About this episode
Guests
Jan Lehnardt | Alba Herrerías Ramírez
Panelist
Richard Littauer
Show Notes
In this episode of Sustain, host Richard Littauer engages with Jan Lehnardt and Alba Herrerías Ramírez from Neighbourhoodie, a consultancy company based in Berlin and the Canary Islands. The discussion delves into Neighbourhoodie’s work on sustaining open source projects, their collaboration with the Sovereign Tech Fund for enhancing open source project's bug resilience, and the technical and ethical facets of their consultancy services. Insights are shared into their past and current projects, including PouchDB, CouchDB, and their contributions to humanitarian causes, emphasizing their focus on creating a sustainable impact in the open source community. Press download now to hear more!
[00:01:55] Jan explains the origin of Neighbourhoodie, which began with the Hoodie open source project, how the company evolved, the decline of the Hoodie project due to timing and resources, and how CouchDB and PouchDB continued to thrive.
[00:04:27] Richard asks about the company’s name and its novelty domain, and Jan gives an overview of Neighbourhoodie’s size and slow and steady growth, and their focus on a positive work environment.
[00:05:51] Jan gives a detail explanation of CouchDB and PouchDB’s functionality, particularly their offline-first and synchronization capabilities, and how this has been used in critical projects like the Ebola vaccine.
[00:08:41] Richard asks about maintaining ethical work practices and avoiding projects that conflict with Neighbourhoodie’s values.
[00:09:53] Jan discusses how Neighbourhoodie balances reinvesting in open source projects and expanding the company, focusing on professional services around CouchDB and PouchDB.
[00:11:53] Alba describes her role in leading Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) projects within Neighbourhoodie, and how they engage with various projects to offer support.
[00:13:31] Jan explains the STF’s Bug Resilience Program.
[00:16:33] Richard asks about the potential ethical dilemma when third-party consultants like Neighbourhoodie might be taking work that could have otherwise gone to maintainers themselves. We hear how Neighbourhoodie, the projects, and the STF agree on statements of work, including milestones and time estimates, to ensure fairness and proper allocation of resources.
[00:21:23] We learn from Jan that dealing with low-quality bug reports isn’t a primary focus of their work, but improving test coverage, dependency updates, and CI/CD processes helps mitigate these issues as a side effect.
[00:22:54] Alba talks about the different types of projects they work in, such as OpenPGP.js, Sequioa, Yocto, PyPi, Systemd, PHP, Log4j, and reproducible builds.
[00:23:49] Jan discusses the challenges and learning opportunities that comes with working across diverse projects, each with its own set of
