2016 Schedule

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Developer

Thursday, Sep 15
10:00am — 11:30am
Enterprise Coworking
81 attending

Radical Transparency & "Open Source by Default"

Ello (the Creators Network) is the only online community designed for creators, by creators. Our mission to support creators everywhere includes corporate-charter-level commitments to not share or sell our members' data and to remain forever ad-free.

We have long felt that those underlying values had a deep meaning for us as an engineering organization, and that we could potentially do a lot to further openness and transparency specifically within the software engineering realm. While we've always strived to be good citizens in the open source community, and contribute back to the tools and frameworks we rely on, in early 2016, we decided to go "open source by default" and started opening up large swaths of the code behind Ello. To date, we've opened up our Android and iOS apps and many of our backing services, and have a lot more waiting in the wings.

This talk will be a discussion of the what, why, and how behind that decision, the implications that it's had for our product and our company, and the challenges we've run into along the way. We'll also talk more generally about the "Open Source By Default" movement and the implications of that for any engineering team, open or not.