As the new FINOS Director of Community, I'm super excited about joining a fantastic team of Open Source experts as well as helping the FINOS community identify and deliver meaningful and impactful programs and projects. 

Throughout my career I've always worked to enable others. 

Whilst at Lloyds Banking Group I was an engineering lead who introduced engineering teams to the Spotify model of Communities, Guilds, Squads and Chapter Leads - all tools designed to empower teams and individuals. I'm a huge believer in enabling teams to make decisions on their own and that federated responsibility has the massive advantage of allowing teams to move fast, making smart decisions based on the context of features being delivered and problems being solved.

Enabling teams to take initiative, whilst collaborating safely, is the bedrock and foundation of a strong Open Source community and is part of a vision for the industry that I bring to FINOS.

As part of FINOS it’s my intention to leverage lean DevOps principles that will help our community to safely consume and contribute to Open Source.

Bringing People Together

Even as a teenager I had a strong belief in team collaboration and sharing, having been a police cadet at fourteen and student representative at university. Bringing people together to solve problems whilst learning is part of my DNA and something I’m passionate about continuing to foster within FINOS, our community and programs.

Even outside work I endeavour to grow and enable engineering communities.

A number of years ago I founded React London - Bring Your Own Project, a London JavaScript meetup created to grow the local ReactJS engineering community. It was initially formed by a small group of people with a strong idea to share code whilst bringing developers together and has now grown to more than 1500 engineering members. This is a great example of how communities can be built from a joint creative vision.

Collaboration whilst Learning

I absolutely believe we can only grow Open Source in Fintech by doing so as a joined up community and this is what drives my excitement about joining FINOS. 

If you’re new to Open Source and would like to experience a huge part of its value, the following ideas are where I started and I hope these will help you too. 

Attend Meetups and Learn From Others

By attending meetups you’ll build a network that includes both people who need your help and can help you. Being part of a meetup helps build confidence by learning from others and also an opportunity to help solve other people's problems. 

Meetups also teach you how to present and conduct live demos by allowing you to practice in a safe community environment.

Grow Your Confidence by Educating Others

Once you've attended a few meetups, why not take what you’ve learned back to the team? 

Brown bag sessions are lunchtime talks designed to cycle knowledge whilst having lunch as a group, hence the brown bag! They’re great social events that are easy to organize, even with little notice. They also take place during working hours, so won’t eat into your evenings. 

Then, why not grow your new experience into lightning talks to take back to your meetups, expanding your confidence and completing the learning cycle.

Try Coding Live

There’s nothing better than developers live coding to really show how things are done. But this skill takes practice and the first time can often seem the hardest. 

Step out and nurture these skills by inviting your team to the first brown bag demo. Focus on something that you’re passionate about as this will reduce the need for scripts and detailed instructions to follow. 

Joining a Fantastic FINOS Team

I’m pleased to be the first FINOS team member based in London and am endeavouring to get to know the London FINOS community so I’m spending lots of time speaking with teams, going to labs and attending events.

So, please invite me to your organisation, as I believe there's a role in Open Source for everyone and am keen to explore and generate new and great ideas. 

Please feel free to email me at james@finos.org. I’m also active on social media where you can Follow me on Twitter or Connect with me on LinkedIn.

Come be part of our community - start with ossf!

On November 20th, the entire FINOS team, Community and I will be in New York celebrating such a amazing year in open source and financial services at the Open Source Strategy Forum (OSSF). It's a one-day conference for experts across financial services, technology and open source to come together to deepen collaboration and drive innovation across the financial services industry. The list of speakers is incredible, and growing - as are the list of attendees. So come and join us - learn from others - educate others - and be part of an expanding community!