Russell Keith-Magee's journey to open source

julia ferraioli: My name is julia ferraioli, and my pronouns are she/her. Today is October 5 2021. And I’m speaking with Russell Keith-Magee, who is a committed technologist, core developer on the Django project, and the founder of the beware project. I’m recording this conversation for open source stories in a rather Spartan office that I still haven’t decorated after moving in. And my first memory of a computer is actually playing Wheel of Fortune on MS DOS, if you can believe that. That was a while ago. And Russell, would you like to introduce yourself?

Russell Keith-Magee: Yes. Hi, my name is Russell Keith-Magee. I am speaking today from Perth, Western Australia which is Whadjuk Nyoongar Boodja; the Whadjuk Noongar are the traditional owners of the land where I’m recording from. Because of virtue of time zones it is actually the sixth of October where I’m recording – timezones how do they work? My first memory of a computer is actually my father bringing home an original Apple Macintosh. My father was very keen on experimenting with new and wacky technology and so we had a Commodore64 in the house very very early.

But before that, before we had that one we did he did have for a trial for a weekend an original Macintosh that he brought home and I remember vividly discovering – no idea what I was going to do with this thing – but I discovered there was a paint program and you could draw and you could draw things with paint. But if you if you’ve got the fattest brush, and you colored in the entire screen entirely black, and then you click reset, it would go through like a couple of shades of like gray scale as the color went away. I don’t know why that blew my mind that you could do that. It’s sitting in my father’s office watching his fingers to shave go through phases of gray amused seven year old me I guess.

julia ferraioli: I seem to remember effects like that myself, as well as manually starting a screensaver. That of course, if you’ve left running too long, it would burn into the monitors.

Russell Keith-Magee: Yes.

On compassion

julia ferraioli: So thank you for joining me today. I’m really excited to chat with you. And I want to just get a little bit of an idea about your background. Let’s dig into the really light weight stuff. Like…what are some important lessons that you’ve learned in your life?

Russell Keith-Magee: I guess it’s kind of been an ongoing lesson to learn that there is almost no situation where having compassion and empathy for the people you’re dealing with, that will not serve you well. In my youth, I can remember being a lot more angry and frustrated at all these other stupid people in the world who just don’t understand. As I’ve gotten older, I have gradually and sometimes very painfully learned that it’s not that everyone else in the world is stupid. It’s just that everyone else in the world has a different set of experiences and a different set of knowledge and a different set of backgrounds, a different set of expectations. More often than not what is perceived as this person being stupid, is just their set of expectations coming into the situation are radically different to your own. Pulling yourself out of your own head to see where they are coming from will one not only make dealing with the world a lot less frustrating for you but can often help you get to whatever shared goal you’re trying to get to a lot easier.

Just by virtue of its if you understand where someone’s coming from, it’s a lot easier to present the information in a way they’re going to be able to understand or absorb or recognize whatever it is that you’re saying. That’s not to say that it isn’t incredibly frustrating sometimes when you’re still in conversations, but it has helped me manage my frustration a lot more to realize where other people are coming or not coming from a place of trying actively to frustrate me. It’s just an accident of the world being a very large and complex and intriguing place.

julia ferraioli: That’s a fantastic lesson. I often tend to think of it as people are operating with different environment variables set.

Russell Keith-Magee: Yes, yes. And there are many, many of them and they’re not at all documented.

julia ferraioli: No!

Russell Keith-Magee: And quite often they are even aware of the environment variables they’re running under, which is part of the frustration, I guess. But yes, being aware of those environmental variables is helpful.

First experiences with open source

julia ferraioli: Excellent. So you are very involved in the open source ecosystem. So how would you describe open source to someone unfamiliar with it?

Russell Keith-Magee: I guess I would describe it as a collective project where a group of people work together to build technological solutions to a problem. So that by sharing, they don’t repeat each other’s work. And they can learn from each other’s lessons. If you’re working on a system by yourself, there’s a limit to how much you can do by yourself. If even two small groups are working together, there is a limit to how much they can achieve on their own. But if everybody is working together and sharing together, you end up with a more robust, more complete solution, because you have more input into what is being developed and what is being built.

So it is, in some regards, the antithesis of what sort of modern capitalism is trying to teach us all to do, which you know that idea that you find something that you’re good and you make sure you corner the market so that nobody else can do it. It is this idea that if we all contribute together, we all give a little bit towards the project. Everyone moves a little bit further as a result.

julia ferraioli: Kind of this collective good concept.

Russell Keith-Magee: Yeah.

julia ferraioli: So what was your first encounter with open source? How did you first become aware of it?

Russell Keith-Magee: I became aware of open source before the word open source was even a thing, so my first exposure was in the mid-90s. I was messing around with a computer and someone did the “Hey, hey, you know, have you have seen this thing called Linux?”, and passed me a great big stack of floppy disks that I could install on my computer. And there’s this whole other operating system that was like completely different from Windows. At that point, free software was a thing. And like you usually do, you read up all the code around or the documentation and the manifesto statements that are around free software. And this was kind of fascinating idea that this is this piece of hardware, this printer was frustrating. So people liberated the software for it so they could program their own printer like, yeah, that that sounds great. How do I get me more of that?

That was sort of the start of my university career by the time I was, in my honors years, the open source movement as we now understand – the OSI [Open Source Initiative] and groups like that – were starting to formalize what they were saying, under a new narrative about what that would mean, that wasn’t quite in the extreme ends of what the Free Software Foundation was pushing but in a similar kind of vein.

julia ferraioli: Gotcha. You talked about Linux, but was there a first piece of open source software that really got you bought into the whole thing?

Russell Keith-Magee: I guess, if I had to put my finger on it, I would say it was probably the GNOME Desktop, again, in that kind of late 90s-ish timeframe, when I should have been spending a lot more time working on my thesis, but it was just being intrigued by this idea of a desktop that you could build and configure and change things and modify. It was still very, very early stages, and so a lot of things broke, a lot of things didn’t work., and it was exposing me to new new ideas and new pieces of technology. And reading up all of the design documents of the people who were actively working on it was kind of this this idea that “Yeah, I can, I can help them”. Not necessarily that I was successful, but, at least in theory, I could help them do what they’re doing.

The only real restriction was my ability to narrow down a single thing that I could work on and contribute to the overall project.

julia ferraioli: So at that time, were you already coding proficiently, or were you…

Russell Keith-Magee: Proficiently is an interesting description, so I learned to program because I had this introduction to programming when I was eight or nine, when dad brought home the Commodore64. So I had been programming in various capacities. I went to university to do physics as an undergrad. I was picking up lots of like all the computing units that I could on the side of my honors ended up being in computer science.

So I could code, I was definitely not at a level that was building entirely new pieces of a desktop system, because there was so many pieces of that puzzle that I didn’t understand yet. But I had certainly had aspirations. I think I did, at one point submit a pull request to some obscure part of GTK, which I think as I remember, rightly, the review came back with sort of raised eyebrows, “What exactly are you trying to do here?” So you know, I wasn’t wasn’t definitely wasn’t successful on my first attempt.

julia ferraioli: I can definitely relate, having had some of those same review comments, in my own experience.

Getting involved in Django

julia ferraioli: So what was the first open source project that you really got involved in?

Russell Keith-Magee: That is Django, which kind of, sort of very much set by direction for the next 15 years of my career, and in some regards life. Although I knew open source, and I liked open source, my involvement in the community was was very, “I’ve got my own little thing that I want to tinker around with”. And I’ve got this grand idea of this thing that I’m going to build that I’ve variously tinkered on for 20-something years at this point. It’s the projects that will never ever get built. By this point, fully aware that my time will never allow me to build it. But you know, it’s a lovely dream.

For a long time, this was the problem domain that I understood. So when I wanted to learn a new language, let’s rebuild it. But this time in C, this time, in Python, this time in Ruby, just to sort of learn, learn the language to bring a problem, you understand to a new language and see how that changes the solution that you’ve got. Around that time, 2004/2005, I had this grand realization that the web, the web is a thing. And I might be able to use the web to solve this problem. So I better learn some more about the web, because it looks like it’s going to be important. And yet, despite at that point, having a PhD in computer science, I never learned anything about how servers or you know, the internet, works at that level anyway.

I sat down and tried to teach myself web programming as best I could, sort of went through PHP tutorials and went through a bunch of other tutorials, and none of them stuck, none of them really made sense. And they’re exacerbated by the fact that open source documentation in the early 2000s were not good. So I tinkered around and tried a bunch of different web frameworks, I remember trying the Rails tutorial at one point, a combination of not knowing Ruby well enough. And Rails being a new domain, that didn’t really make any sense. I tried a couple other different Python web frameworks and then stumbled upon Django, probably about two months after it was originally open sourced.

Django was originally an in house project at the Lawrence Journal World, which is a small town newspaper, in Lawrence, Kansas. They made a decision that they were going to open source their web framework that they had been using to build their newspaper website, basically, as a content management system, but sort of step back from the full CMS kind of aspect, just just the web framework bit. I found it and went through their tutorial. And for the first time is like a little light went on this, like, “Oh, that’s what you do”. Oh, it’s just that! Oh, okay. Well, in which case, let’s go with that and started building up more more and more complex experimentation of what I could do.

Again, because it was a very, very young project, and had only just recently been open sourced, there was a lot of stuff that was missing, there were a lot of features that just weren’t there. So I got to a point where it’s like, “Well, okay, this is great. But I really need to be able to do this other thing” that was like, you could define a many to many relationship between two database objects. You could traverse one direction, but you couldn’t traverse back the other way, well like okay, but I need to get to go both ways. So can I, I fix that? I don’t know. And because I did know Python quite well, at that point. And it was quite a well structured code base and a lot smaller code base than it is today. I got into the code like traced through, I can query it this way. Here it’s being constructed. So if I just like take that and copy it and like reverse all the variables the other way, then that’ll reverse it, right?

So I did that. And there was also a good test suite. So I could write a bunch of test cases to prove that yes, this was actually doing exactly what it should do, and submitted that as a pull request. So that was that would have been about two or three months after I for first time downloaded Django, submitted that pull request like that got reviewed and pulled into the code that I did a couple other little smaller minor things around the timezone handling or not some other bits and pieces that popped up. Adrian Holovaty, who is one of the project project founders, sort of mailed and said, “Hey, do you want to join the core team?”

Joining the Django core team

Russell Keith-Magee: So it was a very, very rapid from having never seen the project before to “you’re on the core team now, good luck”. It also helped that at the time, they were going through this big thing called magic removal, which was like a very large scale reengineering of some of the core pieces of Django, so they were willing to sort of give this newcomer access to the magic removal branch without necessarily giving them access to the core. So, I joined the team to help with the removal of the magic. And it kind of just progressed from there, I sort of just kept tinkering around on open source, on Django.

By happy coincidence, about three months after I’d been given the commit bit – that I was actively contributing – the place where I was working at the time was a defense consulting company that had a very, pretty lucrative contract to build this system that they were going to build for an exercise that was coming up, and the engineering plan was just being kicked off. They were just scoping out how much work was going to be and how long it was going to take to deliver. It was going to be a full fat client of Java GUI with user interface and everything was being built. The plan was calling for this 12 months engineering schedule to build this thing out.

It occurred to me that hang on, sure, we could do that. But we could also do this as a web page, and it’ll be done in like three weeks. Like, we’re just doing basic data collection here. This isn’t a big, big thing we’re trying to build. So why don’t we just do it as a website? I pitched that to my engineering manager, who sort of said, “Hmm, interesting, I hadn’t thought of that”, and he goes off, he did the Django tutorial.

About two days later came back with a very, very bare bones prototype, but a fully working bare bones prototype of this system we need to build, we can polish it a lot, but this would do if we had to. And so it was kind of “Well, yeah, let’s do that”. Because we’ll be done in like two months. And we can spend the rest of the time fine tuning it to make sure it’s exactly what we need, rather than not having a deliverable until October of this year. At which point we discover it doesn’t work, we’ve got to finesse all the other problems.

So at that point, working on open source, it didn’t become my day job. But I had a lot of leeway in my working day, to fix the problems in Django that were preventing us from building the thing that was actually commercially viable. And that sort of ideal model of, you’re not 100% working on Django, but you’re working, you’re using it and then fixing the bugs as you go and contributing those bugs upstream. So that then everybody benefits from the thing that you’ve discovered the hard way by trying to resolve this bug. That just kind of then set the direction for the next couple of years.

A lot of the company that we’re working at, their work started being seen through the lens of “can we do this as a web framework?” They never became a web company, per se, they were still defense consulting, but they worked out that they could rapidly develop these websites. I had a lot of leeway to work on Django bugs and answering questions on mailing lists that weren’t directly related to what we were doing. But they did have a big picture I had relevance to how we were progressing.

Working in a global community

Russell Keith-Magee: Now, the thing that’s sort of going on in the background here is that I’m based in Perth, Western Australia, we like to lay claim to being the most isolated capital city in the world. If you get on a plane, you have to fly for three hours to get to the nearest State Capital. Four or five, depending upon when you’re going to get to a real city. So I was here in Perth working away on an open source project, did not meet anybody else on the project for almost three years when the first DjangoCon conference was held.

I begged my my line manager, (I had changed companies move to a different company, but they had hired me on the basis of my Django experience). So they said, “Okay, we’ll pay for you to go to this conference”, wow, someone’s going to pay for me to fly to the United States so that I can talk about this thing that I’ve been doing in my spare time, and a little bit of my work time as well. At that point, I flew to San Francisco the conference that was Google hosted the very, very first conference and in the lobby of the hotel where we’d been to set up. I’m checking in, and another Australian voice over there said, “that sounds like you might be an Australian, are you Russell?” It turns out, it’s Malcolm Tredinnick who I’ve been working with was who was based in Sydney, who I had never met before.

He was the first person I’ve met that I’ve been working with at that point for two and a half, three years, and started a beautiful friendship, and then met the rest of the team over the course of the next two days of the conference.

julia ferraioli: Was it weird, meeting people in person after interacting with them online for so long?

Russell Keith-Magee: Very weird. And I guess that was kind of my first real exposure to the idea that the person you are on the internet is not the person you are in person? Or it isn’t necessarily. I think the conference hotel that we were at, had this sort of weird little social room, which is set up with the HiFi lounge, and all kinds of weird stuff in there.

But I met a couple of people in there one night, and one woman in particular, Barbara Shaurette, who met me and said, “You’re not the same person I was expecting from reading all of your emails, you are a very different person”, which I think was a compliment. We’re still friends. So I think it was still a compliment. But yeah, so she pointed out that my email presence was very formal and very, very straightforward. Very bullet point. These are the things we’re going to get done. Which, when I’ve had a beer, and I’m relaxing with friends, I’m not.

It was an interesting little head check that the internet and who you are in person, can be very, very different. Any other thing is also keep in mind that this is 2005/2006. I did not at that point, have a broadband internet connection. I was doing a lot of this stuff on a very, very slow ADSL. But it was very slow ADSL. So video chat – it could be done, but it wasn’t done a lot. “Just jump on a zoom call” was not something you would do. It was all being done by text. It was very much the emails you wrote was who you were, unless you actually physically knew someone in person.

julia ferraioli: I think that even though we have Zoom and video calls, I think people still run into that disconnect, that cognitive dissonance between who you are in person and who you are online, because you can edit.

Russell Keith-Magee: Yeah, you can edit stuff. There’s also that there is, this is one of the things I’ve been feeling particularly around sort of COVID as an experience is that’s forced me to be in Perth, like I’m not going to anywhere, all the conferences that I normally go to. And online conferences become weird because if I go to an online conference in the United States, they’re winding down at the end of the day, and it’s six o’clock in the morning for me.

So they’re kicking back and they’ve got a drink in one hand, and they’re being nice and social and I’m wolfing down cereal. And I guess I could mix that with whiskey, but probably not a good idea. And so there’s a whole different – where you are in the day matters a whole lot around the way that you interact with other people and sort of whether you’re being social or whether you’re being formal or whether you’re like we’re trying to formally follow an agenda or were just kicking back and telling stories and that’s a really hard thing to navigate when you are so geographically isolated, and timezone isolated in my case as well.

julia ferraioli: Absolutely. And people are often in different mindsets at different times of the day. Makes total sense.

Open source contractualism, identity, and burnout

julia ferraioli: So what would you like to talk about today?

Russell Keith-Magee: I guess is there’s the story that I’ve just told about getting involved in open source is kind of the origin story. Which which is how I got into open source and how I got to be involved in the Django project and that has absolutely shaped my life and the meta story is there – is it honestly like I guess there’s the Gary Larson comment from way back when or maybe from The New Yorker “on the internet no one knows you’re a dog” was my life for a long time it’s like I’m I am this person on the internet from from out in the middle of nowhere and the only reason you know I exist is because I mailed the mailing lists.

I’ve been able to go from that to be someone who is known to people in Europe and known to people in the US and other people in the rest of Australia or in Asia. I’ve traveled to conferences to see them, and been invited to speak at conferences. So it has been an amazing personal journey to be able to have this international presence and reputation based upon something that is basically what I’m working on in my spare time for the fun, for the most part. And that’s been wonderful, like the people that I’ve met, have changed my life in ways that I can’t describe, and provided opportunities that I would not have imagined 20 years ago.

But there’s also a really weird kind of dark downside to it. The volunteering, because so much of it is done as volunteer labor. It is very easy to get sucked into a hole, where you end up giving a lot of yourself. As a volunteer, it is easy to end up in a place where you end up giving a lot of yourself to this project that it literally doesn’t pay the bills, it maybe indirectly pays the bills, like most of the job offers that I’ve gotten over the last 15 years have been related one way or another to my reputation open source, which is definitely helpful. But it’s very easy to get tied up in, oh, but I have to keep doing this contribution, I have to give time, I’ve got these emails that have to be answered. And that, in particular, there are a lot of people who come to open source who don’t necessarily share the giving back aspect as much they see this free thing. They treat it as a product that they can consume and absorb and use.

When it doesn’t work, it’s your fault. And it’s specifically your fault, because you personally are the person who didn’t find this bug, fix this bug, didn’t respond to their ticket fast enough, whatever it is that they perceive to be the slight. That can be as simple as just straight up abuse on mailing lists, or it can be a really sort of subtle, insidious thing of just constantly being the thorn in the side asking about, when is this going to happen, when are you going to do this thing. When it is working with someone who you have done something for them, and they do something for you, because it is a give and take relationship, at least there is a sense of obligation there, but it’s an earned obligation because they have done something for you in return.

But there’s a lot of people who don’t necessarily see it as that earned obligation. That can lead into some very, very dark patterns of where you’re getting your little dopamine rush of contribution by doing something. The reason you’re getting that dopamine rush is people asking you to do something that you wouldn’t have otherwise done. You weren’t getting paid to do this. So why would you want to do it otherwise. You’re all of a sudden you are internalizing all of the angst and pain about a bug that in no way impacts on you. It’s like not solving a problem you have, you just think you’re fixing this thing because someone else will feel better as a result of you fixing their thing. And that combination of those sort of pressures.

I sort of am a chronic volunteer, I will jump in and help help out with anything that I see that is going on, led me to get involved in the Django Software Foundation because someone needed to do it. I thought that I could do it, and I did it reasonably well for a couple of years, I guess. You end up doing a bunch of things that you’re not doing because you enjoy them, you’re doing them because you think they need to be done. But you’re not getting anything back other than maybe some collective community appreciation, if you’re lucky.

In terms of my own personal story, I ended up in a very, very dark place not just as a result of open source with some other things going on in my life at the same time. But the combination of factors and open source contribution was a big one. And I was diagnosed as having a major mental health incident about seven years ago at this point, and I needed to take a big step back, scale back by involvement in Django, scale backed by an open open source for a little while, at least at least reassess what I was doing all the reasons why I was doing it. I guess there is so much positive and so much good that comes out of open source as a community as an ecosystem. Software and systems improve collectively much better than they do when they’re being pushed by one company’s particular interests. But there is also a dark side.

Related to that is something that is part of my pivot was stepping away from Django as a project. I needed to separate it the easiest way I do things in black and white, you either do them or I don’t. And so the easiest way for me was to kind of step back from from Django as a project. I started tinkering on my own thing on the BeeWare project, which one, so let me tinker and contribute in my own time on my own thing, something that I was interested in. That has sort of has grown over time. And, you know, I need to keep a head check on whether I’ve ended up going down the same dark pattern sometimes.

But it kind of also drew my attention to the way that – without wanting to sound too much like a political radical – the way that capitalism interacts with that whole process, that a lot of the pressures that you end up seeing that you observe as individuals asking, when are you going to fix this is not actually an individual asking, it’s a company asking. They’re doing it because a company is using this product and needs it to be fixed. But those companies aren’t necessarily giving back. Some do. Some do a lot more than others.

It’s not anywhere near as ingrained in open source as an ecosystem, open source as a as a culture that companies who are using open source who are almost always using it, because it’s the free option and free as in, it costs nothing option not because it’s the freedom liberty, lovely, high, high ideals, that maybe the word free is occasionally useful. They’re using it because it costs them nothing. And they’re getting free support. They’re getting it from volunteers who are burning themselves out to satisfy these needs, because they’ve got this weird little dopamine thing going on in their head.

That’s not sustainable long term.

The unfortunate side of open source is the number of people that I’ve seen that have gone in, contribute do two years of amazing work and contributions, and then just burnout because of the pressures that have been placed on them by, often, people who have resources and should know a lot better, but because they’re able to, and there’s no sort of active restriction to prevent them from doing it. Don’t stop them from burning out other people because they are outside their organizational hierarchy or whatever. I think where we are as a open source as a movement is in an interesting little place right now like, technologically I think everybody or almost everybody is on board with the idea that open systems build better systems in the long run. But we haven’t worked out how we build them collectively. Without in some cases literally killing people. That there is a piece of this puzzle that’s missing.

I think collectively we are in a place where we need to have decide having these conversations a lot more seriously than we are at the moment.

julia ferraioli: It’s interesting, too, because as we’ve seen the rise in popularity of open source both in the projects started and the projects consumed, there is this increased pressure because maintainers are worried that if they don’t follow up on requests or bugs or what have you, that they’re going to be damaging their professional identity as well. So it does make it very difficult to take care of your own needs and your identity away from open source. It’s at a kind of critical point. And it has been for a while.

Russell Keith-Magee: Yeah, it has been for a while it’s like and this is also not a new situation like burnout of maintainers is something that we’ve observed. It hasn’t necessarily been actively observed. But if you go back and look you can sort of see the patterns have been for like years and years going back.

And the only open source ones that are proclaimed contributors who don’t burn out are the ones who either the project is open source in name but not actually in spirit, it’s like it’s the in-house project that everyone can see the source code to but only people at that company actually work on it. But then as soon as that company decides they don’t care about the project, the project dies, the project just gets cut off because all of a sudden it doesn’t have this organic ecosystem around it. It’s just this one thing that’s been propped up by one company. We know that this is the thing that builds the best technological solutions or certainly has all evidence seems to suggest it builds the best technological solutions.

How do we actually build this without hurting people? How do we continue to recognize that there are people on the other side of the planet who can make a meaningful contribution to the design and design of this ecosystem? Without needing to literally burn them out because they’re spending all their spare time answering angry emails from someone who, for them, is just this, this thing that I’m going to shout off and yell into the night? But it’s an actual directed personal attack at one person who’s receiving that email.

The potential of open source

julia ferraioli: Yeah. So we only have a couple minutes left – time got away from me for sure, I’vebeen engrossed – so I’ll pose one last question. Where do you see open source’s greatest potential?

Russell Keith-Magee: I guess for me, the greatest potential is in the fact that it is accessible to everybody. I am geographically isolated, but I have been able to get into a project. I’ve had, as a result of my involvement in the Django project, any number of contacts with people in Africa who have had – because there is this zero cost of entry and it’s really just as long as you’ve got an internet connection you can kind of get involved with the community, at some level – they’ve been able to get into this technology, it is a massive lever that lets people get into this technology very, very easily. The fact that you don’t have to be physically resided in San Francisco, to be able to have an impact on the technological world, or New York or Austin or you know, any other tech city you want to pick, you can be anywhere.

You can literally be anywhere and contribute and have a meaningful impact on the world, I think is probably the biggest potential impact that it can have that it can literally be a worldwide project to improve the world that we are in. Working out how to then resource that in a way that doesn’t cause these people to come into the project and then burn out because entire world then lands on their doorstep and asks why they’re not doing their job properly. That is then the challenge that I think we’ve got, that we’re facing as a community.

julia ferraioli: Gotcha. The opportunity and challenges do go hand in hand.

Russell Keith-Magee: Yeah. And I think that part of that that goes along, and is one of those things that’s tied to it because it is zero cost to get into, it also means that the problems that get addressed aren’t necessarily the ones that have huge financial payoffs next to it. The things that get solved other things that problems that people actually have, versus the problems that can be monetized by somebody. And so lots of little things can be built, that solve a small community’s needs really, really well and would never be commercially viable.

But because you’ve now got a technology stack that is evolving, that lowers the barrier to entry, because more and more focus has been put on to how do we onboard people into this technology? And how do we make this technology easier and easier to use? Combined with the ubiquity of modern technology, it means that we end up with more of the world’s problems being solved, but not by directly one company decided this problem needs to be solved by building the tools that lets people help themselves and then giving them a community and an ecosystem they can get into to help everybody work out that they can do this thing better. Your “hands around the world” kind of feeling but I genuinely believe that it is, at least at some level is true. And it certainly is possible.

julia ferraioli: Well, thank you so much Russell, for coming and speaking with us today. I hope to be able to chat with you again soon!

Russell Keith-Magee: Absolutely. My pleasure.

The story was facilated by amanda casari and julia ferraioli