Guest: Andrew Aitken (LinkedIn)
Company: Hedera (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

Hedera is one of the organizations leading the way in decentralization, already boasting a fully decentralized governing council structure and members. With open source forming an integral part of being a truly decentralized organization, the company is very active in its open-source efforts, from open-sourcing the Hashgraph Consensus Algorithm to being a member of the Hyperledger Foundation and engaging with the open-source community.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Andrew Aitken, Chief Open Source Officer at Hedera, talks about the company and its key focuses. He goes on to discuss the importance of open source for Hedera, before touching on what he is seeing in the Web3 space.

Key highlights of this video interview:

• Aitken gives us an introduction to Hedera, the public permission blockchain with an enterprise focus and a distributed council or governance model. He talks about the founders of the company and how their consensus model sets them apart, such as their low carbon impact.
• As a 25-year veteran in the open-source space, Aitken talks about what attracted him to Hedera. He recalls how he initially helped them develop their open-source strategy while at Wipro Technologies before transitioning to the Chief Open Source Officer role at Hedera.
• Aitken discusses the challenges he sees in the space such as bringing the committed council members to the open source community and developing a strategy around that. Additionally, he talks about needing a strong set of tools, environments, and a user journey to get the Web3 community involved.
• Hedera is a member of the Hyperledger Foundation and the Hyperledger Fabric platform is integrated with Hedera’s platform. Aikten goes into detail about Hedera’s involvement with the project and also with the new project, Cacti, which is focused on interoperability between different blockchains.
• Aitken talks about how important open source is to Hedera, saying it forms a part of their focus on being a true decentralized organization. He discusses how they bought the rights from the founders to the Hashgraph Consensus Algorithm and made it open source. He goes on to talk about embracing the open-source community.
• With the case of HashiCorp’s licensing change of Terraform, there is concern from the community. However, Aitken understands why some of the organizations do take this route. He gives his opinion of what could be done better in terms of engaging with the community and getting their feedback in cases like HashiCorp.
• Aitken defines what Web3 is and takes us through some of the new use cases he is seeing. He talks about how Web3 technologies and new business models are providing the opportunity to improve the planet, and how many of the use cases are focused on sustainability.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.