On Wednesday 10 February 2021, Moorcrofts Joint Managing Partner and Head of Tech, Andrew Katz, will speak at FOSS Backstage, an exciting conference dedicated to everything related to FOSS governance and open collaboration.

About FOSS Backstage

FOSS Backstage, now in its third edition will take place in a fully online, interactive environment, across Wednesday 10 and Thursday 11 February 2021. It will provide a space to discuss a broad spectrum of issues related to community management, vendor neutrality and leading projects without discretionary power.

Conference topics will include: open source project leadership best practices, community management, open source project metrics, open source strategy for enterprise, adopting open source collaboration in corporations, legal matters when dealing with open source and many more.

About Andrew Katz and Malcolm Bain’s Talk

Andrew will co-present with Malcolm Bain, Across Legal who together will deliver a workshop entitled ‘Freeing software with governance, for public administrations’.

The talk will focus on, Public Money, Public Code… but what are the best practices for public sector bodies to release new projects or share their own projects as FOSS? Why is it not “easy-peasy” (it certainly should be a “no-brainer”)? Public sector bodies usually don’t have the staff with FOSS skills (certainly at management level, although they increasingly have developers who do, and are keen to embrace FOSS), they don’t have the time, and it is not a priority… even if there is a legal mandate.

Andrew and Malcolm will present their experience in working with two public sector projects in the UK and Spain respectively, for publicly sharing code, with two totally different approaches looking for short term wins and long term sustainability. Governance? Contributions? Community Principles? High level inter-administration agreements? IP Management? Resources and funding? Navigating internal management?

You name, we have … no answers but maybe some hints that will help you work with local governments for freeing up public code.

About Andrew Katz

Andrew is one of the UK’s leading free and open-source lawyers, is a Fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe and the Open Forum Academy, and is a visiting researcher at the University of Skövde, Sweden. Prior to qualifying as a lawyer, Andrew was a software developer (he is a certified NeXT developer).

He is also a founder of Orcro Compliance, a division of Moorcrofts specialising in compliance issues with particular focus on GDPR and OpenChain compliance. Moorcrofts has been appointed by the Linux Foundation as an OpenChain partner, and Andrew has guided organisations large and small through the OpenChain compliance process.

Andrew’s skillsets also cover open source licensing, technology law and Intellectual Property.

About Malcolm Bain

Malcolm Bain is a lawyer (partner at Across Legal) specialising in ICT law, based in Barcelona, with a special focus on Open Source Projects.

Who FOSS Backstage is for

With a focus on decentralised decision making and open collaboration FOSS Backstage will be a great place for: developers, architects, sysadmins, community leaders, students and anyone interested in building and managing communities within the open source space, to get together and exchange ideas.

Organisers of Foss Backstage

FOSS Backstage is organised by Plain Schwarz UG in collaboration with Isabel Drost-Fromm (Open Source Strategist at Europace AG, Member and former Director of the Apache Software Foundation, founder and PMC member of Apache Mahout) and Stefan Rudnitzki (Team Lead of the agile coach team at Testo, co-organizer of MongoDB usergroup Berlin and Async Cat Herding meetup Berlin).

Video

The video of the talk is now available and can be viewed via YouTube.

More Information

For more information about the conference visit the Foss Backstage website.