Community Infrastructure for FOSS Projects

Presented at HOPE X (2014), July 20, 2014, 4 p.m. (60 minutes).

At HOPE Number Nine in 2012, James spoke to people about how to build community infrastructure to provide support at a scale larger than just one project at a time. Then he went and built some. This talk is about lessons learned - how to replicate the successes and avoid the failures he's experienced in the last two years. The focus will be on his two case studies: 1) the formation of a localization community for anti-censorship and anti-surveillance tech (which went reasonably well) and 2) creating a heavier-weight code auditing organization for anti-censorship and anti-surveillance tech (which had some hiccups). There are lessons in both and they will be the basis of discussion here. The goal is to also seed some ideas on how to build this kind of infrastructure for other niches and the wider free software community.


Presenters:

  • James Vasile
    James Vasile directs the Open Internet Tools Project, which supports development of free software anti-censorship and anti-surveillance tools. He is a partner at Open Tech Strategies, which advises organizations and businesses as they navigate the open-source world. He is also a senior fellow at the Software Freedom Law Center, where he acts as a strategic advisor on a range of free software efforts. James has helped boot up a number of free software organizations, including the FreedomBox Foundation, Open Source Matters, and the Software Freedom Conservancy.

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