Episode: 4242
Title: HPR4242: Interview with Lorenzo 'kelset' Sciandra
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4242/hpr4242.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 21:55:13

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4242 for Tuesday the 5th of November 2024.
Today's show is entitled Interview with Lorenzo Calzacchandra.
It is part of the series interviews.
It is hosted by Ken Fallon and is about 11 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Ken tracks down a Lorenzo to talk about his presentations at Arcamp.
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallon and you're listening to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
A few days ago or weeks now, I did a coverage from Arcamp 2024 and during that time it was
absolutely chaotic busy, so I missed quite a lot of people.
One of the people that was at the event and I wanted to catch up with
and agree to do a call after the event was, is here with me now.
Can you introduce yourself, Lorenzo?
Who are you and why were you at Arcamp?
Yes, so I'm Lorenzo Chandra, I'm currently working as a technologist for the Saurantek Fund.
Basically, what that means is they work with this German organization to give
money to open source.
That's very nice, why did they do that?
Basically, our mission is to support the critical digital infrastructure in the public interest,
so in a way it's because we recognize, let's say a quote-unquote task force,
basically, we are a company that has been off of one of the ministries and
through the work of some of the core members of our city and the CEO,
what happened is that they raised awareness about, like, hey, the digital infrastructure
allows everyone to do a lot, so we need all to take care of it.
It kind of goes back a bit to, you know, Nadia Zagbal, Rodsen Bridges,
uh, work for the Ford Foundation, and also, I think, the keystone of our work is kind of like
this concept of digital sovereignty, so basically, the fact that everyone, so companies, individuals,
and the state can use a whatever digital tool they need to achieve what they want.
Like, they're not stuck in a monopoly, they have the freedom, and we believe that, basically,
that is the enabler for, you know, democratic processes, and also a stable economic situation,
so that's kind of like the, let's say, the mission statement and a bit of the vision behind it.
And where, where's this company based?
In Germany, so it's a spin-off of the Ministry for Economic Affairs,
uh, B.M. LeKa, I think it's in, but we're based in Berlin.
Okay. Um, are you a nonprofit organization? How do you get your funding?
We get the funding directly from the Ministry, like, these are all public money, so we need to follow,
you know, all the public money procedures. Uh, I don't remember exactly our nomination,
and I think there's some change that will happen soon around that, so I'll,
I'll have to sidetrack slightly, uh, like, the, yeah, no, that's a shame that we have because I'm
not entirely sure. And links to your organization and websites will be in the show notes for this
episode. Um, so what had you over at our camp? Our camp last time I checked wasn't part, Manchester
wasn't part of Germany. Might be part of the violin, but might not. So, uh, yeah.
Great question. So first off, um, what brought me there is, of course, the fact that
open source is everywhere, like, we are not, for example, bound to fund all the open source in
Germany, right? We found open source wherever it is. So in a way, yes, we are based in Germany,
but interaction with the maintainers and developers and the open source ecosystem can
happen everywhere, because in the end, also one of our side goals in a way is to, you know,
be in the spotlight so that other states can copy us. So for example, uh, at all camp, I managed to
do, uh, talk about as we, as the F and the work that we do. And to me, the best outcome is that
people in the room were like, I love this. I want this for the UK and maybe in the UK in a few
years, there's going to be something similar. Like, we can now expand outside of our boundaries
of Germany. We can just hope that people will clone us basically into their own country.
Very good. Very good. So in many ways, you're benefiting open source in general anyway.
Yeah. Because if you touch us, it crosses borders, but you're also inspiring people to, uh,
to do similar thing as well. Very good. Uh, was that what your first time as an old camp?
Yeah. And actually, it's because by sheer coincidence in March, I was doing a different conference
Qcon and I met Andy Piper. And then Andy turns out to be one of the organizers and he posted about
he was like, Hey, I'm doing this again. I was like, Oh my god. If Andy's involved, I need to be
there. And the fact that I, I was able to also, you know, uh, do we talk about this? The F was kind of
like a nice good to have on top of that in a way. Like, I just knew that if Andy was involved,
he was going to be good. So I was just like, Okay, perfect. I need to be where open source is.
I'm going to just jump into it. Fantastic. Um, was that the only talk that you gave, uh, during the
event? No, I got a bit trigger at P when I saw the board with like all the options and, you know,
you could. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've done talks for the past five, six years. So, uh, luckily,
I had like a repertoire ready of slides that I could just like tweak slightly. And basically,
aside from doing an SDF talk, which is kind of like, you know, because I want to create this awareness
and especially to, you know, maybe talk with the people that usually don't see like the corporate
conferences, which is something that I super loved about. But yeah, on day two, I kind of like
took a bit of a, let's say a personal twist and did a talk about an argument I'm very passionate
about, which is mental health. So I did a talk about mental health intact. Mm-hmm. Well, we have
we have mental health series here on HPR. So can you give us a rundown of what you covered?
Just. Yeah. So the talk in particular was about the concept of burnout. So we started from the,
you know, the world, the health organization definition from there. And then I described a bit
why it might happen. So for example, you know, when you're involved in open source and you deal with
a lot of people that don't give you any award for your work, but also treat you as customer support,
like that create a very important situation. For example, and I talked a bit about my personal
experience with burnout. I've been an open source maintainer for I started being an open source
maintainer in 2017. And basically I dealt with a couple of burnouts. So I talked a bit about my
story to kind of like also ground a bit the things I was talking about. And then I shared some
of the techniques I've been using over the years, some of the things that I've heard from other
people because I've also started making a project like a podcast where I do a monthly episode
where I talk with someone as in talk about their journey mental health. So I tried to parse some
of the learnings from those conversations plus my own experience and like create a series of bullet
points that people could just like take home with them to, you know, maybe slightly improve their
mental health. Yeah, fantastic. Do you have these slides available? Are they on the
yeah, they're online. I use speaker that usually for my slides. So there is a little bit.
So we'll pop those into the show notes for this episode. That's absolutely fantastic. So
for a short time, what do you think? What's what you like? I think that there was a
a two from day one where a person really said that this conference really shows the open source is
not only everywhere, but also like it's not just about the code. And I truly think that
these events is really something that I wish more people experienced in a sense because
especially when you start looking at open source in a more corporate sense, when you start going to
I don't know, literally two weeks before I was a bit before I was in Vienna for the Linux
Foundation open source summit. So that's like kind of the complete opposite. It's like the
biggest one, the most corporate one, you know, you're a Linux store on a stage with like a keynote
and like a thousand people in the room like. So I think that sometimes we try and to really like
not see open sources, something that enables people to be creative and be empowered to do.
And these events, I think, it actually manifested that. Like it's, I think it's a very good
reminder that open source is actually in the real world and people are doing things. It's not just
about PRs and repositories. It's about like, thanks to this piezo software that is available to
everyone, I was able to build something out of it. Like, of course, the maximum example was the
Pete, the pigeon, like the shiny pigeon. Yeah. But yeah, in general, I think like a lot of people
created great talks and presentations about, you know, all these different aspects that
usually we don't think about and I absolutely love that. I always think it to myself.
Well, when looking back at all the outcomes, I had this, once I saw that shiny pigeon,
disco ball pigeon, I was thinking, was that the one with the disco ball pigeon? Yeah, that was
a, that's where I met you. So forever, two thousand and I'll come 24 will be the stolen
pigeon. Yeah. And if you don't know what we're on about, just go on to master them and search for
hashtag on cam 24 and you'll see a picture of the pigeon there.
Was there anything else that we should have talked about that we didn't get around to?
I mean, now the fellowship for maintainers is not up and anymore on the STF website, but
if you're interested in seeing different ways of funding open source, we have this new program that
is starting in January. So if you rise on that, that basically we're going to pay four up to five
maintainers for a year to just do maintenance work. Like, and yeah, that's going to be an interesting
experiment for us. Well, fantastic. Great stuff. Listen, thanks very much for taking the time.
Sorry, it took so long to organize this after the event, but it's been a bit a, a chaotic when
with the IA going down and everything. And yeah, and folks tune in tomorrow for another exciting
episode of Hacker Public Radio.
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