How Not to Make Open Source with Leszek Manicki

Oct 18, 2023

Leszek Manicki, Engineering Manager at Wikimedia Germany, shares his experiences with getting more contributors to open-source projects while maintaining high security standards. He discusses the challenges and lessons learned from Wikimedia's efforts, and gives recommendations for other organizations. Leszek also highlights the importance of simple architecture and the benefits of outside contributors. He shares his hopes for positive socio-economic change through representing a non-profit organization at a commercialized event.

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Introduction

00:00 • 4min

Avoiding Closed Collaboration

03:42 • 12min

Increasing Collaboration and Building the Software

15:44 • 2min

The Importance of Simple Architecture and Benefits of Outside Contributors

17:38 • 3min

Observing the Relationship Between Corporate Actors and Wikimedia in the Open Source Summit

20:21 • 2min

Leszek Manicki is the Engineering Manager at Wikimedia Germany. In this episode, we connect at the Open Source Summit in Bilbao to discuss what he has learned being a part of Wikimedia movement and how that inspired his talk at the summit, How Not To Make Open Source. Throughout our conversation, Leszek describes the challenges Wikimedia has experienced in trying to get more contributors to their projects while also having a high security standard and a complex architecture. He also describes what he has learned from these challenges, and gives recommendations for other organizations to consider as they look to get more contributors to their own projects. Leszek also shares his experience representing a non-profit organization that seeks to offer free knowledge at an event that features more commercialized open-source offerings, and how he hopes this will bring about a positive socio-economic change.

Highlights:

I introduce Leszek, who is the Engineering Manager at Wikimedia Germany as he joins me at the Open Source Summit in Bilbao (00:23)
Leszek describes his role at Wikimedia movement and what brings him to the Open Source Summit as a speaker (00:39)
The number one thing that Leszek believes open-source organizations shouldn’t do (03:41)
How Wikimedia has attempted to get more external contributors to their projects and what they learned from their successes and failures there (07:17)
Leszek describes the relationship between the creation of knowledge and the creation of software in the Wikimedia organization (12:57)
How Leszek and his team are increasing collaboration with external sources to build software (15:43)
Why Leszek advocates for simple architecture when you’re building a project that will seek external contributors (17:38)
The inherent value that Leszek sees in having a community of contributors on a project (18:52)
Leszek reflects on his experience attending the Open Source Summit and his hopes for the future (20:20)

Links:

Leszek

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leszek-manicki
Company: https://www.wikimedia.org/