Empowering Users: Building Community-Driven Solutions

Manik Surtani is Head of Open Source and Bradley Axen is Principal Engineer at Block. Manik was key to launching Block's Open Source Programs Office and Bradley is a major open source contributor - including the project Goose which is Block's extensible AI agent project. It currently has over 11K stars on GitHub and has been used for a number of internal use cases at Block as well as by the general AI builder ecosystem.

In this episode, we dig into:

• Block's history releasing and supporting open source projects, and how that led to the creation of the programs office

• How big companies like Block approach open source and come up with ideas for projects like Goose

• The Goose project and how it's different from other agent frameworks