How to Grow & Scale Your OS Community - Berkeley 2024

[Music] and I'm really excited today because we have a very diverse panel here actually um we have Ben he is from far he is uh most focused on academic research or things that honestly are scaling outside of Academia and um he's going to provide the sort of academic research perspective we have Adam who's developer relations and Advocate at we8 um he's more focused on all the developers and hackathons and docs and tooling and everything we have Shannon who's from future uh Forum future open open Future Foundation open Future Foundation and um she's working with a wide variety of uh constituents so Founders uh lawyers creators kind of like wide variety of people so building Community is actually really expensive sometimes like renting a venue and you know paying devel and the whole thing and so like where do you guys actually get your money because um you know everyone here that who is Building open source software you know they want to do what you guys are doing or at least I would assume they do but resources are constrained so I think like funding is sort of the the first thing that is kind of needed well first is values you guys kind of unpack that a little bit next is funding once you have the funding now you're actually able to then start running the programs so um for some of the open source builders in the room uh would love kind of just like hear like what are the either funding opportunities for them or how you guys get funding to actually execute these programs uh venture capital is pretty huge and it's a great way to kind of boot uh it's a great way to kind of like build out uh your current offerings and once you have Venture Capital um you can build out a lot of programs because you have like Venture Capital just drops in it's like a big bucket of money great uh Ben you want to go next sure I'm happy to occupy the opposite poll where uh as a nonprofit and one with many academic ties uh Venture Capital funding seems great as well um we often raise from philanthropic foundations and uh individuals who are interested in AI safety and then of course there's grants from governments academic bodies as well uh I think in particular there's a lot of interest in AI safety now and I expect that to continue to grow and there is an incredible like personally I think that the constraint is not on the funding side but rather on things like individuals with experience in the field um people with the human capital necessary to translate that and take some of the ideas and push them forward from a research perspective or from an engineering perspective and it's something important to keep in mind when when building any kind of community or open source project I think is the appreciation that I yeah I I think that there is more money than there is necessarily necessary talent and so being able to position whatever you're doing in this framework of being able to alleviate the constraint is one that I personally found many people to be receptive to yeah honestly I uh have only been spending people's money um I I think uh you know there's a lot of Open Source funding from places like Arcadia I think they they do a lot of money and I know open Futures grants are a lot funded by Arcadia uh but we actually have also been pretty cheap in our uh in our process of getting folks to tell us you know what they care about I think this has been a lot of Coalition building more of like can we get our partners like Wikipedia like creative commment like internet archive which are these huge communities I only hire people who've really been in the ecosystem and so like you normally have to like be around keep on showing up and kind of like work with us and so I'm kind of curious like how you guys manage hiring like is that something that you you know value like previous contributions within your ecosystem or another ecosystem or is it a you know just 100% like normal recruiting process yeah happy to start uh also 100% I think it's so cliche to say a group is Mission driven um I do think we're Mission driven though and uh it's like really obvious because often if you're working uh with far or another group on AI safety you could also probably be making far more money somewhere else and it's because of the like belief in the importance of uh AI safety or related topics and also the intellectual interest and the in some sense agency to be able to pursue ideas that you might not be able to do in Academia or at a frontier lab but be able to do it within far and with the resources you need to really push it further um I don't know that shows up through the type of engagements we have with research collaborators far before they're hired or before they kind of become part of our uh closer community and yeah I think it's a question that I like personally have as well as we like try to scale up and Tackle more challenges is like will this be able to scale I mean obviously you need to just bring in top town not all of them are going to like have the same history of research and things like that but at least for now I just think that it's such a great heuristic and great way to assess is like yeah people who show up and clearly have an interest can definitely Echo this I think if you show up to events and you kind of engage with the community on some ongoing basis you kind of create some credibility and some awareness of like who you are and branding for yourself uh but developer relations hiring is like pretty challenging to start in beginning because the field of develop relations is also kind of newish and fresh uh I think the first first time we heard of it was like early 2000s and so like even today there's a lot of people who who like have the skill sets of Deval but have never done it in their role and so that's that also kind of makes it a little bit more complicated uh to hire for uh it also changes the dynamic when you're hiring in a closed- source company versus an open source company so I think what my strategies are are to lean into some of the past experiences of these people and did their past experiences align with them some of the initiatives and goals that you want to achieve moving forward whether you're at closed Source or open source companies doing this well I've only hired at scale before so I feel like that's a very different hiring ecosystem um but I have been hired in the in the open source ecosystem and I I do think it has been like how do I even show up or show that I'm a part of this community having not really been in it my entire life you know having been more uh excited I suppose or excited is the wrong word but having had more experience in in private companies or startups and uh really what really did help was CI reaching out to people and then also just showing up to their events and um and sharing some ideas about what I think should be done and and then for open Future for example Alec was like okay you did this thing at creative comments you want to do it for me so I I think like it is really adopting ideas that you really care about and then presenting them in a way that makes sense to a new organization and seeing uh if there's a way for for something interesting to happen amazing any more time