Gina Maini
Twitter: @wiredsis
Who even is this chick?
I’m an ex-JavaScript/ex-OCaml developer currently making a living writing F# at Jet as a library and platform engineer. I’ve worked on many systems at Jet: divergence detection, distributed tracing, web APIs, event streaming libraries, and many more-- all in F#. I became familiar with many in the community through my speaking and lectures at meetups. I love the F# community because unlike other places on the interwebz, people here want to help you and get what it means to be inclusive.
Why I’d Like To Be Considered
People who know me know that I am a passionate, little spitfire. I’m honest and I don’t pull punches, which is why I can tell you that Jet has not done enough for the community. As I see it, we have a lot of work to do giving back. We stand a lot to gain by learning from you all here.
We have been negligent in our duties as users of OSS and I’m actively working with others internally to change the culture in a radical way. Myself and others have formed a community of practice internally with executive sponsorship specifically dedicated to Open Source. We have crunched the numbers on developer sentiment in our company and are presenting “dollars and cents” business value and importance of Open Source to the leadership of Jet. We are mobilizing and creating processes around allowing our developers to open source great F# libraries and are currently incubating ideas for how we could engage and mentor newer members of Jet.
Thank You For Your Time And Consideration
If you want to know more about my previous Open Source work in OCaml, why my undergraduate degree is in Music Theatre, or how to toilet train a cat-- or really, anything– feel free to reach out to me on FSSF Slack.
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Gina,
Given this:
Myself and others have formed a community of practice internally with executive sponsorship specifically dedicated to Open Source. We have crunched the numbers on developer sentiment in our company and are presenting “dollars and cents” business value and importance of Open Source to the leadership of Jet.
Do you feel that you’ve learned lessons in this process that might be applicable to other companies using F#? One of the biggest issues F# seems to have is a lot of “heads down” corporate users - I’d be curious whether you have any ideas of ways to engage with this massive community, and get them connected to FSSF and the community as a whole.
Yeah, great question @reedcopsey.
I don’t think there is a magic formula for moving a large, enterprise corporation to OSS. But if there were to exist such an alchemy, the root ingredient would be profits. You have to convey business value to your product org and executive leadership. There are a few ways to go about gathering meaningful data and presenting a compelling story. Some people focus on dollars and cents value to main product impact (which is useful), but overlook developer happiness, recruiting, and tech brand. I would say to folks trying to make their orgs care more to focus on presenting a full picture in a high-level way (I’m working on a snazzy white paper with nice graphs and sentiment analysis).
And then, as a last note in response to “get them connected to FSSF and the community as a whole”: I feel like it’s not just about # of connections it’s about quality of such connections. You want to foster good principles, mentorship, and learning between your organization and FSSF. Packaging a subscription to FSSF with your IDE subscription when your devs start (as part of a learning and development component) might be a great start. I would sell it to business as access to the broader community to bounce questions of design, language, and frameworks. I think Jet will contemplate this a bit more in the coming year as we could stand to gain a lot with this type of policy. Baby steps 
TL;DR it’s all about story telling.
