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Symphony Software Foundation - Annual Members Meeting
Symphony Software Foundation Newsletter - Annual Members Meeting Edition

Dear Community,

It seems like open source is on a winning streak these days and I couldn’t be more thrilled about the momentum it is gaining within financial services. The Foundation is now counting more than 50 projects! With BlackRock joining the Linux Foundationand OpenFin open sourcing Hadouken, we are happy to say that our members are leading the innovation wave.

It's time for you to take the wheel and join our community to help further fintech innovation!

But maybe you are an engineer and wondering: Why would I contribute to open source? 

In a nutshell, to grow your chances of a fulfilling career! And take it from a lucky one: I would not have had the privilege to run our community if I hadn't submitted my first open source contributions 10 years ago. Dan Butcher, editor at eFinancialCareers, captured my thoughts quite nicely in his article.

Or perhaps you are an executive and wondering: Why should my firm contribute to open source? 

Want the exec summary? To drive faster innovation and a successful technology strategy! During the last 20 years, most of the innovation stemmed from open source, and that's where a tremendous amount of talent is hidden (not). But don't trust an Italian. Hear how Neal Pawar, CTO at AQR, strategically engaged AQR in open source, reaching for talent to support company growth and innovate. Guess what? He was also able to retain senior technologists. 

You should be convinced by now... so just ask yourself: How do I join the community?

If you are a Foundation member, you don't want to miss our upcoming Annual Members Meeting on June 21st (only 2 weeks left!) in NYC. Register today to meet the community, working group fellows and open source leaders in the industry! We published the full day agenda which features a great lineup of speakers, including Lawrence Miller, EVP Global Technology, Symphony Communication Services LLC who will give us an open source update, and Michael Scannell, API Solution Architect, Symphony Communication Services LLC, who will lead a development training session on Symphony API/integrations. Finally, check out the spoiler blog post from Tick42 CEO, Leslie Spiro, our member and speaker at the meeting.

And if you are across the pond in Europe, I'll be at our #SSFMeetup at BlackRock on June 14. We’ll have speakers from BlackRock, together with our At-Large Member Jon Freedman and our own DevOps Director, Maurizio Pillitu. Also come meet us at FinJS on June 13.

Finally, it's a little ways out, but you sure don't want to miss this one: I am happy to announce the Foundation will host its inaugural Open Source Strategy Forum on Wednesday, November 8 in NYC. This will be the first open source conference for financial services, focused on how to effectively engage in open source collaboration and drive successful technology strategy. Our friends at WhiteSource clearly elaborate in their latest post as to how and why. 

We are part of a revolution that would be unthinkable even a few years ago. This community is bringing together developers and executives from the industry. Don't miss out! Come help us drive it in the open!

We look forward to hearing from you!

Gabriele Columbro
Executive Director - Symphony Software Foundation

Members Focus

Annual Members Meeting: on June 21, the Foundation is hosting its annual meeting in New York. We encourage our members to take this opportunity to help us shape our Foundation! Bob Canaway, Chief Marketing Officer at Black Duck Software will present the results of its recent Open Source 360 Survey - which you participated in. Jamie Jones, Federal Solutions Engineer at GitHub will discuss how financial services, open source, and modern development workflows can go hand in hand. Lawrence Miller, EVP, Global Technology, Symphony Communication Services LLC will give us an open source update. Last but not least, you will have the opportunity to take part in an afternoon training session on Symphony API/integration development with Symphony Communication Services LLC. We also encourage members to take this opportunity to network, and attend the many in-person working group meetings, workshops and hands on project discussions. Check out the full program. For the latest lineup see hereMembers can still register here

Congratulations to our newest gold member, Ipreo! 
On joining the Foundation, Bill Sherman, EVP, Head of the Global Markets Group at Ipreo, said:
 
“We believe strongly that openness and collaboration foster innovation, and that by bringing industry participants together we can create workflow solutions that move the financial markets forward. We look forward to working closely with the Foundation community to help drive these industry-led initiatives.”

If you haven't already, join us in welcoming the Ipreo team.You can read the full press release here.

Elections of Gold Directors: following the recent votes, the Gold Members elected three new Gold Directors. Congratulations to:

  • Brad Levy, CEO MarkitSERV, Global Head of Loans, IHS Markit
  • Justin Peterson, Managing Director, Global Head of Institutional Technology, Tradeweb
  • Ken Watson, Chief Technology Officer, Ipreo 

Leslie Spiro, CEO at Tick42 and Silver Member on why he thinks it’s time that enterprise web developers embraced UX Integration. In his latest blog, he shares his thoughts on enterprise web development and architecture. Leslie will be presenting on this same topic at our Annual Members Meeting. Sign up now if you haven’t done so already.

Project Highlights

ContainerJS (New!): provides an abstraction layer over multiple HTML5 containers such as OpenFin, Electron and the browser, that enables deeper desktop integration from containerized apps (such as the Symphony web UI). This repository contains the current work-in-progress code, and has been gaining momentum, in part thanks to the Desktop Wrapper Working Group.

REST API Client: a .NET client for the Symphony REST API, which includes the following features:
  • Client code and model objects for all API endpoints;
  • Automatic token management for authentication;
  • Event-based data feed for processing inbound messages;
  • Builder for constructing formatted messages (MessageML).

The project currently targets .NET Framework 4.5 and was initiated at FactSet, and has been developed as open source from the very beginning. 

Symphony Java Client has released v1.0.1: this library continues to provide a real-time Java wrapper around the Symphony REST APIs to simplify the creation of chat sessions, room access, presence, messaging and more.

Latest Contributions 

Click to Dial Integration: a solution that helps users and firms to leverage services available within their corporate environment. Requirements are being worked on here. Feedback and input welcome!

Swagger files for the Symphony public APIs: a project in Symphony OSS repository to hold Swagger definitions' files rather than hosting them on the Symphony developer portal. Code will be released to coincide with the release of Symphony 1.46.

MessageMLV2 parser: support of Symphony structured objects to parse the following formats: PresentationML, MessageML, EntityJSON, Freemarker and Markdown.

Symfuny Chat Bot: a bot designed to respond to room posts.

Vote-Bot: a bot to provide vote capabilities on proposals amongst a defined list of users over a relay chat.

ContainerJS: a small prototype of the APIs being defined / debated by the Desktop Wrapper WG.

Symphony Node Binding: a node.js module that exposes the functionality of the symphony api. 

 

FORK US ON GITHUB

Contributor Spotlight

Colin Eberhardt-1.jpgColin Eberhardt, Technology Director, Scott Logic

Colin Eberhardt, Technology Director at Scott Logic and the first At-Large Member of the Symphony Software Foundation, isn’t shy about expressing his appreciation for open source. He spends many weekends and evenings on GitHub as an active member of the open source community, contributing to projects of various scales. With each project, he learned something new.

To find out what his top five projects are and to learn about his aspirations for open source click here.

Where It’s At

London Meetup, June 14: the Foundation, in conjunction with BlackRock, will hold its upcoming London #ssfmeetup on June 14. We’ll have talks from BlackRock and the Foundation, and food and beverages will be provided. Attendance is limited so make sure to sign up. If you’re not London based, share the news with your local peers and colleagues.

Annual Members Meeting, New York, June 21: take this opportunity to help us shape our Foundation at the Convene Conference Center in New York. We have an impressive lineup of speakers and Symphony Communication Services LLC will be providing an afternoon-long training session on Symphony API/integration development. In addition, there will be many opportunities for networking and practical engagement, including in-person working group meetings, workshops and project working sessions. See here for the latest schedule

The annual meeting is open to members only. 

Open Source Strategy Forum

Open Source Strategy Forum, New York, November 8: the Open Source Strategy Forum is a one-day conference for executive-level decision makers and senior technologists from financial services seeking to drive industry innovation through open source. Attendees will include C-level executives from most of the world’s largest and most important financial services firms as well as open source and enterprise thought leaders. A world-class speaker roster will lead a dynamic conversation about leveraging open source as key part of a corporate technology strategy.

Call for Speakers
We’re actively soliciting speakers to deliver world-class presentations at the event on November 8, 2017. Submit your talk for consideration now!

Sponsorship Opportunities
Opportunities to get in front of 150-200 of the most influential decision makers and technologists in financial services are now available. Email us for the 2017 prospectus and more information.

Previous Events

In April, we hosted three events: Open Innovation Challenge, Silicon Valley, Project Automation Series: NodeJS and our very first Social Code Scanning Workshop.

The Open Innovation Challenge, Silicon ValleyThe Open Innovation Challenge, Silicon Valley was hosted in conjunction with Deutsche Bank Labs, Silicon Valley. About 30 people turned up, with the judges awarding three prizes to two teams:
  • Best Innovation: SMS Symphony from Gunn High School team
  • Best Integration: GitLab integration from BNY Mellon team
  • Best Open Innovation: SMS Symphony from Gunn High School team

Missed out? You can see the full recap here

There is still time to register for our next Open Innovation Challenge, Global.

Our first Project Automation Series featured a virtual panel on NodeJS. The panel was hosted by our own Director of DevOps, Maurizio Pillitu, and joined by Jon Freedman and Colin Eberhardt, Foundation members, and Dan Shaw from NodeSource. You can replay the podcast here.

Maurizio Pillitu at Social Code Scanning The Foundation, in conjunction with Codeworks, presented the first Social Code Scanning, a hands-on code workshop dedicated to code security, quality and legal compliance. Our very own Director of DevOps, Maurizio Pillitu, discussed how to measure your code and also lead an interactive workshop.

Interested in hosting a developer event or #ssfmeetup? We can sponsor and power development!

CONTACT US

Blog Spotlight

Excerpt from a great post from Patricia Johnson, Open Source Security and Licensing Expert at WhiteSource on the importance of having an effective and secure open source supply chain:

Governments, corporations and cybersecurity experts are still reeling after getting a taste of the most widespread ransomware attack to date. Understanding today’s application security challenges, one may want to acknowledge that software composition has changed fundamentally in recent years. A software program today typically consists of proprietary code, open source components and commercial libraries, while open source has become the most dominant part. Open source is everywhere. You can’t avoid it anymore. So you might as well manage it. Can we afford the damage of a cyber attack on financial market data?

Read the full post here.

Have Your Voice Heard!

What use cases and / or platforms would you like to see the Foundation focus on?*

*the more responses we get, the more accurate our survey results can be! Make sure you answer this issue’s question

Have your voice heard here!

 Join us

REGISTER NOW: MEMBERS MEETING

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