terms under which their work is done are set. Now this is usually not a problem with most open source licenses, but it does become a problem with things like contributor license agreements.
13:01
Because with contributor license agreements you are effectively signing away your right to the ownership of your contribution. In addition to that, what those kind of situations also create is a situation under which the contributor cannot be meaningfully sure of what future licenses might be.
13:24
Which means that they might find themselves in a situation where a contribution they have done under specific requirements actually ends up being used in a very different context. Which might create legal questions for legal departments in these organizations.
13:43
For example, in some countries it is seen as corruption if public means are used in order to create private value. So in a hypothetical example of a code base which is public when a civil servant contributes to it, but is then the license is changed to be closed.
14:03
That might mean that at that point that contribution of the civil servant has become corrupted in some sense, which is politically a problem. And this is a reason that many law departments in public organizations might bar civil servants from contributing.
14:23
So if you want civil servants to be a part of your community, make sure that everyone regains the rights over their own contribution under the same license that you use to get it. Of course, we all understand that licenses that are open source initiative approved licenses are the right license to go for.
14:46
And if those licenses are guarding a project like this, that should usually be fine.
15:02
The next thing which can be really meaningful to get these people into your community and to work with them is to enable and facilitate communications between public sector users of your project. Now, this might not come sort of like instinctively to them.
15:23
Many people that work in that sector kind of have the feeling that they are a bit odd ones out and it's always harder for the odd ones out to organize. But organizing them around their specific use cases and, for instance, setting up a user group for public users of your project
15:44
might mean that they are able to collaborate on the sort of like public sector specific implementation details of your project. Those might include, for instance, how to do public procurements of the software, what
16:02
public policy these things connect to and what legal compliance this has is connected to. So what laws something is connected to. And that means that it might be significantly easier if those conversations are had
16:21
in the public and the conclusions from those conversations are had in the public. It might be significantly easier for new public institutions to take up your project because they can see, well, this other public institution or these civil servants over there have already done the compliance check on the GDPR. And thus, we can with some certainty say that this is probably relatively compliant or
16:46
they can see, well, this other public institution has procured this with a private party. They have hired a private party to implement it for them. So maybe we can use their sort of methods of procurement to figure out how we can also implement it effectively in our organization.
17:05
And that can greatly speed up the uptake of these projects in the public sector and also involve the people that are then involved with the project. So for now, I want to keep it at that.
17:21
I'm mainly grateful for the opportunity to come here to the Community Dev Room, which for me is maybe the most important open source event in the year, to ask all of you to think about enabling public sector workers,
17:40
civil servants to be a part of your projects and to let you know that these people are out there, both working in these organizations, but also many people working for, for instance, small contractors for public sector organizations that if they are connected within your community can really add a lot of value.
18:03
So that's something which you could do today. And we'll really, I think, improve the state of our public administrations in general is find those people in your community and connect them to each other and help them solve each other's problems together. And, and with that, like, I really want to thank all of you, and especially, of course, Laura
18:27
and Leslie, and I'm really looking forward to all the other great talks that we're going to see today. Thanks.