I volunteered at the State of Open conference this month, the conference is put on by the Open Source technology advocacy groups OpenUK.

Volunteering allowed me to sit in on a few sessions. AI was obviously a hot topic. There is naturally a lot of unhappiness at what constitutes the idea of an “open” foundation model; it isn’t just the code and the model weights, there’s also an interest in the training corpus and any human refinement process that might be used.

It is reasonable to assume that a lack of transparency in training data is because a lot of it has been illegally obtained. The conference did have a discussion group on the UK government’s consultation on copyright and training material, one that critics have said represents a transfer of wealth from creators to technologists.

Overall though it felt that there was more unhappiness than solutions. The expectation seems to be that companies will be able to train their models on whatever material they want and can obtain.

This unhappiness rang again for the other topic I heard a lot about which was maintainer well-being and open source community health. Maintainers feel stretched and undervalued, companies have been withdrawing financial support and informal, volunteer-run organisations handle conflict poorly within its own pool of collaborators leading to people leaving projects where they feel criticised and undervalued.

The good news is that people’s belief in the importance and value of openness, transparency and collaboration is still strong. The speakers at the conference were here to share because they want to help others and believe in the power of shared efforts and knowledge.

Becoming a volunteer

Someone asked me about how you volunteer for the conference and to be honest it was pretty straight-forward, I saw an invitation on LinkedIn, filled out a Google Form and then just turned up to the briefings and did the jobs I was asked to do. If I have the time then I think it is always worth volunteering to help out at these kinds of events as while you might not be able to get to see everything you want it also means you have something meaningful to be doing if the schedule is kind of ropey.

You also get to interact with your fellow volunteers which is much more fun that going to a conference alone.

Links

• Astronomer Apace Airflow as a service
• dbt a tool for transforming data
• Tessl a start up looking to switch from coding as we know it today to specification-driven development

Talk recommendations

This is purely based on what I was able to see.

• What is AI development?, an outline of how an AI development process might work and the reality of where we are now
• I inherited this project and all I got was these angry users: this was a pretty level-headed attempt to explain why maintainers need to be cautious about changes
• Linux Kernal Patch 6: this talk was confusingly titled, poorly structured and overran; on the other hand it has some really interesting findings on using asynchronous IO for better database performance