Episode 297 - Megan Forbes and Ashwathi Iyer
[00:00:00] Richard: Hello and welcome to Sustain, the podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? What does TTO stand for? Anyone, anyone? I'm really excited to be here today. My name is Richard Littauer, I am your usual Sustain host. Hello again.
[00:00:26] Hi, hi. Now I'm not joined by any co-hosts today, but they're all amazing and beautiful. Wherever they are in the world, I wish them joy. Luckily, I am joined by two other guests so you don't have to listen to just me talk. I'm joined today by Aswathi Iyer from University of Michigan, and Megan Forbes from Johns Hopkins University, calling in from Massachusetts, and I'm very excited to have both of them on.
[00:00:48] The goal for today is to talk about tech transfer offices, OSPOs, which is the short form of Open Source Program Office, and how they can work together to make open source for great good. At least [00:01:00] that was my understanding. Megan, tell me a bit about your OSPO at JHU and how it's been going, and how you work with the tech transfer office and whatever that is.
[00:01:10] Megan Forbes: So the Open Source Programs Office at Johns Hopkins, we are formally part of the libraries, so that gives us the freedom to really interact with folks all across the university. We're not perceived as being just serving computer science or just serving HPC or anything like that. So we sort of benefit.
[00:01:28] We have some of the shine from the libraries on us. The- OSPO has been around for eight years, so it started before my time. I've been at Hopkins for three and a half years now. Primarily, what we concern ourselves with, you know, Hopkins obviously is a huge research university, so most of what we concern ourselves with is supporting researchers, supporting research software.
[00:01:51] A lot of which happens to be open source, but not all of it. And we are very closely connected with our tech transfer office, because we all have the constant question [00:02:00] of, how do we keep these projects going, especially once the grant funding runs out? We know from where the OSPO is sitting, we see a lot of expertise in the tech transfer office that basically we just wanna take advantage of, right?
[00:02:13] We're all magpies in the open source world, so we wanna take advantage of some of that expertise in the TTO office and see if we can use that to help our faculty, our PIs, figure out how to sustain those research software projects. 
[00:02:26] Richard: When I think about a university, I think about students going to school, I think about researchers doing awesome stuff, and I think about facilities that are somewhat useful for sports.
[00:02:34] Tech transfer is this odd word, which kind of reminds me of translation, which is another word at a university that doesn't mean translating text, but means transferring things to the real world. Can you just describe what tech transfer offices do? 
[00:02:49] Ashwathi Iyer: Great question. Describing what tech transfer offices do and what our office does will provide a little bit of context for how we support open source projects.
[00:02:58] Tech transfer [00:03:00] offices are offices within the university whose charter is to help commercialize or broadly disseminate work that is taking place at the university. And also, increasingly Explore collaborations with industry around research. So this could be sponsored research, it could be joint development, joint investments into a startup.
[00:03:23] So that's kind of broadly what tech transfer offices do. The tech transfer office at the University of Michigan is called Innovation Partnerships, and that's where I sit. So I work on the software licensing team at Innovation Partnerships. Our broad charter is to help amplify the impact of research that's happening at the university in the broadest sense possible.
[00:03:45] We define impact very broadly, and that sort of ties into why we have such strong programming for open source projects. Financial impact is definitely a part of it, but also we focus on societal impact and research [00:04:00] impact. We have kind of three thr- thrusts that we provide support around to research teams.
[00:04:06] We have a corporate and foundation research alliances team, CFRA, and they help researchers with sponsored research projects with companies or with foundations and other types of kind of longer term collaborations. We have a licensing team which works with faculty on an invention report basis. So we work all the way from figuring out intellectual property protection strategy.
[00:04:31] Do you file a patent? Do you open source your software, or is it something in between? Marketing the, the technology and then providing all of the support around commercialization, whether it's trying to license something to an existing company, broadly disseminating an open source project, or spinning it out into a startup, and we negotiate all of those agreements as well, exclusive license, NDAs, et cetera.
[00:04:55] And then we have a ventures team that comes in when a group is interested in spinning [00:05:00] out a startup company, and they provide high touch business strategy support. So we have a bunch of mentors with amazing industry and startup experience, and they help provide one-on-one mentorship to teams that want to spin out a startup company.
[00:05:14] Within this context is we support open source projects. So Michigan, we've been supporting open source projects for several years. And part of the reason is that a lot of faculty do open source, and it's a really core part of having research impact, having societal impact. And we have so many commercial open source software companies in the world that are amazingly successful, so it could also be a pathway to having a financial impact.
[00:05:42] A few years ago, we formalized a lot of the programming that we're doing around open source into a named program called Michigan Open Source Software, which we then renamed to Michigan Open Source Support because we wanted to also include a lot of content based innovations that we [00:06:00] support that are open access.
[00:06:01] You know, creative comments license, which I know is not strictly open source, but has the same strategies that we apply to help those teams. And MOSS is basically an initiative to provide strategic support to open source projects to specifically accelerate their ability to achieve sustainable outcomes that can then help them have long-term impact.
[00:06:21] So we help project teams think beyond open source release to specifically focus on community building strategies. So three things, the first is community building strategy, the second is funding pathways, and then the third is sustainability or business models that will let them support an active community and have long-term impact.
[00:06:42] We kinda like roughly think of these business models as either sustained research funding, open core licensing revenue, or some kind of a spin out outside of the university. That could be a for-profit, nonprofit, or being hosted by an open source foundation. The way we think about open [00:07:00] source support is that it falls squarely within the mission of a tech transfer office, especially when you're trying to work backwards from what is the sustainability model or the business model that will allow this project to have long-term impact.
[00:07:14] Richard: Thanks, Aswathi. Megan, I'm guessing as you're at JHU, you're not a member of MOSS because the M stands for Michigan. Do you have a similar role within the JHU OSPO? 
[00:07:24] Megan Forbes: Not so formal. The JHU OSPO, we have connections with our tech transfer office, but there isn't sort of within tech transfer sort of a similar initiative to MOSS.
[00:07:36] This is probably more built on personal connections at this point than sort of formal strategy. 
[00:07:41] Richard: It's really interesting to me because when I think about open source and sustainability, I think about a lot of opportunities you have maybe through your fiscal host, right? Open Source Collective provides some tools for collectives to go out there and get information.
[00:07:53] More high-touch fiscal hosts do more, so maybe something like NumFOCUS will, will offer [00:08:00] more in-person help. Linux Foundation maybe offer less, but more marketing, right? It's like there's different things that already exist within the research space. Then there's, of course, costs, you know, corporate open source and that sort of thing, and venture-backed startups doing that sort of thing.
[00:08:13] But this seems to be somewhere in the middle ground, where it's saying, for academics who are interested, who are already in the university, in the university space, we're going to offer these services to help them as much as possible to survive. Do you find that most of your clients, and I'm using air quotes here, oh, listeners, clients are researchers or students?
[00:08:31] Megan Forbes: We mostly are working directly with researchers, and I think they don't know that Fiscal Sponsors or maybe they've heard of NumFOCUS or the Linux Foundation, but- 
[00:08:40] Ashwathi Iyer: Yeah ... 
[00:08:41] Megan Forbes: as something that they use, not something that they would engage with. And so I think a lot of the work that we do is helping them try to figure out what their endpoint might be given the software.
[00:08:51] So is a good endpoint for you something like NumFOCUS? Is a good endpoint for you something like commercial open source? Is it membership? Is it spinning out to [00:09:00] your own 501c3, which we would never probably advocate for? It's too much work, but that's a lot of what we do, is trying to help guide those conversations of you have a project, you want it to keep going.
[00:09:12] Okay, how are we gonna make that happen? 
[00:09:14] Richard: So I have a similar question for you two, which is- Just as you help other people figure out where they can go and how they can scale, how do you scale this? Because there's only two of you on this call. So what do you do with the thousands of researchers who are banging down your door asking for help with their open source business problem?
[00:09:31] Ashwathi Iyer: When we think of the open source projects that we're supporting, it's kind of in the broader context of the tech transfer function that we're providing, right? So every open source project that we support, it's based on an invention disclosure that's submitted to our office, which is a description of, you know, what was the project, who are the inventors or the contributors, what was the funding, right?
[00:09:52] So that's what an invention disclosure is. So the question of volume and scale applies to much more [00:10:00] than open source projects for us, because in the last fiscal year, we had seven hundred plus invention disclosures, some of which were open source, some of which weren't, right? So open source is just part of the overall question of how do we scale support in a way that retains what I think a lot of researchers find valuable, which is high touch, very personalized support.
[00:10:26] Because one of the things about working with university researchers is that it is a very trust-based activity. You have to spend time with the researchers. You have to really understand what are their goals, whether it's on the research front or commercialization front. You know, how does their view of, like, how they want to have impact change with time, right?
[00:10:48] So all of that takes time. It is challenging to scale while retaining that personalized touch. So I don't have great answers for how we scale it. It's something that we struggle [00:11:00] with on a daily basis. The software licensing team at Michigan is three people right now. The open source projects that we support are roughly divided amongst the three of us, and then a few others have a few open source projects that they support.
[00:11:16] We also have a great network of mentors who can provide business model support. But on the question of community building strategy and customer discovery and kinda like all of those activities that can help project teams get to the point where they can apply for further funding or seriously think about a sustainability model, I am talking to our regional I-Corps Hub about trying to offer a more cohorted experience for both open source specific customer discovery, but also having some community building pieces in there.
[00:11:52] Because right now what we're doing through Moss is we do this thing called Moss Community Toolkit, which is one-on-one per [00:12:00] project program where we work with teams and community building strategy, which is a lot harder to scale than, you know, if you could do it in a cohorted way. So that's one of the ways that we're trying to address the scale issue 
[00:12:13] Richard: I-Corps is an NSF program.
[00:12:15] I'm looking at their website right now. It says that they've had 1,400 startups formed with 3.16, so close to pi, billion dollars of funding raised, which is pretty intense. Not all of those, of course, are open source. Many of them will have open source under the hood. I would venture to say all of them.
[00:12:31] Someone go out there and prove me wrong. You talked about invention disclosures earlier, which is a bizarre concept to me. I have never heard of this, but that's maybe because I haven't worked as much as I should have within the American university system. Would that apply to a researcher who happens to make some commits on another open source project, just a PR, you know, to, to something that's low lying?
[00:12:54] No, you're shaking your head. Where does that come into play? 
[00:12:57] Ashwathi Iyer: So an invention disclosure, I like to [00:13:00] think of it as a project that could go on to have commercial potential, and that we have meaningfully contributed to. So it wouldn't be a PR, it wouldn't be a bug fix that someone does in someone else's project, right?
[00:13:12] It would have to be a project that the faculty or the researchers that we're working with have meaningfully contributed to. A lot of times these tend to be projects that originated at the university, so it's not a preexisting project. It's not like someone, you know, sending a poll request or committing something to a public project, for example.
[00:13:34] Richard: So there's a inherent tension there between open source- And so some would say, you know, blue sky research and commercialization, which is probably something that you hear a lot in the TTO. Like, where does that exist? How does it work? How do you reconcile the tension of wanting to commercialize or wanting to help people commercialize their projects versus wanting to commercialize and wanting to help people commercialize their projects versus wanting people to [00:14:00] just do open source and license things openly and not worry about commercialization 'cause they're making it freely available and that's just fine for them.
[00:14:07] Do you wrestle with this in the middle of the night or not? 
[00:14:10] Ashwathi Iyer: Not really, because our mission is not just to commercialize research, right? Our charter is to amplify the impact of research, so that could be really broad. It could be something that is going to be a venture-backed company or it could be a research project that is released open source, and all of the other users are other academic groups who would not pay for it, but, you know, it's a very thriving community, right?
[00:14:36] So both of those are forms of impact that we value. One thing I'll mention, though, is that even in that case where it's the research team wants to give away the project for free, they want to make it publicly available, we're 100% in support of that. But even that kind of a project needs some kind of a sustainability model, right?
[00:14:59] It could be [00:15:00] something as simple as what is the minimum viable cost to help sustain this project, and can we secure this either from the department or from having a budget line item in a grant proposal that they're writing for project maintenance? So those are the kinds of questions that we help teams grapple with, even if all they want to do is release things open, have it be freely available, never think about commercialization.
[00:15:29] That's 100% fine for us as long as that's what the research team wants, but we still go back to the business model question, even in those cases. 
[00:15:37] Richard: This sounds like a really cool service offering that you have, where you're able to help open source projects grow, and you're able to help researchers or practitioners who have open source projects be able to, you know, learn about community out there and learn about what their end goal is and how to get to the middle goal.
[00:15:53] You know, do you wanna be a massive charity? Maybe don't. Maybe just use open source collective. Y- those sorts of advice. That seems [00:16:00] really useful, and I'm thinking about the larger open source ecosystem. Is there any way for people outside of academia to use services like this? Are there other nonprofits that do this sort of work in the same way, or am I just missing something with my conceptualization?
[00:16:14] Megan Forbes: So a lot of the work that I do at Hopkins builds on a project that started maybe 10 years ago called It Takes a Village. That started in a very specific niche, which was projects that had been funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services in the States, and they had funded all of these open source projects.
[00:16:35] Yeah. And then they were wondering, like, "What's gonna happen when we stop funding them?" There was sort of a book that was written, and then we spent a couple years building this toolkit. And so a lot of the work that we do and a lot of the work that we've collaborated on at Hopkins with our tech transfer office is taking those toolkit tools and adapting them more generally for research software.
[00:16:56] But I would say that that is a really good free resource, and I know that a lot [00:17:00] of people use that. I think Aswathi used that for part of 
[00:17:03] Ashwathi Iyer: the resources that they're, they're using 
[00:17:05] Megan Forbes: at Michigan. And so that's one thing, you know, that guides folks through each of those elements. Like, what does it mean to have governance?
[00:17:12] What does community engagement look like? What does financial sustainability look like? You know, it sort of guides folks through those. To echo what Aswathi said earlier, though, you can put out toolkits all you want, and you can make them as user-friendly as you want, and you can user test them as much as you want, people want other people to hold their hands always.
[00:17:30] So the scale question, go back to the scale question a little bit. Yes, it would be nice if we could help more people, but I'm really happy if I can help one person. Like, that's great if we can have a really positive interaction with somebody, and then they come out of it at the end with a better idea about what to do with their project, that's great.
[00:17:48] So well, you told me I can't swear, so I'm gonna hold o- one thing instead of asking a bunch of other things. 
[00:17:54] Richard: You c- you can swear however you want. We might have, might have to bleep you out. That's really cool. I like the [00:18:00] idea of it being maximally helpful even to just one person, and that makes sense to me.
[00:18:04] I hadn't seen It Takes a Village before. I've linked it. It'll be in the show notes, and do check those out at podcast.thesanos.org. Have you managed to have any postdocs or any students help out with this sort of work? Do you offer training to help other people give this work? 
[00:18:19] Megan Forbes: That's a big project that we did.
[00:18:21] So one way we scaled was me in the OS votes, me and 10% of my supervisor. And so scaling was, like, looking around the university to see who had graduate students that I could borrow. And so our tech transfer office has a program called the Commercialization Academy, which is a funded project. They hire fellows.
[00:18:42] They're either, you know, PhD students or postdocs, and they put them to work in tech transfer. And so I reached out to them and said, "Can I borrow some of your grad students?" Because, again, just sort of going back to this, tech transfer doesn't necessarily mean commercialization. It means, like, Hopkins' [00:19:00] mission, right?
[00:19:00] Bringing the benefits of discovery to the world. So this is part of that. So can I marry this entrepreneurship and value proposition development and customer discovery development expertise that these fellows are gaining and marry that with the PIs, right? Who are interested in very specific research questions, right?
[00:19:18] How do I do variant annotation in cancer genomics? The research question they're interested in isn't necessarily, "How do I keep this going forever," right? It's, "How do I make cancer research better?" But the fellows are interested in that question. They are interested in that question of, how do I make this sustainable in the long term?
[00:19:35] So it's sort of marrying those two ideas has been really successful for us. They've been super interested in it, really committed. We've had a, a great time working with the Commercialization Academy. It's also really nice 'cause tech transfer is paying for them. It's always nice. But that's been a really great collaboration for us 
[00:19:53] Richard: Ashwasi, what about you?
[00:19:54] Ashwathi Iyer: We have fellows in our office as well. I think every tech transfer office has fellows [00:20:00] who help with early commercial assessment of technologies. So I've had the privilege of working with a couple of fellows who have provided a ton of support for projects that I have been helping with. So, you know, the support they've provided has ranged from helping organize a webinar and inviting people from the community for one open source project, and that webinar, I think, had 400-plus people attend.
[00:20:25] We have had fellows help with creating one-pagers, marketing summaries to help project teams communicate to their community. We have had a fellow put together different kinds of community building and marketing playbooks, so, you know, things like how do you set up a webinar on your own? How do you create a newsletter?
[00:20:47] Shout out to Will Wrong. I'll send this link to him. He's a fellow who's helped me a lot with some of these operational aspects of Moss. One of the early lessons that we learned about Moss is that it's [00:21:00] really important to shift the focus of the support that we're providing to have the project teams start becoming independent about doing community building themselves.
[00:21:12] So the tech transfer office or the OSPO can't be the driver of those activities. So recently, you know, we have been requiring a really engaged grad student or a post-op from the project team who understands the technology or the technical space of what the project is doing really intimately to be involved and to be the main driver of the community-building activities for open source projects.
[00:21:38] And the reason I, like, keep coming back to community building is I've seen that that is the biggest gap for a lot of open source projects in academia, is that, you know, they don't have an active community, which then makes it very challenging to get follow-on funding and meaningfully explore what a business model or a sustainability model can look like.
[00:21:57] So to me, that's really step one, [00:22:00] is how do they build a community and sustain that community, right? We've been requiring a grad student or a post-op from the project team to be involved, and that kind of narrows down the types of projects that you can support, 'cause grad students want to publish papers.
[00:22:16] They wanna graduate. They're looking for jobs. Not everyone has this as a priority, but we have worked with a few projects where the student or, you know, sometimes it's, like, a research engineer is really, really invested in making sure that the project can be sustainable longer term. And that's kind of been the most, I would say, fruitful collaborations or projects that we've worked on through Moss.
[00:22:39] And this isn't any different, I think, from other types of, like, commercialization support that we provide, right? Any project that we're trying to commercialize, the tech transfer office is really well positioned to provide strategy support, make connections, but someone on the project team has to drive things forward in an operational way.
[00:22:57] The only difference for open source projects, I [00:23:00] think, is that a lot of that Activity happens while it's still a university project and before they already have a sustained form of funding or they've spun out into a startup so then, you know, they can do it with commercialization lens on. For open source projects, you kind of have to shift a lot of the customer discovery, community building, marketing activities to the stage where it's still a research project, which is, I think, what makes it uniquely challenging.
[00:23:27] Richard: Do either of you have any shining examples of projects which have gone through this program and have really grown up? 
[00:23:33] Ashwathi Iyer: We don't have examples of projects that have grown up that have been through Moss, you know, and like specifically the community building activities and stuff. We formalized the program offerings about two years ago, so it's quite new.
[00:23:46] When you think of typical timescales for tech transfer, even more so for open source projects that can get to the point of being sustainable. We've supported open source projects and commercialization of open source projects for [00:24:00] several years, and it predates Moss. One of my colleagues, Drew Bennett, is very well known in the tech transfer world for his open source talk
[00:24:09] He has an open source talk that he gave several times, and he was the original driver of a lot of our open source strategy. So we've had several commercial open source projects spin out. We had a nonprofit that was based on a open access content that spun out as a fiscally sponsored project. So we have several examples of both for-profit and nonprofit spin outs that are based on open source, and I know this is a no-no in the open source world, but we like apply the same strategies for community building to projects that are open access, source available, or even platforms, you know, that are free to sign up.
[00:24:51] From our standpoint, I don't wanna open source wash anything at all, but you know, from our standpoint, a lot of the strategies to help [00:25:00] those projects remain the same. 
[00:25:01] Richard: Megan, what about you? 
[00:25:02] Megan Forbes: I think the people have graduated to the right spot for them, which doesn't always mean spinning out to something else.
[00:25:11] Sometimes graduating means confirming amongst yourselves that staying a potted plant and staying sort of a nice small something that your rotating cast of graduate students can adapt and that you understand what the strategy is and what your limitations are. So I think we've actually maybe had more success to sort of pull people back than setting them free.
[00:25:34] But that's good. I mean, it's good to think about what is your strategy and what are you truly trying to accomplish with this project, and what is the software need to be to support that strategy? And it doesn't always need to be a great big thing, which is hard. You know, as you said, Ashwati, right? People wanna publish and they want things to be new and interesting so they're gonna get tenure.
[00:25:55] Sometimes what we have to do is just sort of have those conversations of, let's talk about what this [00:26:00] project looks like to be sustainable, and sometimes that's small, and that's okay. And we've worked with projects that have already spun out. So, like we've worked with projects that are already part of, like NumFocus, for example.
[00:26:11] But again, they're getting to that point where they made that choice, but they forgot to do governance. So they've got multi-institutional partners. They have no way to make decisions about what the team's priorities are. They're all coming at it from completely different directions. So we're also doing a decent amount of sort of cleanup work for folks that got ahead of their skis a little bit, you know, and spun out maybe before they had really sort of thought through all the ramifications of that.
[00:26:37] Richard: I've never heard of an open source project that didn't have governance as the first thing they did Megan, Aswathi, thank you so much. This has been really, really cool to learn about what you offer and to learn more about open source going through OSPOs and TTOs. Too many acronyms in the world. Can we stop?
[00:26:54] Where can people learn more about MOSS? 
[00:26:57] Ashwathi Iyer: People can learn more about MOSS on our [00:27:00] website that I will put in the chat, and I'm also always very happy to talk about MOSS and pontificate on a Zoom call. So if you wanted to reach out to me, I'm happy to talk about it. 
[00:27:12] Richard: And Megan, what about TRUE or OSS or whatever acronym you use?
[00:27:16] Megan Forbes: We'll put up the Hopkins OSPO website, has all of our current work. 
[00:27:20] Richard: And you can find all of those links at podcast.sustainoss.org. Now it's my favorite part of the podcast, the part where we talk about something completely different. Welcome to Spotlight, where we highlight other people's projects, people, or things, or people that we think just need a bit more light shed on them.
[00:27:35] Traditionally, the host goes first. My spotlight today is Neil deGrasse Tyson's Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, which has just been delightful. It is not anywhere near as fun as the Murderbot books by Martha Wells, and that makes me sad, but it's a bit more realistic, which makes me happy, and there's less murder in it.
[00:27:52] So highly suggest Neil deGrasse Tyson's Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, which you can get through Libby, almost certainly through your local library. So [00:28:00] do check that out. Megan, what is your spotlight today? 
[00:28:03] Megan Forbes: I had a really great conversation last week with Sharon Leon from Digital Scholar, who you folks might be familiar with, like Omeka and, I'm gonna say it wrong, I always say Zenodo when I mean Zotero.
[00:28:17] Richard: Me too. Thank you so much. That makes me feel so much 
[00:28:19] Megan Forbes: better. So it's- All 
[00:28:20] Richard: the time ... 
[00:28:21] Megan Forbes: the one and not the other one. I think Digital Scholar is a really awesome example of they've been sustaining open source for a really long time, and Omeka has thousands of really tiny users who are not technically savvy.
[00:28:36] And so it was a great call with Sharon and how they're sort of expanding how they offer and sort of dipping their toe into some of the waters around sort of fiscal sponsorship. So I think that's gonna be really cool 'cause I think they really have a great sense of how to make things work and who their users are.
[00:28:49] So I'm excited to see where they go with that. 
[00:28:51] Richard: I would like to talk to him. That sounds amazing. Thank you. Ashwati, what's your spotlight today? 
[00:28:56] Ashwathi Iyer: So my spotlight is actually a project that [00:29:00] I work with through MOSS. It is called the Open Source Leg Project. I'm putting a link in the, in the chat. So this is one of those open source projects that makes me feel really good about the work that we do and the fact that we support open source projects.
[00:29:16] So the Open Source Leg is a platform to make prosthetics research more accessible and democratize it to allow researchers to start their research from sort of like a common starting point. It's open hardware as well as software, and I think it's super cool. The team is great, very passionate. Also, just to think of the downstream impacts that it could have for prosthetics design for people with disabilities is really cool, and it's one of those examples of projects that makes me want to wake up in the morning and come to work and feel really excited and fulfilled.
[00:29:55] So that's my, that's my spotlight. 
[00:29:57] Richard: I really like that project. Thank you so much for sharing it. That's a [00:30:00] perfect example of the thing I was asking for earlier when I was saying, "Do you have any shining examples?" It sounds like that's a good one. Listeners, I hope you've enjoyed this podcast. If you have, there are several things you can do.
[00:30:09] One, you can donate. Just straight, right out of the gate, just donate, opencollective.com/sustainoss. You can also share this podcast in all the places where you share it. You could go around your neighborhood with flyers and put them in mailboxes saying, "Listen to the Sustain OSS podcast." You can, uh, go on Bluesky or Mastodon or LinkedIn and, uh, share it there.
[00:30:29] That'd be really, really cool. You can tell your friends. Tell your mom. You can heart it. Uh, you can email me with complaints saying, "I think that was a bit culty, and you probably shouldn't have said that, Richard." You can email me at richard@sustainoss.org. You can also go to podcast.sustainoss.org, which can only be said in an English accent, to look for other links where you can download really cool stuff and check out more about MOSS and JHU and figure out what JHU stands for.
[00:30:54] I think it's Johns Hopkins, but maybe there's only one S. And you can basically [00:31:00] have a good time and suggest other guests for us and talk more about sustainability in your local co-op. Ashwati, Megan, thank you so much for coming on today. It was really, really great. Best of luck with everything, and yeah, it's just cool work.
[00:31:11] Keep it up. 
[00:31:12] Ashwathi Iyer: Thanks, Richard. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you.