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**Max Ogden:** I think it’s interesting that, for example, Stripe has an open source program. I don’t know what percentage of their budget goes to that. The reason I like private philanthropies is that… The people working at the Gates Foundation — we’re not a Gates Foundation grantee, but the people working there… Obvi... |
\[55:34\] Just like I said earlier, there’s a bunch of different ways to define the word grant. For me what that has meant is forcing myself to learn how to pitch my project in a way that affects some community, or has some social impact. That’s where the non-profit side comes in. People assume that if you’re a non-pro... |
For example, this grant process has forced me to learn how to become not just a programmer, but also a project leader, and a grant writer, and learning how to run an organization. If I got a Stripe grant to work on OpenSSL, I don’t think I would learn any of those other things. I think that I would just get paid to wor... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It sounds like what it really separates into… I think non-profit and for-profit is the wrong way to look at this. It’s more of, is the impact of the grant improving technology, or is it to improve a social outcome, right? Because you have plenty of non-profits and for-profits that depend on and will ... |
**Max Ogden:** Yeah, economically there’s the term ‘the public good’ which are things that by definition… Like, lighthouses are a typical example where nobody want to build a lighthouse, because there’s no ROI on a lighthouse; it’s a public infrastructure. But if you don’t have it, then everyone dies, so you need someb... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, that’s partially why I’ve been interested in exploring, or thinking of open source software as public software, to make that link between a public good and... And when I describe open source software to people who don’t use it, it’s like, “This is a thing that exists in the public domain that yo... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It’s important to draw this distinction, though, between what you’re doing. The Node.js Foundation is a non-profit, but at the end of the day it’s there to make sure that that technology succeeds, and there is social good outcomes built on top of the technology, but the mission of the foundation is t... |
**Max Ogden:** Yeah, definitely. The Linux Foundation, for example, is a lot lower level in the stack because… That’s one of the trade-offs you have to make - how detached from the issues do you want to be? I think the more attached to social issues that you are, the easier you’ll find it to get grants, because that’s ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[01:00:24.04\] Where do you think there are gaps in knowledge between grant makers and open source communities? What do you wish that more funders knew about open source, or vice-versa? |
**Max Ogden:** So the biggest issue that I have is the way you have to write the grants upfront with all the budget, and all the plans. It’s the same kind of distinction as waterfall versus agile. |
For example, this grant that we just got. The money arrives — we don’t have to go through the mechanics of how you receive money from grants, but we had access to the grant money in essentially June; it was like two weeks ago. I wrote the grant with Clarissa in October of last year. That’s a pretty long amount of time,... |
If I had to tell you what I was going to work on in nine months from now, I wouldn’t be able to tell you, but that’s another art form of grant writing, being able to write a grant that’s vague enough that you can still… Once you start getting the money, you can still use the money to work on the thing you said you were... |
But right now, the way it works is you do everything in one big proposal (including the budget), and then you’re locked into that for the entire duration of the grant budget. It means that you have to plan ahead a lot, and you’re constrained by the budget as you’re doing the project. For example, say Nadia, you wanted ... |
It’s annoying, because most startups have these slush funds that they can draw from as they need to, which is the initial investment. But the way grants work, your budget is not a big slush fund, it’s paid out in increments, burn rate; they like to be constant. I can’t hire people on a day-to-day basis, and can’t readj... |
There’s definitely some cultural differences in the way that they actually fund. I think if you ask most non-profits, they don’t think about open source, and most funders probably aren’t thinking about open source, but I think that is changing. There’s this perception that there’s not any funding out there for open sou... |
I think that if you ask most open source developers to write a grant, they’ll write a grant that’s super technical and has no social impact linkage, like what I’ve been talking about. They’ll think, “Oh, I wrote a grant to write a new encryption scheme for this thing, or a new database.” There’s probably not a lot of p... |
\[01:04:17.15\] A lot of grant people have been funding technology over the last 10-15 years, and they’re starting to understand how funding technology works, which is things like they have a lot of technical debt, they have a lot of projects that have horrible project management, or they have… People will say in the g... |
You still have to make your pitch be about a social cause, but if you can say, “By the way, we’re doing it as open source and we actually want to invest in building up this ecosystem around this problem”, that’s actually an advantage to you. I don’t think open source is the reason you get the grant, it’s just a thing t... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And just like you were saying earlier, grants want to be tied to the social cause, right? |
**Max Ogden:** Yeah. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It’s what they want. It’s not that programmers don’t care about social causes. If they didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to get such great people working on them. It’s just that getting them to speak in that language, and getting them to be on the same page as the grant writers, right? |
**Max Ogden:** Yeah, definitely. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** In an ideal world, how do you picture that people would be able to work on open source? Because right now there are so many different grants that are… I think there’s a lot of ad-hoc opportunities, but if you were to think about this on an institutional level, how could that actually be supported and ... |
**Max Ogden:** That is an awesome question! One way that I would answer it is procurement reform in government, which is the most boring phrase that you could possibly say. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[laughs\] Yes. |
**Max Ogden:** Think about the amount of money that is spent on software in government. Well, most people probably don’t know, but there’s an average project in the federal government for like… Actually, this isn’t the federal government, this is the City of New York. They spent $600 million, two-thirds of an Instagram... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** What?! |
**Max Ogden:** ...for New York City employees, and it never shipped! |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, right. And one of the reasons… How much does it cost to apply to get that money, right? |
**Max Ogden:** Yeah, because you have to have invested dozens of years into the nepotistic system of existing government procurement. It’s not a technical problem to fix procurement, but if somebody fixes procurement — and by the way, it is being worked on now, because like I mentioned this earlier, healthcare.gov was ... |
And they’re like, “That’s what the vendor told us.” “Oracle said this was a great deal!” |
\[01:08:08.12\] So that is a really important cause right now that has a fair amount of momentum. 18F is where you go to work if you actually want to build the solutions. They’re like an actual contractor that is government employees that like hires people to work on the actual projects. USDS is where you go to set the... |
For instance, they are doing a lot of stuff around making all federal websites have mandatory SSL so that the NSA can’t snoop on what you’re browsing. There’s a lot of cool momentum in fixing that system. |
So if I was going to place a bet on where all the grants are going to be in the future, it’s around delivering government services in more efficient way, and actually competing for government grants because that landscape is about to get a lot more accessible to open source stuff because of all the work that’s happenin... |
Another way I would answer this question is… Procurement reform is one thing, and that’s happening, so keep an eye on that space. The other thing is, like I mentioned, we don’t know how to describe our project in terms of are we a non-profit, are we an academic project? We don’t know what our label is, and we’re trying... |
They had been working for this open access scientific journal, writing a journal article viewer and editor. They had all these other organizations… They were basically being contracted by this one journal called eLife, and they built this thing called eLife Lens, which is a really beautiful way to read papers. Because ... |
Substance is just the editor components, but the Substance team doesn’t have a… They’re just two people, they don’t have the linkage to the social issue, they don’t have the grant-writing capability at this point. They want to get to that point, but they need incubating, and they need support for their project. |
\[01:11:45.01\] Collaborative Knowledge Foundation is a couple of folks that started it that are really focused on fixing the scientific publishing ecosystem. They want every journal to be using open source publishing tools. So they have the social mission, that’s a huge social mission. Access to research is a really b... |
That’s where open source works really well, when you have a bunch of interests that are supporting a factored-out, common infrastructure. I think the Substance Consortium model is really exciting; we’re trying to figure out how to… We need to come up with a cool name for that way of doing things. Ideally, the Dat proje... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on here and talking to us about grant funding. |
**Max Ogden:** Yeah, anytime. Definitely, if you’re listening to this and you want to learn more, feel free to reach out to me, and I can send you some concrete examples of grants that I wrote, and stuff like that. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Great. Thanks, Max. |
• Max Ogden is the creator of DAT, a decentralized tool for distributing datasets. |
• He has worked in the Node.js ecosystem and was involved in starting Node School and publishing modules on NPM. |
• Max was one of the first Code for America fellows and received an award at Auscon that led to him being recruited by Code for America. |
• Before joining Code for America, Max worked at a company doing qualitative market research but felt unfulfilled. |
• He credits his team with providing support and mentorship, which allowed him to learn and grow as a programmer. |
• Max notes that the Portland tech culture is unique in valuing personal and family time over work. |
• The transition from working on the X API to Code for America was a significant change in approach, from just providing data to developers to collaborating with government officials. |
• The human side of code was learned through this process, including understanding and respecting government culture. |
• The importance of embedding people within government to inspire change and introduce new ideas. |
• The negotiation workshop at Code for America taught the speaker about effective communication and respect for others' points of view. |
• The model of Code for America was influential in changing the speaker's approach from focusing on technical solutions to addressing social and incentives problems. |
• The program allowed people from the tech industry to work in government for a year, giving them a new perspective and authority to make changes. |
• The speaker's year-long fellowship in Boston involved implementing open source software and creating a new procurement policy for city support. |
• The project led to significant cultural changes within the city hall, including a shift towards modern and progressive approaches. |
• One of the biggest outcomes was establishing a way for the city to contract with open source vendors for support. |
• The speaker later worked on a different project involving public school data and realized the need for better dataset management. |
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