Community Blog

By Gabriele Columbro, FINOS; Karen Ottoni, Hyperledger Foundation; and Jennifer Lassiter, The Digital Dollar Project

A 2022 open message from our FINOS Executive Director, Gabriele Columbro:

First off, I hope you all had a wonderful holiday period and I hope your 2022 started wonderfully for you and your families. Yes, I can't deny we all are probably more than a bit DONE with this pandemic, but on the other hand I hope the working from home routine helped you find a better work-life balance and rediscover the joy of spending time with your family. It surely was the case for me, and I hope you are able to find your silver lining, whatever it might be.

“L’unione fa la forza” (unity is strength) is one of the most common proverbs in the Italian language. Especially in this period, as the world re-discovers how important and powerful it is to collaborate across borders to solve an unprecedented challenge, it feels good to be part of a growing open source movement.

Author: Gabriele Columbro - Executive Director, FINOS

Please find video and slides from the April 9th, 2020 announcement at the end of this blog post.

As the world faces the unprecedented crisis posed by COVID-19 and adapts to a new reality made of remote workplaces and social distancing, I can’t avoid thinking every day how lucky we are to work in technology and, even more, how grateful we are to have born and been raised in Open Source technology.

Author: Gabriele Columbro - Executive Director, FINOS

In This Article

• With COVID-19 now upon us, many firms are having to suddenly shift to new patterns of remote, distributed work
• Open Source communities have been working in a remote, distributed, time-shifted way for decades and have been extremely productive
• Open Source is a safe harbor for shared technology investments in a context that requires even more efficiency and risk mitigation
• Post COVID-19, open source will make even more sense, not just for tech companies but for every industry

A lot has been going on in the FINOS Community over the last couple of months. So much that, until today, I haven't had a chance to stop and reflect on what our Community has accomplished in less than 7 months since FINOS, the Fintech Open Source Foundation, was launched.

Most importantly, I see that the progress our Community is making will positively impact the global financial services industry, from those who drive and deliver technology across the organizations to those, end users, who consume the services. We all benefit from the improvements and advancements that our open source Community is bringing to the financial services ecosystem. 

The tl;dr is quite simple: our industry is increasingly eager and ready to embrace open collaboration as a prime way to deliver innovation and efficiency. It's time to catch up with, and maybe even surpass, Silicon Valley and there's an opportunity for all of you, companies and individuals, to benefit from this shifting paradigm and disrupt the way we build financial technology.

FINOS Community,

Today is #GivingTuesday, a day when we turn our attention away for a moment from holiday shopping for family and friends and tune into important causes within our communities and around the world.

Perhaps the most important ingredient that makes open source projects successful is diverse and vibrant developer communities. To create thriving open source communities for the long term, we must support efforts to expand computer science education, especially amongst communities that have traditionally been underrepresented in both technology and financial services.