Scratching the itch
As the open source community mobilised to support the response to COVID-19, OpenTechResponse developed a brand-new tool that has helped coordinate and focus efforts. Now, they’re hoping the tool will be at the forefront of all future global disaster responses.
There’s no better way of describing the traditional ethos behind the open source movement than using the ‘itch-to-scratch’ analogy, coined by Eric S. Raymond in his 1997 essay ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’.
In that text, Raymond, a former president of the Open Source Initiative, lists the first of 19 “lessons” he identified for creating open source software as: “Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.”
But what if the itch was global? What if the world became engulfed in a pandemic, leaving talented individuals around the globe at a loss as to how they could help?
Step forward OpenTechResponse, which was launched to provide the scratch for that global itch with its new matchmaking tool.
At its heart, OpenTechResponse (OTR) is a collaboration initiative with the goal of removing silos across open projects, whether software, hardware or data. It helps likeminded people find each other, improves communication between them and brings together projects with volunteers who want to help.
OTR facilitates that overarching purpose by using, building and developing tools, and the innovative matchmaking tool it has launched provides a simple and user-friendly way for projects to collaborate in response to not only COVID-19, but any disaster situation. The team behind it are now putting out a call to action for projects and volunteers to jump onboard with the new tool.
As you would expect from a project of this ilk, a huge spread of expert contributors have been involved across the globe, and the idea sprung from a phone call between the CEO of nonprofit organisation OpenUK, Amanda Brock, and a group of other big-hitters in the open source community. These included Danese Cooper, who is now president at the InnerSource Commons Foundation, along with Jacob Green, founder of Mosslabs.io, a nonprofit which grew out of John Hopkins University — the nucleus of academic medical research in the United States which, notably, is also the source of the extensively-used COVID-19 data dashboard.
Together, they discussed the rapid responses they had seen from the open communities across the globe to the pandemic. They also identified a common problem: multiple projects were springing up in isolation, without coordination, doing the same thing — essentially, many teams were going off to scratch the same itches rather than working together.
Green, an expert in bringing interdisciplinary teams together, spun up a Slack channel to facilitate information exchange between projects and collaborators to help make them aware of each other. As he did that, Brock started reaching out to potential contributors and within a couple of days over 150 people were on the channel sharing projects, breaking down those silos, reducing proliferation. Additionally, the new environment also offered the opportunity for projects to request help from others with specific areas of expertise they needed — anything from software or hardware development to creating documentation and translation or governance.
“The open source movement is made up of people who I believe want to make the best software or hardware in the world,” says former lawyer Brock, a thought leader who writes and speaks prolifically on open source topics. “They’re very focused on fixing issues through that and collaboration, so they’re used to working with people in open projects, both on their own time and through their businesses and employment.
“The nature of people who want to collaborate in this way is such that they want to do what is perceived — by them at least – as ‘the right thing’. Given that, we were completely unsurprised to see a huge, huge volume of responses.”
Due to the level of need and the volume and quality of responses, the requirement was there to have a more efficient means of connecting projects and volunteers. One of the companies Brock reached out to was OpenTeams, whose purpose is to make engagement easier for companies who provide services, software and training around open source and try to better support the whole open source ecosystem.
David Charboneau, OpenTeams co-founder and CTO, described receiving Brock’s approach looking for a matchmaking tool as feeling like “a breath of fresh air” and says: “We recognised immediately the value of what they were proposing and we were just really excited. It seemed like such a great opportunity to help out and it felt like we actually had something of value to provide.
“We’ve got 20,000 people on the [OpenTeams] platform already and we’re trying to grow it further and we’re building up skills profiles — so we’ve got the people with the skills and the data, as well as the projects and the infrastructure. It was just a case of connecting them together in a way that people can say ‘I want to volunteer’ and projects and organisations can say ‘we need volunteers’.
“We were very sensitive to the community’s need to have open source alternatives to Slack for interaction, so we set up some Element [previously Riot.im] discussion channels which were bridged with Slack. We went to Helpy.io for a help desk and we reached out to Discourse.org to set up a discussion area. Then, from that, there’s a core of four-to-six of us that meet twice a week.
“We started discussing ‘what is a tool that would be really helpful to the community?’ and that’s what got the matchmaking tool underway; discussions around what the community culturally needs. OpenTechResponse isn’t performing any specific response, we’re building a tool to support those responses.”
A small development team working out of OpenTeams’ partner company Quansight, each of whom Charboneau was keen to individually express his gratitude to, then worked quickly to put together an initial implementation of the tool to roll out.
Two different flows are built in depending on which side you’re approaching things from. The volunteer flow allows individuals to make their skills known and declare themselves available, which is then reflected with a ‘raised hand’ badge on their profile to make them visible to projects. The project flow, on the other hand, allows for those managing one to build a profile and describe what they need, with the facility to put out as many calls for volunteers as and when they need to. Given the rush to release OTR in response to the pandemic, Charboneau says he doesn’t have any concerns over how robust the current version of the product is.
“I feel good that we have the ability to do the matches and connect people with projects that need their skills — and connect projects who have people with the skills they need,” he says. “If you need hardware skills, or software skills, management skills, you can put these out to as many people as you need to — but all within one greater project. It’s a little bit of an early iteration and I think we’ve got a long way to go but I think we’re good enough to use right now, although I want to make a lot of improvements over time; I’m never satisfied!”
With a plethora of individuals sharing that same tireless attitude and working collectively to ensure this tool is a success, the potential of OpenTechResponse seems boundless.
Patrick McFadin, VP of Developer Relations at DataStax and another one of the volunteers, shares that vision. Again, his involvement was a product of Brock’s call to action and it was he who saw the potential for the project to respond not just to the COVID-19 pandemic but any potential disaster across the world.
“Whenever something terrible happens there are a whole lot of people in tech — and this is in hardware, software, you name it, even in biomedical [science] now — that are left feeling helpless,” McFadin, a self-professed ‘open-source zealot’, says. “People who are like, ‘I have knowledge and I don’t know where to put it. I want to do something besides offer my opinion on Facebook or Twitter’. Whenever we watch a tsunami, for example, on the news, and you see a bunch of helpless people, what do you do? Do you donate money? A lot of people just want to put their hands to something.
“Tapping into that group of people and giving them something that lets them do that is really the key. It’s helping respond to a disaster, but it’s also giving people an outlet, a purpose. It’s the emotion of ‘wow, I could actually do something’. This is an opportunity for us to create a different kind of feeling in the world instead of keeping it hyperlocal. I’m not filling sandbags to stop flooding around my house. I could actually help somebody in Indonesia, or in Africa, or in Italy. If that sense of community is really popular, or it feels very purposeful, that’s very exciting.”
Although McFadin’s involvement, by his own admission, has been as more of an advisor at this stage, his experience with databases — particularly as an early adopter of Apache Cassandra — means his role may become greater as the number of volunteers and projects grows.
He hopes OpenTechResponse will become the first port of call for anyone wishing to volunteer their skills when responding to a crisis. He is adamant there is a huge network of highly-skilled individuals waiting for the kind of opportunity this tool will help develop by allowing projects to come together and coordinate overall disaster responses cohesively and effectively.
“The potential applications, that’s the most exciting part,” he says. “What we’re trying to do is create a place where those ideas which need to happen when they need to happen, will. Or, at least, we give them a chance.
“There are now over 20 million software developers in the world, this is the fastest-growing field right now, probably ever, and it’s because we’re building the future. Why wouldn’t we tap into that massive reservoir of incredible knowledge?
“I want this to become part of, or become the first thing, that’s thought about in terms of how the world responds to any disaster or crisis. I’m passionate about open source because I think things are better when people do them together. My colleague Sam Ramji has this great quote [citing an old proverb] where he says: ‘To go fast, go alone. To go far, go together’.
“That sums up exactly what we’re aiming to do here.”
