Richard Sikang Bian
Head of Open Source; Technical Strategic Initiatives, Ant Group
Hangzhou, China
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Richard led Ant Group Open Source initiative from day 1 and developed the initiative from a single person effort to a cross-functional OSPO team covering governance, strategy, developer experience, product development, growth and internationalization efforts. At this moment, the team collaborates closely with 20+ internal open source projects to help their community development, data science needs, developer growth needs, outreach and partnership collaborations, and go-to-market expansions. We setup rules and processes, building tools and utilities, and design full-fledged products to help both our internal users and external community partners.
As an ex-Square, ex-Microsoft engineer by training and father to a toddler, Richard enjoyed leading strategic initiatives from scratch to fruition and building products that developers and end-users love to use.
Richard has been studying and working for more than 5 years each in 4 different countries (Singapore, Canada, USA and China) with immensely cross-cultural collaboration experience.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Global and regional open source adoption and participation in the era of AI
This panel will offer a deep dive into global and regional open source adoption and participation from the perspectives of enterprise OSPOs and open source foundations, featuring representatives from leading Asian tech giants and the LFAI & Data Foundation. We will start by examining how different regions engage with open source, focusing on the current state and challenges in Asia. The discussion will address the responsibilities and challenges faced by OSPOs, highlighting how these vary by region. We will then explore how OSPOs and foundations can collaborate in the AI era to optimize and enhance their models, helping developers better integrate into the global open source ecosystem.
From 0 to 3, Why Does Ant Group Sending Projects to Apache?
Ant Group (fintech company with 25K employees) has been an active participant in Open Source community with many projects, yet most projects were primarily governed and operated by Ant Group and we don't actively work with OSS Foundations, Apache Foundation included for a long time.
Founding Open Source Program Office (OSPO) and begin properly doing OSS governance has changed that. Now, Ant Group has tailored OSS technical strategy, and comprehensive internal governance process + practices + products to support the strategy. Ant Group knows the importance of building internal Open Source culture and working with the community, but it takes time for the change to happen. How can we accelerate the change?
In this duo-speaker session, we'll share our journey building our OSPO, and the learnings throughout this journey. Moreover, we'll share the story behind sending 3 projects to Apache incubation in 2023 and why we believe Apache Incubator would be the right choice.
Ant OSS Incubator - Apache Way Within
Ant Group (fintech company with 25K employees) founded Open Source Program Office (OSPO) in 2021 and over 3+ years, we've iterated our open source governance and operational support several times and eventually formed "Ant OSS Incubator", an internal structured physical/virtual team focusing on full lifecycle support for our OSS projects. Ant OSS Incubators offers not only standardized solutions of OSS education, governance support, developer experience toolings, operational cases, etc; but also tailored consulting + operational solutions for individual projects to grow from sandbox to incubation then to graduation.
In this duo-speaker session, we'll share our journey building the incubator and how Apache Way, the culture and practices, were providing invaluable support helping a large corporation like Ant Group getting to the current state.
Can OSS culture be taught? - Ant Group's project journey to Apache
Ant Group (fintech company with 25K employees) has been an active participant in Open Source community with many projects (AntV, EggJS, SOFAStack, etc), yet most projects were primarily governed and operated by Ant Group and we don't actively work with OSS Foundations, Apache Foundation included for a long time.
Founding Open Source Program Office (OSPO) and setting tailored OSS strategy has changed that. In 2023, Three Ant Group initiated projects entered Apache incubation and many of our internal engineers have built awareness and capabilities for working with the community, and Apache Way was a critical component for their learning.
The experience of building OSPO and facilitated 3 projects into Apache has taught me a lesson that in order to build long term open source practices and culture, you need more than trainings and education material. In this session, we share how principles, governance, mentorship and commercial knowledge can work together to get you there.
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