Season 3 - Ep. 8 - CHAOSS w/ Matt Germonprez and Sean Goggins

Transcript

welcome to the green pill. network podcast if you're just joining us we are building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers using crypto to bring positive sum digital systems to the world this podcast features the people who are doing it and we publish a season of episodes every five to 10 episodes every couple months this season is impact season how can we manifest the meme of impact equals profit what are the most interesting experience expent in Impact tracking how can we build cryptoeconomic systems that elevate impactful Builders these are the themes of green pill impact season 2024 one special thing we are doing this season is allowing you to collect this episode all of the episodes during this season are available on chain you can go to pods. medgreen pill

to find the episodes and start collecting you can also go to green pill. Network where you can download the green pill book for free join the Discord and become a member of your local green pill. Network chapter today we are talking to Matt German prey and Sean goggin Matt is the Mutual of Omaha distinguished chair of information science and technology and professor of information systems and quantitative analysis in the College of information Science and Technology at University of Nebraska Omaha he uses qualitative field studies to research organizational engagement with open communities and the Dynamics of work found in these engagements he is also the co-founder of the Linux Foundation Community Health

analytics OSS projects uh the syn the the acronym there is chaos uh and that is going to be the primary thing that we talk about with him on this episode is Community Health and analytics for open source projects we are also uh joined by a board member of the chaos project son gogins who is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Missouri this episode I think is a fun episode because we are talking about traditional open- Source software the Linux foundation and the Linux ecosystem and how they think about Community Health analytics and this is a really fun episode because my co-host Carl is working on OS Observer which is

a project that is doing analytics for web 3 open- source project all right what you think of this episode Carl I thought it was was really cool to hear about all of the different ways that they've tried to track both the health of Open Source projects the ecosystem impact the way that they've tried to actually motivate new contributors there's some really powerful metrics that they've come across and so selfishly I'm quite excited to try some of those out in the metrics that we're tracking for open source Observer yeah this felt like the most Carl episode that we've done it felt like there was just this like mirror between the chaos project which is tracking metrics of contributor retention and all these metrics associated with you call them traces in

web you and what you're doing with OS observer in web 3 so it was real fun to to sit back and and to have you interview them because I know that you both have such deep understanding of the data of Open Source projects I just feel there's so much that we can learn between what they've done and the types of things that they're trying to do in the future and some of the problems that we're coming at with fresh perspectives but hopefully some some new tools that can really leave just crypto funing crypto and help fund more digital public hoods everywhere internet yeah well is there anything you think listeners should be listening for as they go into this episode with Matt and Sean uh the only thing I'd ask is that people actually take some time to check out the chaos website hopefully we can include

some links to the to the landing page there explore some of the metrics see some of the ways that they're trying to measure the health of Open Source software projects if anyone's interested in that type of thing I think chaos is an incredible resource yeah for sure so uh there's a link in the show notes but uh c h a o OSS S.C Community is is the website so Community Health analytics in open source software good good meme strong meme game uh for chaos so that's where you can check out the website Al righty well without further Ado we give you Matt and Sean of chaos okay hey Matt hey Sean how you doing good nice to be here good great to be here to have you and of course you've got my co-host Carl what's up Carl hey

everyone great to be here all right Carl we've done a couple episodes together so I'm going to give you the first question on this episode go ahead all right so we're joined by um Sean and Matt from the chaos community and I think it'd be great just to begin by understanding a little bit more about what chaos stands for the history of the organization and where the community is today sure I can take a first pass at that so the chaos project it stands for Community Health analytics open-source software uh the project has been around for probably about seven or eight years uh started as a Linux Foundation project so kind of the the start of the project was a birds of a feather session at uh Linux

Foundation conference in Tahoe where we just kind of went down to the basement and we wondering if if any company had any interest in the health of the open source projects that they rely on and health in this case meaning you know if a if a project fails uh that's usually pretty bad for a company and so just trying to get some insight as to how long a project may be around or how how healthier it is or how toxic it may be whatever whatever Insight it is that you're looking for this birds of a feather session I'd say probably about 50 people showed up from a variety of different uh large it companies so we realized that this was a real issue for

a lot of people um so we started the project uh you know kind of at at the LF uh we've been supported by the Alfred Sloan Foundation since the start of the project as well and I think really the hope there is to understand how we can support critical digital infrastructure that we all rely on because again you know if it if that infrastructure fails in any way that can have cascading effects Downstream for a lot of people Sean you want to add anything I I think when we talk about that critical digital infrastructure and I contrast it with some of the topics that are going to be discussed here in a minute I I think one thing to note is that the Linux Foundation is largely composed of

companies who write software and deploy technology and resell it even if it's developed under an open source umbrella so what is critical in that context is fairly clear to all the people involved and that I think might be a little bit distinguishable or a distinct characteristic of the Linux foundation's scope compared to the things that uh you all might be concerned about and based on some of the lessons that you had prior to starting chaos why were projects failing what were some of the warning signs and some of the things you're trying to identify I guess we'll send that one to Sean yeah I I don't know that there were a ton of projects that were failing I think it's more accurate to say that a lot of companies

were investing a lot in open source without having a clear and consistent way of measuring it so basic things like how do we count commits were not agreed upon across the Linux Foundation universe and one of the first things that we did is create what I would call a taxonomy of basic things that are used in the development of Open Source software issues commits pull requests and defining how to measure those things and and through those measurements I think companies are now able to look at open- source projects and evaluate their comparative Health in the context where they use those projects or contribute to them in a way that wasn't possible seven

or eight years ago Sean makes a fair point that it's not about necessarily a project that just fails and vanishes and has gone forever uh it it may be a a failure uh in the security of an upstream project that is being relied on an incompatibility and and Licensing of an upstream project that's being relied on I think over time you know organizations are interested in projects where they can have um you know strategic impact on that project in the Upstream for uh for reasons that it's easier to work in the Upstream than it is to work after there

a release has been done and then incorporate that release into into your product so so organizations want to have insight into into the communities that they're participating with for a variety of reasons one which may be critical Upstream failures another which may be organizational influence or strategic influence so I think Sean brings up some real good points I was checking out the metrics that you have and some of them had really evocative names like the elephant metric and the project burnout metric and it sounds like these are really looking for ways of identifying what could be either critical people or things that might signal there being some risk Upstream uh I'm i' love to hear a little bit about like how those

metrics might be used in the real world and uh what what they yeah what are some of the the signs that people that are dependent on these things Upstream might might do should they see certain things that are worrying so I think the elephant factor is a good one and just know that we did not invent these terms so elephant factor is an indication of how many organizations are contributing 50% of the code so if you have one organization that's contributing more than half the code that really indicates that project is heavily dependent on one organization and if I'm making Investments I look at that as a risk so many years ago before my time on Earth I believe uh someone came up with elephant

Factor as a way of describing that and we simply defined a common way of calculating it in terms of project contributions so you'd want to see like you do on very active projects you know dozens or hundreds of organizations making contributions that total to 50% similarly with what we call the bus Factor that's how many developers individually it's the same thing but for individuals and we created standards for that and I think for those metrics they are they are pretty useful because first blush if it's dependent on a small group of people or a small set of organizations you probably are going to decide to be cautious about investing in that project compared to one that has a

lot of uptake yeah so I guess what I'm saying is that you have a mix of these indicators that you're able to track almost passively so as long as you're able to see the GitHub repos or the org that is maintaining these um you know is is coordinating the the contributors you're able to to measure these things without needing to ask anything of the of the contributors I also noticed there are some metrics that you're tracking which require people to take surveys or to do pulse checks as another way of looking at how things are going so I'm curious how you combine these two data sets and if there's kind of One Direction that you're trying to lean more in in the future when it comes to Gathering these types of health indicators yeah that's a that's a good question so uh we you correct we we do have uh kind

of two sets of metrics that fall down the path that you're talking about so we certainly do have metrics that are informed from Trace data that you can get from places like GitHub and gitlab and they can speak to things around you know Community engagement they can speak to things like what we were talking about before like elephant Factor you can see those things there are other metrics that are uh certainly harder to obtain via Trace data so it it maybe for example how how effective or how thoughtful is your community on providing paths to leadership so as an organization there may be times where you would like to have a position in

leadership in a community to help steer the direction of that Community but if the paths to leadership don't exist within the community it's it's difficult to to have those strategic influences within that Community or to have that strategic influence so things like path to leadership may have to be discerned through a little bit uh more personal approach with a with a community than could be obtained through Trace data um so how they go together is a is a good question uh I I don't I don't know how many times we have really drawn Drawn Together two these two different types of data into a into a single view as

part of chaos we have started to develop metric models and so each metric by itself may not be that relevant so for example uh the age of an issue or the first response to an issue that metric alone may not be that important but community may Community responsive may be what you're looking for so in this case responsiveness would be a metric model that would uh that would be constructed through a variety of different metrics that are all attending to responsiveness so issue responsiveness could be one of the metrics in that model PR responsiveness could be another one slack

responsiveness could be another so there are ways that we can kind of build these up and I I would guess to your question that there are metrics models that would benefit from both a a quantitative and a qualitative look at the data available to us and I I would add that when we look at the things that require surveys I think not in all cases but I think in many cases the chaos project is helping other open- source projects reflect on how they're interacting with the rest of the contributor or developer universe and the questions that get asked in those surveys I think force a reflection that leads to projects better drawing more people in so if I am more responsive to Matt's example as a

project it's well known that if I'm responsive people are more likely to stick around and that leads to activity that's easily measured in all of the different Trace data derived metrics so in most cases the trace data derived metrics are kind of telling us what's happening and I think in many cases the surveys and programmatic metrics are helping to help projects shape themselves to be uh more Adept at drawing people in to contribute uh Carl I keep coming up with a a question in my mind but then I realized that you're doing OS Observer and you have you're like the web three reflection to a lot of this work that's happening at LX

foundation so uh why don't you take the next one as well all right um well that that brought up a lot of thoughts with when you're describing kind of the getting the right balance of of data that can come from traces as well as trying to get the community to start self-reporting some of these other leading indicators one of the things that we're working on a lot in the context of the ethereum ecosystem is trying to decentralize some of the impact measurement so it's one thing if projects are self-reporting it's another thing if there's someone who could be looking across the ecosystem and trying to apply the same metrics or apply the same survey approaches across a suite of projects it's another thing if anybody be it a contributor a user someone who's impacted by one of these digital public goods is also able to have some voice

and so trying to create that mesh network of all of these different forms of impact attestation and then at the same time create people who are going to be interested in analyzing that data and looking for meaning that's one of the big problems that that we're trying to solve right here are there any things that that you've done here um where you've been trying to expand the types of contributions and ways that people can measure impact Analyze That impact and ideally try and create greater greater meaning from it one one thing that I think the chaos project does well is help to measure that impact after the fact and guide projects to to do better in those antecedent things so have we

done case studies following from beginning to end I think from the perspective of the chaos project in a classic software metaphor of eating your own dog food uh we did a reflection on how do we become a more inclusive project and draw in people from different parts of the world and as we started that we started to engage with uh an organization that emerged in Africa called chaos Africa now which has been with us I think close to two years and by reflecting on our own inclusivity and and how we draw participation in from around the world we happen to run into I think to some extent by accident some really great people uh in the chaos Africa community who really created this

entirely new branch of chaos and has contributed significantly to the growth of the chaos project itself so some of of what we've learned by reflecting on our own activity is that when you do that also be listening for the opportunities to engage with new groups because they probably won't come from where you imagined that they would I I don't think we would have ever thought that chaos Africa would become as big of a part of our community as it has become and I think part of it is that reflection that we did and part of it is being open to what really happened and who really came as opposed to having any preset notion of how that how that was

going to occur I'll make a comment here to Carl um so I think one of the things that that you raise in metrics is something that we've kind of seen over the the last couple years which is there are there are metrics that can kind of provide a it's almost a a retrospective look on the community so when you're looking at Trace data you're looking at historical data uh and you're you're seeing what has been in the community and there are great things that you can understand about that uh you know some of the efforts that we've been focused on more recently uh are putting metrics in front of people to ask them to reflect on them where we have no re real measure of

success or not success that can be defined by the individuals in the community and so even just later later this week we're going to be releasing a project badging initiative where we ask communities to include uh dei. MD file that asks the communities to reflect on four chaos metrics so it's really it's it's different than looking at it historically and it's really trying to put a reflection on these metrics out in front of people uh and it's interesting because a lot of those metrics are ones that we can't measure through Trace data and the the evaluation of those metrics is meant to come from the community members themselves so if a community

puts forward a response to these four particular metrics and the community doesn't agree that that's how they're actually approaching them a conversation can occur there and it's not really our responsibility to to sort that out but our goal is to really get people to reflect on these metrics within their own community so it's an interesting question you brought up you brought up Community there and one of the big challenges that we space that we we find in the space is is trying to determine what are the boundaries of of a community and how to get people to show up and convene and be net positive to the to to the conversations that you want to have and that affect the stakeholders how have you gone about shaping your community and what are the

different touch points that you have for engaging the right people sure uh commun Community is hard people are very difficult and so building community is is a real challenge so uh I definitely hear you on that uh you know a couple things we do have uh through the Sloan Foundation we have been able to hire a community manager Elizabeth Baron who has helped really kind of organize the work around community and Community growth and Community Management so we've been real lucky in that regard I think some of the things that that we find is to continue to push our conversations out into the open it's really easy easy to back Channel conversations which

isn't a real good Community strategy um we continue to focus on the newcomer experience we have found that there are simply a lot of people who want to be involved in a particular large domain whether it's a crypto or whether it's open source or whatever it might be they just want to be involved and sometimes chaos can simply serve as an opportunity to get involved in that but sometimes people's interest is not necessarily in open source Community Health as our specific niche in the chaos project but they're just interested in open source in general so providing a a path for that so I think those are really important characteristics for us from a community perspective and I'll also

point out and then I'll turn it over to Shan but Sean had pointed out uh using Trace data to understand second contributions as a real important indicator of kind of stickiness or people sticking around your community onetime contributions are great um but they're not necessarily real indicative of your community overall and I I certainly agree with with that I think that um as we talk about you know building that Community the second contribution that a person makes is the first signal that you're getting some of what Matt described as that stickiness and knowing what your uptake is and being able to compare that to other projects that you're familiar with from either an ecosystem perspective where

you look at the full uh stack of all the things that you need to deploy and you can look across all the different projects in that stack to see where things are most sticky and possibly try to learn from those projects you can also look at it from a competitive perspective which some people do where if I can identify the five or six projects in a particular technology space doing a comparison of that that second contributor or the second contribution is a good way of kind of understanding in the relative uptake of new contributors I I think it's also useful to point out that like some of the biggest projects in open source Linux Foundation today like the Linux uh the kubernetes project it started as a project inside of Google and then they

open sourced it and making it a community project was really important because having buyin from across that technology space into this tool that or this piece of infrastructure that everyone needed was important for its success I think there are other examples of projects that use maybe a less Community oriented approach and have a a more controlled set of core contributors that are technically you know sustained and successful so I think Community Development is really critical at some some scale where you want to include lots of people because you recognize that all those perspectives are essential to your success I think there are other kinds of uh more narrow Technologies or technologies that

perhaps aren't as part of of as much a part of a core infrastructure as they are sort of a niche in the stack that that can survive with smaller groups of contributors yeah I'll just add one thing so I think it's important to note too that not all communities need to be big so yeah there's this there's this belief that that you need to continue to grow the contributor base you need to have more people uh so just kind of keep that in mind just find that right balance on on what is a good contributor group for you and then Foster that that group the best that you can yeah the larger the group of people you're trying to sustain the more work goes into sustaining it yeah um I'd love to actually put Kevin on the spot here and

ask you to share a little bit about some of your experiences uh getting getting communities to form around different projects and how things change when when funding is added to the mix yeah for sure um well you know I think that gitcoin has done a good job from the start of focusing people people on funding open source software which is always kind of our white whale and the why before before the what and and I think that that's been sort of a strong mimetic attractor to people but you know when you start introducing extrinsic rewards there's a lot of psychological studies that show that uh when you start rewarding people then it changes their incentives and what's the

meme about good Hearts law is that once a measure becomes a Target it ceases to become a good measure so I think we've seen a of that in in crypto and um you know I'll be curious uh to to put to put you back in the uh in the guest seat for a sec Carl what you have you observed with OS Observer which uh I'm hearing a lot of common themes uh between chaos and and O Observer right here what what is your reaction I mean right now we're still at the very early stages of trying to figure out what type of community we want to attract on the one hand I think much like chaos we want there to be a desire for projects to participate and that they actually see benefit in having their be comparable metrics and then in

our case we're also looking to provide a a funding lens so not only looking at the work that is happening but also trying to understand who is funding that work and over time if people are pulling funds together or there's one funer that is funding a set of projects over recurring on recurring basis then over time you can actually start to measure the impact or why you can see is this actually having a bigger impact than if you were to just fund every project with the same amount of money or just do one big lumpsum Grant to one particular project so those are some of the things that we're intellectually interested in when it comes to building the the community as I said before we want projects we want funders to participate but we also want to get people who are

going to explore the data and come up with their own metrics come up with their own models come up with their own reports and narratives around the data right now it's very small it's just a few people uh mostly just working because they find the problem space interesting but we're trying right now to to grow that organically and put together a group of people that are actually going to be quite motivated to combine these two data sets and bring in their own ones I have a comment and it just comes from this conversation so I agree that providing funding to an open source project just kind of at large is not the easiest thing to do um the the challenge comes from understanding how that money will be spent uh who will

receive the funds how long those funds will go uh an equity of work what whatever the issue might be and it I have no idea if if this would go anywhere but you know I don't really ever see open source Community signaling their ability to handle money like they don't signal they handle it well or they don't what happens to it highly variable to be honest with you that how one Community would handle a lumpsum payment would be quite different than how a different Community would handle that same amount of money uh and it just makes me wonder if there's if there's any need for asking communities to Signal how how they would how they would

approach how they would approach funds I just I I actually don't know that I see that really at all or ever in open source money and I think there are these different dimensions there different kinds of Open Source the Linux Foundation is heavily corporatized and so the contributions are companies giving money to the Linux Foundation which is an industry advocacy group and then also contributing developers that these companies pay to the maintenance of these projects it sounds like in crypto there isn't this corporatized Dimension where organizations are contributing paid developers to the project am I am I sort of jumping too far ahead it's a whole mix of things yeah why don't you describe the

landscape Kevin yeah I mean I guess the most flowery way I can describe it as a plurality of approaches and there's some cases in which all the developers are employed full-time by an organization there's sometimes in which it's all volunteers and then there's sometimes in which a project has been working for free for several years and then they're retroactively dropped uh a million dollars worth of tokens and they have to figure out how to distribute them amongst their Community which can create governance problems and I'm using governance as a very highle umbrella for the types of conversations that can happen there and um i' say that in traditional open source and it's been a while since I've done any traditional open source work but it feels like money is kind of stigmatized and it's a little

bit separate from from the work whereas in crypto it sort of expected that uh you could be financially rewarded and they they're they're they mix and in some ways combust uh a little bit more than they otherwise would Carl anything to add there the only thing that I would add is that because most of the financial transactions are are happening in a way where it's very easy to trace them and to see what's actually happening after say a large sum of Money's been given to an organization they control an account and anybody can see who's actually the recipient of that after after it comes along so I think it forces some harder questions earlier on about what are we going to do with this funding and where is it going to go because that transparency is baked in that isn't to say that there's always

good answers and in many cases you have the same kinds of Power struggles where there could be one person person who feels that they deserve all of the funding there could be another person who feels that they their contributions weren't probably accounted for incentivized ETC so you have all these human issues that come but I would say the one benefit is that you're starting from a place where people know that anybody who wants to can actually Trace what's happening with the money and the other thing I'll add there is that there's an added complication of time zone issues and cultural issues because we accept contributors all over the world so lots of opportunities to talk past each other oh sorry Sean it looks like you had a I I yeah I'm just I'm listening and I'm I'm you know I'm just learning about the Dynamics that I think

are ones that I'm not familiar with uh especially the the sort of financially directed part of the whole Enterprise of crypto right so that's that's a different way of thinking about things than what I've what I've observed however anytime you drop a million dollars on people it's going to change them I think the other thing which is pretty interesting is that there's definitely a view that this could only be done through building a network of Open Source contributors there isn't defa back option where you could basically bring all the cord devs under one Corporation and do it that way there's a variety of reasons that contribute to that but basically the need to have a growing network of developers that are contributing

different things that are able to have some redundency built into the system is viewed very much as something it has to exist in order for these networks to be successful yeah that's part of the Linux foundation's origin story too it it basically came into being because that would enable somebody other than a single organization to employ line of talt I also think you're you're raising an interesting issue which is there is the I'll just stick with health and sustainability in the chaos terms but the health and sustainability of an open source project there is also the health and sustainability of an ecosystem and there's the health and sustainability of a supply chain Network which I think is even just a I think these are three

different things and how we build sustainability into those three different things I think takes a different approach and I don't know what that is so if you're but it's something that we definitely think about um and I think that's something that we're going to be thinking about in in 2024 for the chaos project as well yeah when we're out when we're working in the corporatized space these are some of the phenomena we see but when we're working in scientific or university software uh how to sustain the these projects and where the resources come from are certainly prominent concerns yeah there's an interesting anecdote from a round of funding that just just wrapped up recently and there was about a100 Million worth of tokens that would be

given out for a variety of different types of contributions and on the one end you had projects that were actually bringing on users and contributing Revenue directly to the fun and then you also had things that were Upstream of that and an interesting observation was actually that because historically the developer libraries had been so underfunded and it was known that they were critical to the ecosystem but not properly funded or maintained there was a pretty strong correction in this round where a very large share of the funding went to the libraries and much less funding actually went to the end user applications and so seeing that play out and actually having there be this mechanism to correct for it was pretty powerful I'm very fascinated to see

where things are going to end up in the future but it was a uh yeah certainly one at least that sometimes things will actually go in a very different direction than where you think the incentives might naturally lie that's good to hear by the way yeah is is receiving some of the support interesting those are oftentimes the very small projects that nobody sees or talks about on a day-to-day basis but incorporates all the time so that's that's cool that that visibility was there I think the other thing that people are really looking to get better at is understand across this network what are some of the keystone species what are some of the projects that might be small might be less visible but are actually really

instrumental to holding everything together uh I don't think we have any good answers right now but the idea that the the the overall health of the ecosystem requires there to be good interactions between a number of projects and contributors and it might not just be you know a linear dependency flow is one of the things that we're really excited to explore there have been efforts uh in the open source space around core infrastructure initiative from a while ago and the census report that I think Harvard has been leading can provide some insight there as well so if this is the only reason I mention these is if these are a path that you're looking at exploring those might be good places to start they may not answer every question that you have but they

may give you some bearings on just directions to take just want to do a quick time check I think we got about 10 minutes to uh land the plane on the episode so um Carl you want to take the next question um I guess let's pivot back to just the question of funding open source software uh so why do you think we're in this current state right now where open source is incredibly valuable to the to to the internet and to the digital infrastructure that we built but has this reputation leas to being chronically underfunded my perspective on on that question is that you have the core infrastructure that runs the internet if you will that is largely developed and supported by corporations

who make money off of the sale of services and packaged versions of that software around open source projects and those those kinds of projects are sort of easy to see easy to identify and they're run by technology companies who understand how software works I think when you start to include companies whose core value proposition isn't in the technology space then there's a a level of learning and understanding what they actually depend on and how those things that they depend on get built that has yet to occur completely so the more that a company is on the consumer side or an organization's on that consumer side I think it's more likely

that they don't have a full comprehension of what it costs to keep all the things they rely on running think my response to that question is our understanding of the criticality of software honest ly is not that old it's excellent point uh and the the scale of Open Source is so immense that these two things just haven't come in line with one another yet I do think there has been there's increased pressure at the moment through is it the sisa reports the cyber security infrastructure Security Act stuff uh so th those reports are I think putting

pressure on people to really explore the supply chain but I I honestly just think it's a timing issue that the reality of how critical this this stuff is and the the volume of it that exists they just haven't come in line with one another quite yet yeah there's an old Axiom that uh technology tends to uh lead our ability to deal with it by about 15 years so where do you think we are in that cycle you think we're going to be coming up to the point where we actually start valuing these things or we have another 15 years to to yeah underfund these things it's an interesting question um I'm not quite sure that we we know who needs to apply the pressure to fix these things yet so is it is it

pressure on the Upstream communities is it pressure on the the organizations that ship product is it on the foundations that support these I I'm not quite sure we know where that is going to be applied I don't think it'll take 15 years but I I still do think we need to sort out and and now that the the US government is getting involved in this as well that's going to apply pressure throughout the entire open source World ecosystem Supply chains projects uh so I think there still a lot has to be sorted out yeah one thing I I'll say here is that one of the motivations behind creating open source Observer uh the product that working on is to actually

try and Bridge the bit of the Gap right now that we see between the crypto ecosystem or the ethereum ecosystem system and the more traditional longer standing open source ecosystem I think here what's powerful about what's happening in ethereum is that there is a very strong desire from day one to build in a level of commitment to funding open source teams and upstream dependencies and you see this in a variety of forms so it can be everything from a project giving back a share of any Revenue that they make or grants that they receive to all their dependencies to others actually working to create programmatic ways of ensuring that every time there's a transaction or something happens a

share goes into either grants pool or to fund some of the critical dependencies that they have and so it's very interesting when you have a community which is in its early days building this in as a core value and trying to have as much experimentation as possible so not as much a question but a hope that we're actually able to come up with some some New Primitives and instruments that that can transform how open source is funded across the Internet it's an interesting observation and I uh it's great to hear that that's being addressed right kind of at the outset you know I I wonder if I think about the evolution of Open Source coming really from the volunteerism uh you know it I would say

that the open source we see today clearly does have that history in in volunteerism and I'm I'm wondering if if that relationship has had an impact on where we are today I don't know the answer to that so it's it's interesting to see that that in in your particular segment that's being addressed immediately that's that's great well I think we're getting towards the end of the episode so I'd love to start thinking about wrapping up I'm going to ask a completely open-ended question now and that uh is there anything we didn't ask that that you want to say and maybe Matt I'll go to you first uh not not really this has been an interesting conversation uh I think I have a lot of questions just kind of in my own mind that I need to to reflect on you know

I'm I'm curious where you all kind of kind of see this going from your perspective you know and what what the things are that you're trying to overcome at the moment I know you alluded to them and and then subsequently like how could could we in the chaos project kind of help in any way in that Journey for you you're the you're the first person who has turned that open-ended question back on me as the host so it's it's kind of a fun adventure well you know uh the thing that I think is interesting is the cultural difference between uh what we would call web2 or traditional open source in web 3 which is kind of you know um got some crazy radical ideas with it uh open source money being one of them and um you know I think that our our hope is to fund

open source software and and I think having internet native money to fund uh internet native projects feels like it makes sense to us but I'm also aware that since SPF everyone just hates crypto and so uh you know not to turn it back on you again but but you know is like I if if if if crypto people invented a source of funding and a mechanism to get it to traditional open source funders uh to maintain it would it would it just be poo pooed because all crypto is a SP is a scam uh in your Social Circles or or um is there a way to interoperate between these let's call them like gen Z Millennial hipsters who are working on open source money and the people who are working on traditional

open source like if bridging that cultural divide feels like an important thing to me so if I had to put a a question mark at the end of this I guess I would ask like is all crypto a scam to your Social Circles and is there a way that um we can use crypto to fund open source in in your uh in your opinion we have never addressed the scam question at Le at least in in my my world so I can't answer that uh would there be a space where crypto is a funding source for open source projects you know for the sustainability of projects that matter could that be a positive conversation I I honestly think it could be we'd have to think about just what that would be and how it would start but

um so I don't have a great answer for you here uh I I know what I would start with and and that's that like hey you don't throw out the whole internet because there's a couple bad websites please don't throw out all of crypto because someone made up a Harry Potter Sonic 69 coin and like we're building legitimate open source projects with real fundamentals behind them and so let's start with not throwing the baby out with the bath water is is what I would lead within that conversation but um you know I think it's on on web three Builders to prove the utility and to prove that they can be a positive some impact on the world uh let's see uh Sean that's about you on the spot is there anything that we didn't say that that you want to talk about or anything I

didn't ask that you want to say I just comment on the the crypto thing and and say that I think crypto is like any other space in open source where people don't evaluate security software or things like that across the board based on one project and so I think crypto's reputation is much more broad than any one Enterprise in that space I think the question that that I was wondering about is what are the Enterprises that rely on crypto and how do they How does each Enterprise that's using these crypto Stacks that you're describing evaluate and inventory the software that's core to their specific organization and when

each organization that's operating the crypto chain that you're talking about is is looking at their own house internally then I think you start to get a real good sense within each organization of which projects are critical across the board which upstreams are essential or core and once you have that inside your organization you can start to talk about that across organizations um so that framing I think didn't come up and I think is an interesting way to think about this space and and the challenges that you're trying to overcome Carl I know you're doing a lot of that work on dependency analysis for organizations across the space so excited for you to push that forward yeah absolutely I'm also happy to share some some documents and some writing we've done on that

it's there's some things which I think are quite similar like you said um this is just another open source domain and many of the same Dynamics are going to be equally present here I think there are some things which are unique just because crypto has a built-in value capture mechanism so probably the best example that I could give are examples of um providers Enterprises that are effectively selling block space and so what they care about is growing demand for that block space and what they want to what they want to fund is teams and projects that are going to not only create more interesting ways of using that but improve security improve efficiency um kind of reduce uh some of the uh you know poor user experiences

that might exist Etc and so they are very interested in looking for ways of actually identifying Upstream of what the user is doing what are all the things that can make a better developer experience those are good concerns to have I think creating a better developer experience does tend to increase a developer likelihood of contributing yep and what they care about is making sure the developers that come they not only have one contribution but they have multiple contribution so even the example you gave of the the second contributor I think that's something that they would definitely be quite interested in looking at and how that applies cool well it seems to me in closing this episode that we certainly have a lot to learn from chaos and the work that the Linux Foundation has been doing so um I feel like we and crypto

are standing on the shoulders of giants for standing on the entire open source movement but especially the Linux ecosystem which is pioneered how to build a systemically important ecosystem uh operating system ecosystem and so I'm really thankful Matt and Sean for you guys making the time to have this conversation with us and hopefully we can build more social and cultural interupt between our communities in the future so thanks again thank you yeah thanks for having us Amen to that thanks so much all right you just heard from Matt and Sean of the chaos project I am excited about them because measuring open source contributions is one of the Upstream problems from helping open source projects get funding and get recognition that they deserve for

building the foundation of our digital infrastructure thanks again for listening to the green pill. network podcast again we are building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers focused on using crypto and open source software to bring positive some digital systems to the world I think Matt and Sean are examples of that if you value our work you can collect this episode all episodes of this season are available on chain you can go to pods. medgreen pill in order to collect this episode and while you're here you might as well make an offering to our algorithmic overlords please remember to subscribe rate and review on your favorite podcast platform it really helps other listeners find the regenerative cryptoeconomics movement

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