# From Open Source to Open Commons | Mario Behling (Berlin Ethereum Day, June 2026) - Speakers: Mario Behling - Channel: [Berlin Ethereum Meetup](https://streameth.org/berlin-ethereum-meetup) - Date: 2026-09-09 - Duration: 21:57 - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-oezaHf_DY3I - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oezaHf_DY3I ## Description Mario Behling, founder of FOSSASIA, shared lessons from building open source communities, events, platforms, and contributor ecosystems across Asia and globally. The talk connected this experience to Ethereum’s long-term vision and CROPS principles, arguing that open source is free to use, fork, and adapt, but that resilient, private, and secure infrastructure requires sustained funding, maintenance, and trusted ecosystem partners. The Berlin Ethereum Day was a one-day event held on June 15, 2026, during the Berlin Blockchain Week, bringing together speakers from the Ethereum Foundation and the broader FOSS, privacy, and security ecosystems to explore the future of Ethereum and self-sovereign technologies - from technical direction and core values to the challenges and opportunities ahead. Future Meetups and Events: https://www.meetup.com/berlin-ethereum-meetup/ More information on the speakers and the agenda: https://berlinethereumday.com/ ## Transcript So, um, yeah, schönen guten Tag. That's how we say hello here in Berlin. I'm originally from Berlin and I would like to talk with you about from open source to open commons lessons from Fossasia for Ethereum. So, um, um, why I'm here. Why I'm here. Um, like we heard a lot of talks today about open source um, and also about technology, about Ethereum wallets, about protocols. Um, I'm not here to talk more about protocols. Um, there are other people who know more about this, but I can talk to you about 17 years of experience in the open source community, about Berlin, about Asia, um, how to run open source projects from events to the actual, projects on GitHub, for example, um, and to build a durable commons. So, the question is really what makes open source and open technology last. >> [sighs and gasps] >> So, open systems, for me it's very close to my heart. Um, I'm here from Berlin and when I was a kid, I experienced like closed borders, a lot of things were controlled. Um, we had basically a closed system here in East Germany. Um, I'm not sure like back in the days nearly everyone in the audience usually was from Berlin, but nowadays I'm kind of often like a unique person. How many people are here who grew up in Berlin? Anyone else? Yeah? Okay, so I see a couple of people else, so that's great. Hello, um, fellow Berliners. So, um, yeah, so this is basically the the place where I grew up and um, um, I always had the desire for openness, for going out of the country. I mean, my name is Mario, right? It's not a typical German name. And my parents um gave me this name uh probably because they had this also this spirit to go out. And there's even um scientific research about this that a lot of people in my age have international names. And the explanation is that people want to cross over the wall um with their minds. So, later on like I studied and I went around the world, I ended up in Asia and um I founded a lot of um people who are like-minded. Um I started a company in Asia and uh um in this company we uh um said like we are not connected to um people from around the world. I'm from Berlin. I We had a hacker space here and so on. Um but uh when I was in Asia, it was all about business and not so much about open technology. So, we said with some friends, let's start a conference. And uh um yeah, we like free and open source solutions and we like we are in Asia, so we called this conference um FOSS Asia and invited all of our friends. That was in 2009. And then 1,400 people showed up. So, a huge success and we were completely overwhelmed and we decided to continue to do it. Later on, we also run events in other places across Asia um in Singapore, Bangkok, Indonesia, India, and Myanmar. Originally though, this was started um in Vietnam. So, um events create the commons. Um um this is not uh um accidental sequence. Um how uh does it work? Like what do I mean with creating the commons? Well, creating the commons of course um open knowledge, open technology, um open source software, and so on. So, whenever people meet, of course they have ideas and they develop a kind of a trust relationship. They know each other and they meet again at the next event and so on. And then ideas emerge and people say, "Okay, let's do this project together. Let's do some ideas together." and code gets written. So, we started this originally on our own Git setup. Later on we moved to GitHub. More people could find us. Then all under the umbrella of FOSSASIA. So, what we had first as an event then became a kind of host for a lot of different projects. And I look back like of course like we have over 200 repositories and over the years what you can imagine is that not all the project projects continue, right? Like some projects are not like valid anymore today. They're outdated, but it's kind of interesting to look back what we did already in 2009 where we started to develop an interest in free and open hardware as well. So, we developed a project back in the days that was called cryptostick. Yeah. At that time people didn't think so much about crypto as like blockchain solution more like about cryptography. Yeah. But we worked on this and of course this kind of security idea and and having like an open source hardware where you can actually check every not just the software, but you can check even a hardware layout is even more valid today. Other projects we work on I heard here talk about mesh networks. Of course like there's this um famous distribution open OpenWrt. So, we made plugins for OpenWrt that people could deploy it in their hotel or university or so on and have a kind of like or of authentication. Nowadays it's completely normal. And then in 2014 we had this project lok lak. Yeah, lok lak is a dish in Cambodia. So, we also take inspiration from across the region. And the idea of lock lock is to collect a lot of data. Maybe some of you might remember back in those days we had all these big cloud providers. They said, "Oh, yeah, you have a startup or you have an idea or you are a young project. Here are 20,000 dollars in cloud credits and so on. Here are 30,000 dollars in cloud cloud credits." So, we got a lot of cloud credits and what we did back in the days, we harvested a lot of tweets. Yeah, so we had have around 8 billion tweets that we have harvested at that time and our idea was to um use this data to answer questions. And we tried this out and then actually developed the next project based on this data that we collected which was called Suzy AI. So, um Suzy AI was kind of a mixture of um of let's say um a pattern matchmaking. Yeah, also pattern making. So, somebody says like like I ask a question like you are funny and then the question is yes the answer is I am funny, right? So, kind of simple pattern matchmaking but also like already components like modules of AI how we find it nowadays. Of course, back in that time for us it was like a huge resource usage to make it really like fully AI LLM. And we thought like for the next 20 years this will not happen. Yeah, because we thought like, "Okay, 500 million dollars. So, how much would it cost to develop like a full AI solution and who would ever invest in a startup like that?" Well, reality proved us wrong. Of course, like today like let's look at the four projects that we have today. So, the most popular project is wisdom. It's has more than 10,000 dependent projects. So these projects use Vis them inside their own projects and it's a tool for AI data visualization for example for NumPy or PyTorch. As an organization that develops a lot of events that runs a lot of events I want to say. Of course we have our own event solution or just like everything else fully free and open source. We also have like an interpretation platform so people can go there either they use human interpreters or they use AI translations and we have hardware. Okay, I also have some hardware here. I can like then go to this for example a small fun project to introduce people to hardware is our badge. Some people might have seen it at other events and of course they find the app online and all the schematics. People started to play even games with it. Find it at like different hacker congresses. And we also have a open science hardware and so on. Please check it out on our repositories. So the question is now okay. So originally I had a company in Vietnam and we just did the FOSSASIA event on the side. And then everyone asked like okay, how can you fund this? How can you keep this going over the years? How can you even develop projects with this? The way we did it is like really a mixture of different things. So for example to keep the projects going it's a lot of effort because like people come and people go like actually have a lot of students joining our projects >> [sighs and gasps] >> but then also they get jobs, they're busy with other things. So we developed different programs. Of course we participate in programs like Google Summer of Code but we also have our own programs. One program is Code Heat. So with Code Heat we try to build contributor pathways so members in the community become actual contributors. >> [sighs] >> So Um, this is kind of a open source coding contest and but we don't have like issues or ideas that somewhere like that we come up with. We actually ask people to contribute to real issues. There's also this kind of controversial program um that was um Octoberfest I think like people hacked it in a way that like like they they made a lot of contributions to read me files and so on. This is not how it works with us. We actually have like tags and labels and only these issues can be solved in in the Cote program for example. So what do people get in return? Of course they they can get a certificate but they can also win prizes for example come to the first Asia summit. So this is nice. The best contributors win a trip to the first Asia summit then and they can connect more closely with the maintainers of certain projects. So if you want contributors build pathways one lesson for the is Ethereum community. But open source itself is not enough. Because that's that's what I sometimes hear from companies and so on like they invite me like as a consultant or something they they say okay. So yeah we work like five years on this repository and then we make it public next month and then we get all these contributors. Right? That's not how it works because why should people contribute? They don't know about this whole project right? And [snorts] just because it has a open license it has a repository it has good code doesn't mean they will contribute especially like for projects that are in a very specific niche. So what you need is actually need maintainers you need documentation onboarding governance funding and handover. So I can't go in these few minutes into detail for each day of these points but I can say for example handover. I already mentioned maintainers come and go for example like at the Wisdom project our most popular project um the maintainer was or the lead developer was Jack and Jack left after 4 years because he started his own startup and he got funding of $200 million to start a startup. So, okay, cool for him. We It's also cool for us because we can say, "Wow, here this this great founder, he actually also started this project, but of course he's busy with all these other things." So, you need to have all these things in place, documentation so so and so on in order to have a good project hand over. And the question is even like who do you hand it over to, right? Because not any contributor, even good contributors, might be up for it. So, you need to have a pipeline of a lot of um contributors coming in. And if you want to know more about this, please talk to me and I'm also happy to invite you in to one of our community meetings per week. So, open source gives us the right to fork, but open comments gives us the capacity to continue, yeah? So, it's not just like that the code is somewhere open, you actually need to understand how to run the comments. Then, like we continue to do the events over the years. And as you can imagine, it's also like an up and down, right? I have for example I mentioned like we have uh marketing cycles like for example the new cloud projects like all these Google, IBM, Microsoft, and so on. Now we have the cloud, open source also runs on it. So, let let's sponsor all kinds of events. So, that was a great time because it was very easy for us to scale up our events as we got all this marketing budget at this time. But then there events like COVID. And at that time actually we were when COVID started we were in Singapore and it was just like seven or eight days before Singapore was shut down. But at that time nobody knew that it would be shut down in 7 or 8 days. And we talked to everyone, and people from the US, from Europe, and so on. They said, "Yeah, yeah, we're still coming to your event." 2 days later, it was announced that Singapore would shut down. And the catering, the the venue, everything, of course, as you can imagine, then didn't work out anymore. So, lesson for this is, and I think this event you already go in this direction, stay lean. Don't spend more than needed. Like, make it like work with the community. Yeah? For example, also have volunteers, things like this. So, if you want to learn how to do this, like we have a for example a volunteer team management in our event day project, and that already helps also to reduce the overhead and the administration needed. So, the real value of events is then trust, and continuity. It's not like, do you always have the best catering or so? We actually have catering, but it doesn't have to be five-star, right? It's just like everyone has good coffee, has like some place to to get together, and it's more about meeting these people, forming trust relationships, so you can say, "Okay, I met this person on site at the at one of the events, and we have to be we have to be honest, right? I see it every day. There are so many misunderstandings happening in online communication, even though the internet is already like older now. Still, like people are not used So, people are still used to face-to-face communication, and face-to-face interaction builds trust. So, we need to continue the events. So, to sum it up, open source doesn't run itself. Even volunteer communities need operational capacity. And we also had some action with the Ethereum Foundation, of course, also with the group around Vitalik in Singapore. As like FOSSASIA's actually these days based in Singapore. Of course, there are some connections and and gatherings and meetups. And yeah, it's it's it's a bit it's it's a challenging way, right? Because you need both. You need at the intrinsic motivation of people. So, people need to say, "Okay, I'm really interested in this technology. I'm interested in this solution. I'm interested in privacy." And like these topics, but also people need to make a living. So, to find a balance is challenging and happy to talk to you about this more. So, paid coordination, for example, right? You cannot expect somebody who's like many years in the community to to to work for free, right? It's a basically we're building an infrastructure here with open source. And just like as a validators or so, they're paid for gas. Like, you know, the open source code and open source hardware and so on. This is infrastructure and we need to think about how to maintain it with governance and so on. So, the test is whether knowledge can be used when institutions fail also, right? Like so, we see like for example, companies bankrupt go bankrupt, organizations maybe become less active and so on. We see it like in Germany, it's a typical thing, associations, right? Like for example, I'm also a member of the FFI and I have about Peter Henchins earlier. And who was also one of the founding members of the FFI. It is Yeah, it is it is difficult to always maintain a momentum over many years, right? So, and the question is what happens to the code, what happens to the technology afterwards? We need to keep it running, we need to explain it. So, about the idea here in the Ethereum ecosystem. Um crops censorship resistance, um open source, privacy, and security. So, this is not only a protocol agenda, it also must be a um an open source agenda, an open comments agenda um where we work together. And I think like it was mentioned here already by the previous speakers, privacy has a price, and open source makes privacy possible. So, we're not talking about no not cost-free, yeah? Like actually in German in German it is clearer, right? Because in German it's um um you you don't say for free, you say like costless. It like it means like doesn't cost anything, right? And um in English it's it's still like this old debate about what does it mean free, so free software, and so on. Richard Stallman, we met him many times, um talks about these kind of topics better than I do. >> [sighs] >> So, um I don't want to go because like we don't have too much time here. I want to go to the next side like so free to fork, not free to run. Um we need to pay for service, for security, for maintenance, documentation, support, onboarding, events, and people. So, um if you want like talk to me how we maintain this um momentum over many years um with FOSS Asia, how we keep the organization running with um relatively um yeah, low number of um of employees, and um yeah, what what are our ideas? I mean like the the funding in the Ethereum ecosystem is of course much larger than the access to funding that FOSS Asia has. And I think like if we could like follow models that we at FOSS Asia did in um the Ethereum ecosystem, we could really like scale this up, and it then it wouldn't matter if like the um you know, like it's going up or going down like right? I mean like I was here like a couple of years ago. This was much bigger event but like it doesn't matter. You guys are here. You are the important you believe in the free and open ecosystem in Ethereum and and we can build something together, right? I mean like you can operate on on a lean way and still build something valuable for a long time. So protocol values need ecosystem capacities. Um Crops is not only a protocol agenda is also an ecosystem agenda. That's my point and um let's fund the common layers a few ideas here. Um I think like it's it's very important to understand what to spend the funding on that we have. Maintainer work, contributor onboarding, um localization workshops, open platforms. So this is really um um important not just like some marketing. Unfortunately, I also saw some events for example like let's say hackathons. It's kind of like I don't know like $30,000 or something. People can win like and yeah I I like okay it's nice that they hand out this money to contributors to potential contributors to community but sometimes I saw it was done quite superficially. For example, later on it turned out even the code was copied from somewhere else things like that. Um Let's really think about how to spend the resources in the ecosystem and fund contributors who are in it for the long run. Um if you want to talk with us practical next steps partner with Fossasia or with other open source communities not just the Linux Foundation which that is a great foundation but also like bottom up organizations. Also fund regional developer ecosystems, for example, like a hub with existing event and and sponsor outcomes. Um, not just visibility visibility, but really actively sponsor work and bring Ethereum to open tech events like the first Asia Summit or for stem or other events and support implementation partners. Um, do projects like programs like our code heat programs. So this is where first Asia can help and if Ethereum's if Ethereum projects want to reach the broader open source world, um, we can be a bridge and please talk to us and or talk to me here at the event. So thank you very much and have a good continuation of the program. Thank you.