 During today's webcast we're going to be talking about the GitLab Heroes program. My name's John Coughlin and I work on the community relations team here at GitLab. If you couldn't tell by my enthusiasm and accent, I'm a New Yorker. I'm joining you from the suburbs of New York City today. I would love to see where other folks are joining us from. So if you want to just comment in the chat about where you're dialing in from, that would be awesome. If there are any New Yorkers, fellow New Yorkers in the group would love to see you put a comment in there as well. Before we get started, I wanted to cover a couple of housekeeping items. First, feel free to ask questions throughout the presentation. We prefer that folks use a Q&A function at the bottom of your screen for that. We'll have dedicated time for questions at the end of the discussion, but go ahead and send your questions in as you think of them, and we'll try to get to them as soon as we can. I'm not sure how easily I'll be able to toggle between a screen, so if we can't get to them to the end, I appreciate your patience, but I'll try and get to them in real time if possible. I wanted to talk about a quick giveaway that I came up with that didn't run this by Agnes who helped us set this up, but I'm going to try and do a tweet for every person who asks a question, so include your Twitter handle in the Q&A box when you're submitting your question, and we'll give a tweet, or I'll give a tweet to you as a thank you for the question. Then we'll pick five random winners for stickers, get lab stickers, I'll even hand address them and envelopes for my house, and one lucky winner will be walking away with a coupon code for $25 for the GitLab swag shop on Shopify. And finally, if you're experiencing any technical difficulties, please use the chat function to get in touch with Agnes, the moderator for health. So let's get started. As I mentioned, I work on GitLab's Community Relations Team. I'm our Evangelist Program Manager, and so I manage our Meetups program and the newly launched Heroes program, which is what we'll be talking about today. The Heroes program engages, supports, and recognizes members of the wider GitLab community who make outstanding contributions to GitLab and our community around the globe. And I can see, you know, our global community chiming in in the chat. We have folks from Nigeria, Oregon, Denver, Guatemala, Mexico City, and definitely more places that we just haven't heard from yet. Oh, looks like a couple of people from Guatemala, so welcome. And so it's cool that we have this global community, and the Heroes program is really going to help us get closer to the folks who are leaders in the GitLab community and kind of tighten that feedback loop between GitLab and those people that are really making outstanding contributions to GitLab and our community. I wanted to talk a little bit about the history of GitLab for folks that aren't familiar. So GitLab was started as an open source project by one of our co-founders, Dimitri, in 2011. The project was originally just open source collaboration software focusing on issue trackers and source code management. For folks that know where GitLab is now, we've obviously, you know, expanded our application to include many more parts of the DevOps life cycle, but originally it was started in 2011 as this open source project by Dimitri. You need a great collaboration software and so he decided to start this project to kind of scratch his own itch. The following year in 2011, our CEO, Sid, shared GitLab.com as a show hacker news post and there was a ton of interest from the hacker news community in GitLab. And so Sid informed Dimitri who started the original project that he would be monetizing, Sid would be monetizing GitLab.com. Dimitri was really happy about getting exposure for his open source project even though Sid hadn't offered to share any of the profits from GitLab.com with him. There's a long story about what happened after that, but needless to say the two wound up becoming co-founders. Dimitri, you know, is still part of GitLab and so he's wound up, you know, benefiting from Sid's, you know, show hacker news posts after all. And there's, you know, the reason that I'm bringing this up is because, you know, since the beginning of GitLab, since the creation of GitLab, community has been really important. So we started as an open source project or GitLab started as an open source project, you know, GitLab.com, you know, and our co-founders met through hacker news. And so, you know, like the open source community, the hacker news community were really instrumental in the early growth of GitLab as a company and as a community. And we haven't lost sight of the importance of open sourcing and community as we've grown. In fact, you can, you know, still see our CEO chiming in on hacker news posts every now and then. This is a screenshot from last week. There was a post on hacker news about GitLab and Sid, and he jumped into the comments and didn't impromptu AMA. So you know that he really values that community, if he's going to be taking time out of his days to run these types of AMAs on hacker news, just out of the blue. And GitLab, of course, is still an open core company. In fact, we accepted more than 200 community merge requests for our 12.0 release in June, which was really something that we're proud of. And you know, like it's a final kind of note on how important the community is to us at GitLab. In May and June, I spent two weeks shadowing our CEO, Sid, as part of GitLab's CEO shadow program, which is another really cool program we have. And I encourage everyone to look into that. But the shadow program essentially is for GitLab team members or even community members who meet a certain set of criteria. And they get to spend two weeks shadowing our CEO, Sid, and attending all of his meetings and just kind of getting to see, you know, like this higher level view of the company than they might have in their you know, normal lives or, you know, day jobs. The one kind of interesting note I wanted to share was that nearly every meeting with someone external to GitLab, Sid would share metrics around our community and their contributions to GitLab. So in meetings with investors, he would often talk about how many contributions we were getting each month and how many overall contributors we've had to the project. Or he would share the formation stories, you know, about how the community really triggered our growth with journalists, or share other community metrics with folks who were interviewing for different positions at GitLab. But you know, the point is in all those meetings with people that don't really understand the importance of community to GitLab, Sid would make it a point to try and get that message across. And when your CEO is talking about the community and nearly every meeting and you work on the community relations team, that's really exciting because you know community is really important to the company. And the community for GitLab is truly critical to our success, which is why we started the GitLab Heroes Program. Heroes is a way for us to build towards our mission and live our values to better connect with the GitLab community. So I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about our values for folks who are new to GitLab, new to our community, or maybe just, you know, haven't looked into the values too much. The reason I want to talk about values is because I think that values create culture and culture is what attracts people to participate in communities. And so, you know, just want everyone that's joining us today to understand, you know, what our values are and what makes our community special. So the six values you can see there on the left, the acronym, if you look at the first letter of each value, spells credit. You know, so the first value is collaboration. Collaboration is about helping others and working together. And this goes for people in the community, people in the company, the company and the community working together. You know, and so collaboration is really important to us and something that I think is really beneficial to us when we're trying to build community because our community is really collaborative. And when we talk to people who are contributing to our open source project or doing other things to help grow the GitLab community, one of the, you know, really great pieces of feedback that we hear is that people find the community to be really welcoming and supportive. And so that's been, that value has been instrumental in helping us grow our community. The results value is about doing what you promise and doing what's best with the organization and the community as a whole. The efficiency value is about working on the right things and doing what's best for the GitLab community. So you can think about that as, you know, optimizing your effort to improve the community. And that's something that we think about when we're kind of planning our work. And we really try to incorporate feedback from the community as we plan our road maps and prioritize different things that we're building or building with the community. So by working on the right things for our community and for our users, we're able to achieve more progress, which is great and helps us to live with better results. Diversity and inclusion is the next value. This one, I think, is really important, both as a company and as a community, where GitLab emphasizes fostering an environment where everyone can thrive. So we work to make sure everyone feels welcome, regardless of, you know, their nationality, their ethnicity, their skill levels. We try to create a community that makes everyone feel welcome, which helps us increase participation of underrepresented groups and different nationalities in our community and company. And I think, you know, we're seeing that even, you know, in the chat today, with all of these different countries represented, we have folks from Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Japan, Brazil, Germany, the US. So it's been great to kind of see that diversity, you know, on the group today, or in the group of people dialing in today, because it shows that we're kind of doing things the right way. Iteration is about doing the smallest thing and getting it out as quickly as possible. This one I love because it gives me a reason to kind of move fast and ship stuff quickly. And in fact, some of you may have noticed, if you went to apply for heroes at our forum, is missing a few fields. And I've been following up with people to collect the additional information that we're not capturing in that forum, but we knew that the community would be excited about this program. And we wanted to get it out as soon as we could so that we can, you know, get people into the heroes program and highlight some of their stories at our upcoming user conferences in the fall in Brooklyn and London. Those are called GetLed commit. So, you know, that was an example of just getting the program out there, even though, you know, it wasn't perfectly, you know, the form wasn't in perfect shape, because we wanted to get feedback from people. And so far, the feedback has been really positive based on the interest received. And then the final value is transparency. Transparency is about being as open as we can about as many things as possible. And I think this is the one that, you know, when I hear from community members, this is the value that seems to resonate the most with our community. But I would love again to see folks in the chat share, you know, which value is most important to you, or other reasons why you joined the GetLed community. The reason that transparency is important, and I think it's something that helps us attract new folks to our community is because it, you know, levels of playing field, it makes it easier for folks to know where we're going and know what's going on so they can contribute to help us get to those goals that we have. And it develops trust, which I think is really important in communities. You need to be able to trust the folks that are leading the community and the other community members in order to have a great community. And I think that our transparency value helps us get there faster. And we live our transparency value in lots of really interesting ways. Our roadmaps are all open. Our employee handbook is published for other folks to read and copy from. And we do other things like publishing team meetings and putting them on YouTube. And we're writing blog posts about things we got wrong. That just really let people kind of understand who we are and what's going on at GetLed. And I think that familiarity that people feel from all of that kind of transparency helps, you know, our community feel a little bit more tight-knit than it would otherwise. All right. So now you know about our history and our values and why community is really important to us. Just wanted to highlight a few kind of stats about GetLed, the company. As I mentioned earlier, we started in 2011 as an open source project and the company was founded in 2014. After that, we went through Y Combinator, which is a Silicon Valley accelerator program in 2015. And that was when the growth really took off. The chart to the right shows the growth of the company's revenue since 2016. So after Y Combinator. But we've grown in many other ways as well. Our team is about 800 people across 56 countries. We have more than 2,000 people who have contributed to our open source project. We have 4,500 meetup members globally, which I'm really proud of. And that's thanks to an amazing group of community organizers that we have, including a few that are on the call today. And we have more than 100,000 organizations using GetLed with more than a million users. So, you know, the growth has been amazing. And, you know, just to give you a sense of how fast the company is growing, I started at GetLed in December and I've been here longer than half of my teammates. And I mentioned we have 100,000 organizations using our projects. Here's a sample of some of those folks or organizations. And you probably recognize a bunch of these logos. Maybe you even see your employer on this slide. And it's cool to see, you know, just how many organizations are starting to adopt GetLed. And not just adopt, but also increase their usage. Maybe going from using GetLed for CICD to other parts of their DevOps stack. So to share some community stats of how the community is growing, you can see on this slide both the growth of the community contributors and also the community contributions. And the one thing that's really neat, I think, is that contribution growth is outpacing contributor growth, which means we're not just getting more people to contribute, but they're also increasing the amount of contributions that they're, you know, committing to GetLed. And you can see in our latest releases, 11.11 and 12.0, we, 12.0 is actually a little bit short. In both of those releases, we surpassed 200 community contributions, which is an awesome milestone for us and something we hope to maintain, you know, over the next few releases and grow. Our meetup community is similar growth. We have 29 meetup groups around the world with more than 4,500 members worldwide. And most of these groups are organized by GetLed community members, which is awesome. We'd love to continue to that trend of growing our global community by engaging local leaders who are passionate about bringing the GetLed community together. So if there's anyone on the call that wants to learn about starting a meetup group in their neighborhood or their area, please let me know. All right, so now we have some context on GetLed and our community. Now let's get to the Heroes Program, which is why you're all here. So what is GetLed Heroes and why do we start this? GetLed Heroes, as I mentioned earlier, is a program to engage, support, and recognize the members of the wider GetLed community who are making outstanding contributions to GetLed and our community around the world. The Heroes Program's goal is to connect us and strengthen our bonds with the leading community members. Folks who apply to the program and can demonstrate exceptional contributions to the GetLed community will receive support and rewards to enable and sustain their continued contributions to GetLed. In many cases, we'll provide support to help our Heroes level up their professional profiles, make new connections, and develop new skills. So really what we're talking about here is a program where GetLed wants to identify the top community contributors and work with them to help level up or increase the impact of the contributions that they're making to GetLed. So maybe you gave a talk at a DevOps meetup in your hometown, and now there's interest to start a GetLed community group. We want to provide you with the resources that you need to start that GetLed group and grow a community there. Maybe you've made some great code contributions or written a blog post about moving to GetLed, and now you want to share that story at a conference. We want to help. Maybe you contributed to our open source project and now you really want to start a meetup group about open source to get more folks contributing to GetLed and other open source projects. We want to help. And maybe there's something cool that you bring to the GetLed community that's unique to you. Let us know. We want to help. This is really about collaboration between GetLed and our community. And so, you know, please let us know how you want to, you know, engage with us. What are the cool things that you're doing for the community? And we can talk about where that kind of fits. I think, you know, some of the ways that we're going to help heroes are by providing them access to our team, connecting them with speaking opportunities or support on call for paper submissions, invitations to GetLed events. I mentioned the commit event earlier, and we're hoping to have some heroes there this fall. And of course, sending you guys special swags to impress your co-workers and friends and folks when you're out at Tech Events. But the real value for, you know, the heroes is also building up new skills, building up new contacts, building up a profile in the tech community that's going to help accelerate your career. So we talked a little bit about the ways to get involved or the types of contributions, you know, that we have in mind for potential heroes. But I wanted to get into, you know, just a little bit more detail. So contributions, code contributions in the form of MRs have been a part of GetLed since before GetLed was a company. So those are really important. And we definitely want to recognize people who are making great contributions to our project. We also want to engage folks who are generating interesting technical content about GetLed. That could be a blog post, a YouTube video, or a demo or talk for a conference. All of those are really important contributions in helping, you know, generate awareness and also educate people about what is, you know, happening in GetLed and why they should be excited about what's going on with GetLed. And I already mentioned, you know, a project or a program that's near and dear to my heart as the leader of the program, our Meetup program. So folks that want to become an organizer of a new group, join an existing group as a co-organizer or give a talk about GetLed that may be a local GetLed group or if there's not a GetLed group in your area or local DevOps or open source group. So those are all great ways to contribute. One of the things that's been really interesting is that as we started to receive applications, and this is something I alluded to a bit earlier, there have been some really kind of surprising things that we weren't expecting or hadn't considered that are awesome contributions to the community. And so things like participating in feedback sessions with the GetLed product team, setting up a GetLed instance for a nearby university or, you know, pushing your company to move to GetLed, which is very awesome, are all great kind of contributions. So please don't let my imagination limit you when you're applying. Make sure you let us know about all the great contributions you're making to GetLed in the community. And really cool to see in the chat people, you know, sharing that they're interested in the Meetups. Definitely want to follow up with all of you after this about that. So the Heroes program has three different levels. We're calling the kind of progress through the levels, the Heroes journey. So as you go from contributor to hero to superhero, you're kind of completing this Heroes journey. And we expect most folks will join the Heroes program as contributors. And then we'll work together to elevate through these different levels. But there will certainly be folks, especially now as the program's kind of just getting started. And we kind of, you know, have a bunch of great people who will just be joining. So there will certainly be folks that jump right to the superhero or hero level. So for our core team members, or folks that are organizing some of our big Meetup groups, they might jump right to that hero or superhero level. Because the leveling is dependent on the contributions that you make. So if you're making, you know, multiple high impact MRs every release, or you're giving talks about GetLed at big conferences, or, you know, as I mentioned, a member of the core team or organizing a group with hundreds of members, meetup group of members, you might be eligible to join at a higher level. But regardless of where you join the program, we've lined up some great rewards to help enable our heroes to be successful. So of course, there's got to be swag and free GetLed, bold or ultimate licenses to help people, you know, with those demos or increase their familiarity with all the different features that we offer. Invites to GetLed events, potentially invites to conferences where we're attending and have extra passes for the community support when traveling to events. So if you want to give a talk about GetLed at an event, you know, nearby, and you have your, you know, submission accepted, let us know and we can talk about how we can support folks in getting to those events. Support from the GetLed team. So if you have questions about specific issues or need help with, you know, a call for paper submission or generating content for a talk, we can help there. And we also have a great GetLed technical evangelism team that will work with our most active heroes on elevating their technology thought leadership. So that could be collaborating on conference talks and submissions for calls for papers. They could be working together on technical demos or blog posts and even social media coaching. So if you're looking to elevate your profile, we had this GetLed technical evangelism team want to help you get there. And they're going to be working with kind of like the superhero level, most active folks in the community. Sorry, I just got a reply to Agnes quick. All right. So by now, I'm guessing everyone's probably, you know, all fired up and ready to apply. And so, you know, there's a link on this slide. And when you go to that page, you can read more about the program. If you're interested, submit your application. And as I mentioned, the form is in capturing everything that we need right now. So we'll be following up by email to collect a little bit more information about your contributions and then communicating about next steps. We have a batch of about 40 applications that we've received already, which is really exciting that we'll be reviewing in the next couple of weeks. So if you've already applied and haven't heard back about your application yet, stay tuned. We're just finishing reviewing all these awesome submissions that we received for the commit conferences. And then once we announce schedule for those, we'll have a little extra time to review the heroes applications. And then from there we'll be reviewing applications on a rolling basis. So that's it for me. Thanks so much for spending time, you know, learning about heroes today. I'd love to answer your questions. We're here feedback about the program. And yes, I can put a link in the chat. Thank you, Roger, for suggesting that. And okay, now on to the question. So our first question is from David. And David is asking, are there resources for an admin like me that discover and get lab, not expert then, and want to promote it inside the company to install it and make all adopt? Good question. David, thanks for that. We definitely have resources on our website that can help with that. And probably have some folks on our team that would also like to, you know, kind of help you with that if increasing get lab adoption inside your company is important to you. We'd love to help. So please let's follow up after the meeting and I'll connect you to the right people and the right resources to help you be successful in that. And do we have any other questions? Feel free to just put them in the chat. Avubakar is asking, what is the process for starting a community meetup group? Great question. So the process is pretty straightforward. We have an issue template in one of our get lab projects, and you'll just go in and complete as much information as you can. And that'll kick off the planning process. And so the template includes information about the groups, the location, the dates, the times, and a list of tasks that we recommend folks complete in order to plan a successful event. And so creation of the issue is really the trigger for starting the group. The way that get lab, you know, we kind of think about starting a community group is that get lab will provide support in creating the group. So we have a meetup pro account that you can link your group to. And that allows us to cover the cost for the group. And then we'll also help you by providing the planning template that will allow you to have a successful event. And we can help by sending swag, providing some financial support, so up to $500 for events to cover the cost of food and drinks. And then we'll help you with the marketing of the event. So giving you some guidance on best practices around creating the event page, helping market the events through the get lab blog and get lab social media. And then the organizers, you know, we ask for their help in finding a local venue, reading local communication with the group, because there are sometimes different, you know, languages that I may not be able to kind of translate things too well. And other different kind of cultural things where we think it's best for the local community leader to kind of own that. And then we also ask the local community leaders to find a venue. And in some cases find the speakers, although we can try and help with that as well. So thanks for that question, Abubakar. And I'd be happy to talk to you in more detail about it, or if you want to just open an issue. I think I can drop a link to our meetups page on our website, where you'll be able to find more information about the program, and also a link to that issue template. Joseph is asking, GitHub had a recent issue with US trade controls and restricted some devs from their projects, what's get labs policy on this? So I've seen that we've had some chatter about that or discussions about that in our Slack group. I think that would actually be a better question for someone on our legal team. But I'm sure that they're preparing a response to that question, because it's probably something that's top of mind for a lot of folks. And so I would recommend you stay tuned to the GitLab blog for additional information about or additional clarification about our policy on this. But unfortunately, I'm not familiar with the specifics of that policy right now, and I don't feel comfortable commenting on a legal question. Thank you, Phil, for offering to help David. And David's got another question. Is it possible to participate even for not very experienced GitLab users or not? So my answer to that question is absolutely. At GitLab, we believe everyone can contribute. And so I don't think that the expectation is that every person in the heroes program is an expert in all things GitLab. I think as I mentioned, there are a number of ways to contribute. So we have people that organize meetup groups, and that's someone who isn't an expert at GitLab, but is really passionate about our community and our values. Could certainly start one of those without a ton of technical knowledge of the product. On our open source project, when we think about contributions, we're thinking about not just code contributions, but also documentation or translations. So there are definitely a number of different ways for folks to contribute without having a ton of experience as a GitLab user admin. And Roger's question, is your Slack channel available for heroes? So that's still something that we've been debating internally. As I mentioned, one of our values is iteration. And so this first iteration of the programs kind of rewards for heroes is not offering Slack access, although that question is open. And so the answer may wind up being yes. But we do have a GitLab, a GitR channel where a lot of the community hangs out. So I would recommend checking that out if you have specific questions or just wondering days with other community members for chat. Any other questions? Yeah, David, so thanks for the question. What are the media for community exchange? I've seen the forum, but sometimes low and the IRC channel. So we have also have a GitLab GitR channel, which I think is a little bit more real time than our forum. Although we do have community advocates on our team who monitor the forum all the time and try to direct unanswered questions to the best people in our community or best GitLab team members to answer those. So I think don't give up on the forum just yet. But if you're looking for real time communication, I would recommend GitR. And I can share a link to that in the chat. Yeah, David, Mattermost, Slack, Discord, all great ideas. But for right now, we're directing most of the conversation to our GitR channel. And so some of those other kind of applications that you mentioned, I think, are all tried and true and tested and proven to be successful for other communities. But for the GitLab community right now, we focus mostly on the GitR channel. And there's some discussion about opening up Slack for some of our most active community members and hope to have an answer or a good answer on that soon. So I guess if that's it for the questions, we'll give it another few seconds. But if that's it for the questions, just want to say thank you all so much for joining today. It's been really great chatting and seeing kind of the global community dial in for this and from all these different time zones and things. So really great to have you all here and hope to see a bunch of new applications to the Heroes Program later today or in the coming days from all of you. And yeah, if you have any follow-up questions, we'll be sending out an email following this with a link to the slides. And you're welcome to reply directly to me through that email. And we can continue the conversation there. And yeah, just want to say thanks again and hope to talk to you all again soon.