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\[31:51\] So the first grant was six months. The second grant — I think it was $260,000 for a year. That was because I basically said, “Hey, I don’t want to work on this alone. I need a team.” Then I was able to hire two people. That was a huge moment for me, going from… I remember I had discussions with my partner, Je... |
When I got that first Sloan grant, it was huge, because now I could start building the team up. The project went to three people after a year. We got the Sloan grant, and Josh said, “I want to pay you so that you prioritize scientific use cases. Because if we don’t pay you…” He basically justified the grant, like if he... |
What happens today is that the data never gets shared. If it does get shared the link breaks, and nobody can find the dataset, or the researcher moves to another university, and it’s on a hard drive that nobody knows where it is anymore, because the person’s not working there anymore. There’s just a lack of good soluti... |
It’s like, “The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, supporting the furthering of science and technology in the modern world,” or whatever. They’re very science-focused. \[laughing\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Now we’re a proper NPR podcast. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Right? \[laughter\] |
**Max Ogden:** Exactly! Maybe they’ll come do this podcast now, because they’ll be like, “Hey, you said the thing! Now we’ll give you money.” \[laughter\] |
They’re very science-focused. They’re very clear about saying, “We want to prioritize you to work on science.” I actually thought that was cool, because I think science is cool. What happened was, we had this first one-year grant that established the team. What we had to do was make a commitment to working with scienti... |
Grant people always want you to have metrics, so that they can measure if you’re slacking off, or not. At the end of it, they can evaluate… Because they write a lot of grants, and they want to be able to evaluate grants using high-level metrics. Our metrics were, "Let’s partner with a certain number of labs." That was ... |
\[35:59\] It was actually really fun, because in the grant it was like, “Okay, we’ll do four really in-depth partnerships with labs.” We got to work with astrophysicists, with DNA researchers, with social scientists... It was super fun, because I got to learn a lot, and I got to really challenge my notion of what data ... |
I mentioned incentives earlier... I think grants are a great way to create new incentives because you just pay people, and that’s a pretty good incentive. In public institutions, like science and government, there is often not great incentives to do things. For example, it doesn’t further your career in science; you’re... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, right. But there is a fair amount of prestige for developers to take on really hard problems. I like that aspect where he was saying, “I want to pay you to do this, so that..." Good people are focusing on hard problems. |
I think a lot of people are probably thinking, “Well, if you only have $96,000 a year, you’re not going to get great people.” But actually, you have some severely hard problems that you’ve been working on, and you’ve gotten some really amazing people to work on them. I don’t think that people really appreciate the scop... |
You’ve essentially implemented a custom Merkle Tree. Basically, for the audience that doesn’t know what that is, you basically reimplemented Git, and then you backed it by a BitTorrent network for efficient sharing, and stuff like that. This is not simple work, and you have a small team of really amazing people. You we... |
**Max Ogden:** That’s a good question. Mathias was the obvious choice for me. I had never met him actually, but I published a lot of Node.js modules. I was aware of him, because he was also publishing a lot of modules to npm. I felt the npm community was really cool because there were a lot of people trying to produce ... |
He still had a job, but he was in Denmark, so even though it was a full-time job, it’s a Denmark full-time job, so it’s like a part-time job in America. \[laughter\] |
\[39:49\] So he just said, “Yeah, cool, I’ll work part-time.” He eventually quit his job, and has been working full-time for a year-and-a-half, or two years now. Clarissa is the next person that we hired, and she’s awesome. She was working at a startup that got bought; they were trying to build a GitHub for data, but t... |
If I was going to underscore one thing, if you’re a coder that wants to go down the path of supporting yourself through grants, it’s really important that you go to as many community events as possible, both to meet funders, but to meet coworkers, and expose yourself to different ideas. And the intersectional thing tha... |
Everybody knows journalism is trying to reinvent itself, because nobody’s buying papers anymore. The government has had a lot of innovation lately because of Code for America and healthcare.gov being such a disaster, and there’s this US digital service now. And science is what we’ve been working on, mostly. So I think ... |
Going to work at a startup, getting people to engage with advertising more doesn’t have the same moral imperative as fixing the way people are informed about what's happening in their community, or fixing local government, or making scientific results more available in the long-term, things like that. |
We do definitely play a little bit. It’s not coercive, but the reason my team… We don’t have that many people, by the way. We just went from three to five, and we have a couple part-time contractors. So we’re not a huge team, but I think the reason that we’re able to get… I think everybody on our team is super world-cl... |
I feel everybody on our team is more like… I encourage people to have their own projects that they’re passionate about, that they can be the owners of, which also helps in a remote working context, because if you have your own projects that you’re the owner of, then you don’t have to sync up with other people to work o... |
\[44:16\] I view it as we’re just a bunch of people really getting paid to try to explore the future of how scientific data is shared. If we were running ourselves like a startup, we would try to have everything be branded under our name, and have everything be productized, or strategically open source things, and stra... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Some of those solutions to those problems are going to end up being better as their own thing, not attached to Dat, right? It’s about what’s best for the project, and for the solution to the problem, not necessarily tying everything and making it ‘on-brand’, the way that you would in a startup, right... |
**Max Ogden:** Right, totally. Yeah, yeah. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, I think we’re coming up for a break pretty soon. In a few minutes we’re going to deep-dive into what’s it’s like to get paid to work on your passion. We’ll be right back. |
**Break:** \[45:34\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** We're back with Max Ogden. Alright, Max, we’re going to get into the whole paying people to work on open source thing. Especially a lot of the stuff you said about giving people a lot of autonomy, and letting them deal with whatever... Because I’ve seen that go bad as well as good. I think the classi... |
So when you change the incentive structures around open source, and you’re just paying people to work on whatever, does it end up getting mismatched with the actual audience for that, and the rest of the community around that? How do you make sure you’re staying on track, and staying really on mission for your organiza... |
**Max Ogden:** I think the way my coworker Clarissa likes to put it is, “We can write code really efficiently because we’re all professionals. So we can go a thousand miles, but if we go a thousand miles in the wrong direction, we’re actually hurting ourselves.” So having the direction is the hardest part, and scoping ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Whoa, alright, hold on... Are you saying that your organization uses conference-driven development as a development strategy? Like, institutionally? |
**Max Ogden:** Oh, yeah. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] That is amazing! |
**Max Ogden:** \[47:52\] This is key, definitely. Yeah, I definitely endorse it. Because for me, for example, if you go to the Dat project GitHub, you won’t see that many projects. It’s mostly administrative repositories. To find all of our projects, you go to all of our individual team members’ pages. So I think it’s ... |
Similarly, I think it’s important that they personally are speaking on behalf of the community. We don’t have a developer evangelist that does that full-time. I just encourage everybody to be the evangelism for themselves. I also don’t want people to give Dat talks, I want them to talk about whatever they’re passionate... |
Basically, the only contract that I have with people on the team is, “I give you money, and you just try to come up with creative ways to contribute to the ecosystem and solve the problem in some way.” But at the same time, we can’t just be willy-nilly, giving people infinite amounts of time to work on stuff. Another s... |
I worked at coffee shops for the last four years. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Welcome to the club. |
**Max Ogden:** Yeah, the Coffee Shop Team! So there’s too many things… You can spend hours talking about it. I was going to say, a really important thing for us is we have a travel budget in our grants that allows us to convene, and we end up convening fairly regularly. I would say every two months, or three months, we... |
We spend that three-day period getting really excited and doing project planning and coordination, coming up with what our prototype that we’re trying to build is, what the alpha release of something looks like. Then we can go back to our day-to-day lives, be independent, and work on it. That’s the two-phase thing. We ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Budget-wise, that’s probably still cheaper than an office, right? |
**Max Ogden:** \[51:53\] Yeah. Oh, yeah. Now that we have more people, I’m not sure how the economics are going to work out for travel budget, but grant funders are generally open to convenience. They… |
**Nadia Eghbal:** They love it. |
**Max Ogden:** Yeah, they love convenience. Once you have a relationship with a funder, you can be like, “Hey I wanted to get 20 people that are the leaders in this open source community together with a bunch of scientists. Can you pay for us to all fly out to some place?”, and they’re like, “Okay.” |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That’s all it’s called, a convening? |
**Max Ogden:** Yeah. But $50,000 to fly a bunch of people for a weekend conference? $50,000 to them is totally… As long as you pitched them on a thing that’s like, “We’ll definitely write a report for you afterwards.” \[laughs\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yes! \[laugh\] |
**Max Ogden:** They actually like that. We’re going to try to do that soon because I’m starting to build a consortium or alliance —we don’t know the word yet— with a bunch of other project-based open source teams… I’m sorry, grant-based open source teams. We’re trying to write a manifesto for what it means to be on a p... |
We’re trying to figure out what’s a name that we can call ourselves that people will understand. Also, all the stuff that I’m sharing here, it would be cool if we had it written up in an accessible way so people can start down that path. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Zooming out a little bit, I don’t know how much you paid attention to the past year or so, but there have been a bunch of grant programs, grant means coming from a bunch of different organizations like Mozilla, Linux, Stripe, and I’m curious to hear your take on what role do you think grants could or ... |
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