An innovative way to meet the open-source community
On Thursday 26 November, the EU-FOSSA 2 team organized a highly successful Ask Me Anything (AMA) session. The online event took place in the r/opensource group on the Reddit social media platform and allowed the community to post questions to the team. Right after the initial announcement, a week before the actual event, Reddit visitors started posting their first questions.
During the one-hour AMA session, the team gave live answers to more than a dozen questions on a wide range of topics. These included the EU-FOSSA 2 bug bounty programmes and hackathons, sustainability/funding of open-source projects, supporting infrastructure, building on national projects and alignment with similar international initiatives. The team also answered questions on issues related to trade policy, patents, and standards.
The team consisted of people working on the EU-FOSSA 2 project, one developing the new open source strategy of the European Commission, and one working for the European Parliament:
- Sebastian Raible – Former assistant to MEP Julia Reda (currently assistant to MEP Sergey Lagodinsky),
- Marek Przybyszewski – Programme Manager for the Commission's EU-FOSSA 2 project and open source strategy,
- Gijs Hillenius – Consultant guiding the renewal of the open-source strategy of the Directorate-General for Informatics (DIGIT), and
- Saranjit Arora – Project Manager for EU-FOSSA 2.
It was good to have Sebastian Raible attend, as he initiated the project in 2016 and represented the MEPs on various EU-FOSSA 2 meetings over the next three years.
The open source lifestyle
EU-FOSSA 2 aims to increase the security of critical open source software used by European Institutions as well as the public. It does this by setting up bug bounty programmes, organising hackathons and conferences, and engaging with developer communities. In addition to more traditional ways of engaging, an AMA session like this – a first for DIGIT – has proven to be a useful channel to meet the open-source community on their own ground in an open and accessible way.
The AMA thread holding the questions and answers can be seen here.
For more information on the EU-FOSSA 2 project click here