Sustainability of the open source movement and the code itself is an ongoing discussion and ever-present concern. As Nadia Eghbal wrote, “Many open source projects are experiencing a difficult transition from selfless creative pursuit to critical public infrastructure. These increasing dependencies mean we have a shared responsibility to ensure that these projects find the support they need.”

We’ll take up this discussion as well, but to answer the “how”, we’ll start with “who”: Who are open source contributors? Who else should be contributing? And what systems or platforms would encourage this engagement? This panel will dive into these questions, especially in light of the evolving context around the building of and interaction with open source software - evolving via the work of individual contributors, corporations sponsoring external development, and organizations building open source products. From these questions, we will build towards a discussion of methods that may be important for the open source community of the future.

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7pm Doors open

7:30pm Welcome

7:35pm Opening and panel introduction by Liz Steininger (CEO Least Authority)

7:40pm Panel moderated by Liz Steininger, featuring:

• Yulia Startsev (Dev Tools Engineer, Mozilla)
• Charleen Fei (Developer, Jolocom)
• Alexis Sellier (Co-founder, Monadic)

8:30pm Continue the discussion over drinks

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About the panelists:

Liz Steininger is the CEO/Managing Director of Least Authority in Berlin, a company supporting people’s right to privacy through security consulting and building secure solutions. Prior, she managed financing for Internet freedom projects at the Open Technology Fund. Liz has over 17 years of experience as a Project Manager, Program Manager and Analyst on numerous tech development projects in both private companies and public organizations.

Yulia Startsev is an engineer on the Firefox Developer Tools team. She also represents Mozilla at ECMA's TC39 committee, which standardizes ECMAScript (JavaScript).

Charleen Fei comes from an non-traditional tech background, having first studied law and receiving her LLM in 2012 for Intellectual Property Law from the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property and Competition Law in Munich. While working on data privacy issues and tech innovation from the legal perspective at Intel Mobile Communications GmbH, she discovered that she would see herself rather on the other side of the table, and transitioned to coding for change. Currently, she is a core developer for Jolocom GmbH, which is developing an open-source, blockchain-integrated self-sovereign digital identity solution.

Alexis Sellier is the co-founder of Monadic. Long time open source contributor, he recently co-founded Monadic's first project open source coin, a project which aims to create a sustainable economy around open source software.