[00:00.000 --> 00:00.580]  Sunday morning.
[00:00.780 --> 00:04.440]  I'll give a couple of brief announcements as usual, and then I will be your speaker.
[00:04.580 --> 00:09.520]  My name is Greg Newby, and I'm going to do a talk about when the founder is gone, longevity for open projects.
[00:10.220 --> 00:20.540]  And let me actually schedule today, starting right now, I don't encourage you to leave this room, but starting now in the sixth floor are the FCC exams.
[00:20.880 --> 00:24.280]  So if you want to get your ham radio ticket, today is the day.
[00:24.540 --> 00:25.480]  It's from 10 a.m.
[00:25.600 --> 00:26.200]  till 1 p.m.
[00:26.200 --> 00:29.500]  I think, I don't know if it's all the exams, but they're 15 bucks at least for most exams.
[00:31.020 --> 00:41.360]  And there's not only people to give the exams down on the sixth floor, they can also, they'd love to actually talk to you and describe some of the process of the exams, the different tickets you can get, so forth.
[00:41.600 --> 00:43.000]  That's from 10 till 1.
[00:43.700 --> 00:52.080]  And then from, and again, I don't encourage you to leave here, but if you want to learn about HUNA healing, there's also a workshop going on on that topic on the sixth floor.
[00:52.200 --> 00:58.060]  And I know that the healing crew would love to speak with you about some of their interests.
[00:58.060 --> 01:01.200]  So those are a couple of things that are going on just, just this morning.
[01:01.420 --> 01:08.960]  I also want to preview, later on today, this is Sunday, so the final day of the HOPE No.
[01:09.040 --> 01:09.600]  9 conference.
[01:09.600 --> 01:10.320]  So sad.
[01:10.640 --> 01:12.960]  We're not yet out of steam here.
[01:13.100 --> 01:14.900]  I hope that you're not yet out of steam.
[01:15.000 --> 01:15.860]  A lot of energy left.
[01:16.080 --> 01:20.700]  But the cleanup is a process we encourage a lot of group participation for.
[01:20.700 --> 01:24.480]  And there's going to be a mass cleanup after the closing ceremonies tonight.
[01:24.680 --> 01:26.040]  That'll be around 8 o'clock or 8.30.
[01:26.680 --> 01:28.120]  Closing ceremonies begin at 7.
[01:28.120 --> 01:29.940]  They go till we're done, usually 8 or 8.30.
[01:30.660 --> 01:32.120]  And then tomorrow, Monday.
[01:32.300 --> 01:35.980]  And we're particularly looking for volunteers to help out with the truck move out on Monday.
[01:36.040 --> 01:44.740]  And we're so interested that there will be an Alaska Airlines giveaway for people that are present and active at the end of the process.
[01:44.740 --> 01:46.120]  There'll be a random drawing.
[01:46.120 --> 02:00.040]  So if you're interested in being eligible for that drawing for free tickets wherever Alaska air flies, which includes East Coast, West Coast, California, and Mexico, then be here and help out.
[02:01.260 --> 02:01.800]  Okay.
[02:02.000 --> 02:10.860]  So I'd also like to mention, please, when you are giving the exams, we do have gloves stationed throughout the venue right now.
[02:10.900 --> 02:12.760]  And I want to encourage safety.
[02:12.760 --> 02:16.640]  We do have EMTs on staff down at the security desk.
[02:16.740 --> 02:21.400]  If there are any punctures, anything like that, we do want to hear about it.
[02:21.460 --> 02:27.500]  So please exercise safety when administering the official exams here at the HOPE event.
[02:29.760 --> 02:30.280]  Okay.
[02:30.580 --> 02:31.540]  Let's transition.
[02:31.780 --> 02:36.020]  Now that I've emceed myself, let's transition to the actual talk.
[02:36.240 --> 02:39.660]  This is called When the Founder is Gone, Longevity for Open Projects.
[02:39.660 --> 02:42.980]  And I have a little bit of an outline.
[02:43.160 --> 02:46.800]  I might as well mention it, and then I have the abstract for full disclosure.
[02:47.240 --> 02:54.560]  The outline is that we're going to focus on open technology-oriented projects, so the types of open-source projects, open content projects.
[02:54.720 --> 02:56.600]  And sometimes there are some fuzzy lines.
[02:56.820 --> 03:00.360]  Some commercial-oriented projects may or may not sort of qualify.
[03:00.360 --> 03:03.200]  But I think most of us know generally what I'm talking about.
[03:03.340 --> 03:21.000]  And rather than listing any of them or even listing any of the leaders, because I'm really talking about the leaders of these projects, I'm going to rely on you to have a picture in your own mind of organizations that you're involved with and the extent to which what I'm going to talk about applies to or might apply to some of those projects that you're involved with,
[03:21.080 --> 03:26.320]  that you care about, or possibly that you're thinking someday you might like to start and be in charge of.
[03:28.740 --> 03:40.040]  The characteristic, and this is sort of the thesis, I guess, if you will, is that many of these projects are reliant upon a visionary leader, a founder, a person that puts a whole lot of effort in.
[03:40.100 --> 03:41.160]  We'll come back to that topic.
[03:41.360 --> 03:47.060]  But the idea, the inspiration is that leaders can be lost in various situations.
[03:47.360 --> 03:48.720]  They can, certainly they can die.
[03:48.940 --> 03:57.360]  They can also, you know, lose their job, lose their funding, decide to devote more time to their family, you know, all these types of things that remove people from active leadership.
[03:57.640 --> 04:01.860]  And so the question is, are there techniques to mitigate the risks of losing the leader?
[04:02.220 --> 04:12.960]  And something that I'll sort of introduce, I won't dwell on a lot, is that the characteristics of the leaders and the characteristics of the projects might actually be self-limiting.
[04:13.060 --> 04:14.760]  I believe in some cases they are.
[04:14.920 --> 04:30.420]  In other words, that maybe it doesn't necessarily get done, but a lot of times projects run their own course, their own natural life cycle, and, of course, the life cycles vary quite a lot, but run their own life cycle, and eventually, you know, whatever happens,
[04:30.540 --> 04:36.520]  they fade away, they get closed, they finish, they call it done, they give up, they get subsumed with another project, you know, something like this.
[04:36.700 --> 04:49.780]  But there's a life cycle that makes me think that sometimes longevity for some of the projects that we're aware of, and I said, you know, you'll have one in your mind or a few in your mind right now, might not even be possible.
[04:49.780 --> 04:54.920]  It may or may not be desirable, but might not be possible in the multi-decadal environment.
[04:55.180 --> 05:03.220]  I just pasted in the abstract, I know it's too small to read, but I'll get these slides up on my web page, petascale.org.vita.html.
[05:03.800 --> 05:05.960]  We'll link to this later on, today or tomorrow.
[05:07.520 --> 05:12.780]  And I also wanted to mention that I gave a talk at the Chaos Computer Camp last summer.
[05:13.280 --> 05:23.600]  I don't imagine there are too many people in the room here that were at that talk, but the slides for that talk are online, and the title, as you see here, is Building and Giving Way Motivations.
[05:24.040 --> 05:37.440]  And the reason why I came up with that talk, so this is sort of a personally motivated, or that was personally motivated, as is this talk, was essentially I was reflecting on a little bit of what I was talking about earlier, which is that there are these projects,
[05:37.560 --> 05:40.940]  and they rely upon leadership of some sort.
[05:41.040 --> 05:47.980]  They rely upon contributions, activity of maybe a very large core, but certainly a core of often volunteers, usually volunteers.
[05:48.520 --> 05:54.000]  Some people get paid, maybe by their workplace, maybe by the project, but sort of a volunteer type thing.
[05:54.160 --> 05:58.140]  And so the major observation here is that people do love to volunteer.
[05:58.420 --> 06:10.140]  We see so many people putting in so much effort to these great projects, and a lot of them, of course, are at this event here today, both the leaders and the contributors, or sort of contributor leaders sometimes.
[06:11.660 --> 06:20.760]  And one of the main takeaway points there is that people do love to volunteer, but what motivates them to volunteer might not actually be agreement with the perceptions of the leader.
[06:21.120 --> 06:27.180]  It might instead be something else, for example, an alignment with the outcomes of the project.
[06:27.280 --> 06:30.820]  And you can see the notes for that online, and I think, I think, I'm pretty sure they streamed that.
[06:30.920 --> 06:35.660]  I haven't actually seen the encoded video, but I think there's video out there as well on that talk.
[06:35.660 --> 06:37.360]  So I wanted to give that as a background.
[06:37.620 --> 06:39.700]  And then, as I mentioned, I have a personal motivation here.
[06:39.820 --> 06:44.860]  As many of you know, I'm involved with Project Gutenberg, and I have my little blurb in there.
[06:45.060 --> 06:49.780]  And Michael Hart died just a little less than a year ago, so last September 6th.
[06:50.120 --> 06:55.080]  And so we had a transition plan, and unfortunately, the transition plan is me.
[06:55.360 --> 07:00.740]  So I'm thinking a whole lot about the practical aspects of what's next, you know, what happens.
[07:00.840 --> 07:04.640]  What happens when the founder is gone and when the project is not yet done?
[07:04.640 --> 07:06.560]  There's still a lot of work left to do.
[07:08.020 --> 07:20.160]  So I'll come back to a few of the characteristics of Gutenberg, and I'm not going to dwell on that too much as an exemplar, other than from some of my own personal sort of anecdotes and things like that.
[07:20.360 --> 07:35.040]  But I will mention early on here on this slide that Gutenberg is one of the very early projects, and certainly one of these open projects that you now have several of, probably, in your mind.
[07:35.500 --> 07:46.560]  Certainly one of the very, very earliest ones, and of all those very, very early ones, almost definitely, at least if not the, but certainly one of the ones with the most longevity.
[07:47.680 --> 07:54.420]  So Michael essentially devoted his whole active career from the early 70s and then by the mid-80s.
[07:54.620 --> 07:58.940]  He had sort of a variety of things he was doing from the early 70s to the mid-80s.
[07:59.020 --> 08:07.700]  He was involved with hi-fi, did a lot of time with bicycles, things like that, as sort of various types of enterprises he was involved with.
[08:07.700 --> 08:18.160]  But from the actual founding, the creation of the electronic book back in 71, and then full-time starting in the mid-80s, he was a Project Gutenberg guy.
[08:18.220 --> 08:22.520]  So he put in many tens of thousands of hours maintaining things.
[08:23.160 --> 08:25.180]  And this is not atypical.
[08:25.320 --> 08:26.380]  That's really the point.
[08:26.540 --> 08:32.400]  I mean, the longevity, the early engagement is unusual and stands out.
[08:32.400 --> 08:47.900]  However, the idea that that a person comes along, has a great idea, forms it a little bit, thinks of how it can, you know, take him and take the goals, him or her, and take the goals of this project into the future, maybe change the world, different types of motivations that the leader has.
[08:49.820 --> 08:50.720]  It's pretty common.
[08:50.940 --> 09:03.900]  When you look at these projects, it's pretty common to find that there's a single leader that came up with the idea, put in lots and lots of time, sometimes paid, sometimes unpaid, sometimes within an organization, sometimes before there's an organization.
[09:04.300 --> 09:06.520]  You know, a lot of variety in how that actually occurs.
[09:06.720 --> 09:10.980]  There's some books and theses that people have written on that aspect of these open projects.
[09:11.440 --> 09:25.020]  But it's not uncommon for people to really spend their, either more than free time, or in some cases, as with Michael, the whole entire career, engaged in doing what they believe and what they are motivated by.
[09:26.840 --> 09:32.320]  So anyway, in the case of Gutenberg, sort of a long-term engagement with Michael.
[09:32.540 --> 09:48.620]  I was involved since 1991, and then in 2001, part of this transition plan that Michael was very big on was to form... this is really a necessity, actually, that it took him a while to convince him of, but to form an actual corporate structure, because people were donating money,
[09:48.660 --> 09:52.300]  which we didn't need much of, but making various types of donations.
[09:52.700 --> 10:01.200]  And he wanted to be able to have some sort of employment that came from his role, and a variety of other sort of structural, boring, legalistic type reasons.
[10:01.480 --> 10:06.820]  But we formed a foundation, or he formed a foundation, and I became the director and CEO of that foundation.
[10:06.880 --> 10:09.200]  And that's been my role since 2001.
[10:09.700 --> 10:10.980]  But I was involved before then.
[10:11.160 --> 10:16.180]  So this is actually pretty good, I would say, in terms of the long-range planning.
[10:16.620 --> 10:23.480]  I wouldn't necessarily claim that the Gutenberg story and my current role is exemplary in terms of an effective transition.
[10:23.640 --> 10:26.020]  Check with me in maybe a year or two, and I'll let you know.
[10:27.200 --> 10:30.000]  And, oh, and by the way, that picture... let me go back here.
[10:30.260 --> 10:33.860]  That picture was taken right over there, same clothing, when Michael gave the keynote at HOPE Number 6 back in... I'm sorry, The Fifth HOPE, rather, in 2006.
[10:38.780 --> 10:42.740]  You can see our little name badge that some of you might remember with the prisoner.
[10:43.500 --> 10:47.900]  And Michael, of course, had to cross out whatever number he got on his.
[10:47.900 --> 10:48.820]  You see it on the hat there.
[10:49.100 --> 10:54.140]  Whatever number he got on his badge, he had to cross it out and put number one as his number.
[10:54.880 --> 10:58.920]  All right, so let's talk a little bit about how leadership tends to function.
[10:59.100 --> 11:03.120]  And I should mention, by the way, if people want to interrupt, I don't mind.
[11:03.400 --> 11:13.440]  I sort of laid out the preface, and I'll go in, as the outline said, I'll talk a little bit about leadership, a little bit about what motivates volunteers, a little bit about how we can mitigate some of the risk of loss of leader.
[11:13.840 --> 11:16.460]  If you'd like to make a comment, step up to the microphone.
[11:17.380 --> 11:19.200]  And I'm happy to be interrupted.
[11:20.580 --> 11:23.060]  The yelling out of comments from the audience is okay.
[11:23.300 --> 11:24.860]  And I'll try to remember to repeat it back.
[11:25.100 --> 11:27.260]  But if you step up to the mic, then I'll know you're there.
[11:27.380 --> 11:31.360]  And also, the tape will pick up what you asked about.
[11:32.300 --> 11:49.420]  So on the topic of leadership, the thing that tends to happen, and again, you already have, as I said, some ideas about some of these projects in your own mind, and you probably know some details that might not fit this particular description.
[11:49.640 --> 12:01.640]  But the thing that tends to happen is that projects, as I said, are very often, many of the ones that I can think of, are not formed, really pretty well all of them, but they're not formed by some committee, some group, you know, getting together.
[12:01.720 --> 12:02.800]  Not the effective ones.
[12:02.940 --> 12:05.440]  I mean, with a few exceptions.
[12:05.720 --> 12:09.560]  They're not formed by a bunch of people sitting around saying, let's dream up a way of changing the world.
[12:09.760 --> 12:28.520]  They're formed by a visionary leader that not only has the idea, but also devotes the time, the energy, over often a period of years before anyone else ever even heard of it, to their passion, to what they think is going to be a way of achieving their goals,
[12:28.600 --> 12:31.640]  which often involve things like changing the world.
[12:31.880 --> 12:36.820]  I actually have another slide on that, changing the world and making some improvements.
[12:37.280 --> 12:38.880]  So here's the thing.
[12:40.500 --> 12:44.060]  And I have another slide that goes into a little bit of detail on this as well.
[12:44.180 --> 12:58.740]  But the people that are the leaders, the visionary folks, the founders, are not necessarily that well suited to running an organization that is probably necessary as this project grows.
[12:58.960 --> 13:01.440]  And again, I think we see, you can think of some examples in your own mind.
[13:01.540 --> 13:04.780]  I think we see a lot of examples where this tends to happen.
[13:05.180 --> 13:16.840]  And so we have a visionary, a founder, who is the thought leader that's maybe giving some level of direction and was able in some early days to spell out where things were going to be headed, and talk to a lot of people.
[13:16.960 --> 13:20.080]  There's a lot of individual evangelism.
[13:20.200 --> 13:24.160]  Maybe it's by email or something like that, but often it's a face-to-face situation.
[13:24.880 --> 13:29.000]  And so they're in this thought leader role.
[13:29.940 --> 13:37.660]  But the organization that surrounds the project is essentially something like a meritocracy-based hierarchy.
[13:38.220 --> 13:46.760]  So you have an organizational chart with whatever it is, maybe it's a board of directors, maybe it's a CEO, maybe it's a steering committee, maybe there's another word for it.
[13:47.260 --> 13:54.780]  Maybe you don't have democracy, you have some sort of consensus-driven organization.
[13:55.220 --> 13:58.140]  But whatever it is, there's some sort of organizational structure.
[13:58.440 --> 14:07.560]  And the founders usually, I don't know if usually is quite the right word, in many cases are not necessarily well suited to setting that up or operating within it.
[14:07.700 --> 14:09.160]  And we'll talk about that.
[14:10.940 --> 14:20.180]  But even if they're not, the last point here is that the leader's role is still the sort of thought leader project and giving the overall guidance.
[14:20.280 --> 14:21.100]  Because they started it, right?
[14:21.200 --> 14:22.160]  It was their idea.
[14:22.340 --> 14:25.940]  And other people signed on in some way, contributed effort in some way.
[14:26.060 --> 14:37.300]  So the leader's role is something that is often crucial for keeping the project active, keeping volunteers engaged, making maybe a variety of decisions.
[14:37.940 --> 14:46.500]  And yet, the fit of this leader within the hierarchy that comes out is something that I think is pretty variable.
[14:46.680 --> 14:49.540]  There's a lot of different roles.
[14:49.840 --> 14:55.580]  So I had the opportunity to read a recent article in The Nation magazine.
[14:55.580 --> 14:59.060]  I think it was based on a whole book or a presentation by Christopher Hayes.
[14:59.800 --> 15:04.080]  And I just thought it was interesting enough that I stuck it into my talk here.
[15:04.240 --> 15:08.040]  The idea is that meritocracies sometimes are doomed to become oligarchies.
[15:08.540 --> 15:27.840]  And I was going to say, rather than oligarchy, I was going to say, if I were rephrasing this, I would talk about beneficent monarchies, essentially, where you have the founder in some role, and the founder essentially has the ability to say yes or no on just about anything and usually be followed,
[15:27.960 --> 15:29.660]  sometimes be questioned, but usually be followed.
[15:29.880 --> 15:35.120]  And that essentially is a parallel decision-making structure to the formal organization.
[15:35.380 --> 15:42.980]  So if you have a, like I said, a board of directors, you have various managerial types of roles in some of the larger projects.
[15:44.280 --> 15:51.600]  You have, in an open-source project, you have code committers, people in charge of bug maintenance, you know, all the regular things that most of us are familiar with.
[15:52.880 --> 16:08.480]  The person in charge is often, like I said, not necessarily part of that sort of more democratic, more meritocratic structure, but is instead the oligarch or part of the oligarchy structure.
[16:08.760 --> 16:09.940]  So anyway, I wanted to mention that.
[16:10.000 --> 16:10.620]  You can read the article.
[16:10.740 --> 16:12.140]  It was in The Nation magazine a few weeks ago.
[16:12.220 --> 16:15.260]  And as I said, I think there's a whole book that's out on that.
[16:15.800 --> 16:24.060]  And the takeaway here, which really goes back to what I mentioned earlier about leadership roles, styles, motivations, and so forth, and I have a slide on this.
[16:24.180 --> 16:41.640]  This is actually copied out of my CCC talk last year, is that by definition, the people that are these visionary founder people that become the leaders, that become the inspiration for all the volunteers, all the activity that have their name on the, whatever it is,
[16:41.740 --> 16:46.700]  you know, on the website or or that's the go-to for media that people want to talk to.
[16:47.140 --> 16:52.100]  These folks, by definition, are thinking outside the box.
[16:52.960 --> 16:55.860]  They're trying to be disruptive, often intentionally.
[16:56.060 --> 17:03.000]  They're trying to, I had a slide, I think, on itch to scratch, or they're trying to change the world.
[17:03.140 --> 17:04.920]  They're trying to improve society.
[17:04.920 --> 17:06.540]  They're trying to save the children.
[17:06.720 --> 17:08.740]  You know, there's all these different motivations that people have.
[17:08.940 --> 17:19.860]  But they're trying to do that by maybe varying levels of radicalness, but by affecting change, by coming along with a different, better way of doing things.
[17:20.140 --> 17:22.280]  And this is a great quote from George Bernard Shaw.
[17:22.420 --> 17:28.240]  And I found out, by the way, for those of you that are fans, that there's actually variations on this quotes in different books.
[17:28.340 --> 17:38.700]  It turns out that, and maybe speeches as well, it turns out that when great people like Shaw have great ideas, they often repeat themselves with variation over time.
[17:38.880 --> 17:43.960]  But the quote I found here is that reasonable people adapt themselves to the world.
[17:44.360 --> 17:47.500]  Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves.
[17:47.880 --> 17:52.440]  All progress, therefore, depends upon unreasonable people.
[17:52.920 --> 17:59.000]  Being unreasonable, this is my comment here, often means that you're faced with social pressure.
[17:59.220 --> 18:07.820]  And if you're unreasonable in elementary school, these days, you might find yourself on some sort of drug.
[18:08.100 --> 18:14.060]  And you know that your unreasonableness is mitigated by the organizational structure of the school that you're part of.
[18:14.380 --> 18:19.080]  Maybe in olden days, it wasn't quite the same, but there's still a social pressure to conform.
[18:19.240 --> 18:21.260]  And I think we all know something about that.
[18:21.400 --> 18:40.720]  So here's the point, again, is that the people that come up with these big innovations, the ones that you have in your mind right now, they did that as often a conscious effort, but certainly as part of an effort to disrupt, to impact change, to exceed the boundaries of what they're supposed to do,
[18:40.800 --> 18:42.560]  to bypass the authority structures.
[18:42.760 --> 18:45.240]  You can come up with different labels for this type of thing.
[18:46.260 --> 19:07.520]  So the disconnect then is what I just described is probably not a great match for being like, say, the CEO of a nonprofit corporation, or being the director of a board, or being the public face and, say, the chief fundraiser, or the person that writes all the policies and does the organizational structure,
[19:07.580 --> 19:18.580]  or the manager, the person that people go to, to have discussions about, you know, the next steps for the projects, to deal with conflict management.
[19:18.580 --> 19:28.860]  When you have these projects that I'm talking about, they attract volunteers that devote a lot of time, sometimes more than the leader, but not usually, I don't think, but devote a whole lot of time to what they believe in.
[19:29.600 --> 19:37.820]  And again, think of some examples, some of the open-source projects, things like this, the open content projects, the Wikipedias, the other wiki-oriented activities.
[19:37.820 --> 19:41.720]  People are devoting hundreds, maybe thousands of hours to what they believe in.
[19:42.080 --> 19:44.500]  And so there's conflict, there's people that are motivated.
[19:44.660 --> 19:48.760]  And is a leader well-suited to manage all those folks, all those different views.
[19:49.120 --> 19:50.780]  In many cases, not at all.
[19:50.980 --> 19:51.900]  And so what happens?
[19:52.140 --> 19:56.920]  Well, one thing is they might transition and start doing that sort of thing, that happens, transition to management.
[19:57.400 --> 20:06.440]  Another is that they get good at delegating and maybe find some people that are motivated for those particular things, and let them do that aspect.
[20:06.600 --> 20:08.740]  And then they continue on with whatever they're interested in.
[20:09.600 --> 20:11.920]  Another which happens quite often is they leave.
[20:12.020 --> 20:12.880]  They say, okay, success.
[20:13.320 --> 20:24.400]  I've now created, I've taken my idea, I've now created a structure or helped to create a structure that will move on into the future with what it is that I was hoping to achieve.
[20:24.640 --> 20:28.340]  So call it success, move on to the next, the next great idea.
[20:29.840 --> 20:33.120]  There's also potential, of course, to be disruptive to the organization.
[20:33.120 --> 20:47.300]  And we see, unfortunately, some examples of that in the history of these open projects, certainly in the last 20 years or so, where the founder essentially became a liability because the founder was out maybe speaking against some of the organizational goals that had come through the more through the hierarchy,
[20:47.560 --> 20:50.260]  the meritocracy-based hierarchy.
[20:51.160 --> 20:55.140]  This is only temporary because it's, or it's not sustainable, right?
[20:55.260 --> 21:03.680]  Because if the founder leader is out doing that, then the volunteers, go back to my earlier slide, the volunteers are going to rapidly get demotivated.
[21:03.780 --> 21:04.760]  And what are they going to do?
[21:04.840 --> 21:06.080]  Well, they'll spin up their own projects.
[21:06.200 --> 21:07.560]  They'll get involved in competing projects.
[21:07.580 --> 21:08.760]  They'll go and do something else.
[21:09.040 --> 21:10.320]  You know, they're not going to stay motivated.
[21:10.320 --> 21:28.500]  So essentially, that's either a death spiral, or that being disruptive is either a death spiral, or it is a pathway to some sort of big change, whether it's a leader stepping down, moving out, moving on, or some of these other, you know, types of approaches that I mentioned.
[21:30.260 --> 21:34.980]  And then this last one, I think, is very common, which is to pursue rabbit holes instead of the core activity.
[21:35.160 --> 21:48.140]  So if you have a, you know, a big project that's doing a whole bunch of things that the founder, leader, visionary helped to set up, and it's sort of running, it's sort of churning along, you have an organizational structure, you have a, like I said, whatever it might be,
[21:48.240 --> 21:59.680]  a board of directors, and a general manager, and these types of things, whether voluntary, paid, paid by their work to contribute to the nonprofit organization.
[21:59.680 --> 22:01.380]  We see a lot of these different types of examples.
[22:02.940 --> 22:19.820]  But one approach to deal with a disconnect of the leader not being necessarily a great sort of manager of all this stuff is for them to go off and do other sort of side projects, or pursue depth in particular areas, and leave the rest of it to other folks.
[22:21.860 --> 22:29.740]  So what happens when you're successful, of course, is, as I said earlier, is you end up with this organizational structure.
[22:29.960 --> 22:45.360]  And I'm sure there's some people in the room, and also people that have had experience with projects, where essentially what you really hope, as someone that's maybe sort of founding or involved with founding one of these efforts, you have the idea, you have an idea that you think could play a role in fill in the blank,
[22:45.520 --> 22:53.120]  you know, changing the world, educating the children, you know, saving the whales, you know, whatever it is you might be interested in that motivates you.
[22:53.240 --> 23:06.980]  And you're really hoping that people sign on, that people get engaged, that people help out, because for the most part, it's hard to change the world as a solo effort, certainly in the long run, what you want to do is, you know, if you're successful, what you want to do,
[23:07.280 --> 23:12.460]  again, typically, is end up as part of a structure, as part of a set of volunteers.
[23:12.840 --> 23:18.260]  And again, maybe there's some money involved, we'll talk about that in a moment, maybe there's people getting paid to do it.
[23:18.320 --> 23:20.580]  But whatever it is, there's a group of people that are engaged.
[23:22.620 --> 23:25.080]  Well, so you came with these ideas.
[23:25.600 --> 23:28.580]  And, you know, I filled in, you know, just a couple of the motivations there.
[23:28.740 --> 23:31.000]  But, but of course, they're all very idiosyncratic.
[23:31.840 --> 23:44.280]  What motivates people to devote these thousands, maybe tens of thousands of hours, maybe solo, alone, before people sort of start to subscribe to your, your notions and help out.
[23:44.860 --> 23:51.400]  So we have these different inspirations, building better mousetrap type of thing, making the world better, safer, greener, etc.
[23:52.460 --> 23:55.080]  Itching the scratch, the open-source, motivation.
[23:56.040 --> 24:07.620]  Now, whatever that is, the leader came at that motivation from their own, whatever it was, their own background, their own experience, their own training, upbringing, beliefs of various types.
[24:07.960 --> 24:21.940]  And those, of course, will, at least to some extent, sway the, sway the way the leader talks about the value of the project.
[24:22.360 --> 24:40.660]  And the thing that I, that I've found, and this is something that is not at all obvious, which is why I mentioned it, and it's really the highlight of my other talk that I alluded to at the camp last summer, is that it might not matter that much if the leader's goals are not so well aligned with the goals of the key volunteers.
[24:41.000 --> 24:49.260]  I just find this to be counterintuitive, but something that is, I think, demonstrated across a whole number of projects that people can think of.
[24:49.360 --> 24:55.240]  And I'm interested, by the way, if you want to call out or step up to counter examples or other stories, this type of thing.
[24:55.560 --> 25:10.200]  But what I found is that a lot of the volunteers that are engaged in these projects are motivated by their own, whatever it may be, background, history, experience, upbringing, and so forth, that might not agree with what motivated the leader.
[25:10.360 --> 25:18.820]  So in the case of Project Gutenberg, just to give you a concrete example, we have a bunch of people that are really motivated by hyper-accurate markup of the original items.
[25:18.980 --> 25:27.160]  So you have a book and, you know, a printed book on dead trees from 100 years ago, and you want to digitize that and turn it into an e-book, a Project Gutenberg book.
[25:27.280 --> 25:44.280]  So we have a number of volunteers that are incredibly motivated by markup that communicates all the layout on that original book, you know, where the line breaks were, any misspellings that were in there, hyphenation, if there are special shapes for characters or little woodcut type things at the beginning of chapters or paragraphs.
[25:44.520 --> 25:46.820]  They'd love to get that represented.
[25:48.040 --> 25:52.620]  Michael Hart, founder of Gutenberg, absolutely didn't care about that type of thing.
[25:52.780 --> 25:54.820]  He wanted to get the book so that it was readable.
[25:54.960 --> 25:56.220]  He cared about the reading experience.
[25:56.440 --> 25:58.060]  Just didn't have... he didn't mind it.
[25:58.120 --> 25:58.700]  That's the key.
[25:58.700 --> 25:59.680]  He didn't stop it.
[25:59.800 --> 26:01.760]  But he was not motivated by that.
[26:01.900 --> 26:08.600]  So you have volunteers that come along and they're creating books and having other like-minded volunteers that have these characteristics that they care about.
[26:08.820 --> 26:14.800]  And again, there are other things, I don't want to dwell on a lot of detail, but a lot of other things that motivate people to contribute to that particular effort.
[26:15.920 --> 26:17.000]  And it was no problem.
[26:17.720 --> 26:28.780]  As long as no one was saying no, as long as no one was preventing you from pursuing the things that you cared about, you could go ahead and be motivated by that particular aspect.
[26:29.280 --> 26:30.880]  And again, I think we see this a whole lot.
[26:31.160 --> 26:37.360]  In open-source projects, maybe you see some people that are really motivated by the user experience, interface, that type of thing.
[26:37.620 --> 26:39.460]  Other people that really want to squash bugs.
[26:39.640 --> 26:44.240]  Other people that want to see the elegant algorithms, data structures inside.
[26:44.780 --> 26:53.420]  Other people that are evangelists for particular coding techniques or particular languages or particular, you know, types of features that maybe are new.
[26:53.420 --> 26:55.100]  So you have all these different things that motivate.
[26:55.280 --> 27:03.360]  And if you're an effective project, and I believe this is a shared characteristic, but something that's not always that clear, especially when you're sort of engaged with it.
[27:04.440 --> 27:13.880]  Successful projects are very often subscribed to, worked on by people with pretty different motivations, pretty different things that brought them there.
[27:14.720 --> 27:16.140]  So, okay.
[27:16.260 --> 27:23.320]  So anyway, the takeaway on that slide is just that the alignment doesn't have to be nearly perfect, and you can still get a lot of forward progress.
[27:24.120 --> 27:33.560]  Now, as I mentioned before, one of the problems with success is that the project grows, more people get involved, start getting who knows what, media inquiries, you get people that want to figure out how to commercialize.
[27:33.640 --> 27:35.920]  That's pretty common with a lot of these, I can tell you.
[27:38.120 --> 27:43.540]  You get more people that want to contribute, and they need some handling, they need some guidance, and that doesn't scale that well.
[27:43.540 --> 27:44.160]  Right?
[27:44.300 --> 27:57.800]  So if you're the founder and suddenly, you know, you get some popularity that spikes, suddenly you have an email inbox or a telephone answering machine with 100 messages with people that are really energized to get involved, and you can't deal with them all.
[27:57.920 --> 28:00.320]  You don't have the time to deal with them all like you did with early folks.
[28:00.460 --> 28:15.220]  So a bunch of things that essentially don't scale, essentially start to break down when you go from this sort of solo effort to a small core, small cadre to having this growth into something being really popular.
[28:15.480 --> 28:18.080]  And so what we've seen, we've seen all kinds of examples.
[28:18.220 --> 28:29.200]  One thing we've seen is that it just fails, that this approach just fails, and you know, is a victim of its own success because of a variety of reasons.
[28:29.640 --> 28:43.740]  One is that something like what I described with your email inbox filling up, that the ability of the leadership as it is to bring in and sustain the new volunteers fails.
[28:44.160 --> 28:46.640]  And so new volunteers, they're pretty finicky.
[28:46.840 --> 28:54.360]  I can tell you that, having worked with volunteers in a number of venues, including this conference here, including Gutenberg, including a couple other things.
[28:55.320 --> 29:08.720]  Volunteers, if they don't get sort of a positive reinforcing response in a reasonable time frame, are likely, probably more likely than not, not 100% likely at all, but they're likely to find something else to do.
[29:09.160 --> 29:13.340]  They're motivated by their own thing, you know, their own approach to changing the world.
[29:13.500 --> 29:16.260]  And in the world that we live in these days, there's not a shortage.
[29:16.520 --> 29:24.060]  You know, if you're motivated by addressing hunger, you know, go and Google it or whatever, and you'll find a number of organizations that you can get involved with.
[29:24.240 --> 29:31.340]  Same thing for education, same thing for literature, same thing for, you know, pretty well any type of open-source software project.
[29:31.980 --> 29:34.260]  You know, legal approaches, radio, so forth.
[29:34.380 --> 29:47.020]  You know, if you're not satisfied, if you're not happy with some aspect of interacting with some particular organization, maybe it's getting started, maybe there's a leader with some good ideas, then you as a volunteer are likely to take your efforts elsewhere.
[29:48.300 --> 29:54.860]  The other thing is, if you're really successful, the next thing is people want to start beating you up and saying, no, no, you're doing it wrong.
[29:55.020 --> 29:57.220]  And we've had some really fascinating experiences.
[29:57.640 --> 30:00.720]  Again, you know, sort of personal reflection with Gutenberg.
[30:01.420 --> 30:14.200]  And I was engaged with a lot of these and Michael was engaged, usually, usually we both got to receive these, is key, well, not necessarily key volunteers, key volunteers, but other people that are putting some level of effort in, sometimes not a great effort,
[30:14.320 --> 30:16.780]  sometimes a really, a very high level of effort.
[30:16.960 --> 30:17.900]  So it varies a lot.
[30:18.180 --> 30:23.260]  But people that care quite a bit would essentially tell us that we're doing it wrong.
[30:23.540 --> 30:29.640]  So this question about markup that I mentioned, or choosing languages, or choosing spinoff projects, got a lot of that.
[30:30.040 --> 30:32.420]  I'll even, I'll spend a moment, I'll tell you a story about that.
[30:32.700 --> 30:38.580]  But people essentially tell the leader that the leader is doing it wrong.
[30:38.740 --> 30:40.720]  They say, no, no, no, this isn't what you're here for.
[30:41.020 --> 30:45.160]  You're here for what my vision of, you know, what motivated me is, is here for.
[30:45.320 --> 30:52.860]  And so that's where that, uh, sort of dissonance, the disconnect that I mentioned a few slides ago, um, can create essentially conflict.
[30:52.860 --> 30:57.120]  And how you deal with that, I think is, is, um, there's not, there's not one right solution.
[30:57.460 --> 31:01.740]  Uh, different leaders sometimes deal with that conflict rather poorly, is my observation.
[31:02.100 --> 31:08.900]  But, um, uh, but the fact is that, that, uh, uh, that disconnect can yield the conflict sort of within your organization.
[31:09.180 --> 31:19.340]  But then also you get, if you're successful, you get sort of, um, whatever they may be, uh, Monday morning quarterback types, uh, you know, outsiders that are saying, no, no, you're doing it wrong.
[31:19.340 --> 31:20.740]  Or, or, well, this is good.
[31:20.860 --> 31:21.940]  You had kind of a good idea.
[31:22.060 --> 31:23.940]  And it doesn't matter how revolutionary it was.
[31:24.080 --> 31:25.300]  It doesn't matter if you spent your whole career.
[31:25.420 --> 31:28.080]  It doesn't matter if you were incredibly trained for it, whatever it was.
[31:28.480 --> 31:34.200]  Uh, by the time it's there, by the time it's working, well, seems easy.
[31:34.600 --> 31:36.720]  And suddenly people can, can pick at it.
[31:36.820 --> 31:45.840]  So, so really a Monday morning quarterback type of thing, you know, people spend their whole career learning to play football and, and training up and, and on the machines and, and learning and drilling and so forth.
[31:46.240 --> 31:49.140]  And they get that, that perfect pass, you know, nine times out of 10.
[31:49.320 --> 31:51.320]  And the last time, well, you know, they screwed up.
[31:51.400 --> 31:51.960]  They didn't know this.
[31:52.040 --> 31:52.540]  They didn't know that.
[31:52.640 --> 31:53.340]  They weren't doing this right.
[31:53.420 --> 31:54.180]  They weren't doing that right.
[31:54.520 --> 32:02.980]  Um, and the same thing happens with these, these open projects, uh, all the successes, uh, if you're really successful, the next thing that happens is people are telling you, uh, you're doing it wrong.
[32:03.880 --> 32:10.460]  Um, yeah, the quick, uh, side story on We just spun up on July 4th something called self.gudenberg.org.
[32:11.100 --> 32:14.440]  And this is the self-publishing portal for Project Gutenberg.
[32:14.580 --> 32:16.640]  And I won't go into a lot of details on why we did this.
[32:16.740 --> 32:20.960]  Suffice to say that Gutenberg is not that great at self-publishing for contemporary authors.
[32:21.460 --> 32:26.320]  And yet there's a lot of people that approach us that want to get their stuff online through the Gutenberg name.
[32:26.500 --> 32:31.860]  And so one of our excellent, excellent participants spun up a website.
[32:32.120 --> 32:36.560]  And so the first thing that happens, we spin this up, the first thing that happens is a bunch of people say, no, you're doing it wrong.
[32:36.820 --> 32:37.680]  This isn't right.
[32:37.880 --> 32:38.840]  You have ads.
[32:38.900 --> 32:39.620]  We don't have ads.
[32:39.720 --> 32:40.160]  What's this?
[32:40.520 --> 32:41.460]  You're using PDF.
[32:41.460 --> 32:42.440]  We don't use PDF.
[32:42.680 --> 32:43.140]  What's this?
[32:43.500 --> 32:46.300]  And so they're saying that we're doing it.
[32:46.380 --> 32:52.000]  There's some naysayers, people that are perfectly happy with it, but some naysayers that are essentially saying, no, no, you're doing it wrong.
[32:52.120 --> 32:54.840]  This is not consistent with the goals and motivations of the project.
[32:54.980 --> 32:57.380]  And let me tell you for a fact, I know this is.
[32:57.540 --> 33:03.720]  I mean, apart from my role, this is something that Michael and I talked about for years before we finally put it into place.
[33:03.720 --> 33:20.600]  And we actually even made a couple of false starts where we, I think, probably I would say inappropriately, but certainly in retrospect, I wish we hadn't listened to some of our key motivated advisor, you know, participant, key volunteers, stuff like that.
[33:20.860 --> 33:22.900]  And we didn't want to upset them.
[33:24.120 --> 33:28.040]  And they were telling us, no, no, this isn't what we're here for.
[33:28.040 --> 33:43.600]  And it became essentially a difficult thing to go from the major direction, which has this sort of big umbrella picture, but a narrower actual function, actual activity.
[33:43.700 --> 33:49.100]  In other words, what we do is part of this bigger picture that Michael and I and other people could articulate.
[33:49.100 --> 33:55.060]  But it wasn't always evident to people that were engaged because of the motivating factors that I mentioned earlier.
[33:56.940 --> 34:06.620]  So anyway, that's just a little bit of a story where innovating can be perilous because your key volunteers might tell you that this isn't what we're here for.
[34:06.800 --> 34:09.700]  And you have to deal with that because you don't want to upset those volunteers.
[34:09.700 --> 34:11.140]  You need them, right?
[34:11.240 --> 34:14.080]  Or maybe they're not always volunteers, but you need them is the key.
[34:14.080 --> 34:15.420]  You don't want to upset those folks.
[34:15.620 --> 34:22.420]  But at the same time, the purpose in being there is to move forward and grow.
[34:22.640 --> 34:27.520]  And any leader, trust me, anyone that comes up with this project, they got a bunch of other ideas.
[34:27.820 --> 34:32.660]  You know, there's what they're doing now, what they have been doing, and they got a bunch of other ideas that go beyond that.
[34:33.720 --> 34:37.580]  Okay, so, and let's see.
[34:37.660 --> 34:51.240]  Yeah, I just mentioned as the last point on this slide, the idea that it might be that there's just a natural process due to these types of factors I'm discussing that it's difficult for these types of open projects to last decades.
[34:51.840 --> 34:55.380]  And certainly, we don't see that many that have that type of longevity.
[34:55.740 --> 34:59.660]  On the other hand, most of them have not been around so long, and so we don't know yet, right?
[35:00.360 --> 35:14.200]  The decision, the outcome is not yet known because there's so many projects that have started, particularly since the Internet boomed in around 1995, and again in the early 2000s, and with all the dot com and stuff like that.
[35:14.740 --> 35:20.080]  I think we have a lot of projects that are less than a decade old, and some that have naturally faded away or changed.
[35:20.400 --> 35:23.560]  So I don't think, at least I don't feel, maybe some people have studied it and have some ideas.
[35:23.720 --> 35:26.300]  I don't feel like we know yet what the pattern is going to be.
[35:26.300 --> 35:32.340]  But it's a possibility, at least, that there's just a natural evolution.
[35:32.540 --> 35:34.100]  There's a self...
[35:37.940 --> 35:41.820]  essentially a built-in exploration to some of these approaches.
[35:43.380 --> 35:44.720]  And maybe that's not bad.
[35:45.020 --> 35:45.880]  Maybe that's not bad.
[35:46.040 --> 35:47.860]  So we can talk about money just a little bit.
[35:47.860 --> 35:51.460]  In the Gutenberg realm, we worked really hard.
[35:51.620 --> 35:52.480]  Because I have a day job.
[35:52.620 --> 35:53.420]  Gutenberg isn't it.
[35:53.540 --> 35:55.140]  And running HOPE is not it either.
[35:55.300 --> 35:55.740]  I'll tell you that.
[35:56.140 --> 36:18.480]  But we worked really hard to be immune from money, to be a 501c3 as a library, pursuing some pretty rigorous, in Gutenberg's case, procedures for things like copyright, to make us not 100% immune, but extremely resistant to things that would happen if we got sued for all our money,
[36:18.620 --> 36:21.900]  if we had no money at all, if we lost our ability.
[36:22.320 --> 36:24.480]  This was key for us.
[36:24.560 --> 36:27.120]  And it was key for Michael's approach to things.
[36:27.720 --> 36:30.740]  It's not necessarily practical, though, for everybody, for every project.
[36:30.880 --> 36:32.260]  And a lot of time, there is money involved.
[36:32.520 --> 36:46.200]  A lot of time, there's a motivation, maybe not by the founder, often not by the founder, but by people that are heavily involved as volunteers, to somehow make their living, or at least get reimbursed for some of their activities, or be able to buy supplies,
[36:46.200 --> 36:48.100]  or whatever it is that they need.
[36:49.180 --> 36:54.360]  And this brings risks, because the fighting over money seems to happen.
[36:55.280 --> 37:05.040]  Organizations tend to, if there's money involved, tend to be extremely geared towards oversight of money.
[37:05.040 --> 37:13.300]  You know, the expenses and the various, in the United States, you have the 501c3 and nonprofit and charity status and laws.
[37:13.300 --> 37:15.280]  They vary by state, so forth and so on.
[37:15.380 --> 37:17.520]  You have donors that want to know about your status.
[37:18.400 --> 37:23.820]  So, unfortunately, money can be the tail that wags the dog, in some cases.
[37:24.860 --> 37:28.600]  So, the risk there, of course, is for this to go away.
[37:28.600 --> 37:29.680]  I'm sorry, I didn't see you walk up.
[37:29.760 --> 37:30.180]  Please, go ahead.
[37:30.420 --> 37:35.340]  How long before, when you started to have the idea, before you actually did all the paperwork to create the 501c3?
[37:35.680 --> 37:41.740]  Well, it was actually Michael that, so it was probably about ten years, and it was actually Michael that finally got around to doing it.
[37:41.900 --> 37:50.720]  We had a number of really, really good copyright attorneys that were involved, and there was one fellow that did the trademark license.
[37:50.720 --> 38:02.520]  And I mentioned on the slide earlier, probably it was a little smaller to read, but the Project Gutenberg license is essentially, and you can read it, it's evolved a little bit, but it's more or less the same essence as it was.
[38:02.720 --> 38:08.140]  The Project Gutenberg license was first released in a predecessor to its current form in 1993.
[38:09.020 --> 38:11.900]  The GNU general public license was, I think, 1992.
[38:12.540 --> 38:19.520]  So, Stallman and Hart were around the same time, there were other people as well, saying essentially, how do we lock this stuff in?
[38:19.520 --> 38:20.940]  We really care about freedom.
[38:21.080 --> 38:24.800]  In the case of GPL, it's for copyrighted work, software, essentially.
[38:25.080 --> 38:36.340]  In the case of Gutenberg, it's in public domain, and essentially saying, this is public domain, it's not copyrighted, which is, in case you don't understand that, it's a pretty interesting difference, which I won't dwell on now.
[38:37.740 --> 38:53.600]  So, there had been some lawyers involved in the copyright side and in the trademark side, and they basically said early on, probably before 1993 to Michael, I don't recall being part of that discussion, but they said early on, hey, you know, you're screwing around with having your personal effects,
[38:54.480 --> 38:59.180]  your personal, you know, efforts tied into this volunteer effort.
[38:59.180 --> 39:02.760]  You're asking people to donate, stuff like that, and you ain't got no corporation.
[39:02.880 --> 39:06.740]  You're not, you know, 501c3, anything like that, not incorporated.
[39:08.000 --> 39:11.560]  And so I think that discussion happened for about a decade before it finally happened.
[39:12.500 --> 39:26.800]  And I had been involved, as I said, I had been running the technologies, the key technologies, the FTP servers, Gopher servers back then, and early web servers, for something like eight or ten years, by the time Michael came to me as a candidate to be the director.
[39:27.300 --> 39:30.000]  And it's been great, and really very, very good, very wonderful.
[39:30.000 --> 39:32.120]  But anyway, it took a long time to convince.
[39:32.240 --> 39:34.820]  And that goes back to that Bernard Shaw quote that I read.
[39:36.020 --> 39:38.500]  Michael is a great example, and we have so many now.
[39:38.640 --> 39:40.820]  This is part of what motivated me to do the theme.
[39:41.120 --> 39:44.460]  So many people that got started in something like the 60s or the 70s.
[39:44.520 --> 39:46.440]  We named our room here after Felsenstein.
[39:46.620 --> 39:47.100]  He's a good example.
[39:47.720 --> 39:48.640]  Stallman's a good example.
[39:48.780 --> 39:49.960]  There's a lot of people out there.
[39:50.820 --> 39:54.440]  Torvalds is a little bit younger, you know, but not too far off from that.
[39:54.440 --> 40:03.360]  So we have a lot of people that got motivated in that period of growth when, you know, early PC days, you know, think of laws and jobs and things like that.
[40:03.600 --> 40:06.280]  You know, a lot of people that got involved that are still on the scene.
[40:06.440 --> 40:07.520]  These guys are getting old.
[40:07.660 --> 40:08.740]  Fortunately, most of them are guys.
[40:08.880 --> 40:10.360]  Now, some of them are women as well.
[40:10.520 --> 40:14.160]  But they're getting old, and they're dropping.
[40:14.420 --> 40:16.160]  You know, I have the slide on that there.
[40:16.280 --> 40:18.820]  I mean, is it right here?
[40:20.080 --> 40:25.560]  Yeah, each year, dozens of these well-known project founders die or otherwise forced to step down.
[40:25.840 --> 40:26.420]  You know, they get old.
[40:26.560 --> 40:28.320]  They have problems of various types.
[40:29.260 --> 40:34.660]  Not necessarily problems, but something rather happens and are not able to be engaged as much.
[40:36.260 --> 40:37.940]  So Michael is typical in that way.
[40:38.640 --> 40:39.760]  And hopefully that answered your question.
[40:40.040 --> 40:40.480]  But...
[40:41.980 --> 40:44.620]  So, yeah, next slide here is that time happens.
[40:45.000 --> 40:48.240]  And essentially what I said, that people are getting old.
[40:48.240 --> 40:51.620]  They lose their motivation sometimes in various ways.
[40:51.840 --> 40:53.460]  And so what do we do?
[40:53.640 --> 40:56.920]  Well, one thing I mentioned on a previous slide was maybe that's the process.
[40:57.240 --> 40:58.340]  You know, maybe that's the way it goes.
[40:58.440 --> 41:00.580]  Especially because it's very difficult.
[41:00.960 --> 41:06.120]  I think we have some examples, but I think it's very difficult to spin up a really functional organization to maintain these.
[41:06.540 --> 41:08.060]  You can think of some exemplars.
[41:08.200 --> 41:11.800]  I happen to think Apache is a really good exemplar for organizational structure.
[41:12.140 --> 41:15.740]  I don't think Wikipedia is yet a good exemplar.
[41:15.820 --> 41:16.480]  Maybe it'll become.
[41:16.480 --> 41:20.020]  I think there's a lot of dysfunction there and, you know, different opinions in this.
[41:20.120 --> 41:21.800]  And I'm not here to express those too much.
[41:21.960 --> 41:28.720]  But the fact is that sometimes there's a structure that can survive the leadership.
[41:28.940 --> 41:33.640]  A lot of times I think the leader is such a key role that you've got to figure out what to do.
[41:34.480 --> 41:37.540]  So part of what you can do is look at what the leader is actually doing.
[41:38.120 --> 41:45.580]  So if the leader's gone, you know, maybe even temporarily unable to contribute, you might lose their effort if they're putting in thousands of hours per year.
[41:45.700 --> 41:48.940]  And probably a lot of us are engaged in projects where that's the case.
[41:49.060 --> 41:50.680]  That the leader is...
[41:50.680 --> 41:56.060]  I'm talking about the thought leader, the visionary, the founder, not so much the organizational leader.
[41:56.060 --> 42:01.760]  So the Michael Hart in this case, not the Greg Newby, but of course there can be a lot of overlapping roles.
[42:02.040 --> 42:05.160]  But these thousands of hours per year might be lost.
[42:05.200 --> 42:09.100]  And it might be that those thousands of hours per year were really, really necessary.
[42:09.100 --> 42:16.300]  And that the other volunteers that might be putting in thousands and thousands of hours per year, maybe they're motivated for their thing.
[42:17.080 --> 42:17.520]  Right?
[42:17.640 --> 42:20.840]  So in the case of Project Gutenberg, we have people that really love particular languages.
[42:21.040 --> 42:22.640]  They really love particular genres.
[42:22.660 --> 42:30.680]  They really love doing what we call the whitewashing, which is the final process of assembling books and fixing errors and stuff like that.
[42:31.240 --> 42:32.280]  People who love scanning.
[42:32.520 --> 42:32.940]  Great.
[42:33.220 --> 42:33.660]  Fantastic.
[42:33.760 --> 42:35.280]  We need those folks, of course.
[42:35.280 --> 42:39.420]  They're part of this distributed structure that's the Project Gutenberg way.
[42:39.800 --> 42:41.160]  But all projects have this type of thing.
[42:41.440 --> 42:42.360]  Here's the thing, though.
[42:42.800 --> 42:54.040]  Those folks probably don't want to, or not equipped to, or not motivated to, and might not even be ready or willing to devote their time to being the organizational leader, taking on an organizational role.
[42:54.200 --> 42:55.320]  We see this all the time.
[42:55.440 --> 43:00.500]  I send out notes to the Gutenberg mailing list and to the newsletters and say, hey, we can use some people.
[43:00.620 --> 43:01.520]  We're thinking of getting together.
[43:01.580 --> 43:02.260]  We've got to do some planning.
[43:02.400 --> 43:03.100]  You know, Michael's died.
[43:03.780 --> 43:04.800]  What are we going to do next?
[43:04.800 --> 43:05.880]  What are some people's ideas?
[43:06.120 --> 43:09.040]  And you'd be amazed at how few responses I get.
[43:09.500 --> 43:14.100]  I mean, literally handfuls of responses, and often those don't even go anywhere.
[43:14.360 --> 43:17.520]  You know, people that want to have some discussion, but they think there's someone.
[43:17.900 --> 43:20.440]  You know, doesn't someone already take care of this?
[43:20.500 --> 43:25.200]  Well, you know, I'm someone in a lot of cases, but there's not a lot of someone's out there.
[43:25.800 --> 43:26.240]  Right?
[43:26.240 --> 43:29.700]  So, and it's a volunteer meritocracy type of situation.
[43:29.940 --> 43:32.800]  You know, if you care about it, step up and take charge.
[43:33.120 --> 43:36.100]  And our way, it's not always the way of every project.
[43:36.260 --> 43:37.960]  There's a lot of different procedures that go through, actually.
[43:38.160 --> 43:47.300]  Apache is maybe on the other side, to use an example of a structured approach to sort of moving forward to become a project within Apache.
[43:47.300 --> 43:49.640]  The Gutenberg way is to say, yes, do it.
[43:49.860 --> 43:50.700]  You're encouraged.
[43:50.920 --> 43:51.420]  Go for it.
[43:51.480 --> 43:52.000]  What do you need?
[43:52.360 --> 43:53.520]  We'll put a newsletter.
[43:53.720 --> 43:54.520]  We'll give you a website.
[43:55.240 --> 43:58.300]  Whatever you think is the barrier, we're going to remove.
[43:58.560 --> 44:00.500]  And the real barrier turns out to be effort.
[44:01.020 --> 44:05.320]  It turns out to be someone, you, whoever it may be, you know, putting in the time.
[44:06.220 --> 44:08.720]  So anyway, this loss of work is really, really key.
[44:09.940 --> 44:11.900]  Also, this idea of planning.
[44:12.280 --> 44:15.160]  Leaders are sometimes pretty good at articulating a long-term plan.
[44:15.700 --> 44:17.080]  Sometimes not so much.
[44:17.500 --> 44:27.420]  Often what happens is, as I alluded to earlier, the leader might have this long-term plan, but they discover that when they talk about it in great detail, they upset the volunteers.
[44:27.740 --> 44:30.120]  Because the volunteers are motivated by something else.
[44:30.380 --> 44:39.780]  So, for example, in the case of Gutenberg, a lot of the long-term plan deals with literacy, deals with equality, deals with improved education.
[44:39.780 --> 44:42.880]  These are pretty good things to subscribe to.
[44:42.880 --> 44:54.380]  But also a lot of the goals that Michael had, and certainly I share, have to do with fighting oppression, have to do with questioning authority, have to do with, you know, shaping a better society.
[44:54.820 --> 44:56.980]  And those, again, sound pretty good.
[44:57.060 --> 45:01.700]  But as soon as you start getting into details, it doesn't take too long before people disagree with you.
[45:01.820 --> 45:03.260]  People have their own different views.
[45:03.260 --> 45:09.700]  So, essentially, the leader, I think, sometimes, to be successful, has to hide their light under a bushel a little bit, to use the analogy.
[45:12.520 --> 45:15.000]  The figurehead thing is important.
[45:15.520 --> 45:17.100]  Some of these are really big names.
[45:17.220 --> 45:18.300]  So, Stallman comes to mind.
[45:18.680 --> 45:24.660]  You know, so if Stallman were lost, I don't think it would decrease the code output very much, is my opinion.
[45:24.660 --> 45:26.460]  I'm not sure if this is absolutely correct.
[45:26.680 --> 45:30.080]  But I don't think he's doing a whole lot of coding for the free software projects.
[45:30.260 --> 45:32.840]  But he sure is an important figurehead, and an outspoken one.
[45:33.000 --> 45:35.660]  And so what would happen if he were to become unavailable?
[45:39.900 --> 45:45.540]  And, again, think of your own examples from the different projects that you might know about or be involved with.
[45:46.560 --> 45:48.300]  And this loss of stability.
[45:48.460 --> 45:49.380]  Conflict is important.
[45:49.520 --> 45:51.880]  Conflict happens in so many of these projects.
[45:53.880 --> 46:00.500]  And it's often the leader that, willingly or not, is the go-to to resolve the conflict.
[46:00.500 --> 46:12.220]  And so what happens, of course, if that role of that person is unavailable or maybe unwilling temporarily in some limited situation, but unavailable to resolve that conflict, who knows what's going to happen, right?
[46:12.260 --> 46:13.480]  You might have a loss of productivity.
[46:13.600 --> 46:15.260]  You might lose key volunteers.
[46:15.280 --> 46:21.240]  You might have forks or sort of spin-off projects where people, you know, pick up and leave and do things their own way.
[46:22.160 --> 46:26.620]  Or one of the most damaging ones, I feel, is you might simply have a stall.
[46:26.620 --> 46:30.420]  You might have things not happen for a while that really should be happening.
[46:30.660 --> 46:33.160]  So the Gutenberg self-publishing is a good example.
[46:33.300 --> 46:35.420]  We had conflict and we said, all right, let's back off a little bit.
[46:35.500 --> 46:36.200]  We'll think about this.
[46:36.380 --> 46:42.580]  And then two years, three years later now, we said, or I said, actually, in this case, enough ready.
[46:42.900 --> 46:44.080]  You know, we know this is important.
[46:44.300 --> 46:46.120]  It's totally on topic for us.
[46:46.500 --> 46:53.500]  And the fact that some people aren't going to like it, well, we're going to try to be gentle and say, look, do what motivates you.
[46:54.040 --> 46:55.200]  We're saying yes here.
[46:55.320 --> 46:55.940]  We're not saying no.
[46:56.080 --> 46:56.840]  Continue on.
[46:57.120 --> 46:58.140]  Do your thing.
[46:58.840 --> 46:59.840]  Grow your thing.
[47:00.020 --> 47:00.880]  Take more leadership.
[47:01.720 --> 47:02.120]  Absolutely.
[47:02.120 --> 47:02.520]  Absolutely.
[47:02.520 --> 47:03.620]  You have all that ability.
[47:03.900 --> 47:10.580]  What you don't have, this is actually key to the way we did things with Gutenberg, and different projects have maybe a somewhat different approach.
[47:10.880 --> 47:13.140]  But the key with Gutenberg is do your thing.
[47:13.240 --> 47:14.680]  You get yeses all over the place.
[47:14.740 --> 47:15.780]  You get all kinds of support.
[47:15.900 --> 47:17.760]  What you don't have is no.
[47:18.320 --> 47:21.080]  What you don't have is the ability to say, no, no, you can't do this.
[47:21.160 --> 47:21.960]  You're not doing it right.
[47:21.960 --> 47:24.000]  I believe you must have this markup.
[47:24.120 --> 47:25.680]  I believe you must have this type of literature.
[47:25.860 --> 47:27.560]  I believe you must have this organizational structure.
[47:27.980 --> 47:31.020]  I believe you must have color images, not black and white images.
[47:31.100 --> 47:35.080]  All these different types of things that come up in our project and different projects have different things.
[47:35.300 --> 47:37.960]  You know, user interface and licenses and just on and on.
[47:39.060 --> 47:40.340]  That's the thing you don't get to do.
[47:40.500 --> 47:42.420]  You don't get to say no.
[47:42.520 --> 47:43.280]  You get to say yes.
[47:44.820 --> 47:48.660]  And unfortunately, of course, we're in a world where there's a lot of structure.
[47:48.900 --> 47:50.300]  You hear a lot about steel.
[47:50.500 --> 47:59.440]  Those of Staten and Steel's talks, one of the things he likes to talk about is that the ability to say no is often the only power that people have or to hold things up.
[48:00.340 --> 48:03.280]  Hopefully not in some of the meritocracy type things we're talking about.
[48:04.620 --> 48:06.680]  Trying to keep an eye on my time here.
[48:08.240 --> 48:08.840]  Thank you.
[48:08.960 --> 48:09.480]  Thank you very much.
[48:11.320 --> 48:24.440]  So strategies, as alluded to earlier, these are not... I wouldn't say these are necessarily incredibly illuminating or illuminated, but you can think of some strategies to mitigate the loss of the leader.
[48:24.600 --> 48:27.940]  And the first one here is the most obvious, which is some sort of succession plan.
[48:28.400 --> 48:33.560]  And leaders, these visionary folks, usually are not so good at this.
[48:33.880 --> 48:34.900]  Usually not so good at it.
[48:34.900 --> 48:39.360]  Often they can't even see their role that clearly because they're, you know, they're really close.
[48:39.560 --> 48:42.120]  They've been doing this for years, decades in some cases.
[48:42.360 --> 48:44.100]  Many, many tens of thousands of hours.
[48:45.100 --> 48:51.020]  And even if they're motivated, even if they have this great idea, they might not be that effective at making it happen.
[48:51.300 --> 48:55.740]  And that's really what happened with Gutenberg, where there was a plan.
[48:55.740 --> 48:59.700]  And luckily, I was, I was in communication for a whole number of years.
[49:00.220 --> 49:03.080]  So I have a good idea as to where we want to go.
[49:03.240 --> 49:04.720]  But it was never that well articulated.
[49:05.140 --> 49:13.520]  So unfortunately, people might challenge me and say, or some other people that are involved with Gutenberg and say, hey, you know, that we don't think that's what Michael had in mind.
[49:13.520 --> 49:18.160]  And all I can do is, is, is say what I believe or what I had discussed or something like that.
[49:18.420 --> 49:20.540]  Unfortunately, we can't point to a written document.
[49:20.820 --> 49:28.000]  Or if there's written documents, they don't give the, you say, we think this gives the guidance, then you look at more detail and you discover it doesn't give you the guidance.
[49:28.280 --> 49:35.580]  So like the Supreme Court arguing over interpretation of the Constitution, no matter how well it's written, there's room for interpretation.
[49:35.580 --> 49:43.320]  And if you don't have the writer there, the originator, the leader, the founder to, to interpret, then that's, that's a problem.
[49:45.920 --> 49:56.500]  Okay, so, so anyway, succession plan, obviously, though, and even, I just said a couple of things where it's difficult to do, but any succession plan is probably better than, than none, right?
[49:57.360 --> 49:59.100]  Succession plan, not secession plan.
[50:04.140 --> 50:12.320]  So, trying to get people to commit to step up, obviously, that happened with me a fairly long time ago in the case of Gutenberg, and willingly so, and it's been wonderful, as I said.
[50:12.680 --> 50:23.580]  But the, unfortunately, the fact is that finding people that might be willing to step in, if necessary, and take, take on increased responsibilities, seems to be pretty difficult.
[50:23.580 --> 50:30.720]  What I've discovered is that, as I mentioned earlier, people are motivated by what they're motivated by, and often that's not essentially leadership.
[50:31.020 --> 50:37.040]  The people that are motivated by leadership often are not people that want to sort of come up through the meritocracy.
[50:37.460 --> 50:38.760]  It's really a challenge.
[50:39.020 --> 50:42.260]  And then if they do come up through the meritocracy, often they're not good leaders.
[50:42.900 --> 50:48.960]  Because what got them up through the meritocracy, you know, it's a little bit like the Peter Principle, you know, where you rise to your level of incompetence.
[50:48.960 --> 51:06.400]  What got you up through the meritocracy might have been, in the case of Gutenberg, really great attention to detail, really, really, really fine quality control and incredible devotion to being authentic and accurate and so forth with preserving books and try to apply this to other projects that you're thinking of.
[51:08.420 --> 51:12.020]  And, well, how does that make you good at managing finances?
[51:12.260 --> 51:14.200]  How does that make you good at motivating volunteers?
[51:14.380 --> 51:16.420]  How does that make you good at interacting with media?
[51:16.420 --> 51:25.160]  You know, you just go on with a whole list of things that your experience, even multi-year experience with thousands of hours as a key volunteer, didn't particularly generate.
[51:27.960 --> 51:36.400]  Yeah, like I said, the alternative there is, okay, find someone that comes in and they're a person that was a go-getter and they're an organizational person and stuff like that.
[51:36.560 --> 51:45.140]  Well, okay, that might work, but they don't have the in-of-the-trenches sort of experience that maybe would be necessary.
[51:45.140 --> 51:50.520]  And the key thing there is there's this sort of human values aspect.
[51:50.800 --> 51:56.660]  And so if your values are not pretty well aligned in the leadership, then you're looking at, I think, peril.
[51:56.840 --> 52:03.380]  You know, you're looking at the risk of misalignment going forward or, you know, chaos setting in, something like that.
[52:05.240 --> 52:07.160]  Okay, so other strategies.
[52:07.340 --> 52:08.720]  Delegate and distribute the leadership role.
[52:08.720 --> 52:13.360]  So an organizational structure of some sort, and I mentioned earlier some different approaches that have been taken to that.
[52:15.500 --> 52:21.100]  Last few points here on mitigating the loss is to identify the points of failure.
[52:21.320 --> 52:26.700]  So this is just, you know, it's sort of like disaster planning that you go to ready.gov.
[52:26.880 --> 52:28.440]  It's like, okay, what's our meeting point?
[52:28.480 --> 52:29.820]  And do we know where our flashlight is?
[52:29.900 --> 52:32.380]  And do we have, you know, $100 in cash or something like that?
[52:32.380 --> 52:34.780]  You know, just a week's worth of food.
[52:34.960 --> 52:36.100]  You know, the basic sort of thing.
[52:36.260 --> 52:38.380]  You can go through that sort of exercise for the organization.
[52:38.500 --> 52:39.360]  Do we have the passwords?
[52:39.380 --> 52:40.420]  Do we have the bank accounts?
[52:40.940 --> 52:49.520]  Do we know who some of the key organizational players are that a leader might have interaction with, but not all of the folks in the trenches?
[52:53.680 --> 52:59.360]  So fairly basic, but sometimes difficult to affect.
[52:59.360 --> 53:07.880]  And also, as I said, something that in my experience, looking at some of these projects, the leader, the visionary is often not that well suited for.
[53:08.220 --> 53:10.240]  Okay, so this is my last minute or so here.
[53:10.660 --> 53:12.940]  So some concluding thoughts is that leadership happens.
[53:13.100 --> 53:21.060]  People that are motivated, you know, put in the work and so forth, do not necessarily become successful.
[53:21.300 --> 53:22.320]  I think there's a lot of luck.
[53:22.380 --> 53:23.100]  There's a lot of timing.
[53:23.560 --> 53:26.160]  We see a lot of the projects of today.
[53:26.160 --> 53:38.420]  So like I said, name some of the projects you're involved with or aware of, that aren't maybe all that different than projects that could have happened a number of years ago, or maybe were founded a couple of years ago, or maybe even 10 or 20 years ago,
[53:38.600 --> 53:42.680]  but weren't quite ready for whatever reason, timing, luck, so forth.
[53:44.300 --> 53:51.060]  Nevertheless, the talent and hard work and thousands, usually tens of thousands of hours of effort over years is still necessary.
[53:53.840 --> 54:01.340]  And what I hope is that today, I know there's a lot of people that want to get this type of thing started, that have some ideas.
[54:01.460 --> 54:05.980]  I'd love to talk to you about it for whatever value my insights might have.
[54:06.340 --> 54:21.500]  But what I hope is that this gave you some ideas about leadership, some ideas about the role of volunteerism and ways where, maybe it's not the most important thing, but ways where if you're coming up with a project, you can think of the longevity of the project sort of out of the box at the outset.
[54:22.780 --> 54:24.480]  And some last few things to think of.
[54:24.560 --> 54:25.480]  Is that a question there, a comment?
[54:25.680 --> 54:27.060]  No, you're just coming to sit down.
[54:27.540 --> 54:30.060]  If people have questions, get them in these last few seconds.
[54:30.180 --> 54:31.180]  You can yell them out if you want.
[54:32.880 --> 54:37.440]  Just my last slide here for sort of thought experiments on your own.
[54:37.700 --> 54:38.900]  Think of the counter examples.
[54:39.160 --> 54:39.520]  That's great.
[54:39.560 --> 54:40.080]  I don't mind.
[54:40.200 --> 54:41.740]  I'm not claiming to be right.
[54:41.880 --> 54:43.860]  I'm claiming to have some observations that I hope are useful.
[54:44.800 --> 54:47.480]  And try to identify and then share the best practices.
[54:48.940 --> 54:57.700]  For projects that have a benevolent dictator for life, like Python or Linux, do you know what their succession plans are, in case the founder dies?
[54:58.220 --> 54:58.980]  Actually, I don't.
[54:59.080 --> 55:00.840]  I'm curious to know in some of those cases.
[55:02.080 --> 55:04.100]  I think that there's certainly a risk, though.
[55:04.180 --> 55:08.020]  I think the risk factors that I mentioned are very real for those projects.
[55:08.020 --> 55:17.560]  Not only the level of effort, because what you're talking about there is where people are devoting essentially their whole, you know, work day, and more, in many cases, to the effort.
[55:18.000 --> 55:19.820]  But also, they're the visionary leader.
[55:20.240 --> 55:28.540]  And in some cases, with Linux, certainly, the glue that binds are some of the attracting factor.
[55:28.680 --> 55:30.580]  Yeah, I'm very curious to know what some of those are.
[55:30.760 --> 55:39.300]  And again, I would point to some of the ones that are not personality-driven, like Apache, as maybe being a direction for more longevity.
[55:39.520 --> 55:42.680]  But even then, I think that's an open question, whether that occurs.
[55:43.600 --> 55:45.280]  Well, I think I'm at the end of my time.
[55:45.280 --> 55:45.740]  I apologize.
[55:45.780 --> 55:47.700]  I know people might have had a few other questions.
[55:47.720 --> 55:49.240]  But I did encourage you to step up earlier.
[55:50.500 --> 55:51.460]  So I'm around.
[55:51.460 --> 55:52.100]  You've seen me.
[55:52.400 --> 55:54.300]  I'll wear the suit today, so I'll be easy to spot.
[55:54.660 --> 55:57.240]  And I'd love to talk about this stuff in any amount of detail.
[55:57.240 --> 55:58.680]  I'm very good with email.
[55:59.020 --> 55:59.540]  Very good.
[55:59.620 --> 56:02.600]  I might get a little behind with being at the conference all weekend.
[56:02.600 --> 56:03.840]  But please do get in touch.
[56:03.960 --> 56:05.040]  Questions, ideas, whatever.
[56:05.580 --> 56:08.820]  I think I can leave it to the hacking community to find my email address.
[56:09.120 --> 56:14.540]  Petascale.org, Gutenberg.org, PGLAF.org are the sites to visit.
[56:14.720 --> 56:15.700]  So thanks for coming.
[56:15.820 --> 56:16.340]  Thanks for attending.
[56:16.500 --> 56:17.220]  Thanks for the insights.
[56:17.500 --> 56:26.220]  Thanks to everybody, especially, who I know there's so many in this room, that have devoted thousands of hours, maybe tens of thousands of hours, maybe ten years, maybe more.
[56:26.340 --> 56:28.400]  Maybe you're just getting started in your own projects.
[56:28.500 --> 56:29.760]  These are just incredibly important.
[56:29.900 --> 56:30.500]  I'm a believer.
[56:30.680 --> 56:32.200]  I think they make the world go round.
[56:32.200 --> 56:36.320]  I think they're going to shape our future and stick with it.
[56:36.900 --> 56:37.300]  Thanks.
[56:44.780 --> 56:45.640]  Oh, thank you.
[56:46.260 --> 56:47.120]  I don't need that.
[56:47.220 --> 56:47.960]  I need the next talk.