Future of Coding - Sustaining the Underfunded: Nadia Eghbal

Episode Date: October 12, 2018

Two years ago, Nadia Eghbal "stumbled onto the internet's biggest blindspot": sustainability of open-source. Her Ford Foundation report "Roads and Bridges" became an instant classic. She shined a light on the underappreciated roles of maintainers and how difficult it was for even vital projects to get enough funding for a single person full time. In this conversation, we discuss how she found "stumbled onto" this problem initially, and her road from the Ford Foundation to GitHub and now Protocol Labs. We discuss the challenges of indepdendent research and remote work... and how being able to find amazing friends and co-conspirators on Twitter somehow makes it all better. Nadia lays out her vision for the future of open source, and how we can tackle the human side of scaling open-source development. She also gives us a sneak preview of her current work on a new economic model for understanding how open-source software consumption scales. It doesn't scale costlessly, because "you have to make continual changes to it, either because people are submitting changes back to it, but also because software degrades over time. Knowledge degrades over time. You can't just release something once and be done with it." Notes and transcript at futureofcoding.org/episodes/31Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcodingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to the Future of Coding. This is Steve Krause. So I have two big pieces of news today before I introduce our guest. Firstly, my paper on the comprehensibility of functional reactive programming was accepted to Rebels at Splash this year. My first academic paper that I wrote was accepted. Yes, it was an in-progress paper, and this is also a workshop at a conference, which I think is much more informal, but I'm still very excited. And I will be in Boston from the 4th of November to the 9th of November. So reach out on whatever platform you can if you're in town and want to meet up. I am very excited about that. And as far as the paper goes, I have half a mind to read it right here on this podcast in its own

episode, but that kind of seems difficult just with voice to explain without slides or any visual aids. I'm working on the talk version of the paper now, so maybe I will just link to that YouTube video that I come up with when it is done. Secondly, I was approached by Amjad at Replit to sponsor this podcast. I was very flattered when I got that email, and I'm really, really excited to work with him and his company. They're just a really cool group. I worked with them briefly a few months ago,

but apparently he started following the podcast and liked what we're up to here and wanted to be a part of it and help move it forward. So yeah, so it's really exciting. In part, he's paying for episode transcripts. The first one was the last episode, which actually James Koppel paid for himself, but going forward, Replit is going to be paying for episodes, which is really exciting. It's been really frequently requested that we get transcripts for episodes. I was almost going to set up a Patreon to pool the money of people who listened to the show already and wanted transcripts because people were actually paying for it individually. And that's silly. We should pool resources for something like this. But then the problem was solved by a third party.

So we don't have to do that yet or forever maybe. So anyways, without further ado, here is my very first message from our sponsor. Repl.it is an online REPL for over 30 languages. It started out as a code playground, but now scales up to a full development environment where you can do everything from deploying web servers to training ML models, all driven by the REPL. They're a small startup in San Francisco, but they reach millions of programmers, students, and teachers. They're looking for hackers interested in the future of coding and making software tools more accessible and enjoyable.

So email jobs at repl.it if you're interested in learning more. And now to introduce our guest. I'm really excited. I have someone really special today that I really, you know, was a little shocked when she agreed so easily to be on the podcast because in my mind, she's a very big deal at this point. So Nadia Ekbal is an independent researcher at Protocol Labs now. She has become the leading voice on the topic of sustainability and open source, practically starting the conversation

or at the very least drastically shifting it single-handedly with the publication of her paper with the Ford Foundation, Roads and Bridges. It's a wonderful report and doesn't take nearly as long to read as it may seem because it is like 80 pages. But the spacing is such that you could read it in a single sitting in like an hour or so if you got into it, which I suspect many people who listen here would. On the bright side, I go in this conversation, we go over many topics that I that isn't in that report. We kind of go beyond the report and also beyond her other writings that you'll find on the internet. In preparation for

this episode, I read everything I could find of hers on the internet because she is really brilliant. So we go on on less traveled roads here. So that's on the upside on the internet because she is really brilliant. So we go on less traveled roads here. So that's on the upside. On the downside, this podcast won't be a replacement for reading that report and reading her other work. Her report and her other writing deal a lot with the essential role of the open source maintainer, which today is more part of the conversation that maintainers are overworked and undervalued, and the activities they do are so essential, even more so than a lot of the code activities that are essential to open source. But anyways, so read the report, maybe even before you listen,

pause this and go read the report and then come back. But you could also just listen to this and read the report some other time. One other note, just a reminder, now that we have Replit sponsoring this episode, also comes along with a transcript, which you could find at futureofcoding.org slash episodes slash 31. And then if you just scroll down, you'll see the transcript. You could also just type hashtag transcript at the end of the URL to get to the transcript. And if you have any feedback on anything, as always, but especially now with this new sponsor, please feel free to tweet or email me. I am excited to hear your feedback. So without any further ado, I bring you Nadia Ekbal. Welcome, Nadia. Hi, Steve. I think a number of people who listen to the podcast have likely heard about you and your work before on the sustainability of open source.

But for many people, I think myself included, it seems like you kind of came out of nowhere with all this amazing work. And so I'd like to start from before you started writing about open source sustainability and hear a bit about your background, where you came from originally. Yeah. Yeah. I still kind of feel like sometimes I came out of nowhere, too. Although I guess it's been a few years now. Yeah, I kind of stumbled into open source unintentionally. There were two tracks of things that happened. Like one was that I've never, I've never, I've never considered myself to be a software developer, although I've written not always what people say about coding, but it was just very easy not because I was like totally brilliant and wrote everything myself but because we could rely on other people's tools other people's frameworks and libraries and I mean even languages that made it such a quick and easy experience for me and so I think that was something I kind of like that stuck with me over the years that I remember that coding is not

just about the actual code that you personally are writing, but you're kind of standing on the shoulders of these other giants. So that was kind of like one thread. And then the other thread where I kind of more directly came into open source, despite not really knowing anything about it, was I was working in venture capital briefly before I started doing the open source stuff. And even before then, I guess for the past few years up to that point, I've been really interested in understanding opportunities in technology that were really interesting and really important, but weren't obviously fundable by venture capital. And experimented with a few different permutations of that, but just sort of feeling like landscape-wise it didn't really make sense to me that venture capital is this very extreme experimental form of funding that made sense in the early days of software because software was this risky, unproven thing. So you have a risky, unproven sort of capital to go with it. But it seemed that as

software was maturing, that we should be finding other, just a great diversity of types of funding that would lead to different outcomes in tech. So it was just really interesting to ask the question of like, what else is out there for funding besides venture capital to fund things that are useful on technology. And after I left the firm I was at, I was sort of just like flailing about and looking for answers to that question. I didn't really have a plan, which was definitely like a difficult time. But I kind of just treat it as this sort of like intellectual problem. And I had enough money to make that work for at least a few months and would just start like digging around on the Internet, looking for interesting things that I thought should exist in the world that didn't seem obviously suited to venture capital and just cold emailing people and asking them, hey, like, how are you funding yourself? Or how is this work being funded? Funny story, that's actually how I ended up at Protocol Labs now. I met Juan because he was one of those people that I like stumbled upon IPFS. And I was like, this is really cool. And I just emailed him like a huge list of like all these different projects that I found interesting and they weren't all open source. They were just like anything technology related that I thought was interesting.

And after going through that list, I kind of realized that there were a lot of these things were sort of, I guess, like theoretically interesting or yes, maybe they should exist, but like they didn't, they didn't already exist. It was kind of harder to make this theoretical argument for someone ought to fund this thing. Whereas I noticed for this other category of stuff, which was open source projects, they already existed and people already relied on them, but they didn't have any sort of clear funding model, despite talking to the maintainers of these projects who seemed pretty frustrated about their situation.

And so that was kind of, I think, the moment where I was like, oh, there's something really interesting happening in open source. And I started kind of like digging into that question and talking to friends who knew more about open source than I did. I think this is kind of like the fun part of an outsider's perspective. You often don't have a lot of context on a situation which can sometimes make you kind of naive and like do dumb things. But it can also give you a fresh perspective on a problem. And a lot of people I talked to were like, oh, no, that's how open source works. It's totally fine.

It's just this like community participatory thing. I know it sounds really weird, but it just like it works great. And from my view, it was kind of like, well, I don't know if that really makes sense, since it seems like we're all relying on this like critical infrastructure that like doesn't have any way of sustaining itself. And this is around the time that Heartbleed happened. There's like Shellshock that happened around then. And since then we've had like the Equifax thing that happened. So there were just like more and more examples

of open source projects causing problems for other people because they were kind of being overlooked or under supported. And yeah, that's kind of how I ended up in this space. There's a long way of saying that. Wonderful. Yeah, that definitely answers the question. I had there were two interesting threads in there that I wanted to double back and ask about. The first one was that. So it sounds like you left your VC job with a question, like almost like an academic intellectual question, like you said, that you wanted to answer. And it sounds like to solve a real problem. And then like eventually

you found your way to a problem that then you wrote about it or worked on solving. It's just to me, it sounds like a very interesting way to think about your career. It's like a way that I happen to also think about my career in kind of a similar spirit, I think. But I think it's pretty rare to like on your own leave and just like think deeply about what's wrong with the world and how you're going to solve it. So I'd be curious to talk more about that decision and where you got that idea from.

And yeah, just that whole. Yeah. Looking back on it, I think it, I mean, it seems like almost a little bit dumb. Like I'm glad I did it and it worked out great. But sometimes you kind of look back and those moments are like, what was I thinking? It was definitely like the most difficult time in my post collegecollege life was that year between

not yeah not working in venture anymore and then by the time I guess well yeah I guess around the time I joined github um about a year later uh just because it's really hard to explain to people what you're working on um I remember like the first couple months I was just like people were like oh you just you know you just left your job of course you're working on. I remember like the first couple of months, I was just like, people were like, Oh, you just, you know, you just left your job. Of course you're exploring, whatever. But by the time it got into like a year into that, you're like working on something that you can't really articulate because it's like, it's, it's, I think this is actually the thing that is still, I have to keep reminding myself of now that like sustainability is, I can now say like sustainability and open source and it's like shorthand and people like understand what I'm talking about um but at the time it was like

like it was like a really long-winded like abstract explanation of this thing I found vaguely interesting that no one else really did and you just kind of sound crazy um like I I remember definitely avoiding a lot of social events that year because I just didn't really want to have to explain that I was doing this thing that made absolutely no sense. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's really funny that you say that

because my brother is going to a job interview right now. And before he left, he was telling me that probably the biggest perk about getting this job will be that he has a career that he can tell people about at parties. It's so funny. You tell yourself that like it doesn't matter, but it really does. When someone's like, what are you doing with your time? And you can't answer in one sentence. You're like, God, what am I doing with my time? Yeah. And of course, I struggled with this a lot as well.

It's really hard with parents and adults, people whose approval you really care about. In my experience, a solution that I found, who knows if this is an actual solution or not. But what feels like a solution is I felt like I needed to find a community that would value the contributions I wanted to make to society somewhere else. Because the communities I was in was like, I live in New York City and it's a lot of finance people. But on the internet, I found people who really get the work. And I feel like you definitely found the same. But I'm wondering if you think of it the same way that the communities you found online validated your work in a way that helped you then in in-person conversations with people

in real life, like your parents or whatever, who don't get it. Definitely. Yeah. I think that was a very difficult mental break for me to make living in San Francisco and working in tech, because I think the dominant theme of conversation in tech here is like startups and venture capital, or at least that was the world I was coming from was like, if you say you work in tech, people assume that you're really into startups or you're, so you're either going to start a company or you're going to start funding companies. And those are like the two main career paths. And so I think it, it, it took me some time to realize that there is a ton of people that work in tech that don't do stuff like that.

But I really had to find a community of people that would value that. And I think like, yeah, I think I found two types of communities. One was around just open source developers themselves. Like I spent a lot of time just like really deeply immersed in that. And it wasn't just because of the work I was doing, but also because I think like spiritually, it was just like, I just really enjoyed being around developers who cared a lot about software, who cared a lot about tech, but like we're doing it for these like very intrinsic motivations. I just found that like really restorative to be around. And then also I think there's just more of like a meta community that I've

found now that took me some time to get to where they might not necessarily understand day to day what I'm doing, but they understand the process of I'm working on something that I really care about personally that I think is different and interesting. And like, we all have our own weird problems that we're all fascinated by and enjoy digging in on. And there's sort of like this mutual respect that it's, the first question out of their mouth is not going to be like, Oh,

are you going to start a company around it? Cause if you don't start a company, then why are you even doing this? Which is the kind of conversations I was having like a few years ago that felt very disheartening. Yep. I know exactly what you mean. I also come from those communities. But yeah, I have a different ethic around it now. So. Yeah, I think it is. I don't know if it's that I'm finding more of those communities or that things really are changing. I feel like they really are changing, especially after the last presidential election. I think it's just like more people that are kind of regressed which isn't true it's just that i spend so much time with people online who are like who think like me that when i talk to random people in real life it's like such a shock i could have been filtered out it's entirely possible i

just avoid those people now and i just pretend they don't exist yeah i imagine so like you and i met uh through various online activities. And now I was trying to make a list and I had to stop when I reached like 80 people. I have so many hundreds of people that I've met from Twitter and Slack and other various online places all over the world. Do you feel like you too have like all these friends from the internet that you? Yeah. Yeah. That's definitely changed. I think like most of my friends were in San Francisco before that were in tech. And now, I mean, and this is maybe just a general trend of tech also. But yeah, now I feel like there are people just like all over the world, especially given, I guess, that I spend more time now in open source communities that are more distributed.

But yeah, I mean, Twitter has been like life saving. I think it's just so I've met so many great people just through conversations on twitter i mean usually now if i'm hanging out with someone in real life and someone asks like how did you two meet it's almost always like oh twitter um which is a funny thing to explain but yeah really cool i think it's just it's so great that we can unlock um just like similar minded people and connect to each other from around the world that you might not have otherwise found yeah and it's just crazy people always laugh when i say that i make friends and we talk about research on twitter it's like they're like who are these people like academics other programmers hobbyists uh it's just like but it's only like

140 characters how do you say anything interesting it is funny to think about because it, but it's only like 140 characters. How do you say anything interesting? It is funny to think about because it's like, it's not even necessarily that we like are tweeting back and forth or something, but it's that you just read their tweets and you're like, I mean, it's the same as blogging, I guess. Or yeah, as long as you see their thoughts online and you're like, oh, that's a person I want to spend more time with. And then it might facilitate like an offline interaction or a private conversation. Yeah, totally. Well, so the other thread from your story was that you took time off and you kind of self-funded this few months or like kind of a year of work on your own to find

an interesting problem to work on. And the funding of the finding of problems first, like crossed my mind. I think Brett Victor or Alan Kay mentioned it. That's an area where people don't think about funding things. And that's a tricky one because usually the incentives, you want someone to work really hard on finding something good so then we can reward them when they've succeeded. So I don't know. I wonder if you've had thoughts on the funding of that part of the journey like whether it's a good idea or not or or just like uh i know you've done a lot of uh

thinking on the sustainability of open source uh and and existing open source projects that people already rely on that's like an obvious it's a clear case to make that you know to fund that so i'm wondering if you've just if you've done thinking on the funding of the finding of the problem because yeah because clearly you think that's you you you're someone who would understand why that's important because you had to fund it yourself the finding of the problem yeah it's really tricky it's um i feel like my views are always kind of changing on it I absolutely think that if you can afford to do it then um and if you can afford to do it and there's no other path out there then like why wouldn't you um I couldn't afford it in the sense that like I wasn't like rolling in dough or anything but I had enough money that I knew and I didn't have debt. And so like, I knew that I could like do it and survive. Um, I definitely like, uh, the Ford

foundation funded me after I think about six months into that, which at that point was getting kind of necessary. So, um, so I didn't manage to find like funding here and there. Um, I think it's, it's just like an interesting question because it really gets into this question of like what is the point of having money not to go super deep or anything um but I think like they're having other people fund what you're doing can also tell you that you're onto something and so I think it can be um and also like having funding can give you, it can help convey a message or convey that you're working on something important.

So like once I had funding from Ford, it was definitely different for me to say like, oh, I'm being funded by Ford to do this thing. Even though they weren't paying me like gobs of money, it was just like being able to say it versus like, I'm a crazy person who's just doing this out of my savings and cold emailing people. Like it doesn't sound, it sounds kind of sad and pathetic. Um, or at least I felt sad and pathetic. Um,

and so, yeah, there's like something like useful about having someone fund your work that is validating. Um, but I think in those really, really early stages, like it can be very liberating to say, well, I have the money to do this. So I might as well just like, like in the really, really early stages, like it can be very liberating to say, well, I have the money to do this. So I might as well just like, like in the end, like if there's something you really want to do and you can't find any funding for it, or maybe you just haven't built up enough, like, like I couldn't have asked Ford for funding before I did any work. Like I think the reason they did fund me was because I said, I've already had conversations with like a hundred people about this.

So they like knew I at least had done some work. Um, but if I just started out cold asking people for money, I probably wouldn't have had much luck. Um, so yeah, I don't know. It's a really hard question. And the more I get like into, I think, yeah, I mean the, the more like I, I've eventually come to appreciate the value of having funding whether it's an employer or whatever, just because it does convey some sense of worth, at least even to yourself. But I do find it really liberating. I also think, sorry, I'm just rambling a little bit about this, but I think like it felt like a really bad use of my money at the time and that I was just like, throwing it down the drain to work on a problem. But I, in the end, like, I ended up like, like basically breaking even that year, I think. And when I think about like, people that are going to grad school, because they don't know what they want to do. Like you're going into like, you know, potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to find yourself. Like if you have the

savings already, you might as well like not go into that debt and just like spend a year like learning a lot. You know, like it's basically, I think it sounds financially risky, but it's actually not that risky compared to some of the other ways that we like funded those kinds of journeys yeah i would agree with that as someone who didn't graduate college but is now doing academic research you definitely don't need an institution uh to help you figure out a lot of things yeah and even like yeah i mean beyond official school or anything but people just spend tons of money on like these investments that sound like good for their careers or good for their lives. I think because they are like we all get so uncomfortable about not wanting to sound like we're not doing anything useful. Yeah, I think on the Recurse Center website, Recurse Center is like a three-month-long retreat in New York City for programmers.

And I think on their website, they say somewhere that the basic point of Recurse Center is that when people ask you what you're doing with your life, you can say, oh, I'm at this thing called the Recurse Center, as opposed to, oh, I took three months off to just like code on random shit. That's so great. Some of you just have like shell organizations

that people create. So you have some fancy title to point to. Yeah. Well, I think that's like definitely the easiest solution. I feel like the solution that I just, my heart's in because I like feel the love is like just, you need to find your community because they exist on the internet somewhere. There is a group of people who will validate your lifestyle choices. I guess now this sounds like it could be a bad thing.

If you can come up with any destructive lifestyle choices, then someone will support you on the internet. That's not what we want. But I guess we want people who have positive but countercultural choices to be able to find people who can respect them for it. Anyways, enough about that let's uh talk more about your your direct work uh i think we got a little bit too meta too quickly let's talk about open yeah me too me too let's talk about the sustainability open source um i thought a good place to start uh because i was i i over prepared for this interview just

reading rereading all like everything you've ever written this well i don't want to reread some of that yeah yeah i i was like oh wow she was blogging 2014 let's see what that was oh god no uh so uh so i saw in various places you talk about the distinction um like the beginning of free software and how and then you distinguish it uh with open source software and then then you come up with your own term public software so i thought and you could walk us through the history a bit and contextualize the differences between these movements yeah i mean short answer is i still don't have a good i kind of played around with some terms and ideas back then. But I still use open source primarily now, but I still don't like it. I think, so the funny thing is that free software and open source software have the same literal definition. And both sides will acknowledge that um there's nothing like technically different about free versus open source software in terms of like the four freedoms or whatever um but they obviously

convey like very different cultural connotations um and i think there's some like third connotation now that isn't adequately captured by open source and that like like because most software that we're putting into our proprietary software is open source um which wasn't true like you know even 10 years ago like most of the software we're building on is just open source at this point which is just like so obvious now that you don't even have to say it um using the term open source is just like kind of meaningless and i think like there's a very clear wave from the early 2000s of people who like very strongly identify with the idea of open source um and i think are mostly focused on licensing issues whereas like this whatever this other wave is is just like people that are writing stuff and sharing it

under very permissive licenses and just sort of like i mean it doesn't even occur to them to think about what that means um because like of course why wouldn't I share my code with other people? And like that, those people, I think are more concerned about sustainability than maybe the second generation. Oddly, I think they have some things in common with free software people more than anyone would care to admit. But yeah, I mean, like there's, because I think it's also so obvious to them that like, well, I'm writing code at my job. I'm writing code for fun. Like, why would I not get paid to like write code in whatever shape or form?

It's sort of just like an obvious question. Yeah. That's another thought on. So I think in your writing, you refer to this, like, I think it was a tweet, like the post open source software. Yeah. Like where people just like, screw that, screw the license. Like I'm just going to commit to GitHub and I'm definitely of, of this generation. Like I feel like I don't even think I've read any license all the way

through. Like, I don't even know the difference. I think I know that MIT is like the most permissive, but besides that, I don't really know anything. So and usually when I start a project, it's like 90 percent not going to turn into anything. So I don't even want to invest the time to figure out the licensing. So but I think I've also seen your writing that you say that it's important to pick the right license. So maybe you could give a plea or educate us on why it's important. Well, long story short, when I joined GitHub, one of my colleagues, Mike Linksfair, created this really great website that's just called ChooseALicense.com and it's the easiest thing to understand. So if you ever need to pick a

license, just go to that website. Is it important to do it at the beginning of the project? It's important to do it at the beginning of the project or can i yeah it's important to do in the beginning because that way everything that is it's hard to change licenses retroactively or if you do then you have to then like all the former contributions will be under one license and the all the other ones will be on another license like relicensing is a little bit of a legal headache um so you might as well just throw something on especially on github they make it really easy you can just add a license file when you start a new project and just at least put like mit on it and be done with it um and mit is like by far the most popular license at this point um but yeah i mean the main ones are mit basically it's like mit is

super permissive um gpl if you care about copy left and apache 2.0 if you're a business is i think like the shortest like tweet length version of how to pick a license um what was i gonna say that sounds like a good a valuable tweet yeah yeah i mean it i think like the reason i think it's actually like not a good thing but um it speaks to the success of the early open source movement that people don't really care or think about licenses now. And it's problematic when like there is no license on the project, but I think- Why is that problematic? Because like you can't, if you don't have an open source license on your code, it's not actually open source, even though you might be sharing it around with people. So someone really, really

cared they could do something about it. So who's liable to risk? Like, what's it's not open source in what sense? Like, someone if someone uses it, and I'm on the creator, I can sue them because I didn't put an open source license? Yeah, or say someone took your code, and they put it in something that like hurt someone. I don't know. Like maybe the code malfunctioned and something horrible happened. I don't know. Technically, I guess you could, there might be an argument. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't really want to go super deeply into this. But like there, so one of the important parts of an open source license is that the software is provided as is, and that you're free of any liability associated with it. Whereas if it's your code,

I guess, I don't know. I don't know which argument is worse that they took your code without permission or that your code is in something that might've like harmed someone that I guess you're technically liable for. The point being, I guess that like early open source people worked really, really hard to make licenses. Like the concept of licensing sounds really complicated, but really, there are basically three main licenses that people choose from. And they worked really hard to standardize and simplify that stuff. So it's really easy just to add an MIT license file on GitHub or copy paste the text and just like stick it on there. And I think that's sort of like the defining difference between that earlier generation and the current generation where like they had to really fight for that stuff because it really,

really mattered then because this stuff wasn't standardized. Like, I mean, if you think about it, it's like pretty crazy that that open source itself simplified the legal process so that the legal files themselves are just as standardized and widely shared as open source code. Imagine if you had to hire a lawyer to draft something every time you wanted to release code, that would be crazy. But they made it really, really simple. um but yeah now it's like so simple and so obvious that like people that are you know writing open source code now don't even like think about or understand the differences i think that's like always really frustrating for early open source people because

they're just like why don't people care about the licenses and it's like well because you did such a good job making sure that no one had to care about it so like this is actually a success for you like don't be don't be frustrated. That's how I feel about it. That's funny. So next topic. I want to talk about like the dream of open source. I think a lot of people have had different dreams over the years. One of the original dreams is the bazaar, I guess, versus the cathedral. And I think I've seen you on different places

talk about how things haven't quite lived up to that dream in different places. And so I thought maybe I'd give you the opportunity to craft a new vision for like what the dream of open source could look like. Like what's realistic to hope for? Yeah, I mean, I think it's sort of just understanding what is actually happening now

compared to like when something like the Cathedral Bazaar was written, it was written in, like, such an early time in open source's life. And who knows? We're still at very, very early times. That a lot of it is just sort of, like, theoretical. And whereas now I think of it less as, like, I want things to be a certain way, but more of let's look at what's actually happening and does that match up with this rhetoric that we've been holding really strongly onto? So like one reason I think free software people and like modern open source people, which I hate to use, I mean,

they're modern software developers that are also free software people, but if we're thinking in terms of like waves or whatever, whatever is happening right now the reason why I think they actually have more in common than they realize is that free software people also really cared about sustainability um but a lot of those projects and like at the time of the free software movement like there were just such fewer people working on software so you had like you know let's say you have like 10 developers who are like working on this project and everyone is it truly is this like pure production commons kind of thing where everyone is participating

they have a much smaller base of people that are using the code and so like everyone really does feel this sense of ownership in like the software commons and so they really care about sustainability but like sustainability works very well when you don't have that many people using your project. And everyone who's contributing is like very active. There's an expectation that users like try to solve their own problems or that they're like talking to developers and like working through stuff. Whereas today at scale, like it's just impossible to expect that everyone who uses open source software is going to be able to contribute back. Like these projects have gotten super, super complicated. You have like millions of people that are using them

or relying on them. And so like that idea of this sort of like happy little like peer production commons of like small groups of people working on something sustainably is just like not really possible at scale. And so what I'm trying to understand better and sort of develop a theory around is what does it look like to kind of separate out the production and the consumption of something like there is no real cost to the producer associated with that um that's the promise of all digital goods right that you can consume them kind of

costlessly um and it doesn't matter if like a thousand people or 10 million people use it but the production side of it i think does have some finite limiting factors um and you can only and i think the the limiting thing about the rhetoric that we like have really tightly held on to in open source right now is that it's supposed to be this 100 participatory commons kind of thing but like it's just impossible to expect that out of like millions of users who don't have the same context for the production side of that project and in some ways I think this mirrors what is happening on the internet in general. Like we thought the internet is this like super

democratizing place. And if only everyone could talk to each other, we would just all get along. But like, I think everyone is quickly realizing that like, if you just don't have the context to understand, you can't just like walk into someone's community and then demand things because it's democracy. And it's the internet and anyone can talk to anyone like there are kind of like rules around how you participate in conversations or how you approach people you don't know on the internet um i think it's the same thing in open source we're just kind of seeing that same trend being merged um so what i would like to see i guess like the dream of open source for me would be to be able to sort of like reassert like what does that um what is that

smaller like maybe slightly more semi-private or just higher context production commons look like that's separated out from the thing they're producing, which can be consumed costlessly by anyone. Interesting. So as a part of that vision, I know you used the metaphor of infrastructure to talk about open source in a lot of different places. And you make the comparison between trucking companies don't have to pay for roads because the government taxes all of us and then pays for roads. But as far as I could see in your writing, I don't think you ever mentioned, like, oh, maybe the government should tax people and then the government should somehow sustain open source software. Is that something you've considered at all? It was something I thought about early on. It's been kind of funny how, I don't think I've ever talked about this really, but the process of trying to work through solutions for open source

has definitely changed my politics or challenged my political beliefs um so i'll get too deeply into but um i'd be fascinated if you're comfortable to share but yeah well i'll try to think of a nice not less slightly less controversial way to talk about it um so i think like this is one reason why eleanor ostrom's work has really resonated with me um and so she wrote this book governing Governing the Commons, and it's about her, she's basically documenting all these examples from like, fisheries and farms and things like that, of people who sustainably self-managed the commons. And a key part of her thesis is that we assume that the tragedy of the commons needs to be resolved either by the market or the state.

So like the government is intervening or we have to like price it or something so that people don't like over extract from the commons. But she's in her examples, she's like documenting all these cases of commons that where they didn't have any external intervention. And people just learned how to manage it themselves. And I think our work has resonated a lot with like the times right now, just in general. And I've noticed like a lot of pickup from like crypto folks right now as well. And I think there's just something there around the idea that like external intervention can kind of feel like this bandaidaid response of like maybe the government doesn't

know the best thing that the commons need to you know care for itself or whatever um and so i've kind of taken those views to heart around open source where like from the beginning it's very obvious to me that like open source is different from sustaining other things because it's so decentralized um it's kind of hard. You can't really imagine it like being something that the government manages because like it would take away one of the best things about open source, which is like, in theory, anyone can really like jump in and get involved. There is no central entity. It's not even all in the same country.

So it's like really hard to picture like how would, how would government even really sustain it unless we're talking about like the UN or something. And that happening in conjunction with I think in the past year or so, just a lot of, there's been a lot of critique of the tech industry and a lot of scrutiny. And I think we're seeing two types of responses coming out of that. One is an increased interest in regulation of tech from the government. And the other is people who have sort of like lost faith in the ability of the government to regulate. Both people might care about the same thing. Like, I mean,

if you dug into my writing from like 2014, like I used to advocate a lot for regulation of like monopolies and things like that in tech. But I definitely lost a lot of faith in that, especially in the Facebook testimonies that happened this year. Just seeing that, like, I don't know that the government knows how to resolve these problems, because I don't know that the government understands tech well enough. And maybe it just can't move fast enough to really like respond to these things. And so while in theory, I would love someone to like help step in and solve things for open source. I don't have a lot of faith that one, that anyone has the knowledge to really do that,

including government. And two, that like adding some sort of centralized aspect to open source can just kind of destroy the whole point of it um and so yeah i think i've as i've tried to think about sort of like well what is that like what does the commons of software producers look like i think that is like a government in the sense of in an open source project there are going to be some people who just make more decisions this is like why i really care about um emphasizing role of maintainers, because I don't think maintainers get talked about enough as a separate group from open source contributors. And so maybe maintainers are like the government, but it's still not literally the government.

Fascinating. Yeah, you bring up a lot of things i want to respond to uh and and push on some more so uh i think the first place i want to i just want to put out there that i'm mostly playing devil dad i don't i don't necessarily believe um but uh so i i'm with you in that like it'd be neat if we could tell this without government um but the example you specifically point to is how roads and infrastructure weren't government things. They were just things that people did just because they had pride or whatever and they just wanted to do it. And Andrew Carnegie and other people took it upon themselves to do it for their own reasons.

But then eventually the government adopted it once it became like obvious that it was a government thing. So I just bring that up just to push back a bit and say like, it may not seem like a government thing now, but maybe it'll become that way as it's more and more obvious that these open source libraries are like core infrastructure for the world. And then the second point is, I want to say is, I guess open source libraries are like core infrastructure for the world and then the second point is um i want to say is i guess open source is new so maybe it's like unlike anything

in history but i can't think of anything else in history that's been so core and fundamental and yet has remained independent and like contributor volunteer so yeah i really struggle. It's unlikely to stay that way. Is that the? Yeah, yeah. Or just like, it's hard to point to success story from the past, which doesn't necessarily mean it's impossible, because like, we have all these new, like, the world's so different now than it is in the past. So it's not to say it's impossible um i don't know i just wanted to push back one last time uh because like just to be totally upfront i i too am fairly like uh anti-government or like i don't know anti-government but i'm fairly like um i i like believe in people to solve their own problems uh so i'm with you i just in the interest of like seeing the other side i thought i'd push back a bit more i think um I think I still have the the underlying role of what government should be doing um like I'm still on board with well

a couple things okay so one just the idea of like you know roads weren't managed by government and then they did become that way um I think yeah I think there's like a parallel trajectory in the sense that roads were sort of like disorganized and not really thought out or planned well. And yeah, I mean, the history is just so fast. I mean, I did not know until I started digging into this stuff that just like travel used to be like really dangerous and like people were like dangerous because the roads were bad, but dangerous because they were like bandits on the highways and stuff and like I mean it's just like crazy and and now like we don't worry about that stuff when we drive um and so like yeah there's some some I guess the trajectory that like somehow

this system needs to become a little bit more coherent and organized and thoughtful like I think that is inevitably going to happen because like you said I mean that's that's just sort of what happens to all these things as they become really widely used but I just don't know that like government is a literal like literally the government I don't know whether it'll be that partly because like again we're just like dealing with a different level of scale on the internet that I think is fundamentally different from physical problems. Like, yeah. Dealing with the roads is, you know, in the 1800s was just very different from dealing with like internet scale

problems today that are not just confined to one country. But yeah, I do think that there needs to be some sort of coordination, like thoughtful coordination around how to address these problems. Um, but I think where I hope people will be able to self-organize to do that. Yeah. I find myself kind of thinking that we're gonna, we're kind of waiting around for the Andrew Carnegie of our day to like, like some tech billionaire to be like you know what like my problem like the thing I care about is open source and that'd be great and it really just takes one

given the consolidation of capital these days it'd be so funny I mean like one of the things I just continue to be delighted by um and frustrated by is like sometimes I get like really in my head on like, what would be the right solution of these things. And then I realized that like, there's still so many people that love open source because open source is totally undefined. So someone came through and was like, I'm going to solve this problem. They'd be like, well, who are you that you're supposed to, you're not going to solve this problem. Like, I i mean it's so crazy like people that um get upset about like tracking and open source it's just like you know basic usage metrics are not available to maintainers of open source projects like they could be managing some of

the most widely used software in the world like that we all rely on and they have like no idea who's using it which is crazy um but if they like you know try to add any sort of analytics people just freak out or like, you know, adding any sort of like commercial license option, people go crazy. And so, yeah, I find it just like really wonderful that it sort of keeps me in check of every time I feel this desire to be like, well, maybe someone will just magically solve it tomorrow. And I'm like, oh, they would hate that, wouldn't they? That that's funny uh well so i guess that brings up the question of uh like incentives and like intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation

and the volunteer culture we have in open source which feels like this really delicate thing that we want to protect and encourage and yet also it's like the same it's this exact thing that like prevents us from just being paid regular salaries for doing this work yeah it's like the same it's this exact thing that like prevents us from just being paid regular salaries for doing this work yeah it's i don't know that yeah that feels like a really difficult problem to solve yeah i mean it does get right back into these um these sort of cultural clashes around and i think some of this is just like norms that will eventually have to change. So the example I always go back to is nonprofit sector where like, yeah, there's a lot of altruism in that sector. And there's a lot of people that might just volunteer because they want to

volunteer. But like, I don't think anyone questions the idea that like someone needs to get paid to like manage that work or coordinate there's, there's some overhead cost. Right. And like back in the day maybe like the only people who could do charity and non-profit were rich people who could fund themselves but today it's like understood that you know it's like a job and you should get paid a salary to do it yeah or just like there's different reasons why

you might want to go pick up trash on a Saturday morning with your friends versus like run a non-profit right like they're like really different incentives one might just because it feels good or you want to spend time with your co-workers or something like that or you just want to feel like you made a difference um and another might be well I don't know I'm not gonna I'm not gonna manage the accounting and billing for like people's i don't know donations or something i'm not going to do that just because it's fun i'm going to do it because i'm getting paid to do it and yeah i think like similarly in open source there's some like writing code is often i don't think we really need to like intrinsically motivate people to write code that is fun for them

um and i think that's usually what people point to when they say open source is working just fine because people are like intrinsically motivated to do this stuff. And I think that's again, like in the free software times, like that made perfect sense because they were just working on whatever they felt like. But if you're dealing with like, you know, support tickets or bug reports,

like not a lot of people love doing that in their free time. Some people do, but not a lot of people do doing that in their free time. Some people do, but not a lot of people do. But then it becomes really interesting to think about, well, what are the levers that we can pull? So in the example of support, which is kind of top of mind for me, because I've been digging into support research these past couple of weeks. Yeah. Like a core developer might want to write code for the project, but they don't want to do like, you know,

reading through bug reports or answering user questions. So you can either pay them to do that which is why i think a lot of products will monetize through support offering some kind of paid support option um because then there's like at least an an extrinsic motivation of like all right let's get paid to like deal with this stuff um or you can find someone else who is intrinsically motivated to deal with that. And so the reason why you have people on Stack Overflow answering tons of questions from users, even though they're not core developers in the project, is because, well, maybe they're some power user that wrote a book about R or something. And they're really excited to show off their knowledge, or it helps make them an expert on the topic so like they have their they have their own motivation for wanting to answer questions even though a core developer might be like oh this is the worst thing i don't want to do this

um so yeah i guess just like being explicit about like who's intrinsically motivated to do this job and then how do we find the right person to do it and acknowledging where sometimes intrinsic motivations just fail and we just like need to pay people to do certain types of work that no one else wants to do yep um so uh yeah i think that brings up a lot of interesting problems uh the question of non-code uh non-code work and open source like documentation and answering support questions. I'll just list a few related topics, and you'll respond to them as you see fit. Another thing is scaling all the things that maintainers do,

because that's a really tough thing to scale, and something that you've brought a lot of attention to. Also, people talk a lot about scaling first-time contributors, but it's really the second-time contributor. That's the thing we want to improve from a perspective. And then the last thing I'll bring up is that it seems like it isn't always the case that money is the problem. You gave us one example of a developer or someone who wrote a check to an open-source project and then checked back in later. and he didn't spend any of the money because he didn't know how to spend the money yeah i think that was jeff atwood um yeah that's something that i've been learning um over the past

few years too is like the idea of sustainability is not just about paying people like in some cases it is absolutely about paying people and in other cases it's about figuring out how to distribute a certain like workload or burden off off one maintainer and find other avenues for them um and those are really intertwined but like yeah i mean in the end it's just sort of about like figuring out how to manage coordination costs um for an open source project. But yeah, I mean, not knowing how to spend things is always interesting just because like money means different things at different scales.

So like something I'll hear from maintainers sometimes is I would rather get paid $0 to do something than $1 because if it's $0, I'm doing it because it's fun and I enjoy it. As soon as I get paid $1, if it's $0, I'm doing it because it's fun and I enjoy it. As soon as I get paid a dollar, then it's like, wait, all this code I wrote is worth like, you know, 10 bucks in PayPal donations to you. And it kind of like upsets them more than if they just never been paid to work on it at all. Which I think is just like, so yeah, it's just so interesting from like an economic perspective, right? Like that, like the value of the dollar is not actually linear um and then like yeah at higher

scales it's i mean even like some developers open source developers who are getting paid to work on open source i mean the best paid examples i can think of are you know maybe in like the hundred thousand dollar range um not some people are getting paid full-time as like employees somewhere to work on open source i'm not those, but just people who have like raised money independently. I'm like, that's not a ton of money for someone who's like a really, really, really high value developer. Like they can make way more money just working in industry. If you get paid like, you know,

$5,000 a year or something, that's not enough for you to quit your job. And neither is like $50,000, but would $500,000 be sure. But sure but like yeah it makes these really awkward like time scales where like fifty thousand dollars in donations is a lot of donations but it might not be enough to pay for one full-time developer so what do you do with that money yes awkward yeah you're right that That is an interesting valley of awkwardness. Yes, that's what it should be called. So back to the vision of open source. The vision I have for open source is different. And I propose to get there, or like the way I'm trying to get there is through technology in a way that's kind of like a different path than you're taking.

I think we're just coming at the same problem from different perspectives. through technology in a way that's kind of a, like a different path than you're taking. I think we're just coming at the same, the same problem from different perspectives. So my vision for open source kind of harkens back to, I think more of the original vision that like anyone who uses the thing and has an idea for how to change the thing or make it better can just do that. And there's like nothing standing in their way. But I guess there's the obvious problem that you were saying that software is just so big and complicated that that's just impractical. So the strategies that I'm working on is to just solve that problem directly, like just to make,

to design programming languages and programming systems to lend themselves better to comprehensibility. So that one day maybe it could be realistic to expect to like, not, not my grandma, but like someone who uses Excel every day and it comes up with it. So I say Excel because they're like pretty computer literate, but then they come up with a way to make Excel better just for themselves or their company.

And they could just do it themselves, even though they're not like a real programmer. So that's kind of the vision of the world I'm shooting for. So I'd be curious to get your quick thoughts on that perspective. Were you focused on people who would be able to do that, as in like, create a solution for themselves, right? Not necessarily contributing back upstream to a project. Yeah, I didn't make a clear distinction. I think either would be great. So if there's something I think would benefit everybody,

well, so I imagine the way it would happen to most people is like, oh, I just think this would be better for me. And then you do it. And then it's like, as a second thought, oh, maybe my friend would like this, or maybe like the entire community would like this. But think as a first step i just want to customize the software for me and then maybe i'll ship like maybe other people would find it valuable and they can like optionally adopt it so i think the uh the complexity challenges that i was alluding

to are probably less technical and more people related or just coordination related um but I do think both are important. So I think, but they end up almost sometimes being in conflict with each other. So yeah, I mean like there's a whole body of interest around making it easier for people to make first time contributions. And this kind of gets to where you're alluding to at the first versus second time contributions. Where, yeah, I mean, it should just be easier to make a contribution than it is right now, or just, like, it should be more obvious on how to do that.

And then maybe that's sort of, like, and it's not just sort of, like, how do I make a pull request, but also, like, can I even, like, read what is going on in this code so that I can make a meaningful change? But then there's the like the vision of the project, right? And like, maybe you really care about making some change. You feel really passionate that this change should happen.

Like if you're using Excel, if only Excel were like open source or something and you like, you know, discovered something that was really useful for your own use case. And you're like, all right, maybe other people would benefit from it too. And you're really excited to submit those changes upstream. And the maintainer tells you like, no, we don't need this. Like that's a really, that's a conflict that needs to be managed. Right. And so like the stuff that's good for someone individually is not always

great for everyone. And I think that's one of those like hard maintainer jobs of like, how do I know which contributions make sense to accept versus not? And I think thankfully in open source, like at least like you can always fork the project and, and have your own personal version of it. Right. Like if you're like, well, I like this better than, you know, merge into your own version of the projects and keep using that, which is really nice. But yes, I think it's hard to manage the like, like, how do you know when something is good for you versus when is it actually good for everyone else?

Or do you just like think it would be good for everyone else? Yeah, that's a tough one. I don't know if it's actually possible, but I'd like to believe that with the right sort of programming language and tooling, we could have our cake and eat it too, in the sense that I can propose some change. is relatively stable and like nonpartisan almost, like kind of unbiased. And then which would allow other people to like make almost plug-in-y things. So there's less of a single point of like one person just deciding for everybody what's right and everyone can kind of decide for themselves.

I feel like that's kind of the vision that would bring the most happiness to the most people. I yeah i guess in the sense of like you should be able to break apart the projects i mean it's essentially forking again of people should be able to work on their own versions of things um but in terms of returning back to the main project like i think it'd be like chaos if everyone could just put in whatever they want right because like what if you have an idea and someone else has literally the opposite idea and this is sort of like the the problem of like democracy at scale right where maybe both believe really passionately that your ideas make sense but like whose ideas should make it in and only

one person's can yeah i guess i'm saying that um uh so it'd be neat if like the the core could be something that is like kind of what you're saying you don't really fork it that often it's like has a pretty unified vision but it allows for an architecture where where people can disagree and not affect each other because it's it's kind of like a la carte more yeah i like thinking about that just for like society in general. I don't think filter bubbles are a bad thing because like, I don't know, inevitably we all need our own little spaces to do our own things. And yeah, it's sort of like, I don't know, I feel like software architecture really mirrors

society in some ways or the other way around of like, yeah, sometimes you just need to break things apart and let people have their own spaces to do whatever it is they care about um so um kind of on like a different tact um i'm sure you're familiar with the phrase that benevolent dictator for life i think uh this think this week is like a particularly interesting time to talk about that phrase because I guess a few months ago Guido stepped down from that position for Python and I think just this week

or maybe it was yesterday, I don't know, it was very recently, Linus Torvald also stepped down from Linux. I think they stepped down for different but very related reasons that I imagine you would have some comments on. Yeah, well, I think they were pretty different without knowing a whole lot about the back channel history in either of those situations.

I think on Linus's side, it was sort of, he's been infamous of being a maybe not so benevolent dictator for life um and that's been like a point of contention for a very long time in that community whereas with guido i think it's been more that like i think he's had a pretty positive reputation of um at least maybe i maybe only talk to people who like guido but um but yeah i think I think the sense I got from that, just from the outside, was a little bit more like he was tired and had been kind of burned out by some of the conversations

that were happening and kind of just wanted to move on. I think Linus actually said, like, I'm just taking a break. I'm not burned out and I'm excited to stay on this project for a long time. I'm going to come back. But yeah, it is pretty crazy to see a few of the biggest bdfls stepping down um in the past couple months and i yeah i don't know if that's just sort of a generation of developers is starting to turn over or or what um yeah i um just i thought you'd find it funny when i goog Googled BDFL, there was like a list on Wikipedia of all of them. And you know, the top of the list. I don't know what the list is sorted by. So it's just random. But Juan Bennett. No way. Wow. Is he kind of a BDFL? I guess so. It feels like the for life seems like you have to have your projects have been around for like

decades before you can say for life but that's funny so I guess that's an interesting segue so I'd be curious to hear about your experience at protocol labs how it's like working on the distributed team I don't know if you go to an office every day who do you work with you know how's that like yeah it's pretty great um we don't have a physical office so i worked at github before this um github is pretty like remote friendly or at least i think it's very remote friendly um so i thought it'd be really prepared for critical labs but critical labs is like takes the concept of remote friendly and like 10x is it um so yeah i mean everyone is totally

distributed uh we have about 100 people now i think um yeah it's been growing a lot and uh yeah we're so part of why i was interested in joint prog labs is because the organization of the company itself is kind of an experiment i I think, that I wanted to follow along with. So we have sort of like different groups of people that work on different teams of people working on different things. And everyone is a little bit like self-managed as their own little like pod or node. And then we have like another group whose job it is to be sort of like the connective tissue within each of those groups. So like, I'm under the research org, which is probably a little bit, I think consists of more like independent self-managed people than maybe like the

Filecoin team or something where people are working with each other all the time. But yeah, it's a really interesting setup in that it's meant to be sort of like little pods of autonomy that are all connected with each other. I've been given a lot of freedom and autonomy at, at protocol labs, which I'm extremely grateful for. They really respect the idea of a research culture and because we don't have managers, we have a totally flat hierarchy. There's sort of like a, I guess a team lead or someone who stewards the research organization. But we don't have literal managers, at least not right now.

So I'm able to sort of structure my day however I see fits. It's been, so when I joined GitHub, I didn't, GitHub used to not have managers. But by the time I joined, there already were managers and like a more formalized structure. So this is the first time I've worked in a company that's like big, but doesn't have managers but by the time I joined there already were managers and like more a more formalized structure um so this is the first time I've worked in a company that's like big but doesn't have managers um or I guess relatively big um so yeah I've been trying to like figure out how do I even like have like accountability and stuff and so I think that idea of just like internet twitter communities and stuff that we talked about earlier like that's been really useful for me like I think I spend most of my time collaborating and talking to people outside of my like actual company or employer,

but I still feel like I have a lot of colleagues and a lot of people to bounce ideas off of just like in the world all over the place, which is great. I started doing this thing that like I really enjoy that's sort of inspired by something we were doing at thing that like i really enjoy that's uh sort of inspired by something we were doing at github where like i just keep a google doc that of like weekly updates it's like a little captain's log um and some people in the org have access to it and so if anyone's sort of like wondering like what does nadia do all day i just try to like keep a log of the things i've been

doing that week and just keep a running list um it's kind of nice for me to be able to look back on and see like what did i do what have i been doing with my time? I guess it's also just a nice like gentle accountability mechanism of like you should have things to write down but it's entirely up to me what I want to write down. Having a newsletter has also been kind of a nice accountability mechanism in that like I send out a newsletter every month and like I want to have writing in it or I want to have something to talk about in it and that's sort of like but yeah it's sort of like I've had to come up with my own my own ways of measuring progress um besides like a traditional I guess formal kind of employer-employee relationship. Yep, same.

I've had to deal with a lot of those issues. I also keep one of those, like, logs. They're kind of funny. It's like, talk to yourself in there. Yeah, it's great. I actually publish mine as soon as I write it. Oh, really? Yeah.

I stole the idea from other people on the internet who i saw doing it and it and it just gave me so much value into their like act to what they're actually working on and their like meta process of how they think through things that i just i couldn't you know i just really wanted to just pay it forward and um and it's been really great one of my favorite things about it is um the linkability of it so like i i like liberally use um headers for everything and it's hosted on github pages so everything has like a link to a specific place in the log so um so at this point it's 50 000 words or more it's like the length of a novel but i can link to like a specific paragraph uh elsewhere in the log or on

twitter or like in conversations with people so that's great yeah i don't know yeah i i i would encourage you to do the same uh just for the selfish reason that i did it i'm like yeah i i feel like i i would be a little bit nervous to publish it i don't know why though because i publish other things online that I should feel self-conscious about right now. The way mine happened kind of is I have like a personal journal, like diary, I guess, where I talk about like my own life, like all sorts of stuff that I definitely would want to be public. And then like just in there, I would also have work stuff. And then I was like, this is this is kind of silly. Like a lot of this stuff is has nothing to do with my life like my personal life and other people would find it useful like I just have to like

separate these two so so potentially there's like things that you don't want to be public and and like you can keep some of those private but a lot of I imagine a lot of what you write about in that log is like totally benign yeah that's why i'm sort of like surprised that i would find myself feeling awkward about sharing it because it's not like yeah i'm not i'm not journaling about my private life in there but it's like it's almost i think the fear of judgment of like well what if it's not what if i think i'm doing tons of stuff but like really i'm not doing that much at all um which is stupid yeah it's been funny with the newsletter they sent out because like I I have a section where I like share books that I've read that month that are relevant it's not

even all the books that I've read but they're just the ones that I think are semi-relevant to the work that I do um and I also feel kind of ashamed because it's like you know there's like three books on there a month or something and I've had multiple people like respond and be like wow you read so much how do you do that that? And I'm like, really? So I guess it's all relative and we should stop trying to measure ourselves to other people. But I always feel like I don't read enough or I don't read fast enough. Well, I think part of it is I think people get the sense that you're not sharing everything. Like they know that.

They just see what you do share. So they feel like the tip of the iceberg kind of thing. So like, man, what must be under there? i'll just continue to convey that mystery of yes there's there's so much going on here that you don't know about um so i'd be curious to hear uh if we get a sneak preview of like the new threads or research you're working on i know it might be fuzzy but i thought that's kind of what podcasts are for just unstructured you know where your thoughts are yeah um so i'm about to go kind of heads down this in just unstructured, you know, where your thoughts are. Yeah. So I'm about to go kind of heads down this in the next couple of months, which I'm very excited about.

Just there's something nice about writing long form. I think as I've just kind of been in full-time research for the past few months, I think I've been doing a lot more like short form research sprints and blog posts, but they can feel a little bit cyclical. So it'll be nice to kind of do something longer um most of it is actually kind of what we've already been talking about sorry to say but uh this idea of separating out the idea of uh commons into both a production

and a consumption side and trying to understand how they perform differently. So I think the way that, it's sort of this odd thing, like there is a field of economics that looks at digital goods, but at least in my study of it, and I've talked to other people who have not disagreed with this, that the research on the economics of digital goods basically looks at stuff from free software era of this idea of pure production. You have people in a commons who are

all contributing equally, or they all just feel this shared sense of ownership, and that's what a commons is. And it doesn't really hold up at all to what we see from digital goods today and i think there's sort of this um harmful i think somewhat harmful belief that um digital goods scale costlessly and some of them do like if you write a song and you put a song out on the internet um like you don't go back and revise that song according to the feedback people give you uh but for something like software like you don't go back and revise that song according to the feedback people give you uh but for something like software like that's you know being produced in the open like it's not that you just release once and that's the end of it um you have to make continual changes to it either because

people are submitting changes back to it but also because software degrades over time knowledge degrades over time like you can't just just release something once and be done with it. And we don't really have a great model to understand that right now. And so yeah, if we're challenging this idea that digital goods don't scale costlessly because there is some non-zero cost that goes back to the producer, what does it look like to sustain and maintain that um stuff like patents for example work really well because you you kind of like release or create something once and so you're incentivizing the um the innovation cost i guess or you're rewarding the innovation cost but you're not um but you're not accounting for like maintenance

into perpetuity and so yeah that just requires very different models so basically i'm trying to look at like what is it what is it what is the actual finite resource in uh production in the production side of the commons um mostly looking at the idea of attention and like where is attention finite or scarce and how is it a resource that we choose to allocate or not um which i think dovetails with how we think about attention economies right now but um attention economics is kind of focused on like me the individual making a choice of how to spend my time versus me an individual choosing how to spend my time on behalf of a commons um so yeah that's a whole thread around it and then just sort of getting to like the

contributor incentives and trying to split apart those different kinds of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations that we talked about so yeah hopefully it'll all wrap up to something nice and coherent right now it's a little bit it's a little bit all over the place. But yes, I think they all kind of point to this picture of digital goods at scale that function differently from how we understand them thus far. Yeah, I got it. Okay, great. It's slowly becoming more legible, very, very slowly, but I still feel like it's messy. I think because I've read your other work, the framing of like, I think elsewhere you talked about how someone was, the woman you mentioned, who recontextualized the conversation around public goods. She didn't reframe everything, she just extended an existing framework.

It sounds like that's what you're definitely. Yeah. It's about extending. It's not about replacing. So in this vein, it sounds like the work that you do, the style of work you've been doing is a independent research, which is a phrase that I learned about from you through like you wrote a blog on independent research. You talk about that. It's like, not this new weird thing, but it's kind of been around for a long time uh in in science and it works and it should be more respected uh so i i that's actually how i guess partially how this conversation came about so i thought i'd bring up that topic um particularly

under the context of uh i recently um, actually, like largely because of your influence, writing that article, I found myself a mentor or he kind of found me through your work. So Jonathan Edwards, I mentioned in the last episode, he's agreed to mentor me like in an almost like in an academic sense, like as if we were both in the same institution. But instead, he and I are neither of us are at institutions so um so anyways i thought i'd ask about uh your if you consider yourself an independent researcher if you have a mentor what sorts of things like a la carte are you taking from from like academia and research or what sorts of things are you not doing not? Short answer is I'm definitely still learning. I do consider myself to be an independent researcher, although I have a full-time salaried position

just because it's kind of an unusual setup. I've been trying to challenge certain ideas that I think would have come if I had been in academia. I mean, one being that, like, one thing I do hold very firmly to is I don't believe that you need years and years of training before you can be an effective researcher with interesting things to say in the world. I did consider doing a PhD, and I had a few institutions approach me to talk about that in the past couple years and I did although I love the idea of doing research in that way there was just something cultural that I didn't necessarily align with which was this feeling that like if I study everyone else for the next five to seven

years then maybe I'll be qualified to make a useful statement about the world at the end of that. And I think that might be true for other disciplines or for other problem statements, but at least for my own personal experience, the way I came into this was by finding a different angle on something that I think a lot of people were talking about. And so I'm naturally just going to be a little bit

not into the idea of having to do it that way. So yeah, I do love that, like, my situation right now means I can just like, if you have ideas, and you care about studying them, you should just like, you know, do what you want to do and publish stuff online. And maybe you're repeating other people's work, sometimes, whatever, like you're there to learn. So I think that's a really important part of independent research, but, um, definitely I think the harder parts can be around collaboration and around, um, validation. Like I'm definitely, I feel like I have no shortage of great people to talk to about ideas and things like that, but like, there's something about a deeper collaboration. Um, like a lot of people I will talk to about ideas are people who are doing other things full-time.

I don't have a lot of people who are full-time devoted to the same field and the same problem statement that I am. So while we can have great conversations about things, I really wish I could just... I wish there were other full-time researchers working on the same problem as me. And I've only found people that are really tangential or touch a part of it or are really interested in the topic but are doing something else full-time researchers working on the same problem as me and i i've only found people that are really like tangential or like touch a part of it or are really interested in the topic but are doing something else full-time and so i think that can be a really difficult thing um that might also just be because the problem is newer um and then like the validation part is something i or maybe not validation is the right word but like the work product i think is something that i'm experimenting with like when i first started started Procolabs, I was like, I don't want to write any papers because

like, I believe like, if you have interesting things to say, you should just be able to publish them wherever. And so that's why I've only been doing blog posts, but there is something weird about like, if you spend like some of the blog posts I've done recently took like a really long time to pull that data together. You know, it's like, or at least for me, it felt like a long time, like three weeks or a month or something of like spending a lot of time on it. And in the end you end up with like a blog post and like, then I have other blog posts

that I can write in like literally an hour. And it's just like, wait, but both of these are blog posts. Like there's something about having like a paper that can feel just a little bit more polished. And I think that people are more comfortable citing, which is something I found from when I published Roads and Bridges bridges the longer report that I did like people are like very comfortable there was something about it that felt more legitimate just because it was like

a published report versus a blog post which is kind of why I want to do something long form this fall because I've come to accept that okay like maybe like maybe it doesn't make any sense, but like there are some things that are just better done in like a slightly more polished form. So yeah, that's something I'm still experimenting with and I don't really have answers to yet. Cool. Well, I'm glad that you are at least talking about it because I think you're quite good at putting like vocabulary to things that the rest of us have trouble talking about. I'm glad we're all struggling with it. So the last thing I want to mention is I didn't even realize until I was doing research for this

episode, you have this thing called the helium grant. That's really cool. So I'd be curious to hear about why you started that and how it's going and if you'd encourage people like under what conditions you'd encourage people to yeah definitely um that came out so healing guys came out of an experiment that I did I think last spring um I kind of had this idea for a bit of like I feel like internet audiences are sometimes very under leveraged of like, you have people who are listening to you, you can kind of just share and do weird experiments all the time. And like, I wish I did more weird experiments on my audiences because so yeah, and I think

I just had had the thought of like, well, what would happen if you were just like, I'm going to give away at the time was $5,000. And like, what would people do with it? What would people ask for? And I was talking to a friend about it last spring, who was like, you should totally just do it. And offered to also match that. So I had two $5,000 grants to offer. And so I just like wrote a blog post last spring and kind of like put up on the internet. And it was just really fun to get responses from people I got I think that time somewhere I forgot the numbers I was like I think 2000 ish applications which I all came to my inbox which was a lot of email for a while and yeah I decided to keep doing. I'm doing them now as like kind of on a slightly more rolling deadline. So, um, they're a thousand dollar grants once every quarter. Um, but I've

also made it so that anyone can sponsor one with me. So like last quarter we had, uh, like 12 grants of just like random, it's, it's been fun to see like random things people will apply for, but it's also fun to have random people emailing me being like hey i'm gonna venmo you a thousand dollars like this seems cool um and yeah kind of just like doing that with strangers on the internet is also really fun just more internet friends um but the goal of the sorry go ahead uh no i'm sorry to interrupt i just wanted to confirm it sounds like you are are giving a bit of your own money and then people, people from the internet are matching. Yeah.

That's the way it's set up right now. It's been like, yeah, I put up a thousand dollars every three months. And if anyone else wants to join in and match that, then they can. that's amazing. That's so,

well, yeah, I mean, it's like mostly like, I think it's been fun for me, because I, like seeing the types of applications around the world from just like, like the way I've tried, I've been trying to find the right messaging for it. Like what I really would like to fund are people that are just obsessed with some sort of idea that they really want to be working on, and they need some capital to get them going um it's not really meant to be like a go fund me type thing it's also not

really meant to be like a kickstarter type thing um and that like yeah it should just be like hey i can't stop thinking about this thing and if only i had a little bit extra cash to make it happen um not necessarily always because people don't have the money, but because maybe it's a really weird idea that they don't want to spend a thousand dollars on or whatever. But finding that sweet spot of just the right project can be, can just be like hard to convey. But like, regardless, like the applications I see are just like,

so, so interesting. Just like the crazy stuff that people come up with that they can think to spend $1,000 on. So just a reminder, I always get really inspired by people that are doing weird and interesting things. And I feel like healing grants are basically a funnel for me to have an opportunity to read about weird and interesting things from thousands of people

around the world. And that's why I really enjoy doing it. it's easy enough to just to do yeah can you share a fun story from your your application reading or or granting I'm trying to think what I can share so I also made a whole thing about like keeping applications really private but private um but yeah I'm trying to think what can I share um some of them are just like really creative like one from this last round was a woman who like wanted to write her she needed to finish her she was like a road scholar and she needed to finish her PhD thesis but she had a young daughter and she just like couldn't afford the child care to like get some quiet reading time in so like she was using the money to like pay for a thousand dollars worth of child care which translated into like I don't

know like 40 hours or something of I don't know what the math is on that but some some significant chunk of time for her to do like writing in private um which i thought was cool i remember like from the beginning one of the applications last year was someone who wanted to like fund um uh like an uber or a lyft driver to commute them back and forth to work so that they would have like an extra hour and a half in their day to like work on whatever their project was. I didn't end up awarding it to them, but I thought it was like an interesting creative idea. So I'm always like kind of tickled by like the creative ways that people are like trying to create more hours of uninterrupted time in their day,

which is like slightly different from like funding materials or things like that. Well, it's funny because when you like ask for a thousand dollars it's not like oh well like if you give me this thousand dollars i'll put in my bank account and then uh it'll it'll help me you know abstractly um you have to like kind of explain like how we're going to use it and it's going to directly help you can't give like the direct yeah it's also crazy to see like in some geographic locations like a thousand dollars goes really, really far. Like someone wanted to name like a building after me or something.

And the first set of applications. And I was like, wow, that was for $5,000, but still I was like, man, $5,000 can get me a lot in other places. Whereas you don't get people in like San Francisco. Yeah. I, I, I imagine I wouldn't be surprised if in a couple of years you, like, only gave grants to countries where they went. Spreading, yeah. Yeah, it's also an interesting balance to manage.

I mean, it's really hard to pick applications for this, just because, like, it's not that many grants given the volume of applications. And so, yeah, making the trade-offs of where will $1,000 go further is always interesting. Cool. Well, I think now, just in the interest of time, is a good time to wrap up. So I want to give you just one last opportunity. If there's anything you wanted to plug or if you're looking... I imagine this wouldn't be applicable for you

if you're looking to hire people or to work with people or just generally places on the internet you want to meet people or talk to them or whatever. Now would be the opportunity for that. Yeah, well, I like talking to people on Twitter. And you should totally sign up for my newsletter because I like talking to people on Twitter and you should totally sign up for my newsletter because I like talking to people on there too sweet

awesome well thank you so much for taking the time this was a lot of fun