Open source means you can see the code. Open governance means you can change where it goes.

Hendrik Ebbers is Director of Open Source at Hashgraph, Vice Chair of the Technical Advisory Council at LF Decentralized Trust, and one of the leaders of Project Hiero, the codebase used for the Hedera network. His argument is built on a distinction most organisations miss. Making code open source is easy: create a GitHub organisation, put the code there, and it's open source. But that gives you no influence over where the project goes. Open governance, through vendor-neutral stewardship at a body like LFDT, means other players can contribute, lead, and shape the direction of infrastructure they're building critical systems on. For Hendrik, the difference matters most when the stakes are highest: you don't want to build critical systems on infrastructure where you have zero control, and forking a modern platform isn't as simple as it was with small projects twenty years ago. He illustrates this through two concrete examples from Hiero. First, a contributor flywheel that started with a Hacktoberfest investment in good first issues and has become self-sustaining. People arrived looking for Python projects to contribute to with no interest in decentralized trust, found Hiero, became committers, and are now creating good first issues for others. At one TAC session, the only reported problem was "I have too many contributors." Second, a company called DSR, which saw a Hiero-based digital identity application demonstrated at a United Nations event, came back and contributed a full, unbranded, vendor-neutral version of that application to the project. As Hendrik puts it: if all the open source code were owned by just one person, nobody would come and donate their code. Open governance creates the conditions for that kind of contribution. Topics covered: The distinction between open source, open development, and open governance Why critical infrastructure requires vendor-neutral stewardship, not single-company ownership How Hiero's Hacktoberfest investment became a self-sustaining contributor flywheel The "too many contributors" problem as a sign of open source health DSR's digital identity application donation as proof of open governance working Why governments and enterprises view vendor-neutral governance differently from company-owned open source About the speaker: Hendrik Ebbers is Director of Open Source at Hashgraph, Vice Chair of the Technical Advisory Council at LF Decentralized Trust, and TSC lead for Project Hiero. About LF Decentralized Trust: LF Decentralized Trust is the open source foundation for interoperable, verifiable, and transparent digital trust infrastructure. Home to Besu, Hyperledger Fabric, Hiero, and 20+ other projects. Website: https://www.lfdecentralizedtrust.org LinkedIn:   / lfdecentralizedtrust   X: https://x.com/lfdecentralized #DecentralizedTrust #MemberVoices2026 #OpenGovernance #OpenSource #Hiero #BlockchainDevelopment #DeveloperCommunity