Keynote: Trusted process comes from empowered people -- building trust with Open Collaborations
Channel: Open Source Program Office, UC Santa Cruz
Date: 2022-10-06

Karsten Wade, Principal Community Architect, RedHat

About the Speaker: 

Karsten Wade has worked at Red Hat since 2001 and is a 21 year IT industry professional. He worked previously as a Fedora Project contributor and general open source iconoclast. He is also a CentOS Project board member. As a member of the industry leading community leadership team at Red Hat, he has seen, done, and recovered from many open community mistakes. Through mistakes, learning; through learning, advancement. By teaching and learning with others, we improve the fabric of all open source communities.

Talk Description:

Let's talk about how we help empower individuals to create things we trust deeply ... without ever knowing or trusting the individuals themselves.

Rapid innovation brings new tools and methods, which come with amazing constructive and — eventually — destructive use. The printing press lead to the Renaissance, Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific revolution. But it also gave ink to just as many evil ideas as good ones, and gave scalability to the adage of the pen and the sword.

Standing here, 25 years since the coining of the term "Open Source", it's clear the benefits of Open Collaborations and Open Source in particular have been far reaching. The additional risks to society have been far reaching, too. In recent years, discussion and some work has been done toward making Open Source projects more secure and sustainable. Part of making Open Source projects more secure is to focus on trusting the process, not the people. But how can this focus also make projects more sustainable?

Start by asking:  What does it take to attract and cultivate people to work in Open Collaborations and create such trusted processes?

Unsurprisingly, we're already doing it — it's what happens in schools and Universities every day, it's how organizations from the Scouts to the Military create and iterate on leadership, and it's how community caretakers and stewards have been doing it all along in communities before and far beyond Open Source.

This talk explores some of the range of ways we grow and empower people so they are in the best position to create and sustain trusted processes we all can rely upon. You will be encouraged to look for and share these connections with those you mentor around Open Source, so you can take part in the community caretaking that is the first and most important step in Open Source community stewardship.