Oliver Drotbohm – Connecting Open Source Projects with Public Institutions #FOSSBack

This talk explores the relationship between open source projects and public institutions, focusing on collaboration and software development. The speaker, a member of the Spring Framework team, highlights how public institutions often use open source technologies like Spring, but there is a lack of communication and discovery between these entities. He discusses the challenges faced in identifying who is using which technologies and how institutions can better learn from one another. The speaker suggests ways to improve collaboration, such as sharing idiomatic usage practices and fostering communication among institutions using similar frameworks. He also mentions programs like the open source sabbatical in Munich, which allows employees to contribute back to projects, emphasizing the potential for a more institutionalized exchange of ideas and resources in the public sector.

I would just like to spend the next 5 minutes to talk about the open source project and public institutions and the relationships between those. And when we talk about open source in public institutions, we usually learn about or we talk about applications they use, right? How they move from Microsoft to something like Open Cloud or what have you. But we rarely talk about the software that they

actually build and the open source components that they use when building that software that software, right? And as it turns out, I'm a member of the team that builds or that yeah, that builds a a component that's widely used all across the globe, the Spring Framework. I'm not sure if anyone has heard of that. It's a Java application framework. So every company that's using Java is kind

of or assumingly using Spring. And it's not companies and not only companies, it's also public institutions in Germany. And when those public institutions are customers of the company that I work for, we sometimes get into collaboration with those engineering teams at those public institutions. For example, I've just like talked outside to Klaus from the open source office in Munich. So we there's a commercial relationship between them

and again the company I work for, but um And we do quite a lot of stuff like in terms of presenting road maps, learning what they do, reviewing their code base, for example, for idiomatic usage. And I asked myself like why does it have to be such a like a one-to-one relationship? Because for one, it's like tedious or effortful for us as open source project, basically abstracting

from the concrete Spring thing here, for the open source projects to find out about public institutions actually making use of us. And on the other hand, why is it so hard for the for the public institutions that are usually not like browsing GitHub for cool components to get in exchange with other public institutions to learn from them how they actually use the software. And um uh yeah,

what what they can learn from each other basically using open source software in their the software they write. So, it's for one it's the discovery aspect, right? So, who's using what? I don't I just occasionally learn from someone else presenting on I don't know the GLOSA project, for example, something in the health department of the city of Frankfurt. Uh oh, there's an some Git repo somewhere. I

just go there, look at it, and find out, "Oh, they're using Spring." And I can uh get in touch with them, basically find out what they what they do, what they want to do, find some issues they might have run into or what have you, help them basically in just some um immediate way. Um and on the other hand, for the for the uh public institutions, how

did they how do they find out who to talk to when they're using React, when they're using Spring, when they're using Django, what have you, right? So, that would be something that okay, we could improve on. for the open source projects, it's interesting to see what they um uh what what others do with them, right? Whether like what kind of software is actually built with these projects.

Um for the project for the institutions, it could be very interesting to learn about the idiomatic usage. Maybe we've just like not the most We don't have the most experienced developers, so it might be uh helpful to get the insight from us who have seen a lot of other companies and institutions using our software to basically recommend them, "Oh, you should build it that way, or you

should build it this way." The institutions could learn from each other, right? We've built server applications with technology X. You're planning to do that as well. Let's talk to each other. Um and there's also like the the other kind of in the in the other direction basically. The city of Munich has an open source sabbatical program where they allow their employees to work on open source software

for a period of time and basically contribute back features that they want to see in the open source projects and what have you. What it's basically about is deepening the relationship between the projects that we probably have a lot of contributors here or maintainers and all we probably also have members of these kinds of institutions and I would love to yeah, find some way to institutionalize that

kind of exchange. I'm not sure whether senders might be the a good a good starting point for that, but they already host a lot of code that these institutions make public and I'm pretty sure that in other um open source projects there's similar interest to help and reach out and connect just to to yeah, move the public sector forward especially here in Germany. So, I'll be around

today and tomorrow. So, I'm the short guy with a hat. If that's not enough to find me, there's this masterdon thing. Thank you very much.