[FINOS Community] Updates & a heartfelt thank you for making FINOS a silver lining in a truly challenging 2020

[Gabriele Columbro]

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

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Gabriele Columbro | Executive Director | FINOS

📱 +1 (404) 432-7652 | 🕊 @mindthegabz

   

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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