Mo McElaney
Open Source Janitor
Burlington, Vermont, United States
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Mo McElaney is an open source developer and developer advocate. They are on the Tutorial selection committee for PyCon US and a contributor to version 3 of the Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct and the Hippocratic License through the Organization for Ethical Source. Mo lives in frosty Vermont with their family, cats, and many plants.
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Topics
How I (and a couple of others) successfully ran a free GitHub organization for 4000+ people and 3100
Over the last three years, I have successfully run github.com/ibm with a couple of cohorts as one of those “20%” responsibility jobs. IBM has one of the most prominent instances of a free-tier GitHub organization in the world, and dealing with this scale with such a small team has some unique challenges.
In this talk, I’ll introduce and discuss dealing with some interesting organic growth, what to do when the horse has already left the barn, and you’re attempting to corral the internal community, and how you can tend your garden (organization) without going crazy. My goal is to show you some of the ridiculous scale issues that IBM has to deal with so you can learn and prepare to maintain your organization at your scale and understand how you can defend against issues that all public GitHub organizations will eventually run into.
Responsible AI Usage: Don’t use a chainsaw when all you need is a butter knife🍴
The AI landscape can feel overwhelming. But building truly valuable AI solutions isn’t about brute force. It’s about thoughtful design and responsible usage. This talk helps you understand why smaller open source language models (SLMs) like OLLAMA, Gemma3, and Granite 4.0 are often the better choice, and how to use them ethically.
This talk is for open source and tech enthusiasts who want to:
Build more sustainable and ethical AI solutions.
Understand the core concepts of responsible AI usage.
Contribute to a more thoughtful and accountable AI community.
Join us as we explore how to wield AI with precision- one butter knife at a time.
The Free Puppy: How to responsibly leverage open source ai
Over the past few decades, the trajectory of AI and open source software has evolved in tandem, but with the recent explosion of LLMs and foundation models, “open source AI” has become a catch phrase meaning so many things to so many different people. Some definitions of open source AI are so specific that they leave out hugely popular projects; other definitions focus specifically on models, and many AI projects marketed as open source don’t actually fit within the industry definition of open source. With so many different definitions floating around, how can you know what you are getting when you engage with open source AI?
In this talk, we will review what to look for when evaluating the health, stability, and practicality of open source AI projects (or any open source project for that matter), and why it’s so important to ensure transparency and explainability when deploying open source AI applications. In addition, in this webinar, we will cover licensing considerations, how to evaluate the health of open source projects, how and when to leverage open source, and the importance of community.
The Power of Consensus: How Community Built Contributor Covenant 3
Open source can only thrive with collaboration - but collaboration doesn’t come naturally to some, and contribution doesn’t come naturally to others. How do we drive behavior change in open source to create a psychologically safe & collegial environment for all contributors?
For over a decade, the Contributor Covenant has been the most widely adopted open source code of conduct in the world - and the scope of the Covenant is not merely to lay out a set of prescriptive rules, but to offer contributors a hopeful vision of how a project team collaborates.
When we started version 3, we realized that today’s open source projects needed a truly international document, and that even a diverse handful of core committers couldn’t represent the many ways of working in open source today. Our solution was to anchor our drafting in the needs of our adopters.
Come join us to learn how to strengthen your contribution funnel by prioritizing diverse perspectives in every step of the release process.
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