This session goes, is about open source. And open source, not just as software, but also as a culture. So I'm working at the Dutch, government.I'm a product owner and a software service officer at Dictu, which is, like, service for technical delivery stuff. This is in Dutch. So but it's, part of the Ministry of Economical Affairs, and it's very nice, nice position to be in because you get to experiment a lot. In my free time, I'm also a board member of the Dutch Troupe Association, and I'm, in the lead of the network of the European Troupe Associations. And for this for this work for this volunteer work, I won a award, last year, the women in football award, which was amazing. You know? I got to go to Barcelona and join on stage, and I got this amazing award from all the people that, that I love and just and, that I look up to.

So that was great. So that's just a little bit of, of my background. Fully immersed in open source. Drupal, community, but I know a lot about open source policies. And, because as a government agency, we have to work with open source software. It's the first choice that you have to make. And this this whole whole lot is about it. And if you buy software, you need to check if it's available at the source, and if so, that's the one. Unless you should choose unless it's their reasons, Russell. So that's my background. And what I've noticed because I work in the government, and the government is pretty closed. And if you want to experiment, most of my colleagues, the first thing they say is, like, no. That's not how we do things. And if you look at the open source community, then they have a very different way of working. There's more trust. There's more transparency. There's more, lower thresholds to enter.

And I figured maybe we can bring that, that open source philosophy back into the paid workforce. And I think that would make our works more inclusive, our decisions more transparent. And this is an example that I've been putting through in my own teams, and it really helps. It helps a lot. So what is open source software? I'm not sure, what you already know about open source software. But it's actually just software that's available for all. So it's a package of code that's online. You can, copy it. You can use it. You can distribute it. You can, do merge requests so you can, make a deduction from it. And it's set up in the ninth eighteen nineties as an alternative for the, for the software that's that's that was developed as more property based closed software, like mine mine mine.

And the open source initiative, thought, like, what if we could make software, freely shareable just like academic research? Like, how much bigger would the tools be if we can just share it freely with each other? That's the start of open source. The belief that collaboration, disparity, and shared knowledge would make better tools. And today, as you know, it even powers the Internet itself. It's from servers to your phone. You you use it maybe even now at the moment. Maybe use Firefox as a browser, which is an open source tool. Maybe use Signal. If you don't use Signal yet, you should start using Signal. It's it's it's powering your phone. It's powering, the docs. There's a lot of open source tools available. It's for free, but, of course, that's not the main, object. That's not the main reason to use it.

But you can, try it out for free and, see if it fits your needs. The open source is everywhere. It's in your home. It's in your work environment. It's in your phone. And why why does it matter? Like, why, why do we, do this? So open source means that, because the code is public, we get more people looking at it. More eyes means more innovation. It's just a very clear path. Like, you get more people contributing to it. You will have more innovation. You will have data security. If there if there's a leak in your code and it's public, then it will be noticed and it will be fixed. And I think people underestimate this, but if you have, a leak in something that's closed, they won't tell you.

So you don't know there's a leak, and it won't maybe it won't get fixed, or or it will take their time to fix. But if it's an open source code, it will only be noticed, but it will also be fixed very, very quickly. So the security level is actually higher for an open source software than a closed software. Of course, you need to look at how big is the community and, how good is it maintained. And those are all very much, records. Those are all ways to to see if open source software is the proper one. But that's what you would do if you buy software anyway. You would check, like, will it be maintained in the future? Will it be available in a year? Who's working on it? When and a security update is coming?

All those things you would look into into even if it's closed or it's open, doesn't matter. You need to know if it's safe. And the the nice thing about open source is also that it doesn't have any vendor login. Because the, code is open, you can just take your product and go to another developer, and they can work with it. So you you're not locked, to long, how do you call it? One organization to give this software to you. And the beauty of Open Source is, of course, that it's community powered. So that's the real magic. It's not just software that's open. It's the culture that's open. And that's what we're going to look into. So let's take this weird Drupal community, for example. So what is Drupal anyway?

It's a concept management system that means that we are building, websites with it or back ends with it for applications. We build a complimentary websites with it, and it's, like, the biggest open source community that I've know. It's, like, 1,000,000 contributors worldwide. It's a global community. It's huge in America. It's in India a lot. And, in Africa, it's, they have a couple of associations. It's just all over the world. It's being used. It's being contributed to, participate. So what does it mean? It means that, the code base is on drupal.org. You can just go there. You can get Drupal working on your system, and you can start building your site. It doesn't cost anything. We have issue queues where people can contribute, where people can, create merge requests for code or documents. You get credits if you do so. There are public road maps.

They're open source. They're open Slack meetings. They're, documents that we do, in a collaborative manner. We've got mentorships, all that kind of stuff. It's all part of the open source culture. ABC. So yes. Here we go. I wanna talk about this one. I wanna show you what it can do, what open source can do if you put it in in a organizational perspective. So what happened is, this is the start of a network of European Drupal Association, which is, at the moment, a very quite a powerful network, that's going into a European association institution. We're looking into a federation for Drupal, globally. So it's become a pretty big vehicle for, no, for for for networking, for, collaborate collaboration, for growth, for Drupal, but also for the people in it.

It started very small. It started in 02/2022. I went to DrupalCon in Prague. And this is a a Drupal conference. I I want a ticket to it, actually, so that's why I was there. And I was just wandering around, and there was a meeting for the local Drupal associations. So every country can have an association if they want. If there are people in that country that's setting up an association, that's possible. And they had a meeting, and I was like, you know, let's go there. So I went in, and it was fine. And they were like, oh, what you doing here? Oh, you find it interesting. That's fine. So I joined the conversation. I joined the discussion. And afterwards, I joined their Slack channel.

And during the meeting, it was clear that they actually wanted to, meet up more regularly, not just once a year, but more regularly. But afterwards, I noticed that nothing happened. So we got this group of people. Every country has their association. They want to work together, and they they just didn't do it. And I was like, I need to, you know, I need to find a way to do this, though. So I went online, looked for all these, local people groups, put them all in one big list, and set up a, Teams meeting, like, let's start talking. And, it just grows from there to every month we sit together and we have discussions. We have, meetings. We have a booth at the Drupal comm coming up.

We have, a website that we are sharing now. We have a marketing team. We have a content team. So it's it's just because I was I was like, there's a need. Nobody's doing it. I can do it. Like, I didn't need to ask permission. Maybe I did, but I didn't do it. But I didn't need to ask permission. There was nobody to, you know, to guide or to how do you call it? There's it was just you see something that needs to be done. And because it's open source, you can just do it. And if it's it's it'll get traction, that's then you have then you have the first network for the European associations. And there's a lot of initiatives in the open source community that start like this.

Like, you've got a good idea, if you like to open Drupal human is the same, and, Open University Drupal. I I called the Drupal Open University initiative. They started last year. There were three people doing Drupal called error. Like, we want to have, the education. We want to have a, we want to have a proper educational line for Drupal, for universities, for, colleagues, for, for the workforce, and they just started setting it up. And this initiative is now, like, a 100 people big worldwide, and they are doing a group in a day event, and they are teaching students, and they're gonna have they're gonna publish all their materials on the on GitHub and to share with the world for for free, for open. That's how it can go. So that's just just I and I can't imagine doing this in my own organization in Dutch government because if we if I want to do a network in the government, then I would ask permission, and then I would get, an o.

Mhmm. And then I would just you know, I would have to start lobbying and and dragging it around and asking people to back me up and stuff like that. And because this is open source, I could just do it. And if people were attending, then that's your success. I love it. So that's how it can work. And some of the tools that they use, that are tools, actually pre stimulate the attendance of, people that normally don't talk much or that normally don't get heard much. So we have OpenStack meetings that you can use. And this is a very nice tool because you know, if you got if you're in a meeting and you're a woman or you're from, from another group that's not represented well, You get, you don't get hurt that much. There's even been research that women get interrupted, like, 50% more during meetings. And this is one of the ways we can, which which can help. It is online.

It's asynchronous, so everybody can join the conversation when they have time. So this is perfect for global contributors, for global meetings. And as you can see, what we do is it's chat only. It's in Slack, but you can do this on you could do it also in Microsoft Teams, whatever. They've got a couple of rules. You can, post anonymously if you want by, put putting in an emoy. And then we have an agenda, and we always start with the introduction by putting in your name, your username, and, an icebreaker. And we always close with open floor so everybody can, can put in their topics that they want that they need. So this is this and that's it's very helpful. It's it's, yeah, it means that if you're if you don't talk much in meeting because, I don't know, maybe you're shy or introvert, These tools are gonna help you.

And this one is another one, collaborative documents. Like, normally, I worked at the university before this, and we would have one person doing the notes from the meeting. And it will be their perspective, and it will be the voices that they heard and that they consider important. But if you do it on a collaborate docs, and it can be, Google docs. Everybody knows Google docs probably. You can simultaneously join one document and write in it. So while the meeting is going, you can just type whatever you think is necessary, and you can give each other credits for it. You can comment on each other. And this is a great way to keep the engagement and to keep the, hierarchy flat. So this is a that is a very nice way to do this. Another tool that you can use is, very plainly, just publish what you've decided and why you've decided these things.

So publish your documents, publish your road map, publish your, I don't know, your code of conduct. If you do it on GitHub, then you can also ask people to put in merge request if they want to have something added or if they want to change something. And then you you you still have the, means to to, give the okay or to deny this merge request. So you you have a living in document that you that's that's gonna grow and it's gonna be carried by everybody. So I I would propose these tools to consider it and to use it in your organization in one way or another. I'm pretty sure you all probably work with some board of, a Kanban board or for an agile board. Maybe you've used Jira or, you know, Trello or whatever.

It looks like this. And it's very nice. Mostly, it's being used by just one team and just that team can look at it. But this board is actually from GitHub, and this is public road map. So everybody can see their road map. I'm not part of Twitter, but I've got access to this road map. I can look at it. I can see what they're working on. I can see what their progress is, and I can see, their timeline. It's great. This is no. This is transparency at at at the most. This is what you want. This is this is how people in your in your lower reaches of the organization, and they're gonna like, what I've been doing is for there's a road and there's a vision.

And, I think if you can share it publicly, that's gonna help with the engagement in your organization. So this is your starter kit. Open up your notes. Open up your decisions. Try this asynchronous, meetings, especially if you're, in an organization that has multiple people in different time zones. Always invite feedback and always recognize, contributions. And so if people put in the effort, all you need to do is just give them credit for it. The h tener. So, I think, I need to close-up. So this is what I've learned from the from the open source community. I think that as, you know, as women in tech, we can be the model and we can lead a change because open source is not it's just a it's not just a code. It's about inclusion. You know? It's about building organization and open a software that we use and that we trust.

So I hope that this was a bit helpful, and I hope that maybe you've got some questions. And if so, please put it in the chat. Or, if you find a way to talk, that would be great.