Open Source Bristol – October 2022

We’re really excited to be back with our second live event of the year, hosting October's meetup as part of Bristol Technology Festival.

The meetup will be held at Scott Logic’s Bristol office, and confirmed speakers so far include:

- Victory Brown, Founder of Dezignhers
· Chris Booth, Cora Experience Manager - Machine learning and Insights, NatWest
· Rowan Willis, Senior Developer, Scott Logic

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AGENDA

17:30 // Refreshments and networking

18:00 // Welcome and housekeeping

18:05 // 'Designing security into open source software' // Victory Brown

Global cyber warfare has increased, raising concerns about online user safety – however, the open source community isn’t currently well placed to help protect those users.

As Victory Brown will explain in this talk, the focus of open source contributors and maintainers tends to be on the success, rather than the security, of their projects – but the very openness of the projects makes them vulnerable to high-level security breaches. However, it also makes it possible for the open source community to identify those vulnerabilities quickly and help to resolve them.

With reference to some common security issues in open source software, Victory will explore how we can educate developers and security engineers about design thinking in open source projects, and how they can collaborate with designers to create user-safe software.

18:30 // Observations On Finding Good First Issues' // Rowan Willis

As part of a wider investigation into sustainability in open source contribution, Rowan used a selection of "good first issues" websites to look for potential contribution opportunities for him and his colleagues. As someone who's worked on proprietary closed-source projects for his entire career, this was a challenging but eye-opening experience. In this talk, he presents some of his key findings from this exercise which he hopes can be useful to other new contributors as well as project maintainers.

19:00 // Break

19:30 // 'How NatWest built a near-human conversational AI demo in under 4 weeks using open source' // Chris Booth

Artificial intelligence is making huge leaps in progress – but it’s hard to see through the noise and decide what will be valuable to the business.

This talk is about:

• How NatWest used open source models and data to build a proof of concept, achieving impressive results and validating a business hypothesis in under 4 weeks
• The challenges they faced along the journey
• The gaps in the financial services open source community and what we can collectively do about it.

20:00 // Close

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If you are interested in presenting, please contact Claire Cocks ([ccocks@scottlogic.com](mailto:ccocks@scottlogic.com)). We particularly welcome talk submissions from women speakers, speakers from ethnic minorities, and speakers from other under-represented groups.

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By registering for the event in person or online, you agree to abide by our Code of Conduct which you can find in the 'About' section: https://www.meetup.com/open-source-bristol/

The venue is accessible to wheelchair users, including lifts to the Scott Logic office where the event will take place. We don't want anyone to feel excluded from attending our events. If you have any special requirements, please let us know in advance by contacting Claire Cocks ([ccocks@scottlogic.com](mailto:ccocks@scottlogic.com)).