Giving back
Since the earliest days of Lokku (now over eight years ago!) everything has been built using open source software. Our services would not be possible with out millions of man hours of work supplied by hundreds of thousands of volunteers.
And from the beginning we've thought abut how we can contribute back. Here and there we've sponsored open source events, but the reality of day to day life in a start-up is that you're often focused just on surviving, on improving the product, on hiring the next great team member, on convincing the critical client, etc. It's easy to let your idealistic aspirations slide down the to-do list, not least because doing open source right means actually investing the time to document, to clean up the code, to deal with questions, etc.
I'm pleased to announce that over the last few months we've finally decided to make giving back a priority and give it the time and attention it deserves, and I'd like to highlight some of our efforts - some new, some long standing.
1. The Nestoria development team has launched their own blog where they will highlight their learnings. Processing millions of listings a day across diverse markets and serving them up to millions of consumers in a dead simple way turns out to have more than a few technical challenges. We're hopeful others can learn from our experience.
A regular feature of the blog will be the "module of the month", the first of which was announced today, in which the team will select a deserving perl module to receive an ongoing gittip. The sums involved are far from life changing, but it is a chance for the team to recognize developers who build the tools we rely on every day. Some months it will be well known pieces of the core perl infrastructure (perl is the main langauge used to build Nestoria) and other months it may be a very obscure bit of code that happened to solve our specific problem. Regardless, we want to say thank you to the people who invest time and energy to build great software that we and our users depend on.
2. Over the last months we've made a push to move more of our own code to open source. As an example we recently released jquery-nstslider, a slider library we invented. There is more to come and we invite you to checkout (and fork!) all of our open source code over on our github page.
3. We'll of course continue to organize #geomob, our regular event for geo-innovation, which we try to use as a forum to encourage any and everyone doing clever things in the geo space. Over the years #geomob has played host a great group of speakers from across the spectrum of academia, hobbyists, big brands, and start-ups. The next #geomob is on the 17th of July, the line-up looks great, and the beer will be on us (and our enlightened co-sponsors!). We hope to see you there.
4. In addition to running our own event, it's our pleasure to sponsor other events (I look forward to seeing everyone at SotM-EU in June!), with the one caveat that we will only sponsor events that at least one team member will attend.
5. We depend not just on open source software, but also on lots of open data. As such, we're proud to be members of the UK's Open Data Institute and thus play a small part in helping stimulate the awareness around the many societal benefits of open data. The ODI does great work, please check them out.
So there you have it. None of it is radically world changing, but, for a small business like ours it nevertheless feels like we're pulling our open source weight. I'm proud we've moved some of these efforts up the internal todo list. If you haven't yet, please start following the Nestoria dev blog, we look forward to your pull requests, and let's talk about it over a beer at the next #geomob.
Ed (@freyfogle)