Open Collective's Exit to Community - Berkeley 2024

[Music] how do I get from let's say a centralized small group of people a bdfl or um benevolent dictator for life or even a company if I taking a company and I'm transitioning to some kind of Open Source or some sort of community-owned project how much does that process cost so what exactly is two Community as I said it's about transitioning a given project to governance by a community uh and project can mean a lot of different things in this case so I think said company so this is in cases what we call Nathan Schneider introduced in 2019 this idea of exit to community so anytime you might be considering an IPO or private acquisition uh you can instead think oh you know how can I sell this uh how can I sell my company how can I have this liquidity event where I'm bringing together a set of stakeholders including employees management but also users uh into the governance into the ownership of my company how can I align myself with my community uh you might be thinking about closed Source software so I'll give you some examp more examples later uh but this is maybe like you know Google has a big piece of software uh or IBM uh is Brian still here he's out there but you know I I was going to put him on the spot because like he actually has governed one of these things you know a lot of big companies big corporations take close Source software projects and then figure out how do I move it and one of the principal ways actually in the US at least is they send into the Linux Foundation if you were here for Brian's talk uh open source software you know you might already have a piece of Open Source software but maybe it's maintained by one person you know like most open source projects uh or like at most like two to three how do I bring that up to a wider Community how do I open that up how do I attract more users how do I manage those users that's a huge management process that takes time and effort and honestly like developers are generally not very good at Ed it uh and also just maybe you're in web 3 and you have a dow but actually that Dow is not very decentralized uh how do you uh actually decentralize this uh and who's trying to do that I was actually going to put a bunch of uh logos up here but I realized I didn't have to because they're already here um we got uh yeah we got near we got optimism we got drips so that's um I forget what was the radical right uh octant you know everybody's trying to kind of exit or you know decentralize progressively decentralize um and it's not just everybody here uh a lot as I mentioned a lot of large you know traditional corporations are also trying to do something along these lines uh and they're doing it for lots of different reasons so you know standard reasons around security is sustainability um if you're open source project you want to sort of like obviously bring in additional people additional contributors uh actually some of the questions revolve around scalability or even competition you know why did Google release kubernetes um wasn't necessarily out the goodness of their hearts though you know it actually is arguable that you know part of it was uh part of it was this idea that oh you know like how do we compete with the giant market leader called a AWS there's a lot of reasons that go into these considerations um and a lot of money actually uh a big question uh and this is something that's apparent both for the private companies but also for the you know nonprofits and open source folks you know there's a question trust if it's just one person or a few people or a small board that actually controls what's going on you know that's not a great way of building trust in the community it really depends on what community you're actually serving as well if you're serving a global community of let's say you know marginalized communities your governance s reflect the you know the look and shape and feel of the people you're working with uh so all these things I just mentioned a bunch of stuff and just summarizing it uh there's a lot of is a lot of things in the air that are bringing us to this moment where we're thinking how do I bring together a group a given project and how do I help that project somehow transition to community all right but okay and this is where uh for me the fun begins uh turns out Community isn't free uh turns out the commons not free and uh two Community is not a free process nor is is it easy turns out it's actually kind of risky and takes a much longer than you think it does that's why we're building a calculator uh when I say calculator you should really think like vent versus buy and uh or you know any kind of calculator that you know helps people make a complicated decision that's going to have a big impact on their lives in the future right uh almost every open source profer project and almost every project in general you know ual project in general as we come up is going to have to make these kinds of decisions and there are almost no tools out there right now to help them think through like this is what the risks are these this is what the benefits are and this is what the cost is going to be if you go down this long and winding road so uh yeah and it's more specifically a transition calculator as in you know if I'm going to IPO this is the money I can expect to make and the time and the sort of legal costs obviously we don't know as much about IPO so we're going to know cite existing literature um but if you want to go through an executive Community what is that going to cost uh put in a bunch of numbers put in a bunch of variables and we're going to help you sort of think through this uh so these are the cases that the calculator is going to serve uh as I said it's and we kind of realized this during the in the middle of this research that you know there is impossible to build one calculator to serve them all so we're really building like a bunch of different models a bunch of different calculators to help people think through these different situations which are very quite very different so you know the case one we have a typical small community bdfl of an open source software project they're you know don't want to do it anymore or uh in practice actually a lot of what happens is they're just getting old um you know people are aging out of I guess you know their entering retirement and they don't want to be maintaining this when they're like 70 or 80 uh so you know what happens there uh case two a company wants to open source of softw so it's like things like Google IBM uh meta Etc uh how did they do that and case three is how company you know wants to actually when they want to exit to community what are the processes the legal considerations all the variables they need to consider uh I'll mention case four and five here uh because these are not funded but I would be awesome to do something along these lines and I think it's close to the hearts of some of the people in this room uh but if you have an open source project and you want to kind of like daify you know want to use web three kinds of tools to maintain cability this is a good question and if a company wants to exit to Dow or use some sort of blockchain based kind of sustainability question this is a another case that we would love to sort of do some work on uh finally you can see the openl notebook uh at 2. Community this includes the calculators bunch of Cal mappings that we built worksheets for alternative financing and uh a few different other projects that we are still in the works um in order to as part of this larger project project around how to help companies and communities well transition to better forms of community uh last thing thank you to my co-authors uh Tara MK at cnrs Seth Frey at C Davis uh as well as our funders including the National Science Foundation for slone a midar mid Futures and open Collective itself all right thank you