Thank you. Yeah, thank you for that intro. So thank you for being here. I'm Eli, I'm with Adina and Hazel and we are all members and we all know each other through this collective called the Exit to Community Collective, which is a collective focused

on you guessed it, something called Exit to Community. So what I'm going to do is start off by is by breaking that concept down. So what is this thing? Exit to Community. So I think the best way to go about explaining it is just breaking down

the phrase itself. It's another way that you know, it's articulated is like a community exit. So I think, for the most part, when people hear the word community now in 2024, there's a little bit of cringiness around it. You know, my

guess is maybe you think of like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, or any other sort of CEO of a social media platform or platform with a clear user base, a user base that, you know, obviously doesn't have ownership or governance or a stake

in the platform that they use. And yet the CEO describes the platform as a community or the founder describes it as a community. When you think of community, you're supposed to think of, you know, when you do have a stake in something, when you have a say in something, but for the most part in

tech speak, it's a veneer for not having a voice. So the idea of Exit to Community is to reclaim this word and, you know, give it back its meaning. So that's where the concept of Exit to Community comes in. If you look at the quote here, it comes from Nathan Schneider, who is a scholar who created

this concept. And the idea is that, you know, what if the startup, what if the founders of the startup, they truly believed in community, what if they exited ownership to their community of users and workers and other stakeholders. So I will break down those four bullet points you'll see at

the bottom because they provide different kind of entry points to understanding Exit to Community. So obviously the other word in Community Exit to Community is exit. So Exit to Community is an exit strategy. You might think of the IPO or the acquisition by a larger company. But in those two

routes of an exit strategy, when a startup follows either of those, over time, the quality of that startup and the connection to its community of users

deteriorates because an exit for the most part necessitates a shift in ownership to become more concentrated and more centralized. Instead, when a community of users becomes co-owners of a startup, that kind of changes the

ownership dynamic and gets towards something more equitable and democratic. So that's to say that Exit to Community is really, it came out uniquely from the startup industry, from the context of Silicon Valley. But

beyond its Silicon Valley context, it has deeper resonance across all businesses that could and should be community owned. So it's also a history lesson. Exit to Community might bring to mind cooperatives, cooperative

ownership, but it's not necessarily limited to cooperatives. But it is a history lesson that shows that, you know, when a business does become cooperatively owned, it becomes more sustainable and has a longer term significance. So maybe, you know, here in the US, we have the electric

co-ops in the Midwest that are owned by its customers who rely on electricity. And then in Spain, there is Mondragon. So those are examples of successful long lasting cooperatives. And the history of those cooperatives points to the viability of Exit to Community. And then, yeah, as I said,

I'm going to touch on the last two points together. Exit to Community is inspired by the internet, but it goes well beyond that. And it changes the incentive structures around, you know, how something is owned, because it goes towards mutualism. When you have more stakeholders, the more stakeholders you have in a business, the more you want to keep their interests in

mind, the less risky you want to be about, you know, business decisions, financial risks, etc. But that'll bring me to the next slide, which is that tech startups, sorry, the title is cut off on my

hand, tech startups need a better option. So there very much is ownership in today's tech industry. And that's, by the way, that's the focus of Exit to Community ownership, ownership, ownership. So ownership currently exists, but it has a kind of, it's kind of toxic for the most part. So proprietary

software, you know, because maybe it's owned by only a handful of people who want to maximize profits, therefore it's profit driven. And who are the kinds of owners of most pieces of software, most kinds of platform, it's venture

capitalists, who the whole business operation is, you know, move fast, break stuff, make business decisions that'll turn out the highest profit at the greatest speed. And which is not very Exit to Community minded, because it goes against, you know, values of sustainability and care. And

that puts profit first, ahead of everything, then tech workers are going to be, you know, that's their whole mo do, you know, I'm sure you hear of, you know, tech workers working, you know, 10 plus hour long days, all for the sake of profit, and it just leads to exploitation. But then the

question we want to ask is, you know, well, what if those tech workers in addition to users of certain startups, what if they were the ones who are the instead the ones who own the business, you know, another major component of Exit to Community is kind of the people who are closest to the product have the best knowledge of it. So shouldn't they have, you

know, a much more significant stake than they do already. So the rest of this presentation is covering the affinity between free open source software and Exit to Community, and how both can work in tandem to realize shared goals. So now I will hand things off to Hazel who will

discuss, you know, why, why do we need governance? Why do we need more equitable ownership? And I'm going to Thank you, Eli. Thank you, Eli. So why do we talk about all of this? Why do we talk about like ownership? Why do we talk about

governance? And why do we talk about Exit to Community? I think first of all, we deserve the right to self govern in both our physical lives and in our digital lives. And a group of human rights researchers from organization called coconut came up with a set of our digital rights. The process they how they came up with those right is translating how international digital spaces. So we

should have the same basic rights in digital spaces as we have in our physical ones. And digital rights are fundamental human rights in a digital environment. It's about free speech of expression, association and assembly, access internet devices, rights and

access to information, access to platforms, online safe space, security and safety. And these are all reasons these are all rights that we deserve that makes governance and ownership particularly important. And we should all have the right to self govern the software that we ourselves built. So what is digital self governance? With the internet and with

things like false, we have a lot of new types of communities and new type of dynamics where people mostly associate anonymously and on the internet, and digital self governance creates a particular leverage points that opens up different possibilities for what we can consider self governance to be.

It creates some sort of governance in some cases, like, for example, even though Wikipedia has like a just beautiful like governance dynamic, it also creates some level of like loud voice problem in some cases where like the old voices kind of dominates new ones and create a barrier for new voices come in and feel welcome. But also

like digital comedian dynamics also creates new opportunities for for governance and promise new solutions with new technology. And that's just all to say that with digital organizations and digital communities, we need to learn about these new governance dynamics, we need to

learn how to govern ourselves on the internet and develop an ability to be able to do that well. And communities is like a space that represents trust, it represents work, it represents authenticity and connection. And that is all that that's the reason why it's so important for communities have the right

to own and to govern. And even if software is intangible goods, we need to recognize that software is something that people are able to own, especially for people who steward it or labored for it or build it. And ownership is really important to governance because it gives people a stake, encourage encourages accountability and

responsibility. And communities are like Eli mentioned, are really prone to be captured by profit. It's prone to be captured by like founder syndrome is is is prone to be captured by capital and ownership and community governance really ensures that they can't be captured. And

with that, I'll pass it to Adina. Thanks, Hazel. So as Hazel and Eli has already sort of alluded to, there's a natural fit between the goals of exit to community and open source software, in that both of them

are invested in democratizing technology. So even though exit to community sort of came about in the startup world, it addresses a similar set of questions, right, like the free and open source software movement already touches on the issue of economic ownership, precisely because obviously, when

you're building free software, the whole point is that no one person owns it. And users also aren't being charged. So some of the exploitation issues that Eli touched on are less present. And unlike in the case of proprietary software, the whole operation is unlikely to be built around profit. But that still doesn't totally do away with the

question of ownership broadly considered. Even in an open source context, we might ask questions like, do certain people hold a greater degree of intellectual ownership over a given project? Are certain figures associated with a project in the public imagination? Do they have more

sway in governance and decision making? This is the loud voice problem that Hazel mentioned a minute ago. Do a core devs exercise a healthy or a disproportionate amount of decision making power? Who can afford to work on this project, and to put time and energy into it in a sustained

way if no one's getting paid? I think these questions all get at issues of ownership and governance. And these are all questions that exit to community as a philosophy tries to address. So another important question that we should be asking about any software project, whether it's proprietary or open source, is who does this tool

serve? And who's affected by it? Then these answers to these questions, they might overlap, or they might be totally different. But how you answer these questions basically points towards who is this project's community? Your community might be the general public, or it might be a really niche group of highly technically proficient

developers. But regardless of the size of this community, it's really important to think expansively about who's affected by the product that you're building, and how the people who face these effects could more meaningfully be given a seat at the table. So in terms of kind of

how to think between exit to community and open source, there's sort of two ways of approaching it. On the one hand, we have some historical case studies, which we've profiled for a library of snapshots on the exit to community website, that talk about the growth of governance in open source communities, which we consider

to be akin to exit to community strategy. The two kind of primary examples of that are Python and Debian. So with both of these, I'm just going to briefly sort of map the evolution of governance in each of these projects, and underscore how it resonates

with exit to community. Debian in its early days functioned under pretty centralized leadership, obviously led by its founder, Ian Murdoch. But when Murdoch left the project in 1996, and appointed a successor, that project members turned out not to like the successors leadership style quite as much. And

there was no formal governance process in place to represent contributors opinions or to resolve disputes. So over the course of the late 1990s, project members created a constitution and a voting process for electing new project leaders. And then a series of folks held the project leader role for a year long terms. Over the course of that time, there

was a good deal of experimentation with different leadership models. And eventually, a sort of grassroots consensus started to emerge around which forms of governance worked best. And those were later formalized. So of course, there were hiccups and disputes along the way. But the whole process was pretty grounded in Murdoch's original values and ideas

around the ethical nature of doing free software development. So this moment of sort of emergent governance strategy becoming formalized could have been seen as Debian's exit to community, but more from the ground up. Similarly, in the case of Python, initially, Guido van Rossum served as the

benevolent dictator for life. But after one particularly contentious pep sparked a big debate within the dev community, Rossum decided to step down. And in his absence, people needed to figure out how to make decisions about the future of Python. So the core dev community designed an

approach for choosing a new government's model and for choosing an electoral process for how to vote on that new model. There's a lot of sort of meta governance happening there. And then they opted to have core devs submit governance proposals as peps, use the Condor rect voting method to decide between the proposals, and in the end

ultimately created a steering council, which you might know as PEP 8016. And this kind of remains their governance model today, which is some leadership by a steering council and continued decision making through peps. Like Debian, this historical case study shows a pretty organic

transition towards community governance, but we might still consider it under the framework of exit to community. So those are the historical examples. And the other approach here is a little bit more speculative. We could also think about exit to community with an imaginative cast

and dream about what it would mean to sort of turn a proprietary platform into a public utility or an open source tool. So that brings us to this third case study, which was hashtag buy Twitter, a real initiative that happened in 2016, which was a campaign to try and turn Twitter into a public utility with broader

based ownership and accountability. Obviously, it did not work. But its central provocation was what would it mean for Twitter to be user owned? And I think this question still really resonates, especially for a lot of us who are interested in open source. Because it was an exercise in

dreaming big and thinking about what it would be like to secure our tech projects differently and have them accountable to the community of people who really need them.