Inviting Community Participation

[rmehta]

Taking off from the engagement proposed by MOSIP at IndiaOS Conference last week. Please note that my views are personal and not reflective of IndiaOS which was just a volunteer run conference.

So it is great that the repository is opened and this is just the first step to build a community project and shows great intent. The next step is to align interest in the community to contribute. This will be a gradual process, here are a few suggestions:

1. Publish a list of things you need help for (could be bugs, features, documentation).

2. Announce small bounties to attract developers, amounts that would attract students or freelancers, like Rs Rs 5,000, Rs 10,000 etc based on the size of the activity. For example checkout this issue on our project Translation with context frappe/frappe#6989

3. But beware money may not be enough motivation (for example, there is $2500 sitting for our team to take, but we have not done it yet). Ultimately true hackers want to contribute if there is something they themselves are impacted by. Scratch your own itch is the number 1 motivator for true hackers. For this I have 2 suggestions:

   1. This project is too big for anyone to meaningfully understand its impact. Break this up into smaller units so people can use this ID system in organizations, like IIITB.

   2. Use your good connections with UIDAI so that they are committed to use one non-critical module of MOSIP in the Aadhaar infra. There will be 100 objections to this, but I am proposing this is a very small move to build trust. This has to be a non critical module and can come with its riders. But this will show a lot of intent. Once this is done, you will see a lot of interest.

Open Source is not about getting free labour of hackers, it is about building communities and we can only build communities if we aim for the middle ground.

If you really wish for MOSIP to be a community tool and not an establishment tool, then I hope you will give these suggestions some deep thought. These are not radical ideas, just baby steps.

We (and I hope I can speak for the community here) are not asking for making the full UIDAI codebase open yet, but you should know that is where we want to eventually be, and we don't want to hide this intent. We can expect this will take many months of consistent effort and trust building if we eventually get there. But many of us want to reach this consensus.

But remember, you are the establishment, you have infinite more resources than individual hackers to can help you. This onus is on you to be more open, and we are here to help you in that journey.

[hosurkrishnan]

Right Rishab. It certainly is a gradual process when it comes to community bulding and this is one thing that we would need a lot of help with. Your suggestions are spot on. As you rightly pointed out, money may not be always an attractive proposition for contributions to come in; the technology is. Money could be a good enabler and a pulling factor to start with.

There are a list of things that needs to be done and some of them have been captured (will move them to a different repo) and I will be adding more to it. Such as these

There is a huge potential to involve students community to work with us in form of internships, projects and even joyful hacks.

The UIDAI connections are good indeed, but we have moved much ahead of them. We see Aadhaar only as an inspiration and nothing byond that. We see Aadhaar folks as yet another community member and partner like you. If they have useful suggestions and contributions, then there is no
problem taking them, but we have to careful about taking code from them because there should be no proprietary code flowing in that would damage the whole intent and purpose of MOSIP.

We would like to partner with people like you to help us build a vibrant community (or rather communities as you said). So, please have those thoughts flowing in.

Thank you for the invaluable suggestions, we would like hear more from you.

[rmehta]

So in response to this I had chat with Prof Rajagopalan who heads the project. Here is a quick summary of the call shared in the interest of transparency.

1. Prof Rajagopalan shared that he has been involved in FOSS since the days of Gurumurthy and Atul Chitnis and was one of the first people to pay Atul Chitnis for this forum (discussion board) application.
2. He shared that the goal of the project is to become self sustainable and grant independent and they want to achieve this by August 2021.
3. He said they don't have direct links with UIDAI or iSpirt and certain members of iSpirt are part of the councils to maintain continuity with certain potential customers.
4. Philippines has done a proof of concept implementation of 10,000 registrations. RFPs for the Philippines project are being worked on.
5. They plan on inviting 20 large system integrators for making them aware of the opportunities around MOSIP.
6. UIDAI is not yet a customer, but they have been trying to pitch, so far they have not got a response.
7. Carnegie Mellon University has also done proof of concept implementations.
8. He also indicated that they had done student engagements at multiple universities and collages.
9. Consent Portal: They are working on a consent portal where registrants will have visibility on all agencies that have authenticated via this ID and will have the ability to revoke individual authentications. The will also have the right to control what data has been disclosed to what agency. I suggested to build this module in the open and host a community hackathon with prize money (so its not free labour) to kick off this process, and I also suggested it should be in Bangalore since most of the ecosystem is based of the city. He was very receptive to this idea. He also indicated he has been trying to pitch this portal to the UIDAI team, so having a good proof-of-concept will be a great way for UIDAI to evaluate this.
10. He wanted a reference for hiring a new community manager, and my suggestion was that he himself should be the community manager for sometime to build trust and engagement and use public discussion forums like this issue tracker to engage the community.

Overall I shared my experience of working on ERPNext for the last 10 years to give insight into how community engagement works and he was very receptive of the ideas that were shared.

[hosurkrishnan]

Hi Rushab,

May I request you to write a "Feature Request" for the consent portal in the MOSIP issue tracker ? We can expand on that and possibly arrive upon a feasible architecture through discussions.
And then someone can start putting some code out there and others can improve upon it.

Thanks
Krishnan

[rmehta]

May I request you to write a "Feature Request" for the consent portal in the MOSIP issue tracker ?

Already did! #5

[rmehta]

As per the post on Omidyar website you have raised at least $4M in funding. So the problem you have is there is already too much money in the project. You don't actually need external contributors to make this a sustainable project. As long as the service implementers keep pushing their code in the public, it should be fine.

Since there is no direct link to Indian citizens, it is pointless waste of effort to ask for their contribution.

[srgpalan]

Yes, we have raised about 10 million so far. But first two implementations, Morocco and the Philippines, which we are doing pro bono will consume all of that. The code, training, support to their SI for five years, and customising the code for their requirements will all consume this.
The reason why we ask Indian to contribute is that after gifting the world with a positional number system ( including the zero), we have not really contributed anything to the world and especially to poorer citizens of the world. MOSIP should grow from India as a global effort. We are involving students and faculty from universities in Africa, and also in the developed world. Can India anchor a global digital public good?

[rmehta]

Thanks @srgpalan for engaging publicly, and I would consider this as a brave first step. Welcome to the community ;-).

ERPNext has a reasonable community in African countries and Philippines and have introduced this project to them. https://discuss.erpnext.com/t/offtopic-national-ids-in-philippines-and-morocco-many-african-countries/57242

It would make sense for the internal design documents and issue trackers should made public so they can be scrutinized by citizens of African countries and Philippines.

Ultimately I would like to request you to form a formal strategy to engage the UIDAI and announce it publicly, to try and adopt some modules from MOSIP. It does not have to be a commitment or compromise on their part, just an engagement. That will see an instant interest from Indian citizens, because then it impacts their lives directly. And it would also ensure both quality and oversight.

Government of India also has a published OSS Strategy. From Page 5, point number 8

• Government Organizations shall ensure compliance with this requirement and decide by comparing both OSS and CSS options with respect to capability, strategic control, scalability, security, life-time costs and support requirements.
• GoI shall establish suitable support mechanism for the available OSS that includes Institutional Mechanism, Partnership with Industry, Academia and OSS Community.
• GoI shall actively collaborate with OSS communities in India as well as at the International level and contribute wherever appropriate.

Source: https://meity.gov.in/writereaddata/files/policy_on_adoption_of_oss.pdf

UIDAI can be pushed to engage under this policy statement

[jace]

The reason why we ask Indian to contribute is that after gifting the world with a positional number system ( including the zero), we have not really contributed anything to the world and especially to poorer citizens of the world.

@srgpalan So MOSIP is the greatest thing to come out of India since the invention of positional numbers?

I worry that you are according too much self importance to this project and it impedes true public spirited participation. Please reconsider.