The power of invitation and responsibility of leadership

julia ferraioli: Hello everyone. My name is julia ferraioli. My pronouns are she/her. It is as yet an undetermined day in Seattle because a) it’s still dark outside and b) I haven’t had my second cup of coffee. It is October 21st, 2024. We’re in the home stretch of this year. I’d like to welcome you all to Open Source Stories with our guest, Rich Bowen. Rich, would you like to introduce yourself?

Rich Bowen: Sure. My name’s Rich Bowen, he/him. It’s later in the day for me because I’m in Kentucky toward the eastern side of the United States. I am involved in the Apache Software Foundation. That’s where I’ve spent most of my time in open source. I’m currently an open source strategist at AWS.

julia: Very cool. We’re happy to have you here. You just got back from Community Over Code in Denver too.

Rich: That’s right. Yes. It’s an event that I have been involved with since 2000. I’ve been involved in producing it since about 2002. I’ve turned that over to somebody else. It’s one of my favorite events.

julia: I’ve seen some of the talks from it from this past year, and it’s now on my short list of conferences to try to make it to. Before we dive into one of what is sure to be many of your open source stories, let’s start it off with a little bit of a fun question. What has been one of your most rewarding non-tech hobbies?

Rich: I’ve been collecting knives since I was about 10. I had a very large collection that got stolen out of my car about 20 years ago. After a period of mourning, I’ve been slowly rebuilding that collection since then. About a year and a half ago it occurred to me that all of my hobbies were typey-typey hobbies, and I wanted to delve into something a little bit more physical. I decided that I would start making knives. Starting from a kit back a year and a half ago, I’ve expanded that.

I’m not yet forging blades. That’s still next on my list. I buy blades and I make handles out of various materials. It’s cool making a physical object that you can hold and give to friends. That’s the non-technical hobby that I’ve picked up just recently. Even that has a tech aspect because I can buy power tools. The other hobby that I’ve had for longer is geocaching, which is extremely geeky but is not directly related to my day job.

julia: Neither are knives, hopefully.

Rich: Yes. [laughs]

julia: That’s really cool. I feel like a lot of people in tech and especially people in open source tend to really need that tactile aspect. I’m sorry about your knife collection. That sucks.

Rich: That was hard. It’s been 20 years, so I’m starting to get over it. [laughs].

julia: I can hold a grudge for a long time, so it’s okay to be salty about that. Do you have a whetstone? Do you sharpen your own blades?

Rich: I do. Yes. I have several stones of increasing grit so I can put a razor edge on those things.

julia: I feel like that is a hobby that pays off, because sharpening knives is a delicate business.

Rich: It is and I have cut myself many times.

julia: I have no high horse on that arena since I can cut myself with, apparently, fruit. I encourage the blood to stay inside the body as much as possible.

Making the most of open source opportunities

julia: You’ve had quite the career in open source over the years. I’m wondering what has been the most unexpected aspect of it for you. What has been the most oddball experience that you have had?

Rich: The most oddball experience was when an open source conference led to whitewater rafting in– in 2006, I went to Sri Lanka for ApacheCon, and at the end of the event, I got roped into going out into the jungle with a bunch of my new friends to go whitewater rafting in Kitulgala, which is right in the middle– If you are not familiar with Sri Lanka, there’s Colombo on the West coast and the rest of the island is forested and just the most gorgeous place I’ve ever been.

I went whitewater rafting with a number of people, including David Recordon who ended up being President Obama’s IT director. Also on that trip, I met Arthur C. Clark, who was living in Colombo at the time. The whitewater rafting was awesome, but the thing that has been the coolest about open source has been meeting and occasionally becoming friends with people who have changed the world substantially.

One of the cool things that was part of conference planning when I ran ApacheCon for so many years was that I got to invite the keynotes, and that was always completely self-serving. Douglas Adams and Arthur C. Clark and Hugh Howie, and various other people that I really desperately wanted to meet and got to invite them to the conference and then hang out with them. That’s been one cool aspect of it.

The other side of it is meeting people that have been influential in open source and by extension to technology as a whole. Meeting someone like Ward Cunningham comes to mind. For those of you that don’t know, he’s the guy that coined the word Wiki and invented the technology around wikis. He had this wonderful vision for what the web could be as a collaborative place where we all create that content together. Talking with him about his disappointment of how spammers ruined everything was– it was discouraging, but he just had this wonderful vision.

julia: It really put the empowerment of information into the hands of everyone, because HTML, especially in the early days, was considered a big barrier for folks. If people could just write their normal text, that was huge.

Rich: It was. It was cool to meet him.

julia: I am jealous of your conference running days, and now I’m inclined to maybe start my own conference so I can invite some of my own heroes. Who else was on your wishlist of people that you wanted to invite, whether or not they accepted?

Rich: A couple of years ago, I invited Tad Williams. He is the author of the Sorrow and Thornseries. It was a fun conversation because he accepted, he was excited about it, but his wife said, “No. He has book deadlines.” Then COVID happened and we never actually got him to a conference. He’s somebody that is still on my list to hope that I can meet someday.

julia: I cannot imagine what it was like meeting Douglas Adams.

Rich: He was hilarious in person. He was as funny as his books.

julia: That is extremely surprising to me because I feel like there’s so much jam-packed into the Hitchhiker’s books that there’s no way that could happen in real life. That’s the limit of my brain, is that if I had that much humor, it would all be on paper and none of it saved for in-person interactions.

Rich: Yes. People do tend to be a lot different from their writing, but he was delightful.

julia: Very cool.

Meeting your heroes

julia: Who else on the technical or open source side of meeting your heroes?

Rich: There are a couple of people that I would mention. One is Brian Behlendorf. I now consider him a friend, but when I first met him at a conference, what really struck me about him was how human he was. It was one of my very first conferences that I was attending and I was still very much in the fanboy stage. Brian is actually a little bit younger than I am, but I met him in the hallway at a conference and I thanked him profusely for the work that he had done.

This is 25 or more years later. His response really stuck with me. It was, “Well, I did what I thought needed to be done at the time and I was having fun with my friends.” He’s so delightful, but the thing that stuck with me about that was that those of us that are in open source, most of us are here because someone encouraged us. Brian and various others had encouraged me in the earlier years before I met them in person to step up and do some of the work.

I had been complaining about the documentation of the Apache Web Server, and Brian and also Jim Jagielski said, “Well, then go fix it. You’re allowed to do that.” Another story that comes to mind is when I met Vint Cerf. Somebody invited him to speak at an event here in Lexington, Kentucky and he showed up at our company. He was working for a company called DataBeam, which has been out of business for many, many years having been acquired and reacquired.

I asked Vint in the Q&A time– I’m 18 or 19 thinking I’m coming up with brilliant questions. I asked him, what was the most significant advancement in technology during his lifetime? He said his wife’s hearing aid, because she was born deaf and she has a cochlear implant. This was very eye-opening to me because I also have an implanted hearing aid. His focus on improving human experience rather than saying the World Wide Web, or DNS, or who knows what, that, again, reemphasized to me that what we do is about people. It’s about making people’s lives better. Those are two interactions that really stand out from my early days in open source.

julia: I actually also had the opportunity to interact with Vint a few times and I heard the same story as well. Just a lovely guy, honestly. Very helpful, very willing to go out of his way to help you. Whether it was for tech or not tech. I’m grateful that there are folks like him in our field.

The underrated act of granting permission

julia: I want to go back just a minute because something you said really stuck with me about you’re allowed to do X, Y, Z in open source. Before you heard that, did you have a mindset of–maybe–needing to ask for permission that that unlocked?

Rich: Yes. When I first started engaging with free software, there were clearly these luminaries, these geniuses that were doing all of the work, and I was not one of them. There was very definitely this disconnect between those people and myself. Once we’re on the inside, you might say, we have this notion that everyone knows that they’re allowed to participate, but they don’t.

People like to be invited. It’s more than that. People needto be invited. People need to be told explicitly that this is something that they’re allowed to do, and we forget that. I went to a talk at FOSDEM this year that was… Paris [Pittman] was giving her talk about creating on-ramps for people to participate in open source. She really made a shift in my way of thinking about things, that we need to, whether it’s working groups, or titles, or whatever, create places where people can plug in rather than saying, “Come join us. Come do cool stuff,” and people don’t know where to get started.

I think that maybe I had forgotten that initial experience and that moment where someone said, “Yes, you’re allowed. You don’t have to have a degree, or particular credentials, or have invented HTTP in order to participate.” That was a very empowering moment that we need to keep doing. I also attended a talk earlier this year, Stephen Walli. One of the things he said really stuck with me. Which is that “each generation is responsible for mentoring the next generation”.

He was talking about the Kubernetes community where they had this vibrant onboarding process, and they mentored all these people, and it was super successful and then it wasn’t anymore. That was because they had forgotten to explicitly tell those people, “Now it’s your turn to mentor the next group of people.” That was another moment that was very eye-opening to me, that you got to pass the baton and tell people that you’re passing it. Don’t just assume that they understand.

Mentoring has been, to me, one of the most rewarding parts of open source, is seeing people that I’ve mentored far surpass anything that I could do. One of the really rewarding experiences when I was in Denver at Community Over Code a couple weeks ago was that three separate people said from stage that they were there because I had encouraged them to step up and do something. This is me passing the baton that was passed to me.

It’s a way to ensure your own immortality. It’s not about doing amazing things myself, it’s about encouraging all of these people to come after me and do those things.

Who’s the boss? We’re the boss!

Rich: There is this weird situation that I have where my boss at work is somebody that I encouraged to be part of the Apache Software Foundation. At Apache he answers to me because I’m a board member and he’s the president, and at work I answer to him.

He’s one of those people who 10 years ago I said, “You should really get involved in this aspect of the Apache Software Foundation.” Now 10 years later, he’s the president and making real significant contributions to open source and speaking in front of the Senate about open source security and supply chains and that’s super rewarding to me.

julia: I can just imagine that. It must be tempting occasionally to pull rank in jest, in the wrong context. At least that’s what I would do, to watch the chaos.

Rich: That can be fun.

julia: I imagine now you’re in the place where some of those early influences were for you where people are coming up to you in conferences, like you said, thanking you for encouraging them to be there, but also maybe a little intimidated to approach you potentially.

Rich: My wife tells me that that’s the case. I don’t know. I tend not to notice it, but she tells a story about a conference that we went to in Chicago where this guy came up to me and was clearly trying to find something to talk about so that he could meet me.

[laughs]

It was a little embarrassing for both of us. My grandfather used to say, back home, he’s world-famous, and open source is indeed very small. It’s cool to be recognized but, to me, it’s even cooler to see someone like Swapnil Mane on stage. He’s the chair of community development at the Apache Software Foundation. He said, up from stage, that he’s there because I invited him. He is doing such great work in open source. To me, it’s so much more rewarding.

Bringing up the next generation of leaders

julia: How are you passing the baton and letting people know that you’re passing it while you’re doing it?

Rich: One thing that I’ve started this year is largely inspired by Paris’s talk at FOSDEM. I’ve started up five or six working groups under the community development umbrella at the Apache Software Foundation. I’m trying to document specific roles that people can take in those working groups so they can step up and do a thing, and through doing the thing, recognize that they have ownership there and maybe do another thing.

We started a social media working group where people are encouraged to step up and take responsibility for our social media presence. We started a website group because our website is objectively terrible because this is how I started. Somebody complains about the website and I encourage them not just to say, " well, go fix it," but also say, “here are these specific concrete steps.”

On the code side, you often hear people talk about creating an easy first issue that people can engage with. One of the challenges there is it’s much more work to document why this is a good first issue and how people should go about engaging it than it is to just go fix it yourself. Convincing people that that’s an investment in the future seems to be an important step there. It’s challenging. You’re creating more work for yourself, but in the long run, you’re inviting people to come to fill your shoes.

Succession planning is something also that I’ve been trying very intentionally to do. I’m on the board of directors at Apache. I’m currently serving my 10th term and that’s maybe too long. One of the things that I’ve tried very intentionally to do this term is to invite people to shadow me. People that are considering maybe running for the board someday, I shadow them and show them what I’m doing. At the same time, take advantage of their shoshin, their beginner’s eyes, to document the things that are unclear and fix the things that are broken.

A month or two ago, a board member resigned for some personal reasons. One of the people that I had been shadowing, Kanchana Welagedara, stepped into that seat. Again, that was really rewarding to me that someone that I had taken some steps– There’s still a lot to learn and there’s a lot that I clearly did not teach her and she’s trying to learn on the job but that was really rewarding there. That’s the other thing that I’m trying to do very intentionally to encourage people to step into these roles rather than saying, “Well, those old guys, they’ve got this covered.”

julia: Bringing up the new generation. That’s fantastic.

Find the kind people

julia: I think we’re coming towards the end of our time. Do you have any words of advice for people coming into open source?

Rich: Be kind and find the kind people. There are too many people in open source who are content to be unkind, they’re content to show their technical expertise, but not care about the people that are involved. Be kind. Remember that everything that we do, that all software is social. It’s all about making life better for someone and keeping the customer, keeping the end user in mind when you’re working on stuff is, I think, the most important part of collaboration.

julia: That is a lovely parting thought. Thank you so much for joining us on Open Source Stories.

Rich: Thank you, julia.

The story was facilated by julia ferraioli and edited by julia ferraioli.