Hilary Carter, The Linux Foundation | Open Source Summit Europe 2022

This is texturing TV. Hey guys, we're back at the open source Summit in Dublin, and we're going to be talking about research and I know a lot of folks may not think that that's an exciting topic. But I promise this will be an interesting conversation about that very thing because the challenges we don't always know we're open source software is used how it's used or what it's impact is what the economics around it are.

So what exactly are you guys up to? And how are you going about sorting out? Where is all this open?

Source software who's using it? And Why we should be paying more attention maybe. Yeah, thank you.

Well, it's a great question and it is an answered in the short amount of time. I can assure you so really to back up the The rationale for founding Linux Foundation research was to help answer all of those questions what is taking place in open source project communities? What is the what are the opportunities that are created who is getting involved?

What's the velocity which projects are waning? Where's the acceleration which are the technologies that are benefiting from open source collaboration most recently which are the industries benefiting and so the scope of the opportunity to explore is incredibly vast and the ability to go deep into these individual questions is really amazing. And so the Linux Foundation being at the heart of so many open source project communities has a really Unique opportunity to help answer these questions and leverage the access that we have with our project communities to describe the challenges the opportunities at the individual Technologies the applications and really help people understand that open source is a mechanism for mask collaboration at scale that just provides such tremendous value.

You find where all these instances of Open Source are because people just download stuff and they don't readily volunteer exactly what they're doing or why they do it or how far along they are. So, how do you get them to engage with you? Yeah, that's a great challenge knowing who is downloading open source code is a huge mystery in many cases because downloads tend to exceed implementations.

What we are able to measure is is the output of those downloads. And the other thing is is that some downloads are taking place not necessarily in the source environments themselves. so measuring the extent of Open Source usage is it's not something that we're likely able to solve at LF research today.

Not easily what we can do is identify. The Readiness of Industries in adopting open source Technologies, the Readiness of Industries in consuming code the extent to which different Industries are contributing back to Upstream to project communities. What are the barriers preventing both consumption and contribution?

What are the tools that can help alleviate those barriers? How can we secure software Supply chains through standards and best practices. So we are exploring things that we can.

Answer more readily than some of those challenging questions. Like what's the prevalence and use of all of the open source software that's actually downloaded. It is quite pervasive very difficult to answer.

There's also a whole geographic distribution of Open Source. So you guys looking at that as well in different regions and how they're using things because it will vary from Italy to China to Australia. So are you seeing any patterns there?

Yeah initially when we launched Linux Foundation research, we created a framework for analysis and at the outset it didn't include geography and We did start out by saying we're going to do three things. We're going to look at industry uses of Open Source. We're going to look at open source through the lens of different technology horizontals.

We'll look at open source. Ecosystem issues things like security and diversity Equity inclusion and standards and Leadership issues. And then about a year into the program we thought you know, there's another way to look at this and it was through Geographic lines.

We knew that there were Dynamics and and challenges specific different geographic regions and certainly Europe has a different way of operating than North America than Asia and wanting to invest more heavily in Europe. We thought you know, we need research around what? The state of Readiness is what is the state of Open Source in Europe?

I thought let's launch a new framework for exploring open source Dynamics along different geographical lines, and we can go beyond continent. We can go right down to the country level say what's going on in Italy the what we can do is infinite the my boss Mike Dolan who helped launch Ella free search said, you know, we will not have Issues with you know, the number of topics we can explore scope creep is is our biggest challenge and trying to prioritize how we look at Regional issues and which projects to work on is that that is always the challenge because there's so much to explore you mean your resources are not infinite. No, they are not internet.

And in fact, we could do anything with a larger budget we could go down to the country level we could go to the regional level. I happen to be from Toronto Canada where we have a unique blockchain community. And why did it form Who's involved?

What are the technologies that we're born in Toronto? It's it is incredible to do Regional or Geographic analysis of hubs of innovation. We look at Silicon Valley.

I mean, that's a whole area of study into itself. What would people do with their research what is the action item at the back end of it? Are we going to share this with governments?

Are we going to share this with companies to get them to be more engaged or what is the plan for the the end product of all the research well. We aren't producing research for the sake of it. I can assure you the idea is to create actionable insights that will inform.

Public policy it will inform organizational strategy. It will inform project Community priorities and Foundation level priorities. And so having data that can be useful at all levels of the ecosystem is really really important.

And having you know, our research is publicly available and we it's a it's that's one of the important tenets of LF research that not only do we make our research projects openly available. world platform. 0.

And ready for the world to do their own analysis with our survey data. So because we ask our communities to contribute data sets freely. We feel very important to then give back the analysis and the output of that data compilation and Analysis freely as well.

There. Is this whole open data movement in the research circles. Do you guys think you're going to be at the front of that because it seems like we talk a lot about it, but you know outside of a few government agencies.

I really haven't seen a lot of open data sets yet. So, you know, is that going to be you know, the new thing I believe it is. 0 license.

It is a core principle, I think through openness and transparency. We simply get better outcomes and it's no different from Tech being open having access to open data is is a vital part of innovation and so I'm really pleased that we are able to Release data, obviously, no personally identifiable information is released. We clean our data sets.

We prepare them in such a way for optimizing utility by everybody in the world. So how does someone engage with you guys in the research? There's plenty of research organizations out there.

There are all plenty of Corporations. What do you want them to do in terms of engaging with the foundation? Well, give us a call.

That's the first step. I am presently creating how to engage with us perspective so that even before the first phone call. organizations or communities who are interested in commissioning a research project can know about our methodology canola better research cycle timelines can consider allocating an appropriate budget for research and aligning with our philosophy and and approach and understanding why the Linux Foundation is a preferred option for open source research today.

I think to date organizations have come to us and said can you do research in this area at the intersection of The microgrid and open source Technologies or you willing to are you willing to explore the carbon footprint of non-fungeable tokens. And in all cases we say yes. Yes, and yes, let's do it.

Every research conversation is a discovery and an opportunity to create value and a knowledge Network and what I love about the process is the extent to which we engage with all facets of the community developers project leaders member organizations regulatory bodies and sometimes members of government or public sector willing to have a conversation with us. When you think about how this project is going to come together and live will the data become and can I throw algorithms at all this data that you're going to kind of create and do some more interesting analytics because the state of analytics keeps involving and the tools are evolving. So, you know, what, can we do with all this data that maybe we didn't think about before some new ideas for thinking about research that are going to be brand new.

Wow. So on the algorithm front, I I would encourage anybody to just play around with the data sets that are available. We use tooling and from a an organization called Market site that is our platform their competitive platforms like Tableau and a few others.

We have had really good success with our data analytics platform and how we are able to clean data and present data and standardize our approaches. But if anybody from the community is interested in sharing their algorithmic approaches to to data analytics that will only make our approaches better. One thing I have seen is as my colleague who leads up our quantitative.

research and methodologies named Steven Hendrick with each analyst he works with in the research process. He learned something new from them about a different technique about a different approach about a different way way to present the data and so we're still learning so bring on those algorithms and share them with us because there's a whole massive data scientists Community. That's keenly interested in all this stuff.

So yeah, maybe they'll become an extension of the whole open source Community as we go along. Have you discovered any biases either negative or positive that we have in the community today that the data may not support or that would surprise us. Yeah, absolutely.

I'm not leading the witness. overcoming bias from Linux Foundation friendly Community communities Is something that's really important and we notice that responses to survey questions are different from survey respondents that come from Linux Foundation mailing lists, for example versus those that come from an outside third party panel provider. so we do like to use survey responses from knowledgeable respondent communities who may not be familiar with Linux Foundation and what's very interesting is to compare those results.

Cool folks, this is Hillary Carter. She's in charge of research at the foundation reach out to her. If you have questions, don't call me because I won't have the answers.

She's the one with all the bright ideas and and the data to back it up. Hey guys, thanks for watching this latest edition, and we'll be back in a few minutes.