[FINOS Community] Updates & a heartfelt thank you for making FINOS a silver lining in a truly challenging 2020
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Gabriele Columbro
Dec 23, 2020, 6:28:14 PM12/23/20
to FINOS General List, All FINOS
Dear FINOS Community and Board,
Gab
-- I hope you are all getting ready for a very well deserved break and, despite this year poses some particular challenges, I hope you are going to be able to spend some quality time with your families.
2020 has been a unique and very challenging year for the world, but as I've shared with you before, it has been a massive year of growth for FINOS. We joined the Linux Foundation, we grew our project portfolio thanks to mainly contributions from financial institutions, we welcomed 10 new Members to the Foundation, we launched our Open RegTech initiative, we transitioned our operations to be fully digital with the launch of our virtual meetups and podcasts and we drastically grew our reach and brand recognition. There would be too many exciting topics to cover in this note, but if you'd like to see our take on 2020 check out the my 2020 recap blog post as well as sign up for our newsletter as we plan to send a 2020 wrap up newsletter next week.
We are as well positioned as we can ever be for a potentially massive growth in 2021. So we shouldn't get complacent on the growth of this year, but instead strike the iron while it's hot. We can and should be very ambitious in the challenges we can solve in the industry through open collaboration, both leveraging our existing project landscape as well by bringing together our Members, our Board and our Special Interest Groups to continue uncovering ever higher order opportunities to solve pan-industry issues. As we plan how to best execute in the new year, we would love to hear your feedback on what and how we can continue to deliver tangible value through our collaboration. Drop us a note, or even better reply on the list here :)
Before we wrap this strong year for FINOS, I wanted to share a couple of updates with all of you:
- First off, I wanted to congratulate our new 3 Gold Directors who recently were elected by the Gold Members to represent the class at our Governing Board. Please join me in welcoming Andrew Aitken (Wipro), John Mark Walker (Capital One) and Randy Goldsmith (Tradeweb) to our Governing Board. I look forward to working with you and to the Community, especially the Gold Members, make sure you reach out and connect with your directors. A shout out also to other candidates Jamil Mina (Red Hat), James Turck (Refinitiv) and Kevin Smith (SUSE), as well to the outgoing Directors Brad Levy (Symphony), Nick Kolba (Genesis) and Robert Coletti and Bryan Bogensberger (Independent). Thank you for your contributions so far and I look forward to continuing working with you in the Community.
- I also wanted to welcome Accenture as our newest Platinum Member and David Treat to our Governing Board. While we haven't formally announced this publicly (we plan to do that in early Jan), I wanted to share this major news with the Community. We are very proud of continuing to add Platinum Members to our Foundation, and we know System Integrators play a key role in providing breadth to our reach as well as a vehicle to surface existing collaborations in the open. Please join me in welcoming Accenture to our Community and Dave to the Governing Board.
- As it often happens after a merger like the one with the Linux Foundation, we had to rationalize our investments & functions in the team. With this context, I wanted to inform you that as of December 13th, Rob Underwood is no longer with FINOS. It hasn't been by far an easy decision, as Rob has been an invaluable component of the FINOS team since our launch and has been functional to the growth we have seen in the last 2 years. If you'd like to stay connected with him (and maybe pitch him an open source project or two), you can do so on Linkedin or through his private email. I look forward to continuing to work with Rob in our Community, as I think he could play an important role as a contributor, maintainer and just simply an outstanding advocate for our movement.
- If you have some downtime during these holidays, I exhort you to take a look at the currently proposed projects and special interest groups: there's some really good stuff in there and your feedback would be very important to gauge the value of these initiatives as they make their way in the Foundation.
- Finally, a short update on our Open Developer Platform project: while we will continue to provide that as a key added value to our projects, to enable a productive while compliant and secure developer toolchain, we realized that most of the collaboration can happen offline. So we are discontinuing bi-weekly meetings in favor of providing on-demand access to Maurizio and our Infra team for projects and contributors needing help. See the details that Maurizio, the lead maintainer for the project, has previously shared with this list.
And with that, 2020 is a wrap. I truly hope that, in the mess that this year has been, our Community was able to bring a little bit of silver lining, as well as help you to feel a bit more connected with your peers around the world. Knowing we are connected in building a movement, and executing on a very ambitious vision, definitely helped me and our team to feel less isolated. And as we look with hope to 2021, we are now more aware than ever as to what the potential for this collaboration is. On behalf of the FINOS team, I want to thank you all from the bottom of our heart because, especially during such a challenging year, it's been your passion and commitment, as individuals, that brought our Community to where it is today.
I wish you all a wonderful holiday break and can't wait to reconnect with all of you in the new year. Hopefully in person, sooner rather than later!
Gab
--
FINOS recently announced the availability of Legend, the logical modeling and language contributed by Goldman Sachs. Get sandbox access and contribute to the platform or join us at Open Source Strategy Forum in November to learn more!
FINOS recently announced the availability of Legend, the logical modeling and language contributed by Goldman Sachs. Get sandbox access and contribute to the platform or join us at Open Source Strategy Forum in November to learn more!
FINOS (now part of the Linux Foundation) hosts the largest community of open source contributors in Financial Services. Contribute to our projects and become a Member to help us build a true open financial stack and ecosystem.
--
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Rob Underwood
Dec 27, 2020, 3:40:37 PM12/27/20
to FINOS General List, All FINOS
Thank you Gab for the acknowledgment of me in your year end note below.
Thank you everyone for providing me the opportunity to serve and work with each of you. Thank you to my foundation staff colleagues. Thank you to our LF colleagues whom, due to the pandemic, we never had a chance to meet in person but who nonetheless greeted us with warmth and collegiality, Thank you to the FINOS membership, and thank you to the FINOS board.
I wanted to say a special thank you to, and recognize the work of, all of the project maintainers, contributors, and participants that are the heart and soul of FINOS. At the end of the day, the atomic unit of open source is the contributor’s commit. The investment of time by a developer to write code, test, solicit feedback, review and refine, and in turn submit her code commits as part of a pull request for merge consideration by maintainers is the core use case upon which everything else resides.
Foundations like FINOS exist to serve and support these contributors. Without contributors and their code there would not be any “open source” at all, let alone foundations to support it; all the great press and goodwill in the world won't matter a hill of beans if, after the dais has fallen dark, there doesn’t remain an engaged, growing community of contributors ready, willing, and able to roll up their sleeves to invest time in fixing bugs, building new features, and architecting altogether new platforms as open source. And while some FINOS contributors may not always seek the spotlight, it’s the responsibility of foundation teams - we, the behind the scenes stage hands, lighting techs, markup artists, and set designers - to help the contributors and maintainers, the rightful stars of the show, to feel confident in their lines, to look great and be comfortable in their surroundings, to maintain a productive, positive rapport with the other “stars”, and ultimately find themselves in the best light possible when it’s their time to shine. I hope we’ve done just that for our community.
Given the essential nature of contributors to open source, it’s been gratifying that many FINOS contributors, particularly at FINOS Platinum and Gold bank members, are seeing their open source activity codified into official job duties and accounted for in their employers’ performance management and incentive compensation processes. Open source should not be a wealth generating mechanism for any individual until it can be a life sustaining mechanism for each and every contributing developer, at least those who need to be paid for their open source work. Coupled with new efforts, like GitHub Sponsors, that will enable direct funding from project supporters and end users to project developers, contributors, and maintainers, especially those who are independent and without an employer, I have a lot of hope that the days of open source being done on the back of developers working without pay nor acknowledgement are fading fast.
A couple folks have reached out to ask me what’s next. I have 4 solid leads. I intend to stay in financial services and am especially excited about roles that may put to use my background in other industries such as education, consulting, technology, and media. I like roles that provide me an opportunity to go deep into technology and the products made possible from it. Obviously, open source is of interest. I like to be mission and purpose driven. Going back to my Deloitte project work, I especially enjoy building ecosystems, launching partnerships programs such as the Associate Membership program, and helping organizations with their routes-to-market and overall go-to-market strategy.
Since July I’ve taken on a more formal, expanded responsibility for business development at FINOS. I’m proud of this year's 10 new members that Gab references below and whose trust and confidence we earned during this difficult time. While I think we’ve all had to figure out how to sell without meeting in person, I do think live meetings, at least in enterprise sales, will return. I expect people’s reluctance to want to spend time on planes will lead orgs to resurrect regional and territory sales models, despite the promise that we’ll all live and work from Hawaii or Telluride. Over my career I’ve built a deep and broad network in New York City, which has grown only stronger thanks to my experience working with the FINOS community. While I think it’s hyperbole, I’ve been told that my “superpower” is that I can get into almost any room, at least in New York. I expect that will be something leveraged at my next gig.
Finally, I wanted to thank everyone for their kindness and humanity. As some of you know, several of us on the FINOS team, myself included, are going through very difficult, very intense personal family situations right now, in my case related to the health and safety of my kids along with my adult special needs sister for whom I’m in the process of taking custody. Pandemic and job elimination aside, 2020 has been by far the most challenging year of my life. I appreciate the understanding and kind words of support shown to my family and me during this challenging past year.
Please keep in touch. My email is brooklynrob(at)protonmail(dot)com. My mobile remains the same; my LinkedIn and GitHub are below.
Thank You,
Thank you everyone for providing me the opportunity to serve and work with each of you. Thank you to my foundation staff colleagues. Thank you to our LF colleagues whom, due to the pandemic, we never had a chance to meet in person but who nonetheless greeted us with warmth and collegiality, Thank you to the FINOS membership, and thank you to the FINOS board.
I wanted to say a special thank you to, and recognize the work of, all of the project maintainers, contributors, and participants that are the heart and soul of FINOS. At the end of the day, the atomic unit of open source is the contributor’s commit. The investment of time by a developer to write code, test, solicit feedback, review and refine, and in turn submit her code commits as part of a pull request for merge consideration by maintainers is the core use case upon which everything else resides.
Foundations like FINOS exist to serve and support these contributors. Without contributors and their code there would not be any “open source” at all, let alone foundations to support it; all the great press and goodwill in the world won't matter a hill of beans if, after the dais has fallen dark, there doesn’t remain an engaged, growing community of contributors ready, willing, and able to roll up their sleeves to invest time in fixing bugs, building new features, and architecting altogether new platforms as open source. And while some FINOS contributors may not always seek the spotlight, it’s the responsibility of foundation teams - we, the behind the scenes stage hands, lighting techs, markup artists, and set designers - to help the contributors and maintainers, the rightful stars of the show, to feel confident in their lines, to look great and be comfortable in their surroundings, to maintain a productive, positive rapport with the other “stars”, and ultimately find themselves in the best light possible when it’s their time to shine. I hope we’ve done just that for our community.
Given the essential nature of contributors to open source, it’s been gratifying that many FINOS contributors, particularly at FINOS Platinum and Gold bank members, are seeing their open source activity codified into official job duties and accounted for in their employers’ performance management and incentive compensation processes. Open source should not be a wealth generating mechanism for any individual until it can be a life sustaining mechanism for each and every contributing developer, at least those who need to be paid for their open source work. Coupled with new efforts, like GitHub Sponsors, that will enable direct funding from project supporters and end users to project developers, contributors, and maintainers, especially those who are independent and without an employer, I have a lot of hope that the days of open source being done on the back of developers working without pay nor acknowledgement are fading fast.
A couple folks have reached out to ask me what’s next. I have 4 solid leads. I intend to stay in financial services and am especially excited about roles that may put to use my background in other industries such as education, consulting, technology, and media. I like roles that provide me an opportunity to go deep into technology and the products made possible from it. Obviously, open source is of interest. I like to be mission and purpose driven. Going back to my Deloitte project work, I especially enjoy building ecosystems, launching partnerships programs such as the Associate Membership program, and helping organizations with their routes-to-market and overall go-to-market strategy.
Since July I’ve taken on a more formal, expanded responsibility for business development at FINOS. I’m proud of this year's 10 new members that Gab references below and whose trust and confidence we earned during this difficult time. While I think we’ve all had to figure out how to sell without meeting in person, I do think live meetings, at least in enterprise sales, will return. I expect people’s reluctance to want to spend time on planes will lead orgs to resurrect regional and territory sales models, despite the promise that we’ll all live and work from Hawaii or Telluride. Over my career I’ve built a deep and broad network in New York City, which has grown only stronger thanks to my experience working with the FINOS community. While I think it’s hyperbole, I’ve been told that my “superpower” is that I can get into almost any room, at least in New York. I expect that will be something leveraged at my next gig.
Finally, I wanted to thank everyone for their kindness and humanity. As some of you know, several of us on the FINOS team, myself included, are going through very difficult, very intense personal family situations right now, in my case related to the health and safety of my kids along with my adult special needs sister for whom I’m in the process of taking custody. Pandemic and job elimination aside, 2020 has been by far the most challenging year of my life. I appreciate the understanding and kind words of support shown to my family and me during this challenging past year.
Please keep in touch. My email is brooklynrob(at)protonmail(dot)com. My mobile remains the same; my LinkedIn and GitHub are below.
Thank You,
Rob
--------------------
brooklynrob(at)protonmail(dot)com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/robunderwood
https://github.com/brooklynrob/
On Wed, Dec 23, 2020 at 6:28 PM Gabriele Columbro <gabriele...@finos.org> wrote:
Dear FINOS Community and Board,
I hope you are all getting ready for a very well deserved break and, despite this year poses some particular challenges, I hope you are going to be able to spend some quality time with your families.
2020 has been a unique and very challenging year for the world, but as I've shared with you before, it has been a massive year of growth for FINOS. We joined the Linux Foundation, we grew our project portfolio thanks to mainly contributions from financial institutions, we welcomed 10 new Members to the Foundation, we launched our Open RegTech initiative, we transitioned our operations to be fully digital with the launch of our virtual meetups and podcasts and we drastically grew our reach and brand recognition. There would be too many exciting topics to cover in this note, but if you'd like to see our take on 2020 check out the my 2020 recap blog post as well as sign up for our newsletter as we plan to send a 2020 wrap up newsletter next week.
We are as well positioned as we can ever be for a potentially massive growth in 2021. So we shouldn't get complacent on the growth of this year, but instead strike the iron while it's hot. We can and should be very ambitious in the challenges we can solve in the industry through open collaboration, both leveraging our existing project landscape as well by bringing together our Members, our Board and our Special Interest Groups to continue uncovering ever higher order opportunities to solve pan-industry issues. As we plan how to best execute in the new year, we would love to hear your feedback on what and how we can continue to deliver tangible value through our collaboration. Drop us a note, or even better reply on the list here :)Before we wrap this strong year for FINOS, I wanted to share a couple of updates with all of you:
- First off, I wanted to congratulate our new 3 Gold Directors who recently were elected by the Gold Members to represent the class at our Governing Board. Please join me in welcoming Andrew Aitken (Wipro), John Mark Walker (Capital One) and Randy Goldsmith (Tradeweb) to our Governing Board. I look forward to working with you and to the Community, especially the Gold Members, make sure you reach out and connect with your directors. A shout out also to other candidates Jamil Mina (Red Hat), James Turck (Refinitiv) and Kevin Smith (SUSE), as well to the outgoing Directors Brad Levy (Symphony), Nick Kolba (Genesis) and Robert Coletti and Bryan Bogensberger (Independent). Thank you for your contributions so far and I look forward to continuing working with you in the Community.
- I also wanted to welcome Accenture as our newest Platinum Member and David Treat to our Governing Board. While we haven't formally announced this publicly (we plan to do that in early Jan), I wanted to share this major news with the Community. We are very proud of continuing to add Platinum Members to our Foundation, and we know System Integrators play a key role in providing breadth to our reach as well as a vehicle to surface existing collaborations in the open. Please join me in welcoming Accenture to our Community and Dave to the Governing Board.
- As it often happens after a merger like the one with the Linux Foundation, we had to rationalize our investments & functions in the team. With this context, I wanted to inform you that as of December 13th, Rob Underwood is no longer with FINOS. It hasn't been by far an easy decision, as Rob has been an invaluable component of the FINOS team since our launch and has been functional to the growth we have seen in the last 2 years. If you'd like to stay connected with him (and maybe pitch him an open source project or two), you can do so on Linkedin or through his private email. I look forward to continuing to work with Rob in our Community, as I think he could play an important role as a contributor, maintainer and just simply an outstanding advocate for our movement.
- If you have some downtime during these holidays, I exhort you to take a look at the currently proposed projects and special interest groups: there's some really good stuff in there and your feedback would be very important to gauge the value of these initiatives as they make their way in the Foundation.
- Finally, a short update on our Open Developer Platform project: while we will continue to provide that as a key added value to our projects, to enable a productive while compliant and secure developer toolchain, we realized that most of the collaboration can happen offline. So we are discontinuing bi-weekly meetings in favor of providing on-demand access to Maurizio and our Infra team for projects and contributors needing help. See the details that Maurizio, the lead maintainer for the project, has previously shared with this list.
And with that, 2020 is a wrap. I truly hope that, in the mess that this year has been, our Community was able to bring a little bit of silver lining, as well as help you to feel a bit more connected with your peers around the world. Knowing we are connected in building a movement, and executing on a very ambitious vision, definitely helped me and our team to feel less isolated. And as we look with hope to 2021, we are now more aware than ever as to what the potential for this collaboration is. On behalf of the FINOS team, I want to thank you all from the bottom of our heart because, especially during such a challenging year, it's been your passion and commitment, as individuals, that brought our Community to where it is today.I wish you all a wonderful holiday break and can't wait to reconnect with all of you in the new year. Hopefully in person, sooner rather than later!
Gab
--
Note New Email Address: brooklynrob(at)protonmail(dot)com
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Rob UnderwoodNote New Email Address: brooklynrob(at)protonmail(dot)com
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