 Mike check, Mike check. Hi, guys. When we had started in a few minutes, just curious if you'd like maybe introduce yourself to your neighbor. Sometimes we have people out of country. Is there anybody from out of the country visiting scale this year? Out of state? Is everybody local? Everybody's like, how local? Oh, well, that's OK. That's a ways. Everybody else local to LA? Honeyton. OK, you came a bit of a ways. Seattle. Wow. Have you, is this your first year if you've been here before? OK. OK, that's the sign of somebody who's been here before. Awesome. OK, well, thank you everybody for coming out. And don't forget to say hi and meet people and really add to your conference experience. OK, everybody, it's 11.30. We're going to go ahead and get started. I'm here to introduce speakers. My name is Kathy. This talk is 25 Things I Wish I Knew Before Becoming a Community Organizer with Jason Hibbins. This is the mentoring track. This session will highlight 25 major lessons he's learned in the path to becoming a community organizer. And community organizing can be challenging not only for someone just getting started, but for veteran leaders as well. All attendees should get valuable practical advice for community organizing. Please join me in welcoming Jason. Thank you, Kathy. That was a great introduction that I wrote. Is it not? I'm going to use this one. No, I just turned it on. Here's a green light. All right, how's that? All right, well, thanks for being here today. I really appreciate you spending some time with us. My name is Jason Hibbins. I'm a community architect at Red Hat. That means I'm a mashup of a community manager, project manager, and I just kind of do whatever needs to be done, to be honest with you. I've been at Red Hat for just over 16 years. I started off doing Red Hat tech support. Basically, it was one of the people picking up the phone saying, how can I fix your Red Hat Linux today? And now we have Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBL Smidlerware stuff and Ansible. So we've got all this great technology. So I've seen Red Hat go from a single box product where we would literally make money off of coffee mugs and t-shirts to a multi-product, to a multi-brand. Now we call ourselves an open organization. And so about nine years ago, I started working on our opensource.com project. For those of you not familiar with it, we're an online publication and community highlighting how open source is impacting our lives. We publish a variety of content from software development, programming, Python. We have a focus this month on Raspberry Pi because Raspberry Pi Day is coming up. And the thing that most people don't know is that you can actually submit an article to us and get published. So I actually see several people who have written articles for us in the room. So thank you for your contributions. In 2015, I got a chance to do some community building around our CEO, Red Hat CEO, Jim Whitehurst's book called The Open Organization. So that was kind of a new realm of trying to figure out how you actually build community around a book. So a little spoiler alert, at the end of the book, it says to continue this conversation about The Open Organization, go on over to opensource.com. In a very Red Hat way, Jim Whitehurst kind of came to our team and said, hey, this is happening. Go do with it what you will and go figure it out. So we did. So we started publishing content around open org and the value and open management, open leadership. And I got a great chance to mentor someone and kind of help them become a community manager. And then for the last year or so, I've been building a small community around the intersection of DevOps and open source. I've got about 70 or so that are interested in doing that. So if you are interested in that, please talk to me afterwards. So today, what I've got prepared for you is 25 practical tips about what I've learned over these last years and let's get started. There we go. So the goal of community is really to connect people around a shared purpose and really aim that passion in the right direction. And so for this, that means creating a sense of camaraderie, creating a sense of family, creating a sense of togetherness. So there are many different roles that a community organizer could have. Some could be focused on online communities. Some could be focused on in-person communities. Or maybe there's a little bit of both. Mine's probably 80% online, 20% in-person or somewhere around that. There are a lot of different core responsibilities around community organizing. Some of them could be more project management focused. Or maybe some of you are working in more code tech communities. And so there's just some differences there. My experiences come from opensource.com, where we have a community of authors who are trying to publish content. And so I'm working with people who want to write, but we're writing about technology, which is kind of fun. What's fascinating about this is that while most of the community work I do is online, the time that we get together is really valuable. And so I'll tell you a little bit about that later on of chances that we get to do that. A lot of times when we're at conferences like this, I'm going to pick on Ben, who's in the front row. He's one of our community moderators. And so we get to hang out and do fun things and get to see each other. Or maybe if your CEO is talking at a Purdue University and you happen to be, Ben lives in that area, we might meet in the hallway and catch up for a few minutes. And so I'm going to do this by number. So first tip is to ask participants what they like to do, what they're good at, or what they might be interested in doing, this way that you can help either get them to that new thing they want to do or amplify the engagement that you want them to have. Tip number two is to practice two-way goal setting. This is really around getting buy-in from your participants and also increasing their engagement. Number three is to send thank-yous. Send lots and lots and lots of thank-yous. Don't overdo it, but thank-yous can come in many different forms. It can just be an email that says, thank you for your contribution. It can be a handwritten note, which there's a little bit of lost art in handwritten thank-you notes. And we really enjoy, I enjoy getting handwritten thank-yous and I'm sure other people as well. It could be sending people small gifts, swag, things like that, or it could also be public recognition. And I'll talk a little bit about how one of the programs we have addresses that. Number four is to listen more and talk less. Be inquisitive with your community. Again, this goes back to number one, ask them what they want to do, ask them how they want to participate. You'll never know what you'll get back when you do that. Number five is to remember that every interaction is a gift. And also that surprise is the opposite of engagement. So when you're doing community work, you definitely don't want them to be surprised by any decisions that are being made. You want to be transparent with what's going on with the community and this way you can kind of maintain their engagement and support. Number six is to incorporate feedback loops into everyday practices. Definitely taking a page out of the book from Lean Startup and Agile Development. This is the whole learn something, test something, measure it, validate it, rinse and repeat. And we're doing that all the time with our team. We actually get to do that with our authors a lot because they're getting, we provide professional editorial services. And so they'll give us a draft and then they're getting one of our awesome editors is to go through it. I know they always make me sound a lot better. So I'm always happy about that. And so our authors are learning as they go. We have one of our community moderators who's really, his writing is drastically improved over the years. And so we've been able to coach them and really steer them in the right direction and their content's performing really well. Number seven is to create an environment for trust, collaboration and accountability. Any team that's gonna be successful needs to be able to trust each other in order to collaborate. And then when you're collaborating you definitely wanna be accountable for your actions and have a team that will hold you accountable for those actions. Number eight is to empower and trust your top participants. We have some of, part of the requirements of our moderator program which I'll go into more detail here shortly is that they're writing or curating 10 articles, 12 articles a year. We have some of our moderators who are publishing 30 articles a year. They've got their own little list of things they wanna write. They work with us to make sure that the list is gonna be suitable and they're writing like three or four articles a month. So that's fantastic. So we empower them to do that. This is a fun one. Number nine, gamification doesn't have to be competitive. We have a points and badge system on the site which I'll give you more details about later on. And for us it's kind of a method of kind of tracking participation. And, but there's nothing, we don't give them anything. Like there's nothing that says if you reach 100 points you're gonna get a t-shirt. We don't, that does not exist on our site. But people like to go log in and add all their badges and earn points. So it's really cool to see that happen. Number 10 is to show appreciation and gratitude. This is different than sending out thank yous and sending out swag. We always look for opportunities to do kind of bigger rewards. And so this can come in the form of maybe giving people a conference pass, submitting their travel efforts, additional access, or it could be exclusive access or exclusive privileges to something. And as I kind of mentioned before, in-person experience is our ultimate reward, particularly from my experience in our communities. Number 11 is to celebrate milestones. Doing this local is very easy. Doing this global is really hard. I don't have the best creative ideas on how to do that. But Mozilla does a really good job when they have a new launch. They'll send out little kits to other community members and have multiple office birthday parties or whatever the case may be. But make sure you take time to celebrate when you reach a milestone. Number 12, create a community's award program to recognize achievements at all levels. And I will go into more details about this soon. We reward people that are new to our community. We reward people that have been contributing for years. Number 13 is to prepare as much stuff in advance as possible. This way, when you have a fire, you have time to address it. So as an example, in preparing to come to scale, I still have to do my day job. Sorry, so I get all my, make sure my day job stuff is clear, taken care of out of the way so that I can come to scale and hopefully enjoy it and not checking emails and keynotes and things like that. Also to, I'll talk about something else later. Lost my train of thought. All right, number 14, automate as much as possible, but realize when a personal touch is warranted. If you can, whatever you need to automate, that's just kind of things you're doing every day, get that done. But if you actually need to like personalize something, like an example would be for me, if I'm doing a lot of outreach to speakers, I'll have like a little template, but then I customize it, right? I'll add their name or I'll be like, hey, I remember last time we talked at scale and you gave a great talk or whatever the case may be. I always kind of try to sprinkle in that little personal piece. And then the other part of that is, what I found is that a community organizer, you are going to have a lot of single touch interactions. For me, that means like I'm doing a lot of email or I'm doing a lot of social media and you just have to recognize that that kind of comes with the territory. All right, number 15, practice being short and concise in your messaging. Save all the long stuff for documentation, for other, you know, for attachments, whatever that needs to be. Make sure you have your action items at the top of an email. If you need them to do certain things, don't bury that down in your messaging. There's what that saying is, I would have wrote you a shorter note but I didn't have enough time. That kind of applies to this. Number 16, don't go to participants with an ask every time. You don't want to be that person that's, oh man, here comes Matt again, he's going to ask me for something, right? You want to make sure that you're providing value and think of ways that maybe you can give them a gift, right? Maybe you're reading an article online and you go, oh, that reminds me, Ben would be interested in that because it's about SpaceX and so I'm going to just maybe fire him a tweet and say, hey, Ben thought you'd like to see this and maybe he finds that, hey, that guy's not always going to ask me for an article every month. It's funny, Ricky was working with us on the front row here. She has a talk coming up after lunch, by the way. We have this weird ability where people will go up to someone and they'll be like, I'm going to write it, don't worry. And we are like, we weren't going to ask you about it. So that's really, I don't know how that happens Ricky but it's an interesting situation, right? All right, number 17, avoid engaging in endless debates. Such as this is the year of the Linux desktop or which Linux distribution you prefer or in our Red Hat offices, which flavor of LaCroix is the best? That is a serious argument that happens quite frequently in our office. All right, number 18, community means something different to everyone. So your management might have a different thought on community than you do. Your software engineers or your developers that you're working with may have a different perspective of what community looks like to them and community members may have a different perspective on community. So your job as a community organizer, one of your jobs, whether you're a community organizer or developer advocate, is to educate all these different roles on what community management is. Number 19, be aware that part of community organizing role is to balance the value between the community and your organization. This is probably more prevalent in more software communities, where if you have folks developing, participating in your open source community, developing code from volunteer hours and that becomes a product, there's a delicate balance on how you wanna handle that. And again, it goes back to being transparent with decision making. All right, this is a huge one for me. Number 20 is to document what you do in order to measure success. Here are a couple of things that I recommend you keep track of. Any sort of like high-tech interaction. So this is like, hey, I spent two hours with Mary working on an outline for whatever and just make sure that your management knows that you're spending time there. Events like scale are super valuable for me because I get to meet a lot of community members, I get to recruit new authors. So I always do like a little travel report of people that I talk to, things that I did at the event and always share that with the team. Maintain a contact list of people you want and make sure you have that on a device that's not work-related in case you move on from things. And then write down big wins, right? Write down when you get that note from someone that says, hey, by the way, the article that I wrote helped me get a new job or hey, we wrote an article about some technology and we brought their website down. True story, that happened a long time ago but that was a nice reward for us, not for them. What else? And then we do monthly report. We have a monthly report that we have internally that has a few things that we track and then we send a similar version of that report out to our community members. All right, number 21, we're getting real now. Know and understand that community doesn't stop at five o'clock, right? So we're talking about burnout. Burnout is real. I know because I almost went over the edge. It was not a fun time in my life. You know, it's kind of trying to figure out avoiding that always-on feeling. And from my experience, I started to set limits and that was really valuable for me. Not only should you set limits, you should also share those limits with the people you work with, i.e. I work from 10 to six or I don't check email on the weekends. Just let people know what your limits are. For example, I took some vacation last month. I actually was out here in California down in Long Beach. So I told my folks, I'm gonna be off email for a week and a half, so don't expect a response from me and if you need help, contact this person. And it went great. I got back, I had hardly any email from people, so that was awesome. And then also too, in preparing for that, I had a backup person and I also prepared them. And I said, I made a list, I said, these are the three most important things that could happen while I'm out. Can you keep an eye on these three things? And they did a great job. Let's see here. The other big piece is to have, at least for me, is to have a flexible work schedule. Because one day for me is never the same. So, and also being a parent, things just come up, right? And you've got to be able to take care of that stuff. And the other piece of thought here is I do a lot of stuff after hours, quote, after traditional office hours. And so I'm always sharing with my team or with my manager like, hey, I'm going to this meetup tonight or hey, I'm giving up a weekend to go to scale. So I'm giving up some of my personal time and just keep track of all that stuff. All right. Number 22 is that you should know the signs of burnout, not only for yourself, but also for your community. If you look at this list of things, increased illness, anxiety, lots of interest, looks very similar to depression. And that's kind of what burnout feels like. You maybe just don't want to get up out of bed today and you may just want to sleep till noon, those kinds of things. And then the follow up to this number 23 is to actually have a plan on how to address burnout or to prevent it, have a plan to recharge your batteries, right? This is a great way for me to recharge my batteries. So number 24 is to be intentional about creating time and space to be with your personal network, your family and your friends. Plan vacations, plan long weekends. People know that you're not available, that's key. And then, again, I mentioned setting limits earlier. One of the limits that I set a couple of years ago was I try to only go to two meetups a week. If, like, literally in where I live, there was meetups, I go to meetups every, I go to three meetups a night, right? There's that much tech going, stuff going on. Or there's just that much stuff I'm interested in. And so I realized that I was like, hey, I don't want to look back in six years and be like, my kids grew up and I went to all these awesome meetups and I have all these great people and now my kids in high school and I missed all the glory days. So that limit seems to be working really well. I really enjoy that. I love having dinner with a family. So a couple of pro tips around that. Again, recapping, race the visibility about the work you do after hours. Don't be shy about telling your manager and your colleagues when you go above and beyond and do all the things that community needs. And give them a better story of your role. This is a fun one. My manager and I had this really interesting conversation. He wanted to put a GPS on me. Not because he wanted to know exactly where I was. He just wanted to get a sense of like, where, what does Jason do? Like, where is he at? What's kind of like, he wanted that kind of GPS. We actually still joke about it, but I think he has a better understanding of like, oh yeah, I'm in a meetup and then, oh yeah, now I'm traveling and then, hey, I'm working from home or whatever the case may be. Last thing here is if you do feel like you're getting burned out, please don't suffer in silence. Get some help. Ask a colleague, ask a friend, ask a family. Again, that goes back to knowing the signs and just asking people like, am I doing something different? Like, when I look back, like I was doing some weird shit. Like I was taking, I was like cleaning my desk off. Like I was about to quit, right? And I was, I recognized like, why was I doing that? And I finally, once I figured it out, it worked out a lot better. So, all right, did I skip the slide? Okay, another pro tip is to help others. You've got to help yourself before you help others. This is the hole if you're ever on an airplane and they're giving you the description of the oxygen mask. They tell you to put your oxygen mask on first because if you don't have yours on first, you can't help someone else. So, it's one of my favorite pro tips. All right, and then number 25 is to meet and talk with other community organizers at events, forums, social media. Maybe there's one-on-one interaction. Sometimes you just need some advice. You know, I've gotten to a point where like, I've got to do this new project. I have no idea where to start. So, I call people and say, hey, what would you do? And get some advice. There's a lot of books on community organizing out there. And then I like to get inspired from kind of other kind of walks of life. And so, I'll just like randomly go to another meetup group that looks interesting. One, maybe just to see how they run things. And two, just to kind of, maybe I'm interested in a certain topic. I love kind of those shorter talks, like a night talks, Ted talks, lightning talks, Pikachu talks, whatever the six minute and ten slides thing is, those are really great sources of just different information and then if it sucked, you didn't waste that much time, right? And then we're always kind of partnering with different organizations where we see we have win-wins. And so, that's another piece that helps us. Okay, so this is kind of, I'm gonna switch gears here a little bit and talk a little bit about career stuff. And then we're gonna talk about some of the programs we have. And so, for your career, I feel very passionate about what I do because I work on stuff that matters. I'm helping people get published, we're writing topics that people or other people are interested in. So, if you're in a place, I always encourage like find work that's fulfilling. And if you can't find work that's fulfilling, maybe find something after hours that's fulfilling that can lead to a better life and a better job. So, align work with your passion. If your day job is just paying the bills, find a passion somewhere else no matter what that might be. Maybe you're into exercise, maybe you're into rock climbing, I don't know. But whatever you're passionate about, be passionate about it. All right, got the picture. All right, I'm gonna pause here and see if there's any questions about the 25 tips that I went over. Go ahead, I'll repeat it. Yeah, so the question is around automation and when it doesn't scale. Is that a good summary? Yeah, let me process that for a moment. Let me talk about the points and badge system we have and then I might have a better answer or I might answer your question. Cool, well let's get there. We have, when we launched Observer.com about a year or so afterwards, we established a points and badge system. And so, how we set it up, as you said, what are all the things people can do that they can earn points on the site? And so we're like, okay, they can log into the site. We can award them with that. They can comment on the site. They can, because what we want is to write articles, we put a lot of points behind writing articles. And so we identified the different things and then we assigned a point value to it. Then we assigned these different roles to where people could have. Funny thing happened on the way to creating roles. We thought that 10,000 points would be enough. We had community members get there way faster than we thought. And so Ricky and I had the brains and we're like, okay, we have all these cool open source things. I thought open sorcerer was the coolest thing. That was the ultimate thing you could ever get. And then we had to come up with some new. It's like, what's better than an open sorcerer? I guess that could be a star or a galaxy, whatever. Anyway, that was fun. And like I mentioned earlier, we don't have any, there's no t-shirt at the end of the tunnel, right? There's people just get points and they're really proud to get those points. So here's an example of what it looks like on the website. Rob has been one of our longtime community moderators and you can see an example here of some of our award badges that we give out. And they proudly display their badges. Let's see. Oh, the other thing I want to mention here too is I think part of this, part of the reason why people are into the points and bad stuff is that from open source communities, like a lot of what we do is reputation or a lot of it is just kind of to build our resume or to give back. And so I think that's kind of the correlation with what's happening here. I'm still thinking about the scale thing, so, or do you want to go back? Oh, I'm sorry, sorry that wasn't clear. The points, yeah, I will. The question was, what's the difference between the points and the badges? The points are, the values are, these are the badges that we give out. So as they earn these points, they go through these different levels, yep. And then we have special, as you can see from here, we have different, these green badges are like topical badges, so like they could, maybe they're in CIS admin, maybe they're CIS admin, maybe they're in the DevOps. We created all these like random, kind of techie badges. And then we have special award badges that we hand out to community members. They can't go in and say, I got a community moderator award in 2018. They have to earn, they have to earn that one. Let's see, all right, so let's maybe talk about the community moderator program. So, as I mentioned earlier, these are volunteers, they're signing up for one year commitment, and we ask them to write or curate 12 articles a year. And then curating is great because it actually helps us find new authors for our community. We have a weekly call that's voluntary that we ask them, sometimes they join, sometimes they don't, sometimes they come once a month, but it's an opportunity for them, they know that we're kind of like office hours, right? They know that our team's gonna be there to answer any question and give some updates. We are actually one of our goals is to make our community moderator my diary program more diverse. The challenge is we're working with a limited set of authors, and as you've go to any other diversity inclusion talks, there's a hot topic for us. But this slide, this is a slide that represents some of our community moderators past and present. It's really about connecting people and creating a shared purpose. And part of the rewards that we give for our community moderators is we fly every fall. There's a conference in Raleigh, North Carolina called All Things Open. It should attract 5,000 people this year or so. And it's literally all things open. It's front end development, back end development, security, community, everything, open data, open government. So we, Red Hat flies our community, not Red Hat, Red Hat pays to fly our community moderators to Raleigh. We cover their travel, we cover their lodging, we cover the majority of their meals. We host them at Red Hat the day before the conference, and we have a basically an in-person strategy session. They help us map out what we're gonna do for the next year. We brainstorm new articles. We have some really good food that we bring in. They are fed well, and we put it that way. I'm the one that has to get all the food, so I'm taking a little credit for that. But it's really, like it's kind of like the highlight of my year. Like we get to bring all these people that we work with online. Sometimes we'll bump into them at a conference, but we get to spend some really quality time with them, and really it's just an amazing group of people to work with, and I'm really blessed to be a part of that. I kind of alluded to this earlier, but we also have an awards program that we do. So every January, we do our community awards. So we have a couple of different things we do. The team will pick eight to 10 folks and have, we have what's called the People's Choice Award. So we'll publish the people who are eligible for the People's Choice Award who have been nominated for that, and then our community vote on the people that they think deserve that award. We also have the Moderator of the Year Award. We let our moderators vote on who they think amongst them should be worthy of that. We have a Readers' Choice Award where we select our top articles and then let our community vote on what their favorite article was, and then we have an Emerging Contributor Award where we try to identify individuals in our community who are new to our community, but maybe want to encourage them to write a little bit more. So that's a strategy we're using to kind of get them more involved. Works really well. So I wanted to talk a little bit about tools and share that with you. So, but first I wanted to mention that, I think common to all community organizing is this term I call cat herding. If you ever need to see a really funny video, YouTube cat herding, and there's like this cowboy on a horse, and there's just cats running everywhere in the, gosh, it's just, it's really funny to me. I don't know if you're gonna find it funny. But for me, when I think about cat herding, cat herding, herding, cat herding, woo, that's a bad one. Is that a brothel? I don't know. For me, cat herding is really kind of like organized chaos, being able to kind of see the end of the tunnel and move things out of the way and get to that direction. It's a million things moving in a million directions and just being able to focus, when you get to that end of the tunnel, that's very rewarding, at least for me. But there's a lot of effort that goes into this. And so let's transition. So I know when I go to conferences, I'm always asking people what tools they're using and how they're getting their job done. And so I figured I would share that with you. So the way that I approached this was I made a list of all the things that I think I do. And then I realized, damn, that's a long list. And so I don't even know if it's complete, but it's probably 90% of what I do. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna break this in half and then show you the tools that I use for each of these tasks. And hopefully you'll be able to get a little takeaway from that. I'm a huge fan of being super productive because I like to GSD, I like to get stuff done or insert other S-word. I would encourage you, the other thing is I would encourage you to use tools that make you more productive and that make you make more sense. And in that vein, like sometimes we have tools that are kind of forced on us by our organizations and who we work for. And sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and use it. But maybe you could find a clever workaround. So for cat herding, I am sending out a lot of emails. I use a lot of reminders. I mean, I'm communicating with people on a variety of different platforms. It's text, it's chat, it's, wow. It just, it comes from all the different directions. For my email, I'm using, I've used Thunderbird for, I actually was using Thunderbird before it was Thunderbird, what was it called, Netscape Navigator? It was a Netscape. So I've been on Thunderbird slash Netscape my entire life, except for, I use like something called the email in college. I don't even know if that still exists anymore, but that was my first email platform. I have actually never used Outlook. So I might be a, this conference probably not a rare individual, but in the world, probably a rare individual. I spend a lot of time on conference calls. So Red Hat uses a platform called Blue Jeans. A lot of people in the community use Zoom. I'm using Google Hangouts. You know, it's whatever it needs to be done. For social media, I use a mixture of things. Hootsuite, Buffer. We have another platform we have called Sprout Social that we use. For the project management, there's no great, wonderful tool to do all that stuff. So I'm using probably a lot of what you're using. Spreadsheets, calendars. But my favorite stuff that's really gotten me organized is I'm a big fan. For my personal to-do list, I use a technology called Waffle I.O. It's basically a front, a con-bend board style integration to, it looks like that. It's a con-bend board style integration with GitHub Issues. And so this is like my personal task list. It's actually out in the open. So if you ever want to know what I'm working on, you can go look at it. I don't know why you would want to do that. But I'm also a big fan of Trello. Like my team uses Trello all the time. So I basically, my goal is to get stuff out of my inbox and get it into a card. And then it goes into my workflow. I'm actually very, also very successfully using Trello for the DevOps team. And so I have kind of a semi-public-facing Trello board for different DevOps articles ideas that we're working on. We have a couple of different, instead of having one large backlog, I've got like a priority backlog that's got like up to six cards in it. So if someone's like, the backlog is overwhelming, they can have the short list. And then it actually kind of mimics our publication process. And so that works really well. Cause other authors can see like, oh, they get an article into me and like it's not gonna be published for like three weeks. You can see, oh, there's seven articles ahead of them. And kind of the transparency helps with that. I'm not gonna go through each of the things here, but hopefully you get an idea of the different tasks for this one. I showed you Waffle, Transition Slide. And here's the other half of the list. So if you go to the Expo hall, we've got some cool open source.com hats. I use, I take no credit other than ordering them and paying for them. But I have a great company called Planet Logo that helps us on the creative side and helps us get those fulfilled. You know, I mentioned handwritten thank you notes earlier. Like that's a thing, like that people love that. And so bring the art, the lost art of handwritten thank you notes back. You know, I tend to a lot of meetings but I also host meetups. So I'm using a lot of the, you know, event bright stuff, meetup.com and those type of tools. And then actually probably a little bit unique to my role is I do some basically system administrator stuff on our Drupal backend. And so I'm, I'll take bugs and feature requests from the community and from my team. I'll get those, I'll get those into a sprint. So I'm doing our sprint planning. And then I work with, we have two different vendors. We have a company called Blue Spark that does all our Drupal development. And then we partner with Acquia. They do all of our hosting. So I spent a lot of time living in Jira working with Blue Spark to get our, to basically get our feature development out. And so that also means I do a lot of QA. So that's a fun thing too. Oh, all right. So a couple of pro tips here as we're wrapping up. Use the right tool for the right job and make sure that, particularly in community, that you're using the right tool that the community should be using as well. Again, use tools that make you the most productive so that you can get stuff done. All right, just to wrap it up here. Sometimes in community work, you just have to do stuff. You just have to do it maybe to pay it forward, maybe to help someone out. Maybe it's making a connection in your network with someone. At the time, it might seem like, like it may seem like kind of productive at the time, but you never know when something like that's gonna pay off later on. So that's, I always kind of see, like, oh yeah, I did that thing a couple months ago and then it kind of pays back later on. So sometimes you just gotta just do those little things, get them out of your inbox. And then I kind of alluded to this earlier, but your network is your most valuable asset, right? The work you do in community or as community organizing, all those connections that you're making, all the people that you meet, that's the real value for me in community work is I just get to work with amazing people who are way smarter than I and many different topics, but it's really rewarding for me. So your mission is to take what you've learned here at scale, whether that's in this session, whether it's a hallway conversation, take what you've learned here at scale and let's advance our open source community together. Thank you. And I didn't really think about this automation question. I'm stalling, no. So there was a question earlier around automating all the things, and in my talk, as I said, but know when a personal touch is needed. And so the question was really about how do you know when you can automate at scale and when you need the personal touch? I don't have a really good answer for that. I will crowdsource the answer. Would anyone else like to make a suggestion on that? Please, he's really eager. Ricky, do you wanna hear? Well, I think what we found on opensource.com is we had to scale our team also. There's a certain point if you're managing a community where if you wanna do it well, you have to have additional community managers of some sort. And we started doing that with opensource.com. I think five years ago, four or five years ago, there was one community manager. As the site has matured, everyone on the team has taken more community management roles in addition to what they're doing so that we can make sure that moderators and writers were getting more personal touch from us because we were also having long-term relationships at that point with these folks. They weren't just coming in and leaving. We don't want that. I'm not technically still on the site anymore. My heart is, that's why I say this. And then they added a second community manager and now there's another person doing more community management. So they've just shifted the roles around and everyone is responsible for helping with community. With that said, I've seen larger organizations that they say everyone's responsible for community but they don't have official community managers. That doesn't work for scaling either because if everyone is doing it, no one's really doing it. So you have to have some people who are shepherding the community managers too and making sure that the community is taken care of. Does that help? Okay. Thanks, Ricky. Still by backup. The other thing, as Ricky was talking, the other thing, we actually had, there's a limitation on how many people you can actually work with effectively. I don't know, there's some magical psychological number out there that someone has said is probably like, you can only have like 15 or total to 15 like deep relationships or whatever that case may be. And so we found that even working with our moderators, there's only a certain number of people that we can work with and there's just a certain amount of work you can process all the time too. So I don't know if that's helpful. Other questions? Yeah. Yeah. So the question is when we're measuring success and what we do, how do we quantify the value of an event? It's not easy, but what I do, so the biggest thing is I have a travel report and so I'll just, I'll say, so my travel report for scale will look something like this. On Thursday, I gave a presentation to 70 people and then I talked with five people afterwards. On Saturday, I worked at the booth. I gave away a thousand hats. I don't, that's true. I think I don't know how many I brought. I gave a talk to 30 people and I had good conversations with Jono Bacon, with Jeremy Garcia, blah, blah, blah, whoever I'm writing down, everyone I'm talking with. And the trick about events, right? It's for us, it's not, we're not here generating leads. We're here to meet people and we're here to find the new stories and we're here to understand what are people talking about in open source. And so that, sometimes the events don't pay off for a while, right? I'll have instances where it was maybe two scales ago. I met a volunteer who was working at the, I don't know, one of the booths. And I'm trying to remember exactly what booth. It might have been like the EFF booth or the Software Federation Software Conservatory booth, one of those. And this was a situation where the person didn't know they could write for the site. And he's like, oh, I've got this really great story. And it took, it was a year later when we finally got that first article. And it did really well. We need them right for us again. So that's an example of like, when we meet every week, our team meets every week to go over our, we have it, it's like a health check meeting, right? And so on Tuesdays, we send out our newsletter. And so on Tuesday afternoon, we meet and we're going over the newsletter. We're looking at how, we're looking at how it performs because we wanna learn real time, like what content's performing well. And our goal is to deliver what we think the best content is to our audience. We're not saying, oh, we really want them to click on this. We're like, hey, everyone's been clicking on this so we're gonna give them that, right? We're going over a lot of our web statistics, page use, where they're coming from, how much is coming from search, how much is coming from new content. And then we actually go over, we look at how each article performed the previous week and we have some commentary around it. It'll be like, hey, Ricky curated this one for software development programming, stuff that we're working on. Or, hey, that's the person I met at the booth a year ago, right? Ricky and I are pros of this. We're always bringing that stuff up, like, oh yeah, that came from this event or that came from this event. So we are constantly nagging our manager about that. So does that give you some color on the, go ahead? Yeah, so the question is more around how to create more in-person time or in-person opportunities. Yeah, so it's great because as a community manager, we get to go to a lot of different events. And sometimes our community members are there, which is one reason why we go to the events as well because sometimes our community members are at these events. I forgot to mention that we actually, we host a quarterly call with our moderators and so that's about as in-person, like we do a video call, so that's about as in-person as we can get, right? But we know, we value their time, so it's usually like Saturday morning at 10 a.m. And people, they join and we have a, it's like the best hour of the weekend. Like we just get to hang out and talk and I think what I found is that, particularly with the moderator program and with our writers, is that they actually just enjoy being together because we're all doing the same thing. And so there's times when, I've actually thought about pitching to my boss about going around the world just to hang out with our moderators for a day. I don't know how I'm gonna justify that one, but I thought that would be kind of cool to just, hey, I'm gonna go do a world tour for all the moderators. That hasn't happened yet, so we'll see. Does that help? Yes. Okay. How much time do we have? I haven't even got the red flag yet. Cool, well, I will, okay, I will wrap up here. I'm gonna hang out, one more question. Yeah, then you have one. Okay, I'm gonna try to summarize the question as, if I'm getting to the point where I need a community manager, what do I start with? Or what, what, how do I summarize that? The question is really, we've got a nonprofit, we've got volunteers, and we need some help, moderation, or what would you pay for first? Okay, so, and I think there was a question about different roles and what's, okay, so I'll take a stab at that. We have our team running Opsource.com's four to five people, the different roles that we have there. So I kind of explained my role, like I kind of like part triple system administrator, part sprint coordinator, part building DevOps communities. I order the swag, I order the food, so I have a different kind of community organizing roles there. But, and like we have an editorial manager who manages all of our content. Actually, one of the roles of our community moderators is to help moderate the site, and so we'll have, I'll get an email from one of our moderators who says, here's five more spam accounts, and I'm like, thank you very much, and I go to handle all the spam accounts. So we actually have a lot of our community that's helping with the moderation. And then, trying to think of there's other, as Ricky kind of alluded to earlier, or mentioned earlier, is that we are, each person in our team is playing more and more of a community management role, a community manager role, so we're kind of spreading that out and just being, because we understand that it's all about relationships and relationship building, so we're making sure that we maintain those relationships. I feel like I'm not answering your question, so maybe we can chat afterwards. Okay, you had a question as well? Here, let me give you the mic this way, I don't have to repeat it. So we're trying to organize a community that's gonna require lots of different levels of technical expertise, so I was wondering if you had any advice on how to figure out who's able to do what, how to filter them into those groups, and then further, how do you handle people who might, who think they're doing really great work but might not actually understand the, or have gone through the training? All right, so for the first question, around identifying different levels, so if you think you've got a good idea of what different technicality pieces that will be there, ask them up front, like so, outside of my day job, oh, it went blank, I do a lot of work in civic tech, and so one of our, sorry, do the password with one hand's hard, and I got it wrong. Anyway, we, so one of our, and you remember with our, so our open rally brigade is our civic tech group, we have, we just made a form that we ask people to fill out when they come to the meetup, and it's basically like, what's your name, what's your email, why did you come? What, like what skill set do you have? And then we give some examples of like, are you here for certain languages? So we just basically built a form and asked people to fill it out, and that helps us filter the people to what we told the roles that we're trying to match them with. And then the second piece on contributors who may not be performing up to your expectations. Okay, right, so for that one, definitely don't do it publicly, right? So if, and this kind of goes like, if you have a bad apple, I'm just gonna maybe summarize it, if you have someone not acting correctly in your community to generalize it. It's definitely like, it might just, you might start up with an email saying, hey, we know you're doing this, like, do you understand, I would ask them first, like, do they understand what they're doing, right? And, or do you understand that what you're doing is having this impact? That can be in the form of an email, depending on the sensitivity of it, or sometimes you just pick up the phone and have a conversation with them, because you can have bad apples in your community and you don't want them to take away from all the good stuff that's happening. Helpful? All right. Well, I'll hang up for a few minutes. I know we're up between you and lunch. So thanks again for attending and have a great scale. Hi, I just want to remind you that this is the mentoring track here in this room 103. And at 1.30, we have Ricky, who's going to speak about reprogramming our tech culture. So if you want some tips, practical ways, you can help reshape our industry to promote kindness and positive collaboration. Please come back here at 1.30. Thanks so much. And be sure to say hi to the people that you're sitting next to, because you never know who you're going to meet, right? This is about networking, building community. Thank you. Breaker, breaker, testing, testing. Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks so much for joining us in the mentoring track. I'd like to introduce you to Ricky Endsley. She's going to be speaking about reprogramming our tech culture. So imagine that you could reprogram the tech industry. What would you change? So you could enjoy life and work better. There are many behaviors we engage in that help each other and many that don't. Rockstar worship, tolerating brilliant jerks and working excessive hours are examples we could do without. In this talk, attendees will learn about practical ways they can help reshape our industry to promote kindness and positive collaboration to reprogram it in a positive way. So everybody, please welcome Ricky. Thank you so much. Thank you. All right, thank you for coming. I don't know if you read the talk description, the outline I originally wrote for this talk. If you've given talks before, you know how it generally works with a new talk as you write a proposal and if it gets accepted somewhere, then you write the talk. And then I always follow what my outline was for their proposal and I did with this talk and I, so I, anyway, I ended up with basically a two week long talk and once I was done. And so the original question I wanted to address was imagine you could reprogram the tech industry. What would you change so you could enjoy life and work better? You know, and I thought about all these things in tech that drive us crazy, that we've struggled with, you know, for decades now, this isn't new. My background as I've been working in tech for about a little over 20 years and tech publishing is my background. I started working with CIS admins originally and moved more into from a UNIX background into working with Linux and open source communities. And, you know, we've really struggled with a lot of these cultural issues how do we grow the community, become more diverse, more welcoming to new people, have work-life balance and all of these things. I can't get all that into a one hour session apparently. I tried and so earlier this week I actually texted a gal pal of mine who I work with. We were chatting and I said, can you come over and write my talk for me? Because I had like 14 pages of notes and you know all these academic papers and articles I was citing and she wrote back LOL and I wrote back no seriously, the doors unlocked, coffee's on and so she came over and you know I showed her everything and she's like you get to pick three points for an hour long talk, that's it. And so I've really tried to narrow this down. Based on the great feedback she gave me. So while I was thinking about this talk which I have been thinking about since last fall I think was when I originally came up with this idea. A few weeks ago I was home with a flu and was kind of surfing online and I saw that this book came out, that's my dog Iggy. It's the only pet photo I snuck in here. But so this new book came out, No Hard Feelings. Has anyone heard of the book? Yeah, it just came out really recently and I ordered it immediately. Even though I was home sick, this looks really interesting to me and it has a lot of illustrations in it which are really good. Two women collaborated on it, Liz and Molly. And as I was reading it, I just started bookmarking it. You can kind of see some of the bookmarks in there. I had so many bookmarks and basically I wanted to give a talk that would reproduce the book also, which I can't do. So I wanna recommend you get the book. As I was reading it, I just, I kept thinking this is the handbook I wish I would have had when my career started. Because they really talk about work-life balance and that we are humans dealing with this technology and our needs matter and how do we balance that and how do we collaborate more effectively with communities and in our team. So I do recommend this book. So as I was reading that and then I was talking to my friend about this talk and all these topics that I wanted to tackle, how can we improve this industry? I rethought this question. What would you change so you could enjoy life and work better? And so that's the angle I wanted to take with this talk. We can't change the industry overnight. Like I said, I've been in this industry a little more than 20 years and we are heading in the right direction. Our efforts matter to change the industry. We are slowly getting better. We are slowly becoming a more inclusive industry. Yes, we should be doing this faster. If we really are so smart, this should have been solved a long time ago. If it was really important, it would have been solved a long time ago. And so we really have to continue chipping weight at it. In the meantime, that's a little comfort when you're just trying to get through your day-to-day work. And get up in the morning when you're like, oh, I worked until midnight last night and now I have an eight o'clock meeting and I didn't even get through all my email yesterday. So it's not gonna change overnight but what can we as individuals change so that we can enjoy our lives and our work lives more and we can make a difference with our colleagues, with our teams, within our own communities, with our own projects. So that's the angle I wanted to take. And in this talk, I'll go over the three points my friend told me I'm allowed to discuss. But then I also pooled the larger community via Twitter a couple times and I will share some other larger things that they're thinking about, but some themes that I saw that are high priority, that I hope that we will be addressing as a group, as a community soon. Okay, so one thing I wanna talk about was let's talk about first impressions that we make. And so the authors of the book that I told you about, Liz and Molly, I have also written quite a few articles and I ran across this one article that they wrote, How to Foster a Culture of Blonging at Work. And I really like this because they talk about when somebody joins your team or your community or project or your company. And I don't know if you were in the talk right before in this room, right before the lunch break, my colleague Jason Hibbett from opensource.com gave a community talk. For the past four years, I worked on opensource.com at Red Hat. I've been at Red Hat for just a little over five years. But three weeks ago, I switched teams and I switched projects and I hadn't made a change in several years. And I forgot what that was like. And so this article really resonated with me because I was going from a team that was a very happy team, highly functional, great manager, great project that I loved. And even though I stayed in the company, in my head when I switched teams, I didn't think it would be that traumatic because I was still in the same company. But moving to a new manager and a new team and a new project is still, it reminded me what it was like to join a new company. And so we as a tech industry, we're not always the most welcoming bunch. We're all doing a lot at a very fast pace. I don't know anyone who goes home at the end of the day. I was like, my job was done today. We go home thinking about all the stuff that we still need to do that are excited to do but didn't have time to do. But one way that we as individuals can make a difference is when people join our teams, when people join our communities. And I have really been noticing this as I joined my new team, because they are putting in a lot of hours, each person on my team, they're all stressed out, it's a young team, doing a lot of stuff. One thing that they have done as a group very right is in the way they've been welcoming me on the team. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about that. So in that article I was just talking about transition moments like employees' first day on the job are particularly anxiety inducing, which makes them great opportunities to create a sense of belonging. In that article I've got the links at the end of this talk. They talked about, and I think they also talk about it in that book, what some organizations are doing to welcome new people into their communities and into their projects. They showed examples of companies that will have teammates reach out to people before they welcome them, before the first day and say, what are your questions or here's what you can expect on your first day. They had a company that decorated people's desks before they arrived for the first day with little notes, like we're excited you're here or whatever. And I don't have a desk on my remote team, but I did have people reaching out in advance telling me they were excited. And then they had thought about what my first day would look like. They had outlines for who would meet with me and providing me information up front and then people checking in afterwards. So here's an example of my first week. This was what I was thinking and I tweeted this and along with this gift, this is what I felt like on my first day. I was so excited and I got in and was like, oh, shit, what have I done? Cause I had this great team and had been working on it for four years and it was no stress for me at that point. I really loved what I did. I was just ready for a change and a new challenge. And so that was what my first week felt like. It's gotten a lot better since then, but so one of the studies that Liz and Molly cited in that article was this bamboo HR survey of more than a thousand employees, employed US workers. And they found that 31% of respondents left a job within the first six months and of those 68% left within three months. And I have had a job like that in the past long before I joined Red Hat where I left within three months. And so I could relate to this. And of that, 17% said a friendly smile or helpful coworker would have made all the difference. And I just thought that was really fascinating and that resonated with me also because I liked that other job I had had enough. It was okay, but three months was all I had because it wasn't a friendly environment. There were a couple of nice people there, but as a overall it was an unfriendly, unwelcoming environment and I didn't stay. So they also wanted clear guidelines about what the responsibilities were and more effective training, but a friendly smile or helpful coworker would have made all the difference. I was talking to a friend of mine about this actually and she said this really resonated with her because she had had a new person on her team a couple of years ago and she was supposed to be training this woman. And so she said, I trained her like I would have wanted to be trained and treated and they're very different in how they work though. And so my friend said, you know, I just kind of gave her all the stuff and then got out of her way so she could do it the way she wanted. Well later, my friend found out through her manager that the person actually thought that she was unfriendly and unwelcoming and didn't like her because she just handed her everything and stepped back. And the manager didn't tell her that at the time. Instead, the manager went to my friend and said, hey, I think that maybe if you could do some more one-on-ones and like have coffee with her once or twice a week and check in that might help. And so, you know, my friend did that kind of stuff. And later she found out that the new person's feeling about the role in her had completely changed. And it was, you know, just having a little bit more of outreach, you know, and a safety net. And like I said, I've been very lucky on my new team. They continue to do that. They're all doing it a little differently. In fact, the other day, one of them reached out on Slack and said, hey, do you know about this ball of lobby? And I said, absolutely. Unless I'm supposed to be in it right now and then I don't because like, you know, and so he sent me the link. I was supposed to be in a meeting at that moment. I didn't know a video chat, you know, and that was, he covered my back. I didn't know. And he was looking out for me and reached out because he, you know, I think I'm on a highly functional team. It's only been three weeks, but that's my feeling. So in short, employees coming into a new organization want two things. The opportunity to do their best work and a sense of personal connection with their teammates. And this is something I've been thinking a lot about too with new people who joined Red Hat. When I see they walk around with their new badge on that says I'm new here. I tried to say, hey, welcome to Red Hat. You know, how's it going? Or say it in the cat, I'll invite somebody to sit at the table with me. I have realized that one thing I do at my company is I will be very distracted walking around the hallways, thinking about stuff and I won't make eye contact with people or even say hi and I'm trying to catch myself and do that more. And that's just a thing that we don't think about. And I see it all the time. It's not just me. I mean, people, you know, are just looking at phones walking around in the hallways and we've just really moved away from this eye contact where humans, we work together. It's just, I don't know. I've been doing it long enough now that I'm just now noticing and trying to go back to my roots where I used to think it was weird when everyone was staring at their phones. It's weird. We kind of need to move away from it. So, this is the other quote that really stood out. Being a woman in tech, I don't notice this so much anymore. I don't feel like quite, I don't notice that we're in a minority as much anymore because I've been doing this so long. But anyone who's from a marginalized community, a different group, this is even worse for them. You know, I mean, I don't, yeah, there are a few other women on my team now. I've been on other teams where I was the only woman. I don't notice it so much anymore. But if you're new to the community, of course, you're gonna feel different, or if you're from any of marginalized groups. Because then you're not thinking, do I belong, but does my group belong? And so I do try to make more of an effort, particularly with women who join our company. Those are the ones I'm most likely, or at conferences even, I will reach out to, if I see a woman standing alone, I'm more likely to go up and be like, hey, how's it going? Have you been to scale before? I'll take a, I start talking fast when I get excited, so I'll take a breather. Is this a first scale for anyone? Ah, look, okay. Nice. I came on my first scale, I think it was 5x. And I'd never spoken at an event before, and after someone's talk, I went up and talked to her about it and said, oh, I could never talk at a conference. I'd be too scared. And a year later at scale, I think it was 6x. I gave my very first conference talk. So I love this event and welcome to all you first timers. Talk to me afterwards if you want a friendly face to give you any pro scale tips. But basically I think this is one of the friendliest most welcoming events you'll ever find. So I hope you enjoy it. Okay, thank you for that commercial break. Back. Okay, so these are three concrete takeaways from this point of mine, because she also told me I should throw out concrete examples to help people. Thank you, Galpal, for this. Inviting a colleague for a weekly quick one-on-one or a quick coffee. Quick Slack chat, you know. Quick email, quick phone call if you're into the phone thing or whatever. Luckily my colleagues are doing this. It's a great time for me to go and just catch my breath, ask a few questions. Because you forget, I'm totally reminded of this now. I don't even know who to ask the questions. Because they probably send it to me in documentation somewhere, but I got so much documentation. I can't even read it all yet, you know. And so just having that brief moment where you can ask somebody a safe person on your team a few questions has made a huge difference for me. Provide positive reinforcement and feedback on performance. This is so important when someone's getting started. I forgot about this too until now I'm the new person and I feel like I'm doing everything wrong or I'm not doing anything. And I had a couple people the other day say this thing that you are doing, it was actually a Trello board that is very beautiful now if you ask me with color coding and the calendar view. But they actually liked it too and they told me and that was very exciting for me that I was like, yes, second week on the job I did something that people like, that's good. And then pinging them, like I said, however you like to communicate or they like to communicate. And just check in, how's it going? How's your, you know, any frustrations I can help you with and that sort of thing. All right, number two of the three points I'm allowed to make. The open source community is a collection of individuals. We forget that. People talk about the community all the time. It's a bunch of people. It's a bunch of just totally different people from all over the world who like different things, different backgrounds, different experiences, different tech levels, different operating systems, different hardware, software preferences, the whole nine yards. So I sent this question out on Twitter and asked the open source community slash communities things that they would like. And here's, I'll share some of the responses and I didn't leave people's names in on the responses because I didn't check with them. And when I was less experienced in this field I would just throw everybody's name out on slides. I don't do that now without specifically asking usually. And so I'll tell you some quotes without saying who sent it in. But appreciate everyone is different and treat them as such. And when authors of the book lives in Mali of no hard feelings when they first started collaborating on the book, they started having a lot of conflict right away between the two of them and realizing that they were having miscommunications and they actually have a nice illustration in the book that shows it. And so they talked about their, they got together and they talked about their work styles and they found out that one of them is a morning person and does their best work around 8 a.m. And the other one is an evening person and prefers to work at night. One of them likes email best. One of them hates email and wants to do things via chat. One of them drinks tea, one drinks coffee. And so on. And so just knowing how they work and they work differently after that they were able to meet kind of in the middle and come up with some agreed ways of working. And I found this in my past with teams. It's the same thing. I had a team that really liked working on Slack. I told them, I was finding it very disruptive. Nothing was so urgent. We actually worked together in an office and I was like, you could have rolled over here if it was urgent. Otherwise, it's equivalent of that on Slack for me. It's like you rolled your chair over and if you wouldn't do that in person then don't interrupt me when I'm also trying to work. That's how it felt. And so it was just a different work style and we figured it out on our team. And then here's another one. The open office thing needs to go and so does fragrance, perfume and cologne. So you as individuals can't get rid of your open office, right? Or whether people are wearing perfume or cologne or whatever. But you as individuals can share the pain with your colleagues and try to make it better for everyone. For example, there was this person on my team at opensource.com who could not stand to hear gum chewed or cracked. And that person also accidentally gave everyone on the team silly petty as a gift one time not realizing that everybody would use it and crack it all the time. And it was really driving this person crazy. And so the rest of the team was like, okay, we like her and she's raving lunatic every time we chew gum. So when she wasn't in, they would all chew gum and enjoy it and bust out their silly petty. But when she was in the office, they'd put the silly petty away. So anyway, I visited them the other day. Now that I'm off the team, they're all chewing gum and they're enjoying the silly petty again because that person was me. I went up to visit them in their office and when I was chewing gum and I was like, oh, the gum's back. And she's like, yeah, silly petty's back now too. You're gone. But the point being, they were awesome and that's why I could last on that team for four years because they understood that I could not control whether or not they drove me insane with their gum chewing when I was in the office. But if they wanted me to be in the office with them, they could control whether or not they were chewing gum while I was right there. And they were really cool about it and it became a running joke instead of a hostile work environment and love me some open source.com people. And then someone else said more remote friendly culture and companies. So you can't make your company become remote friendly probably. But if you can, you wanna keep that in mind because I think this is also an inclusion issue. As a single mother when my child was younger and or another time when I had some issues going on with my family, I worked for companies that weren't necessarily remote friendly but I was fortunate enough that I was able to go to my managers and say, I'm at the point now where I have to job hunt or you have to let me work at home some more because I'm torn here and in the past I had managers at companies that were able to give me remote friendly situations for a while or if you were influential in your company, maybe you can come up with some kind of a compromise. For example, opensource.com when I was on that team, the team was all located in Raleigh at the time but we had Wednesdays where we could work from home and that was our time to work from home and then we would have our in-person meetings the other days of the week. Over the years the team, I have a problem with the open office situation and it's very hard for me to concentrate often and so we became more flexible as a team and we found that the whole team functioned well that way because people didn't have to take PTO, they could work from home if their nanny situation fell through and still get work done. So if you're influential in your company you might still be able to work your team in this direction or your project or your organization. Okay, number three, because I'm allowed three, this is a big one for me and this is not something earlier in my career, people don't like to talk about money, they're uncomfortable talking about money and not everyone's allowed to talk about money so the compensation conversation, if you are in a contract and you're not allowed to talk about money or whatever, I'm not telling you to break your contract here so don't sue me. That's not what I'm trying to do but if you're not in that situation and it's just frowned upon or whatever, there are ways to taxily talk about compensation without disclosing what you make. There are ways to, and I'm not saying you shouldn't disclose what you make, sometimes it's appropriate with your close confidants or whatever and when I was younger and earlier in my career people weren't giving me advice on the compensation talk and for women it can be very challenging to have this conversation. I'm not gonna cite all of the studies because it was part of my two week talk plan that I had but there are lots of studies that show women are actually penalized for negotiating whereas men will just get the additional salary and so we need to be having more compensation talks. If our companies are not gonna be transparent about compensation which I wish they would be, there are ways that we can work around it as a group and help each other. So for example, I'd say within the past five years or so I've been able to have more of these compensation talks with women in particular just because I tend to mentor women more and without talking about my specific salary I will talk about how do you find out what salary you should be making and I will work with people on years of experience, what is it that you're doing at your company where are you located, what is the company of your size pay, what are they saying on the websites like Glassdoor and whatever, what are other people sharing about that and then also salary negotiation techniques. So also if you're a part of a marginalized group for example in the company you want to be able to reach out and for example I wanna ask other women but you also wanna ask the larger, the group that's in power, members of that group, what's working for you? How are you negotiating salary? What do you think this company is doing salary wise? Do you know, is there a different group I should be in if I want to be at this X point in my career within five years? Should I be looking at a different team? And this is the kind of networking we as individuals could be doing to help with the salary and the compensation discussion. Does that make sense? It's a hard topic to talk about but I think it's important for us as a group. So now I said I was only allowed three, these aren't mine now. Now I'm gonna go into what the people on the Twitter's were saying when I reached out twice to ask people and I pulled a couple of big themes out of these two these two final points. So this was the hours of labor discussion that I think was part of my original proposal. I really like this one. I'm also pretty much convinced that overworked people in tech are why we have some utterly stupid things. Leaving work and getting over perspective is very clearly needed. And this is a nice progression in this thread. Stop the belief that 70 hour work weeks are productive. Eliminate the expectations spoken or otherwise of working more than 40 hours. And this is the one I really like, 25 hour work weeks. I thought that was a nice progression and this was I think the last one I got and I was like, okay, we've had it with 70 hours. We're ready for 25 hour work weeks. This is one thing I found with my new team and I'm still trying to navigate this. My other team, opensource.com when I was there originally and in my past in tech publishing, I worked nights and weekends. I worked all the holidays in tech publishing. I worked when I was sick in tech publishing because I worked on print and a magazine had to go to the printer regardless. I worked through grief. I missed a funeral once and I think that's a horrible way to live now. I mean, I can't believe I missed this funeral years ago and had to go to a conference instead. I should have gone to the funeral. And so this is the thing now that I'm thinking about differently. I'm on this team now doing a lot. They're all working nights, weekends, some of them. I don't know how everybody manages their hours. And now I'm trying to figure out how am I going to work on this team? And I spend some time thinking about it because I have so much I wanna do. I'm so excited about this new role. There's so much stuff I wanna do and there's not enough hours in the day. But I've learned now that I do stupid stuff if I'm tired. And so I just have to shut it down. I mean, I need to be done. I start having back issues. I start getting sick a lot. And I make horrible mistakes and my mistakes because I work helping to run a blog. They can be public. They can end up allowing stuff to get published. This is bad and people can be affected by it. And it can look bad on my whole team and my organization and my company. And so it's in everybody's best interest if I don't work 60-hour work week. And so that's the place I'm coming from now in my new position. I would like to work all the hours and get caught up and get stuff done. But it'll be bad. And so I'm trying to balance that right now. Stop being slaves to notifications and expecting immediate responses. This is the Slack battle, the messages on your phone. My watch just didn't update and it's buzzing all the time now. I always turn those off and now my watch keeps buzzing at me and I have to remember how to go turn it off again. I, as the years go on, I am turning off more and more notifications. I actually got off Facebook last June. I just left it. I took Twitter off of my phone now so you'll see that I don't tweet as much anymore. I'm really, I have pen pals now. Ben is one of my pen pals. I have pen pals. I write letters now. And so I'm having these fewer conversations that are just more thoughtful for me now and I'm just having to shut down these notifications. Slack, I don't have those come to my phone usually. I have it on a different screen when I'm working because for me it's this constant noise. And again, it's a quality versus quantity of work. Do you want me to get stuff done or do you want me to answer all of these questions that could have waited? It could have been in our weekly meeting. It could have been an email or you could have Googled it. I don't know. Yeah, the notification thing. So this is the other thing I was seeing. This is not just me. Other people are seeing it. There are articles, there are books. I could write a whole dissertation on the notification thing too. Oh, and that reminds me. So last night I was practicing this. I went out to dinner and I was having a quick bite by myself and I thought, okay, I'm gonna sit here and try to decompress and I won't use my phone and check my phone, I'm just gonna sit here. And then I realized I was making that couple at the table next to me really uncomfortable because they were like, who's this psychopath sitting quietly next to us while we're talking? And I was totally listening to their conversation also, I will say. And so I got on my phone and messaged my friends. So I have to pretend like I'm doing stuff on my phone now because I'm making the couple next to me uncomfortable because we are this culture now that people don't sit alone quietly anymore. So that was a side note. Okay, unions, so this is the thing, I actually am starting to see this happen at tech companies. I think that we might be heading in this direction sooner rather than later. I don't know what that means, I'm not a union expert but I could see that happening. I'm kind of surprised it didn't happen 10 years ago now that I think about it but this is my prediction if you wanna take away for somebody who just said I know nothing about unions really, I think this is gonna happen sooner rather than later in our industry, you can quote me on that. And change how we measure success. This is another thing I started seeing in the responses I got on Twitter. Many people care about people more than they care about software and make all managers focused on an evaluated first and foremost on the health and success of their reports rather than their project success or as my reports, they mean people who report to them, not their actual reports. And then this is my favorite and this is how I will end this talk, for leadership to treat employees as people not numbers, we have bugs occasionally too. And I really like that. So I do recommend that book, No Hard Feelings. And thank you, there I am on Twitter. So here's a Q and A because I am a fast talker and I give us a lot of time like I do. Any questions? Okay, great question. How did I address the gum and silly petty? I did it with humor, and my team knew me well and have fit, yeah, I did it with humor. One of the women on the team was a gum cracker and she did it, because when she was intense, it helped her when she was concentrating. And so I got that, but I just said, I'm direct, I'm the person who if anyone on the team was having conflict or struggle with anybody, they would come to me and I would go ahead and have the hard conversation. I'm just used to doing that. And so I went up to her and I was like, I don't mean to be difficult and I can tell you're enjoying your gum, but it's driving me crazy. I can't, I'm just sensitive to it. I can't stand it. So can you try not to crack your gum at work? And she was like, oh yeah, sure, sorry. And then a couple weeks later, I heard her cracking again. And I was, I messaged and I was like, sorry to ask you again, but you're cracking your gum and she's like, oh sorry. And then another time, so right after that, I heard her crack her gum a week or two later and I turned around and she goes, sorry. Guess she couldn't help it. And so we just, we liked each other and so we were able to have these conversations and the silly putty thing. They're like, what did you expect? And I was like, well, when I gave you all silly putty, I thought you'd go home and on Sundays when you're reading the paper, you would use it in the comics because that's what we did when I was a kid and now as a thought occurs to me, you probably don't get the paper anymore because who does that? And so it was just a bad idea, right. But it was a bad idea, I didn't think about it. I was really picturing people using it on comics I think and so they put it up, one of them he handed it to me and was like, just take it, I'm gonna crack it if you let me keep it and so. Yep, I can't really think of any, or maybe it's, I can't think of any on teams that I stayed on very long. The question was, have I had anybody be resistant? And I think at that point you do have to. I did have, I will say I did have an incident with somebody at the company where I approached the ask while I was frustrated and this was not on the gum thing, this was something else and in hindsight, I shouldn't have even been the one to have that conversation. It was a different thing going on and I should have had somebody else have the conversation and I ended up doing that. So I think there's a different, the gum situation at small scale enough that I could have it, there are other larger things where you go to a manager or an HR person or something. Does that answer your question? Okay, yes, yes. Right. Okay, good question. I'll repeat it, although you do speak clearly so maybe everyone heard but how do you deal with the overwork, the working nights or weekends of 60 hours? If you're in a culture or a team that is resistant to working the few hours or if the expectation is you're gonna put in 60 hours and I don't have a clear answer for that because even I'm struggling now on my current team because there is so much work that we need to do and want to do and we're all excited to do and preferably we'll have it done by May because that's Red Hat Summit and we'd really like to be in good shape rolling into Red Hat Summit and so I'm still struggling with that too but I'm already having a conversation with teammates that this is gonna be a problem for me and it's not that I'm not a team player and I don't wanna get the stuff done but I do know that I start to shut down and I can't think clearly and I make bad calls after a certain amount of time. So for me, I'm having the conversations now with teammates and I am trying to adapt where I'm finding a balance for myself in prioritizing and then I will also have the conversation with teammates. What are the priorities? What are the things that absolutely have to get done versus what is it that we wanna get done and try to find that sweet spot? So does that answer your question? I mean, it's complicated and it's hard and I don't think it works the same for everybody in every organization and every team. Right, right. Okay, well, so and that's another thing I'm dealing with on my team is and for me, I think it's gonna be a slow amount of training other people because I had somebody who sent me something the other day and said if I have it in on Friday night, can it publish Monday? And I'm like, well, that's zero work days in between so, because I'm not working Saturday and Sunday because you're sending in something at the end of the day or we had somebody who sent something in February 26th and was like, I need this to publish for the end of the month and I was like, well, then you should have sent it in before the end of the month, right? So that's, I'm just, I'm trying to slowly train people and politely reaching back and saying, great, I'm super excited to get this, excited to work with you. Let's talk about how I can get it in sooner next time. I can do a little of this extra stuff now but long-term it's not gonna work for me to drop everything to help everybody all the time. So the question is, how do you make clear what people are expecting of you so that you know what you're supposed to be delivering? Is that what you're saying? Okay, right, that's a great question. So how do you know what's expected so that and what is doing it wrong look like? And I am lucky also because on my team right now, the team is kind of shifting around and we actually had a really long call this week and I think it was the second one that the team as a whole had recently where we're breaking out what the roles and responsibilities are for every person on the team. That's usually helpful for me because in the past, I was on the team where I was never quite clear. Everybody thought I was supposed to be doing a different thing and it's hard to look successful if nobody's clear on what you're supposed to be doing. And so my team were trying to really define who's responsible for what and part of that is not just so that you know who's responsible for it but so it's the streamlined work. We all need this thing done but we all shouldn't be working on this one thing. And so let's be clear who owns this thing and that way they're in charge of it. So for me now, it's content. It's what does a blog post look like? And there's gonna be crossover with other people on the team and so as far as the feedback goes on what I'm doing wrong, I don't know, I mean in our industry, I mean one of the modders is what is it, what is it, go fast and break things or whatever, it's horrible, whatever it is, you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, so yeah and it's not really what we wanna do but we're all moving it so fast, things are gonna go wrong and I think it's a matter of feedback. I don't think I answered this very well at all but yeah, I think that on our team, we're having, we have a lot of meetings. I'm only organizing one and I've been very clear it's 30 minutes max and most of it's in notes and agenda and that's our opportunity to be very clear on expectations for the week and who is delivering what and when and so I think the meeting thing helps too. So I don't think I answered that well at all, sorry. But okay, any other questions? Yes, okay, that's a good question. He was asking about you have all men on your team and you're thinking that you need diversity on your team and that's right, yeah, that's complicated. I've written about it and talked about it for a really long time. It's a huge issue and there are many approaches to it. I think you need to ask yourself, why do you feel this way? Why don't you have women on your team? You probably are hiring people just like yourself and so you need to think about that. You need to think about how you're doing recruiting and for example, I mean, you need to look at what does your ad look like if you're putting out classified or whatever they're called online now, one ads, what do they call them now? Job posting, hey, I'm dating myself all over the place here. A job posting, yeah, you need to look at the wording of that because the wording of that, I've given talks on this in the past, it excludes people when you talk about, I need a rock star, we've got beer in the kitchen and ping pong tables, that's gonna attract a certain kind of person and so you need to be thinking about how you're wording that kind of stuff and then why do you want more diversity on your team? You need to be mindful of that. Well, you want it because you'll have a better team. There are stats that show that, you'll have a better product and so I think if you approach it like that as opposed to we don't have a woman and we need a woman, there are qualified women out there and so you need to think about how are we making sure that we are getting the best pool of candidates when we go and look, ultimately you should hire the right person for your team but if you're not having qualified women apply on your team, you're not doing a good job at recruiting. No offense, it's a problem everybody has or my own company struggles with it. Do I think it's improving? I think we're more aware that there's a problem and making more effort. I can't say for sure that it's improving. I'm mad about it all the time to be honest. I think if we were all that smart this wouldn't be such a big problem right now. We think we're the smartest people in all the industries and we should be doing a better job of recruiting. I'm seeing some progress. It's not where it should be. Did that answer? Yeah, I don't know. I haven't seen the data that convinces me that it's really better and it's certainly not better at the pace that it should be. I'm very happy with a lot of the outreach efforts. I don't know, I could talk about this for days. I'll just get madder and madder though and so that's why I don't give these talks. I'm mad about it but it should be better. Right, and even my own company, I mean it's good to have get evaluated. She was talking about other companies should come in and objectively evaluate what your efforts are and that sort of thing. Well, I don't know. It's complicated. I mean, I'm tired of talking about it to be honest. I mean, I'm not saying that to you personally but after 20 some years of it, you know, it's just, there's not a pipeline problem. And my own company, we're making efforts. I love my company. I've been there five years. I plan on being there for a long time but I even have frustrations with my own company on how we do outreach or how we are showcasing the women that are already in. And I see a lot of effort. In many cases though, also I see, okay, I guess I think, oh, this is getting off. I shouldn't have got started on this. Okay, I think men could be making more of an effort. I think that women end up having to make a lot of the effort. I have had, okay, thank you. I appreciate when my male colleagues message me privately to say I'm an ally and support you. Not really though. I mean, you should have said that publicly and you should have been an ally by you being out there. Why do I have to go and complain to my company? It's the people who are not actually in power are having to drive this and it's very frustrating. Okay, I should stop now. Thanks. So yeah. Don't get me started on that topic or I will just talk about it for days. Right. Men could be sharing salary information. I've had conversations with men that are very frustrating. I've had male managers call themselves allies that then say they don't feel like they should have to hire someone who might be pregnant. Just these little comments that happen all the time. It's the paper cut thing, a thousand cuts or whatever. Sorry, I can't stop. Don't get me started on this. All right, this has been. Well, I guess I think that's a conversation you have to have with that person. Because they might not, not everyone's gonna want that all the time. Either maybe they are more of an introvert or they don't want the hand holding or they don't want to feel like they're being micromanaged and that sort of thing. And so that might be a conversation where you have it with a person. Is this still useful for you? I know at some point that this might not work for you. Maybe you wanna meet with other people. So anytime this isn't useful for you or you wanna do this differently, let me know if you just wanna do email check-ins or you don't need check-ins anymore, we can move that way. So, yes. Okay, the question was, what do I think about companies that use certain tools to trigger employees providing positive feedback to teammates and that sort of thing? I don't think about it because I hadn't heard of that before. So I had no opinion on it. I didn't know that was a thing. So I don't know. Yeah, it would be interesting to see how that works. Yep. Okay, that's a good point. We actually have that at Red Hat too and I hadn't thought of it that way. It's Red Hat Rewards. And so I think it's quarterly and occasionally we'll get a little reminder and it's a dollar amount that you can reward people or you can just send a little note, whatever. I think that's a great system. And if so, if it's something like that, you're talking about we often forget to use it, which is too bad. That's just money you're leaving out and you're not giving to your colleagues. No, I really appreciate when I get those and I use those pretty often to send to people to thank them for certain things they've done. So I like that kind of a system quite a bit. It's like a bonus, but the colleagues get to control, which I think is cool. Yeah. Was there another question? Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Okay, thank you. That's a great question. She was asking about, I mentioned unions is a thing that somebody mentioned on Twitter that that's the thing they'd like to see in the industry and I've heard some talk about that. But I did say I don't really know about it. I don't really understand about how unions work because I've only been in this industry and I was in publishing before and growing up. I think my stepfather was in a union, but I didn't really know about it. So I don't know what it would look like. I'm really interested to see if we go in that direction because it seems like a logical next step in our industry. So I don't know yet, but I would like to learn more about it. And I hadn't thought about it until I saw that tweet from someone. So that's a great question. I don't have an answer for it yet though. Thank you. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you're talking about, I mean, we would have to redefine what unions look like, you know, and I don't know. Yeah, American Union. So thank you for that. Yes, right. Yeah, I don't know. I just think it's interesting and I'm curious to see what direction it goes in. This industry's full of so many smart, innovative people. You know that I could see unions being redefined and I don't know, we'll see. Okay, any other questions? Yes, one more? No, but I would like to see an example of that. I don't know. Yeah, so yeah, the question was, do I think there are situations where inclusivity could hurt companies? I can't think of what that would look like. I would be curious to hear that argument or see a real example. I think it can be used as an excuse often. I mean, I've seen it as an excuse so we can't find women to do blah, blah, blah, and I'm like, okay, it's hard because, I mean, right. I don't think he's in here now. Brinn and Greg just popped in a minute ago. He's speaking here and he and I were co-chairs of the Lisa, Youth Mix Lisa conference last year and I've been on other, a lot of talk committees before in the past and I know it can be challenging to get women, for example, to submit talks and come speak, but it's not impossible. There's a lot of outreach involved and it takes more effort and there are reasons why I find that it's worth it and the quality of the content tends to be better when you have more diverse perspectives and plus it's more interesting. Who wants to see the same people speaking all the time? So yeah, all right, one more and then I think we're about out of time, no more. Thank you, you all have been great. Thank you so much, appreciate it. Thank you, Ricky. Thank you everybody for joining us on the mentoring track. A segue to the next talk is on salary negotiations at three o'clock, something that our speaker here makes, if you would like to hear more about that, come back at three o'clock. Hi everybody, we'll get started pretty soon. So if you haven't already done so, take a moment to say hi to maybe the people sitting around you and meet some new people. So who's new to scale and who's been here a long time? We got some veterans. You can tell by the different color t-shirts what era of people came. More seats right up here up front if you don't mind being in the front. We have all the... In one repo, but the reason we do that is because one is updated... Yeah, it makes sense. Your names are easy, Cori Quinn and Sonia Gusta. Indeed. You don't even need to worry about introducing us if you don't want to. You don't even need to introduce us. Actually, yeah, you don't. We will introduce ourselves as quick during our talk. Okay, so we have some more people coming in. Can you make room if possible? If you're using a bag... putting a bag on a chair or something makes space for people to come in. Thank you. Yeah, okay. That could be entertaining. Is that you, Noah? That's why I'm making the whole of the line of shower camps. Yeah, that's totally fine. You can take a shot of Sheila. Yeah, yeah. I was not trying to get you to talk to me. Oh, not at all. I didn't feel like that. I didn't have to worry any more. I don't have any. Yeah, right? You're just... No one but Dad bought a father's figure. I can maintain it somehow. Come in, come in, come in. Plenty of room. Just a heads-up warning. There is going to be some salty language. So if that is bothering anyone, there's no judgment. There are plenty of other excellent talks as well, but it's too late to change it now. Also in the logistical housekeeping bit, the first three rows may get wet. This is a splash warning. Sonya spits when she talks, and I pee myself violently and uncontrollably when I'm nervous. Always. It's an old speaker trick, as it turns out. When you have one with... with presenters and one doesn't, you duplicate the title with a slight change of words without freaking out the audience. It also turns out when you're plugging it in, it doesn't mirror the first. You don't have what you're about to say on the screen. It's like, wow, they read their slides excellently, and yes, we do, but the trick is making it look like we're not. All smoke and mirrors. And bullshit, mostly bullshit. Please, we use keynote. We're civilized. I use PowerPoint when I'm trying to sell something to Enterprise. It's not Enterprise with less than eight paragraphs on a single slide. Who's here at scale for the first time? Okay. Who's here for the first time? It's a poll, honestly. Who here writes code or types on a keyboard or whatnot for a living? Good, good, good. We already know what you do, Brian. It's fine. You pretend to work and take credit for other people. It's good. Who here manages people? Who here wants to manage people? Who here never wants to manage people? Who couldn't manage pouring water out of a boot with instructions written on the heel? Oh. Who here has never heard of either of us before today? We're very sorry. Crap, they're here for content. Yeah. In seriousness, who's here because they care about the subject of the talk? Okay, good. Who's here because they just saw my name or her name and thought, this is going to be good regardless of what it is? Cool, so at some point I can just wind up showing up and giving a talk where I do nothing and read some company's S1 or something and you'd be okay with that? Cool. Please, I'm stealing credit. You can have a microphone. It's fine. Is it on? Is it on? I think it's fun that you have a microphone. Oh my God. It is on, I think. Test, test, one, two. Docker is unpleasant. Docker is unpleasant. Oh, good. Oh, good. There are children here. Yes. Perfect. That's how I raised my daughter. The only thing that I would not want my daughter to see in a situation would be if there was anything violated to go to conduct and we are absolutely not doing that. I think so. All right, the clock says three o'clock which means it's time for us to start talking and not stop for breath for until at least an hour from now. Thank you all for coming. The last group comes in. Could you shut the door for hall noise behind you or just, I don't know, get a librarian to violently shush someone. That would be awesome. So, show of hands here. Who here knows how much money your coworkers make? Who here tells your coworkers how much money you make? Okay, we're coworkers. How much money do you make? I make $50,000, Cory. I make $50,000, Cory. Cool. I make $60,000. Now, people think that somehow the next move here is she's going to be upset and angry with me for that. And that's not really how it works. If anything, she should be angry at the company in that situation. It's going to get tricky. We're going to try. So, we're focusing on changing jobs in this talk. There are generally two paths to making more money. You could either get a raise or you can change jobs. This talk is focusing on the latter. Sorry, hiring managers. We're looting your teams. So, can you get a 20% raise for your existing job? Only if you take hostages. Companies aren't going to give large raises to existing employees. There's simply no incentive for them to do just saying in case you need any representation in the future. So, you know, you can say it's confidential. I can't disclose that. Whatever your answer might be. Once you've said that, though, just stop talking. Don't keep filling in the spaces with silence. So, there's something that I read recently that people who are marginalized by racism and or sexism have a compulsion to fill silences because we feel uncomfortable, because we feel like something needs to be said in that space. If you fit that demographic, don't succumb to that compulsion. Just stay quiet. You've given your reason. You don't need to justify it or explain it any further. So, if an offer arrives on the phone, thank them and ask them if you can get back to them in a day or two. If it's via email, keep it to email as long as you can and be thoughtful in writing. Do not under any circumstances accept the offer on the spot. Never, ever, ever, ever. Always, always, always, always keep them waiting for a little bit. Credit where due. I've done it. I think a lot of us have, and it's a, none of this is if you've ever done this, you have failed. Yeah, I screwed up. I won't do it next time. Don't beat yourself up. This resonates with you, but remember for next time. So, let's say that offer is perfect. Great. Awesome. I like the phrasing of that's an interesting number, and then it sets you up to ask for more. It's it's not just about this year's salary. It's what raises tend to get based on. They're never going to give you the top of their range when they give you an offer, even when they tell you they're giving you the top of their range. But, well, that's the top of the salary van, so we can't really go any higher. Now that we're done talking about shit that doesn't matter, let's go back to our negotiation. That's the best kind of problem. Yours. Yeah. So, is the offer actually perfect? If you're not embarrassed by the number, it's not. And as a person marginalized by sexism and or racism, it can be hard to navigate the line between arrogance and confidence, particularly for women. There have been studies that show that when women negotiate, we tend to be perceived as as arrogant with more derogatory terminology attached to that. And one of the ways to avoid having to navigate that line or avoid being seen as arrogant is to simply stick to the facts. Know your value, know the market rate for your position. That way, you're not kind of going off on a tangent the way that Cory might go off on a tangent. You're sticking to what you know. You're giving the company that you're negotiating with some concrete evidence for why you're worth what you're asking to be paid. Oh, and ask others in your industry as well. So that's a good way, not only Glassdoor, but ask people that you know, people who are working alongside you, what they're getting paid. Everybody should be more transparent about what they're being paid. The next step is going to depend a lot on who you are. People who are marginalized by racism, by sexism are often penalized for negotiation because it goes against social norms. There have been studies that show that women tend to not negotiate in situations where they know they're going to lose, but men tend to negotiate regardless. Women advocating for others is viewed differently through a societal lens. The mama bear approach tends to wind up being how that maps, and that's something that society is more comfortable with. Yes, this is a societal garbage fire. That's not the point. So if you fall into one of those groups, you absolutely want to spin your own advocacy as advocating on behalf of the company, how it makes things better for them. And for those people at the beginning of this talk, when I asked who here manages people and you raised your hand, great. It's on you to start working on fixing this. Understand that that's what's going on when you're sitting across that table. And fix it. Change the game. That's what we're here for. And for the white dudes who just owned out while Corey was talking just now. There's another tip that anybody can use. Think of yourself as a business or an entrepreneur. Don't think of yourself as me, Sonia Gupta, me, Corey Quinn. Think of yourself as Sonia Gupta Unlimited. Think of yourself as a business or an entrepreneur. Doing that will help you to step outside of your own self, because I think advocating on behalf of yourself is difficult for almost anybody. So if you think of yourself as advocating on behalf of an entrepreneur or a business, it'll become a lot easier for you to spin your positive traits. Another thing that you want to do is detail your accomplishments. Always speak in terms of I. So if you were on a team, which probably most people in engineering are working on engineering teams, don't necessarily talk about the things that your team accomplished. You want to talk about where your individual contributions were to that team. So stress I, not we. Stress your I accomplishments, not your we accomplishments. You know I never noticed this before, but we really do all look alike. Thank you, Brian. So it turns out that when you come back with a counter-offer, the default response is usually not well, okay, if it is, you want to follow that up per month and see what they say. They may have objections. Let's tackle a few of them. Sonia, I'm sorry, we just can't afford more than what we offered you. So another $10,000 a year is going to make or break this company? You're starting me now. You need to stress your own value and the market rate. Again, you have to know your market rate. Don't talk about your own expenses because you need more money to handle child care, sick parent, whatever it is. That is bush league negotiating. It's not relevant to the company and it does not have any bearing on what you're being discussed at that table. It demonstrates a lack of value that is going to make the potential employer nervous. Lifestyle does not factor into this. So another objection might be well, Corey, the VP doesn't make that much. Well, that's terrific. My friend Sonia and I built this talk on salary negotiation that your VP really needs to watch. We're getting back into that Goldfish story again, aren't we? How much other people make is not your concern. It's that kind of problem. Someone else's. Market rate is market rate. Don't deflect from that. Another objection that the company might give you is so, Corey, we're not about the money. We're about the mission. And I have no further questions said the interrupting white dude and yes, interrupt in that moment because at that point you're no longer having a serious conversation because this does not apply. This is a legitimate nonprofit that's a bit of a different story with the counterpoint that there have been studies that show the best way to help a cause you're passionate about is for you to find the thing that you are the best at. Make obscene amounts of money doing it and then donate it. Nonprofits are great at handling money and to solve the problem they're aimed at, they are much less equipped to handle a well-meaning moron showing up with a shovel hoping to dig ditches and be dug half a world away. Money is not the root of all evil but it helps how benefit causes. Go make more of it. So, you listened to our talk, you took all of our advice, you didn't do what you weren't supposed to do, you did everything right, you've gotten the employer to accept your counter offer, your hard work paid off, you're an excellent negotiator. You're almost done. But wait, the offer can be rescinded until it's in writing perfectly honest, it can be rescinded afterwards but it's a lot less likely. Get a signed offer letter by both parties and sleep on it for at least one business day before you go in and give your resignation. Otherwise, you have to walk back a really uncomfortable conversation. So, remember yesterday when I pretended to come in here and quit, what a great bit that was. You carved your resignation letter into the door. It's important when you leave to burn a bridge, be respectful. You never know when you're going to come across someone in the future and it's generally not worth feeling good to completely set your reputation on fire. There is one thing that this is not a negotiator after the offer is passed in. If you are relocating for the company, very often they will pay for it. And there's almost always a clause that if you leave within a year, you have to pay that back. Okay, I have never failed to have that clause amended slightly to say that if I leave voluntarily and the reason behind that is simple. Yeah, you don't want to pay me to relocate then I quit two months later. Yeah, I should probably pay that back. If I show up it's not a fit and you fire me six months later I don't want to surprise you A, or a new place, we don't have much of a network B, you don't have a job anymore and C, here's a bill, that doesn't go well. You also don't want to wind up with a perverse incentive toward the end of that year to financially incentivize them to get rid of you. The only people who are going to not add that are generally terrible companies. It's a giant red flag that you're going to be very glad you wound up seeing before it bites you. In summary... Negotiate every offer. Never name a number first. Know your value. Read every slide out loud. Go forth and conquer. Go forth and conquer. So for further reading you might want to take a picture of this. Some of this is handy. Mike Monteros, fuck you pay me talk while provocatively titled is absolutely worth seeing as is the open guide to equity compensation. That is well worth the time it takes for you to peruse if your compensation involves anything involving the word stock equity trading maybe cryptocurrency but I was a better therapy center for that. Finally Erb Cohen you can negotiate anything how to get what you want is a really phenomenal book not just for salary negotiation for negotiating anything in life he goes through an example of negotiating for a washing machine. Go check that out. There's also FearlessSalaryNegotiation.com is a really great site on this topic. If you talk to Josh from the site tell him that we sent you. And Corey Quinn this has been embarrassingly large numbers salary negotiation for humans. We have roughly 20 minutes left if you have questions we can't guarantee there will be answers but we are thrilled to suffer your slings and arrows. My shirt, oh my shirt is a burning dumpster fire that's labeled US East 1. In seriousness it was a t-shirt drive I did late last year before re-invent it raised $7,000 for kids cancer research and it was awesome to be able to save money for a good cause while kicking Amazon right in the face. It was really the best of all possible worlds. You really could have planted you to ask that. Thank you. I should have thought to plant someone to ask that. Cool. I think that's absolutely legitimate fear what I would say is that companies are probably have been in that position before so if a company has extended you an offer it's very unlikely that later down the road I think it actually reflects positively upon you because they've already extended you an offer so there's a strong likelihood that they would consider that offer in the future as well so I would say that shouldn't work against you personally. In the back. Yes the question is if whoever names the number first loses does this apply to third party recruiters? I used to be one of those so there's a whole back story on that. The short answer is in most cases the third party recruiter is incentivized to get you the best offer that they can and at the beginning of the process being told they wind up trying to figure out if it's worth their time or what not to position you for a particular role historically once you start going to the back door approach of introducing to companies through internal referrals the whole iffy thing becomes moot but by and large I've seen it go both ways there are times it can help you because they do help negotiate but they'll also in time throw you right under the bus because you can't really change the number later once they've bought off on it I'm not saying don't ever use a third party recruiter I am saying you're giving up negotiating flexibility if you do great question the clarifying point for the video was that there are different models for recruiter compensation some are flat rate, some are commission based make sure you know what you're dealing with before you wind up potentially letting someone negotiate against you I think you can actually respond exactly that way a lot of companies that have remote friendly culture take that into account I think most companies that will take into account I'm sorry I forgot to mention the question was like how do you account for when you're working remotely how do you talk back to a company when they're different costs of living in different areas is that a fair assessment of your question the reason that they say no is because that's not a good number for your area I think it's fair to talk about what the market rate is for your area if the company doesn't already know but the vast majority in my experience of companies that are remote friendly and especially companies that are remote first is they'll know that they'll take that into account when making the offer in the first place so I think it's fair to bring up the market rate for your area during the negotiation process just as long as you don't name that number first do you have any words on that? yeah great question well that says great for a San Francisco salary but you live in Duluth not in San Francisco where inexplicably we believe where all the good developers live it winds up being a bit of a nuance discussion so then you can start throwing it back cool what if I commit to relocating to San Francisco in the next X periods does that number still wind up working and you may not ever have to do it but it at least becomes more transparent where they start trying to give you lowball offers past a certain point there is a little bit of validity to paying people less when they're not in top markets the counterpoint is are you effectively generating more or less value based upon your location you have a strong argument against that my zip code of where you're mailing the check to does not have any bearing on what I'm doing for you value wise it almost gives you the cost of living discussions it ends up into almost a lifestyle discussion you don't want to have from the other side so pushing back on that can be tricky I always tend to negotiate in any direction that means I get more money so depending upon how this works I can make a strong argument the other direction and say well I'm about to be leaving San Francisco absolutely pay me a mark of a rate for San Francisco there's a lot of nuance to this and it gets very specific past a certain point it almost becomes situationally dependent yes so the question was talking about bringing counteroffers to your current company and what was the second part of your question what I would say to talking about counteroffers with your current company is proceed with caution obviously you don't want to put yourself in a position where you're absolutely going to jeopardize your current job something like that talk can be really kind of prickly and difficult to have if you're definitely sure you want to leave your current position then maybe it's worth it to have that conversation but if you're still in the fence I'm not sure that I would use that as a threat against my current company I have a slightly less nuanced approach which is holy shit no effectively what you were saying by going back for a counteroffer is yeah I needed in order to get an offer for more money to put on my interviewing pants I had to talk to people I had to go out I had to solve bullshit algorithm problems on a white board for some God forsaken reason I have to then negotiate an offer get everything set this company wants me now I come back and I'm showing it to you in an offer to match and there's no way that ends well you've already to some extent demonstrated disloyalty you've demonstrated that that is what it takes to get more money in this culture and they may even give you whatever you want for a period of time but you are now a target and by the time that they find up that they can backfill you with someone less expensive in your let go because not a culture fit performance reasons they make up ridiculous stories about you like you accidentally super glued the CEO's door shot you know things like that it winds up being a at that point that offer is gone the difference between that and playing off two competing offers is there's no disloyalty there I'm making a career move I'm talking to different companies yes or no is it you or is it going to be you I prefer to work with you but you need to obviously do something that winds up being aligned don't make me feel like a moron for saying yes it's a very different contextual feel because companies for better or worse slip into this idiotic mindset of forgetting that they employ people instead of owning them there's this sense of oh these are my people I own that they're not they never have been but companies don't think that way for whatever reason I would never present a counter offer I would never present a resignation as a unless you wind up paying me more money and I would be very hard-pressed to accept a counter offer because those always come with weird strings great question though exactly and that's why it's so important as a hiring manager to make sure your people are paid fairly it's if you have to make people beg and jump through hoops to get more money great you're going to find that out the hard way when you leave these people yes mm-hmm I'm going to punt to the person with a graduate degree rather than the eighth grade education I think that's the question was how do you if a company is giving a pay bump for college degree and let's say you have 20 years of experience how do you how do you negotiate that how do you negotiate making that an equivalent I think it's fair to just ask so ask the company if they have a policy of giving you a pay of giving pay bump for college degrees and bring up your experience remember that's the value knowing what you bring to the table so bring that up as a counterpoint to this paper but I think it's totally fair to bring that up during that time I'm not sure there shouldn't be a company policy if there is one there shouldn't be one that doesn't count for 20 years of experience but I think it's fair for you to use that as a counterbalance to the four years and this is part of the reason I excel at getting fired I say things like okay so four years of study getting a degree will get me a 10 to 15 percent pay bump or four weeks of interviewing somewhere else gets me 20% when I go somewhere without a policy like that so what are you going to do for me and if everything is negotiable your risk tolerance and willingness to conversationally punch your employer in the face is going to balance a little bit but good enough great question yes some companies if you ask for too high a salary or you're kind of wishy-washy about it and you want more don't show how happy you are about it they will pull the offer and I've seen this happen multiple times so recognize your market position recognize the value of the job there's very few jobs many candidates so be careful about asking for too much or they might pull the job and not consider you for that role I'd also say that if you ask for what you're worth and if you ask for what you're valued at and a company pulls an offer like walk away that's not a place you want to work anyway there's a nuance to this like alright we'd like to offer you $150,000 and you come back with I'd prefer $2 million that's great so would we all that's not going to go super well if they come back with $150,000 and you say I'd prefer $180,000 and they say great never mind you dodged a bullet and frankly I'd be hard pressed to suggest someone should not come back with something like that and if the consequences they pulled the offer good because they're effectively going to be hiring in a way that optimizes for door mats back there right there you put the blue for a what kind of title the question is how do you know the market rate for an emerging title something like site reliability engineering I think that's becoming more popular it's a really good question site reliability engineering as a title is becoming more popular so I think you could probably find that in Glassdoor but I don't know what do you have to say about that that is a great question so the title that I take for my consultancy is cloud economist two words no one can define to no one questions me on it I'm the only one which means the market rate for me in a very emerging title is whatever I goddamn well say it is and that sword cuts both ways in seriousness I would definitely talk to people who have done similar roles these aren't brand new things that have never been done before it's a transition over from something else and if it's a new title part of the reason people know what the title is it winds up meaning a salary bump aim high great question though terrific no the mom bear negotiating tactic when you're spinning it in terms of how it benefits the company so what you're doing is saying the value and the skills that I bring to the company will help the company in this way so rather than talking about like what you've accomplished how great you are this is something that works for white dudes if you're in a marginalized group it's better for you to spin this as a way as what your contributions will be that you bring to the company that will actually help the company to achieve its goals so it's good for you to have done your research in that in that case does that answer your question about what the mama bear approaches um concrete example of the company's goals um I don't know look you want you're trying to hire someone to come in and manage a migration from your on-prem environment to the cloud that is super difficult expensive painful and time consuming and I've done that three times already it's obviously going to benefit the company a lot to have someone with that kind of experience in here now not in six weeks to start working on that that's the approach that generally tends to work around you point specifically to something you have done mapped to a problem the company has the best value you can bring in a crisis situation is the last time we had this problem here's what we did it's you love that experience shine that's why experience is valuable it's also experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted the question was how do you approach it when you're an undergraduate and you don't have much experience I said that you absolutely do have experience so if you've worked any kind of a job it doesn't have to be a job that even necessarily fits with this industry so in my case when I started in this industry I had no experience as a software developer I started as a junior developer I was a lawyer eight years ago with no technical experience whatsoever what I was able to bring to the table was to spend my other qualities right these are all qualities that you're going to be using on the job it's not just about writing code it's about working as a team member so you actually want to spend all the qualities that you have any of the skills that you developed during your undergraduate period are useful these are things that you can bring to the table it doesn't necessarily have to be job experience specifically so it can be things that you learned let's say you worked on a project an undergrad with a team talk about the collaboration and how that went what kind of thing that you specifically brought to your team in undergrad yeah the question is at some point you get out maneuvered and you have to give a number and you're not in a position where you're able to be getting out of it what I have done in the past successfully because again we say a lot I've given numbers I've screwed up everything that we put in this list mostly I will abstain from commenting on the super glue in the CEO's door shot story but at some point you can if you're minded to give a number this is why market rate is important aim for a very starting ballpark number of toward the high end of market rate but you make it clear that the specifics depend on the exact responsibilities of the role how this winds up manifesting and you give yourself room to maneuver later where you can absolutely bust them if they come back and say well at the beginning you said it was X well at the beginning I thought you were a functional company so it's I'm kidding there's no such thing alright we are out of time thank you all for tolerating us thanks everybody there we go it says it's being recorded so I assume they want the mic on great so my name is John Mark Walker I work on the open edX project for edX.org how many of you have heard of edX.org before okay cool how many of you have heard of open edX oh okay we have some distance to cover in this presentation edX.org is a website for and it's a consortium of 130 universities and companies who put their courses online on edX.org we were spun out of Harvard and MT but we also work with I think 130 other institutions around the world so that's edX.org edX.org is the courses that you take online open edX is the open source software that we released some 5 6 years ago that powers edX.org so in the time since we released open edX it's grown a great deal but as I just demonstrated most people don't know what it is which is kind of an example of kind of dissonance I guess in some ways since it's very well it's installed around the world I guess it's very well known in universities not so much outside of universities so that's my intro spiel but before I get into that I want to get into something a bit more basic I want to talk about why learning is important I want to talk about why learning is important in a community context and how I think I as a community person over the years have kind of missed the boat when it comes to educating our community members and investing in their take our communities to another level so first the question is how do we learn very simple basic question how do we learn anyone what copying yes how many of you got your start in technology by picking up a reference book like a q-book like I did I'm probably showing my age there and just like looking at the commands seeing what the commands did that's how we wrote a first program we copied stuff we talked we copied our parents in some cases my two year old copied us a little too well and we started to watch what we say but yes we learned by copying what's another way we learn what yeah play that's a great example can you give a specific example like something that you learn by playing what's that yeah sure absolutely play some people would call that experiential you know something like that you know I find that when we talk about open source communities you know experiential is a big part of it copying is a big part of it and through those two things we end up doing collaboration and through collaborating we learn from each other and this is kind of one of the great powers of open source communities but I would argue that there's a missing piece there for the most part because we don't understand making these more directed we leave them as kind of their ad hoc format and we don't make them we're not prescriptive about how our community learn and how we engage with them but we're on that later but yeah these are all great examples of how we learn I think people avoided saying that because the pains they've experienced but yes yes pain can be a teaching tool I suppose although I got to be very careful when I go down that path but yes so when we think of learning we think of education most of us think of you know take a class you get a degree you find a job and you make money and that's the whole at least in the United States that's how we think of education and learning and so I kind of want to spin that a bit and try not to go down that path and try to think of I guess a more directed approach like what are we getting out of it so we mentioned copying like how do we actually learn drills, repetition, memorization just copying stuff down, experience play, I learned by doing by gradually building expertise by going through things, by collaborating we also learned through mentorship how many of us have had a teacher that we found to be someone that showed us things that we didn't already know the you know the right teacher in the right place can make all the difference in the world and not necessarily a teacher per se but someone in a position of expertise or authority who can kind of help show you the ropes and kind of show you how to get the most out of what you're doing these things are essential especially in open source communities where mentorship is crucial to building the relationships with new people as they come on board and kind of helping them to grow with each other and so that brings us to the next part which is how do we collaborate and why is that important in the open source world we tend to have a very learned arrogance when it comes to collaboration a lot of open source people we think that we invented collaboration but we didn't it existed long before then but we did do a lot of things right when it comes to setting the stage for good collaboration and in a good community that's set up well with a good governance program and the right mentorship good documentation good organization it can help kind of unlock the potential of learning and innovation through collaboration there are some communities that do a really good job of onboarding new members whether they're users just learning for the first time or developers trying to figure out what parts they can actually take part in and participate in some do it better than others we'll put it that way a lot of communities are very good at letting people learn by doing one of the old adages that Linus Torvald would like to talk about was whenever someone showed up and said again the answer from Linus was well what do you want to do it's up to you you set the path it's up to you to make it what you will I recall as a young 20-something just as the open source things were starting to get off the ground that was one of the aspects of open source that I found so empowering was that I didn't have to follow someone else's set path I could make my own path and do what I wanted with whomever at the time what I didn't understand was that there was a whole lot of privilege behind that aspect what I was able to do and so I want to get into a bit later about how building it so that it's there is great but it's not the only answer but having said that having a self-guided and personalized experience in open source communities is one of the most empowering aspects of open source collaboration so what does it have to do with the learning program well one thing as I mentioned communities do a good job of setting the stage for collaboration we set the stage for learning through collaboration but we don't often have a directed approach we're not very prescriptive in how people learn we don't have objectives for people to accomplish things but not often enough I would argue if you look at one great example of this is an open source community if you build it they will come and usually what you mean by that is people who are ambitious self-guided feel like they belong then they can make a lot with the existing community the problem of course is that there's a lot behind that statement self-guided and feel like they belong and then it turns the question into do we make everyone feel welcome do we make everyone feel like they belong and I think you can compare different communities the Linux kernel community is notorious frankly for not setting the stage for being a welcoming community for more people and I think as a result of that you could say that they've suffered a bit because of the influx of new people to really continue the innovation in that community compare that and contrast it with the Python community which has done a much better job of doing the outreach and making things happen on a broader scale bringing in new people mentoring them having these programs and you can tell that in the nature of its community whenever you go to PyCon it's a much different experience from say a Linux event and as I mentioned communities have not been very prescriptive in their approach to collaboration learning with the lack of objectives and goals for their community if you're going to say with this community we want to learn these things how do we actually set these goals and how do we put them into place and how do we meet these objectives and say we want X percentage of people to have learned this much in this amount of time and think about setting that into motion and thinking about the benefits that we get when a broader community is able to execute on these lines really no one's going to yell at me about my comments at the Linux kernel community so piggybacking on that this brings me to the whole diversity inclusion piece which is when you don't have these explicit objectives and you don't have the explicit mentorship and you don't have these programs in place we have no idea who's dropping off and not continuing with the community we have no idea how many people approach a community and then run away because it doesn't seem to be their thing or not their kind of people we have no idea how often that happens but once you have kind of once you take this programmatic approach and you divide learning program you can actually understand who's coming to you what they're doing why they're there you learn so much more about them and through that you're able to tell how effective you are in reaching out to new communities, new people and making them part of your community are they growing with you or not that's all a big part of it so I think in my estimation having a good learning program is essential to creating a good program for diversity and inclusion I would say that if I had to break down the open source motto and a couple of key phrases it's there if you want it it's always there you're more than welcome to have at it go crazy, do what you will we love experiential learning because it's what we do best by learning through collaboration it's how we all get together and do new things but also in the open source world we have all this stuff why aren't you taking advantage of it that's your fault, not mine and so we have a kind of well it's there, it's all there it's there for your taking so why aren't you taking it and I think we haven't done nearly enough of asking the question of well why aren't they and how can we actually get in front of that and build a community that is inclusive, that is welcoming and where people learn together that said we do have a lot to build on we have accomplished a lot and I think this is one way that we can segue into what are some actual tangible things that we can do in this regard so when you think about the different ways we learn and this is by no means an exhaustive list this is not a learning science slide this is just an example of different ways to learn but if you look at kind of rote learning even though it's an essential part of the process it really likes it we're really big on the experiential learning thing we believe very strongly in learning through doing doing new things doing things with other people but when it comes to like mentorship and a mentorship program again as I mentioned before we don't do such a good job at that again some communities are outliers and do a much better job at that than others but we could do more here and let's go into how we could do that and what it would look like if you want to talk about creating a learning program so many of the tools that we use for collaboration are already considered learning tools maybe not per se but they are examples of tools that we use to learn more and to collaborate with other people all the things that are known that are well defined part of the community stack today to IRC and FLAC to discourse and any other tool that you use to exchange information to publish, to read to public yeah sometimes you can even use a learning platform to continue the cause and that's kind of what I'm going to dive into in the second part of this presentation all these things are tools for learning but if you want to establish a guided learning program what's a way that you can kind of cement these things into a more programmatic approach also I think a lot of communities do several online seminars or videos and that sort of thing those are great but what I'm talking about kind of takes that approach and maybe puts a bit more discipline behind it and I'll show you what I mean by that and these can be a combination of self-directed or expert-led you can have good archives of content that people can access and you can also have experts who lead courses or discussions to help new people get more out of it it doesn't have to be either or so when I say a learning platform can be helpful what do I mean by that what is a learning platform and components I think of something that lets me put together a course so I can create courseware it can be text it can be broken out in different modules it can be video it can be audio it can be embedded problems I want to insert into a course so that they're interactive and you can click or write things and see if it actually works out content presentation tools so that when I prepare the course I have a means of actually giving that course to a set of learners so that they can take part User Learner Management Administration so that I know who's taking the course I know what they're doing I can get some background information on them and I can show them kind of how they're doing in the context of a given course assessments and evaluations so that I have a way along the course to determine how much information they're retaining how well are they learning are there things that they consistently hit a snag on are there some bits of the course that a higher number a higher percentage of people don't seem to grasp how can we make the course better all these sorts of things if you are really on the ball you can have but that's not really essential it's nice to have and frankly there are a lot of Silicon Valley companies that want to sell you adaptive learning and they are not so good at it so be careful not that Silicon Valley has ever tried to sell something they couldn't actually do that never happens so why would you do this what are the advantages that you actually get out of creating a program or using a learning platform and it goes back to what I said earlier about being more prescriptive by adopting a learning program by adopting a learning platform you have to start thinking about learning objectives and what you want people to learn and what stage how you want them to proceed as they start participating more in your community what do you want them to do it fosters a deeper connection again lots of communities document archives or video archives but with a course that you are actually laying out and going forward together with a set of students or learners and you are doing it together collaboratively you are going to get a lot of information about them and they are going to get more information about you they are going to learn a lot more about your technology in a more way and you are going to learn a lot more about how new users acclimate themselves to your given technology area or even if it is not a technology whatever it is that you are building a community around you are each going to learn a lot more from each other you have to understand that the more successful they are the more successful you are if you are able to lead more people to complete these courses successfully and they are able to do more you have shown them then they are much more likely to stay in your community to be more active to be more engaged and you have just created the next set of people who just might become next year's mentors because the whole thing is you want to be able to scale out you want this year's learners to be next year's teachers or in some cases the teachers and learners are never really that distinct to begin with but you want people to continue on that path so they can train the next generation of people so what are the disadvantages it is a lot of work however on the plus side chances are you already have a lot of the basic the basic pieces already there if you have a good set of documentation if you have a good set of a good archive of videos and that sort of thing then you already have the building blocks to do this you just need to set it up in sort of a course format how many of you have ever heard the term instructional designer good excellent ok so a year ago just as I was joining edX I did not know what that word meant but I do now in fact we are going to have an instructional design tutorial in San Diego on March 26th so keep your eyes up and so as I alluded to earlier one of the great things you get out learning program is you learn about the learner where they are succeeding you can actually by building a course and by having all these assessments you know what they are succeeding at and what they are not succeeding at you know which pieces of the course they keep referring back to are they doing that because it is particularly useful or are they doing it because it is obtuse and they do not understand it those are the things that you have to ask next but the data you get from leading courses your community can take part in what you get there is invaluable in terms of what you learn about them and what they learn from you you know what kind of people are showing up demographic hotspots or geographic hotspots or the places around the world where they are making the most use of these courses and all this stuff can be gained through other tools but I think that having an online course lets you do this in a more systematic way so when you think of your typical community feedback loop you have okay so as I was saying the typical community feedback loop is people develop stuff they release it people use it maybe they find a bug they find ways to debug and then it goes back into the developer cycle as you lather, rinse, repeat but what I'm talking about here is really augmenting the user aspect of it once you're a user and you're developing these tools to facilitate deeper usage you're going to find out more about how they use it and I guess it's not that complex a concept but I drew a chart anyway it also provides additional motivation as community or as a community manager we've all participated in badge programs or we've created badge programs it's back sorry, thank you we've all created and there's when it comes to applying motivation to your community members if you have a set of certificates that you gain from completing a course this becomes a tangible thing that your community members the learners can take and post wherever they want it becomes sort of a symbol of currency in the community it's something that can be integrated with any kind of badging program that you already use so as a motivational factor there's a big difference between a course that you complete and there's a pile of docs you can read to find what you want one is a whole lot more fun than the other and we've all done the term gamification is way overused but I think it does apply here so now that I've talked about conceptually what I'd like to do let's switch to open edX specifically so we released it five years ago actually almost six years and last May in Montreal we had our five year birthday party we sang a happy birthday to open edX there's probably video online somewhere but we've gone through several actually funny story when edX itself first started in 2012 and we always had the intent of releasing the software as open source but it wasn't until a certain university stepped in and said you're not using your stuff until you open source it that really forced our hand and that's why we released it in June 2013 and not later that university was Stanford so what is open edX? it's a learning platform there are several aspects of it it's a fully featured platform it has all the components I mentioned earlier that are part of a comprehensive learning platform when it comes to content authoring content display it's very easy to integrate with third party things like say a video player or video hosting provider it can scale there are the smallest courses that are on open edX they're the largest multi-million learner MOOCs on open edX there's this great site out of Indonesia that teaches among them teaches things the auto mechanics but also how to raise chickens so you can learn that in open edX but it's very scalable and it's really geared towards whether you're a small class or a large class and right now we have millions of learners this kind of shows you the graphic is faded but it does show you hotspots around the world where open edX is in use I'm not going to read through all of these so what actually is it what does it do so in our lovely architecture graph over here you can see the four basic components there's authoring which is called studio there's administrative function so it's an admin portal there's an infrastructure where you can actually set up the learning content but also where you can manage the users and there's an LMS where you can also integrate with backend database systems that universities often have but there are four basic components you can see in the pie chart pie chart there and you can augment those with a host of other third party tools that are common either in the enterprise training world or in a university context incidentally we are used in equal parts by universities as well as corporate training groups like Microsoft, IBM a lot of startups that sort of thing and in fact if you look at the totality of our reach there are some 45 million plus people using open edX today either through edX.org or all the vast sundry open edX instances around the world I think of those 25 million I think about 16 million or on a platform in China called Xuatang you can see that edX edX is a 5.1c3 organization so a non-profit but from this chart you can see that we are not the only contributors to open edX there are over 50 organizations this is actually dated last year now we are above 55 contributing organizations so all those companies and organizations and universities have contributed code and you can find their stuff in the get commit blog we have a named release in a few months the current one is ironwood which we are just going to release next week and we provide named releases to make it easier for people to use and actually we have a lot of service providers that take open edX and create products based on that and like any open source project it is very extensible you can add a lot of things to it examples of things that have been added to it or are currently being added to it as we speak one is a individual contributor in the community who decided that we weren't doing docker right so he decided to automate the installation process and create like a one click install it is one of the most viable contributions we have had it is pretty nice you can see the URL there the other major initiative we have had over the past years called block store where we are taking our content storage module and we are basically rewriting it to account for a collaborative approach to producing courses so that faculty or instructors that is a great question most of these contributing companies contribute in the form of pull requests either bug fixes or minor enhancements to core features but to your question most of the contributions that come in are to the core code not in the form of modules or plugins that will probably change because we want to make it easier for people to create modules and extensions and right now it is not we are looking to change that in the near future but one of the core pieces that is changing and we are doing this in collaboration with a couple of groups including Harvard and a service provider called open craft we are basically rewriting our storage module so that people will be able to collaborate on courses more easily reuse of content will be easier so you can take pieces of different courses and you can basically remix courses into new courses what we have learned is that through all of our commercial users they desperately want something like this companies compared to universities need like this much more modular content that they can put in a variety of contexts whereas universities still have the traditional weeks long or months long course a company wants to put together a training program where they are going to have people take these courses for a couple of days at a time and they will be able to reuse certain sections of that for other courses and then there is an adaptive learning standard that is being contributed by an unknown university to be released in two weeks this is an example of some of the sites that have been built on open edX Redis Labs they have kind of well they have an interesting reputation among open source circles recently but they have a great site based on open edX so I like to tout them where I can Mongo the same I don't know what it is about databases on open edX but they seem to like them and things and then IBM has a thing called cognitive class.ai where they teach data science and blockchain things at cognitiveclass.ai so I can include the URL on the slides when I hand them out but these are just three examples they are far more in fact I think I don't have the chart last I looked we have 2400 instances and at least 25,000 courses worldwide and that is where the millions of learners come from our annual conference is coming up at the end of this month it is going to be at UC San Diego March 26th through 29th I will have the URL on the last slide so you can see it but it is going to include a lot of great content like an instructional design summit along just dedicated to how you create courses with open edX that is being done in conjunction with Stanford edX as well as TU Delft at Dutch University these are the keynote speakers Candice Till is a very well known learning science researcher Walter Bender how many of you remember one laptop per child? okay one person really I feel old right now anyway he is keynoteing so why would you put together a learning program what are the reasons what are the takeaways from doing this you grow a more diverse community because you are able to see who is joining and who is not you are able to understand how effective your outreach programs are and you are able to use that as a basis to build a more diverse inclusive community you learn from your users and you are able to ascertain where the trouble spots are and what you need to pay attention to going forward you are also able to determine what is working well keep your community engaged and motivated it keeps people coming back they have a deeper engagement with you and the rest of the community and they are more likely to keep going and stay at it there are a lot of times where there is a plateau and they are kind of knowledge and understanding of something and a lot of times it is difficult to get past that plateau but with a learning program you are able to keep people motivated so that they are able to kind of charge through the plateau and keep going and you can turn a learning program into a collaborative open source project in its own right there is no reason why people can't collaborate on course content just like they collaborate on any other documentation project or code project or any other collaborative project make it something that your community can work on together and why open edX well it is something that you know it is something that has been put out by some of the brightest minds in learning science some of the largest universities its full feature it lets you do everything you need to put together a learning program and it has the backing of a strong community of service providers, universities technology companies a lot of different groups are invested in making open edX successful so it has I would say more so than any other learning platform there are other there are a lot of other contributors giving back to this community alright I think that is all I have for today you can see the main website is open.edx.org the conference website is con.openedx.org visit at your heart's content yes sir I think I said that in the first 30 seconds I think you came in after that but there are a lot of you that came in after that so let me reiterate that edX.org is an online learning site it is a consortium of some 130 universities and companies that put courses online on edX.org so it was spun out of MIT and Harvard which are still the main universities backing it open.edx is we took the software that runs edX.org and we released it as an open source project and that is open edX no there is no completely separate the open edX is strictly the software it has nothing to do with the courses that are put on edX.org the universities they use that content they own those courses we don't own those courses we just deliver it to learners on our website that's correct not at all yeah exactly there are some companies that put together for profit training it really depends on what your goals are as an organization I remember you from last year that's right okay does that answer your question? perfect cool oh yeah so it's Python Django and it's yeah very much I think before the DevOps part there's a bunch of other stuff that we use that I don't understand but yeah it's Python Django actually one of our major points of emphasis right now is we need to upgrade to Python 3 and Django 2 and I know it's an interesting project in its own right but we're finding that's a great way to onboard new developers because you know you don't have to know the stack in much depth but if you're a good Python person you can like you can still contribute and so it's a great way to get people more involved do you have a question? I mean edX.org there are a bunch of courses and you can search through them and find the ones you want to take and some of them you have to some of them are free, some of them you have to pay for some of them are free but then you have to pay to get a certificate there are a bunch of different ways and that all depends on what a relationship we have with a particular university yeah we don't just take anyone I mean learners like anyone can sign up for a course but if you want it right but if you want to put a course in edX.org there's a process you have to go through basically we determine how good the content is and then you pay us to put it on the site or you join the consortium the consortium is 130 members strong and I don't know what the criteria are for joining the consortium the content itself is pretty easy it's the metadata that is really difficult like if you want to take like the assessment results the testing, the grade books if you want to migrate that along with the course material that's challenging the course material itself is pretty easy there are export and import tools for all the different major platforms yeah the file formats are not the biggest challenge the biggest challenge is all the associated metadata with all the learners like any data migration there's the usual caveats that apply sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't any other questions or anything else I can answer for you yes that's a really good question I don't know I would say it's probably a small number because when it comes to the consortium that publishes on edX.org they control that content now some of them like say MIT has a really good track record of making all the course materials MIT started open courseware almost 20 years ago so MIT has a good track record of putting course content either in the public domain or under a Creative Commons license but a lot of universities do not but yeah a lot of the courses are free of charge on the site and anyone can sign up and take those courses any other questions so the question is do consortium members make their content available for reuse or just free use free use the majority of them make the content available for free use on the edX.org site but they don't allow it to be reused elsewhere I think there are exceptions to that MIT is an exception in many respects because a lot of the course content can be reused but it depends on the professor and some of the other variables but some of it is so question about the mobile app we have one what would you like to know about it pretty much one of the main limitations of the mobile app is that you can't do offline courses at least not yet we're looking to build that in so if you don't have a network connection you can't take a course so we're looking at ways to get around that so that if you're in countries without reliable networks you could take an offline course by front loading the download of course materials when the network's available but yeah but not yet but yes we have a mobile app it is very featureable I don't know what exactly you can't do on it that you can do with a regular laptop and browser but you can do pretty much everything I want to say everything but you know every time I say that there's always something that I miss anything else thank you now go ahead and start your own learning programs thank you testing 1, 2, 3 is the mic oh yeah it is I'm not going to start just yet but I have a feeling this is the last session of the day this might be a bit of a smaller crowd why don't we all come forward just a little bit to make it feel a little bit more like I'm talking to an intimate group of people rather than a mostly empty room so for my sake I'm going to ask you to come forward if you can come on in feel free you bet good for you that's the reason for conferences so it's always nice having a staff member in a room because I once was in a conference similar to this one in terms of number of sessions 10 minutes early so I got very confused when about a cord the way through my talk all of a sudden this big influx of people came in oh god so I went through and finished it and then I said anyone who came in at the time the talk was supposed to happen come on forward I'll give the beginning of the talk to you hello come on in and I encourage you to stay for Q&A there are prizes for good questions if you'd like to help out military veterans who are learning to code the talk but I'm on the board of directors of a non-profit code operation code where we're looking for mentors to help with military veterans and their families who are learning software engineering skills so if you'd like to be involved in that please send me a tweet or talk to me afterward or I'm around the internet reach out to me in any way alright cool alright well I want to say thank you for staying for the very last session of the day and I appreciate you coming to this talk so what do you think of when you hear the words open source let's have people shout out a few things free code transparent alright one more free beer I personally don't drink alcohol so unfortunately that's not the prize but there is a lot of beer involved in open source well when I'm at events like this it's usually something positive but it's always a lot of freedom so we have all these warm feelings around the idea of open source but the implementation of the ideas of open source is an entirely different beast and that brings us to the question what makes a project open source let's go ahead and shout out a few more answers the other recipe to build something I work for Chef we love food analogies so I enjoy that one what else makes a project open source anyone can contribute yeah and go ahead and sound like you were right so this seems like a pretty advanced audience because I think for some people a project becomes open source when it is uploaded here if it's public if it's on github it must mean we're doing open source right well in my experience projects that stop after they're uploaded to github and I've made a few of them they tend to die sure someone somewhere might use it and I certainly don't want to discourage anyone from uploading anything to github other than your AWS credentials I've seen that happen that's also something I've done I don't want to discourage anyone from sharing code on github but it is one thing to upload a project to github and call it open source it is quite another to commit to governing a community of users and contributors to shepherding that project now it almost goes without saying that open source governance is hard and that's probably why you're here listening to a talk on it that's probably the reason one of the big reasons this conference exists now the reason it's so hard is because in governance technical skills and communication skills are intertwined you need to use both of these skill sets together at the same time constantly you cannot have a successful open source project with only one or the other or using only one or the other at any given time now the hard parts of open source are not the technical parts and nor are they necessarily the communication parts the hardest parts of open source are the places where technology and humanity intersect now even though they are the hardest parts they are also the most vital they are what separate a successful project a project which evolves and grows and continues to expand its value a successful project which is shared to GitHub and just dies from there now open source governance can seem like an impossible job it definitely still seems like an impossible job to me particularly because at Chef we have currently over 1,000 open source projects that we maintain in one way or the other but even though it will never be easy successful open source governance is possible and the reason I'm here today is because I have seen the success myself and I want to help you be successful in governing your own open source projects so with that who I am I'm Nell Shamrell Harrington I'm a principal engineer at Chef Software I also recently became the community engineering lead which means I'm the lead on those 1,000 open source projects I've been a core maintainer of multiple projects some at Chef some at other companies some at operation code I'm on the board of directors of operation code for those of you who just walked in first of all thank you for coming to my talk second of all operation code is a nonprofit that teaches software engineering skills to military veterans and military families we've recently done a big outreach to military spouses because guess what when you don't have control over where you're going to move at any given time being able to do remote work is an absolute godsend if you want to tweet at me I'm at Nell Shamrell it's very original to my name feel free to reach out to me there anytime so in my experience considering an open source as a user contributor and maintainer of multiple projects I found that the hard parts can be condensed into three main categories I call these the three duties of open source governance and the first is to make it easy to contribute now that might sound simple but it's not simple when you realize how many different types of workstations people have even if it's running the same operating system there's a big difference between a 2010 MacBook Pro and a 2018 MacBook Pro now the second duty is to assist users of the project this is because you as a maintainer are on the front lines of answering requests for help and third is to manage contributions to projects now these might sound pretty obvious and the ideas certainly are but when you get into nitty gritty of implementing these ideas in the real world it's anything but obvious and that's what this talk is about the hard things that come up in the real world when you're involved in open source governance and how to make them work now let's start with that first duty of open source making it easy to contribute I'm going to adjust my mic here apologies for the pop alright one more time and we're going to switch to the handheld hey alright I threatened it it works so let's go ahead and start the first duty making it easy to contribute now while we're experiencing these warm feelings around contributing to open source we tend to think that involves two things and the first is finding a project on github then forking it then making changes within that fork and then submitting those changes in a pull request now this seems amazingly simple from the outside but there is a lot that happens in between those two steps that we don't always think about in particular one of the hardest parts of contributing to open source is just getting any development environment set up at all let alone one that is consistent with what other contributors are using I think this is the first time I've gotten a sigh from the audience when doing this slide which I love and it shows how experienced this audience is and furthermore once you have the development environment set up and you make your changes you then have to test those changes and if setting up development environments on inconsistent workstations is hard running testing on inconsistent workstations is even worse now some projects try to get around to this by supporting only certain types of workstations and while this might help mask the problem of different development environments it also significantly narrows down the list of potential contributors and hinders this first duty of making it easy to contribute so a solution I've seen work very well is using a virtual workstation this is a workstation that someone can download and spin up on their local machine so this is a project I worked on in 2016 called drive the votes the idea behind this app was to allow anyone who needed to ride to the polls we did not ask who you were voting for anyone who needed to ride to the polls in the state where you still went to the polls could go to our app and request a ride and we would match them up with a volunteer who would take them there and back so one of the things we added early on was a vagrant file anyone to quickly spin up a vagrant box where they could do their development one with all the required versions of all the required dependencies already set up for them this is a Rails application so there were a lot of them and two in a way that would be unlikely to affect their local workstation has anyone here been maintaining more than one Ruby and Rails application at the same time on the same workstation I've got a few hands up so that's where a lot of my experience is but it's also similar with node applications anywhere where you have applications that need to use different versions of different dependencies it gets hard and you get a lot of clashing really quickly so this kind of contributor could be developing on Linux, Mac, Windows anything that supports vagrant and I don't know if FreeBSD supports vagrant yet but anything that supports vagrant and by spinning up that vagrant box SSH'ing into it and instantly be using the same development environment as all the other contributors so another option which we have used in the past at Chef with our Habitat project this is a project I'm a core maintainer on was to use a Docker container as a workstation so this is a Docker file we would have in the GitHub repo that provided the configuration for a full development environment within a Docker container now this project has now gotten resource intensive enough that it's a little too much for one Docker container or even multiple ones so we use virtual machines now but for smaller projects Docker containers work extremely well so we use them for all of our projects through operation code so this again means a contributor can be using Linux, Mac, Windows, anything that supports Docker and still have that same development environment as all the other contributors this also made it easier if they wanted a cloud development environment all they had to do was use a container service or some other way of spinning up the container in the cloud and go into it now a key thing to remember when you have a virtualized development environment is you must support the development environment if the development environment breaks that means the project is broken and the first priority of the maintainers needs to be to fix it in order to fulfill this first duty the maintainers of the open source project need to keep the development environment functional at all times so after making a change once someone has that development environment set up comes testing that change and if dealing with different development environments is a challenge try running tests on different development environments it's nearly impossible to get consistent results so the solution for this is to use a continuous integration service like Travis CI or Circle CI this allows contributors to run automated tests in a consistent environment outside of their workstation and avoids those problems where a test passes on one person's machine but fails on another person's machine so this is the supermarket project this is also a project I'm a core maintainer on that is created and maintained by Chef Software now in this project we have our Travis CI account set up so that every time someone opens a pull request it automatically kicks off a build on Travis's hardware and once that test run is complete the results display in the pull request itself it returns consistent results and as I imagine many of you here know consistency in open source is a rare but beautiful thing when you can find it so even though someone has an environment or running the test locally is difficult they still have the option to run them through opening the pull request seeing the results, if it fails they can then make changes to it and commit those changes back to the pull request until those tests pass it also makes things much easier on the maintainers when I'm reviewing a pull request and even if it's not a complete test harness we at least have some test harness that gives me a lot more security and when I'm deciding whether to merge whether that pull request is safe to merge in so there is certainly more to making contributing to a project easy but these two parts setting up the development environment and testing changes have given me the most grief historically now luckily as we just saw there are solutions that make it easier it's never going to be easy I will tell you that right now but it is possible so that's the first duty of open source governance making it easy on the contributor side even if that makes it a little harder on the maintainer side so let's go ahead and move on to the second duty which is assisting users with the project now as an open source maintainer you are on the front lines of answering requests for help and most requests for help come through github issues now these might be bug reports they might be feature requests sometimes they're a combination of both and when the issue is a bug report these parts are one replicating the issue especially when your project has many different dependencies and is used in many different types of environments the second is sometimes the issue is not even in your project at all but in an upstream dependency of your project this is also a hard part and we'll cover that in just a moment but the first let's concentrate on replicating the issue it's especially hard to do this when the person who filed the issue is using the project in a different environment as the maintainer they might be seeing a bug that only shows up under very specific conditions now there are some things you can do again it's never going to be easy but there are things you can do to make replicating the issue faster and more effective and getting it fixed in more quickly so let's look at a real life example this is test kitchen which is another open source project maintained by Chef so people not only use test kitchen in many different environments they use it to test code that is itself meant to run in many different environments so that means the number of possible conditions where someone might see a bug is quite high so when a user sees a bug we need to know exactly how they are running test kitchen in order to be able to diagnose it and to help with this test kitchen uses a built-in template that auto-populates whenever someone opens a new issue so this lays out exactly what the maintainers need to know about a user's environment in order to be able to help that user it tells the user upfront what information they need to provide it's very hard to admit it is possible but it is harder to miss that you need to provide certain details when it auto-populates in the template like that now remember what might be obvious to the maintainer of an open source project is not always obvious to the user it saves a lot of time and a lot of back and forth by stating what you need upfront exactly where the user can see it now let's see if someone reports a bug and when I dig into it it turns out the issue is actually with an upstream project that my project depends on well I have seen a lot of maintainers close that issue not quite saying not my problem but you know that's what they actually meant the truth is though if an issue manifests in your project it is your problem even if it's due to an external dependency how you deal with this it is first as a maintainer it is your responsibility to communicate that issue to the maintainers of the upstream project and then once you do that communicate that to the people who filed the issue additionally you should continue updating that issue in your project with the progress of the upstream issue being fixed it is your responsibility to keep your users informed and to let them know when that issue is fixed now I get the question a lot what if the upstream maintainer doesn't fix the issue what if they've gone dark I have had a maintainer pass away on me which was very sad but I mean there are a variety of reasons that someone may no longer maintain a project so if you're not able to get a response from a maintainer your responsibility then becomes defined in alternate library or an alternate gem whatever it is you're using and incorporating that into your project it's your responsibility to find that alternative so replicating bugs and issues I mean there's certainly more parts to assisting open source users with projects but these two are probably the hardest and also the most frequent that come up now dealing with them is hard but it is possible so that covers the second duty of open source governance let's talk about the third duty managing contributions to the project so there are two main parts to managing contributions when you're a maintainer and the first is determining whether a contribution adds value to the project we'll go more in depth on exactly how to do that in just a bit but the second hard part is when a contribution ultimately does not add value saying no in a way which still supports the contributor and treats both them and their work with empathy and respect so let's talk about what adds value now there's a few things that I any time I see them I know they're going to immediately add value to one of my projects and the first is documentation this has become a cliche but it really is true this is by far the most useful kind of pull request from me as the maintainer to receive and I tell people who are looking to get started in open source to say well everyone tells me I should start with documentation but I don't know how the project works yet and the advice I usually give them is and I've done this make a tutorial for using that project as a maintainer I've been staring at it for so long and using it for so long it's really easy for me to lose sight of what it's like for a first time user to come to my project and attempt to use it this adds value immediately and the second actually is typo fixes so occasionally typos do sneak into projects hopefully not in the actual code that executes though I have seen that ask me about the I'll just tell the story I've got some time so I once got a call from work saying that our entire ticketing system was down we wrote our own ticketing system and I was looking at the code trying to figure out what someone had changed and my wife who is a fluent Spanish speaker said why is that code in Spanish I said what are you talking about and she said it says Funcion that's function in Spanish, why is it in Spanish it was a typo someone had a typo function as Funcion and committed it to master and then deployed it hopefully it's not in the actual executing code though sometimes it is but the truth is typos make your project even if it's in the documentation look less professional and it makes it harder for people to get started with that project so this is also a very valuable contribution for me to receive and the next is small bug fixes one of my absolute favorite types of pull requests to receive is when someone found a bug and immediately submitted a fix to it whenever a pull request fits into one of these three categories documentation typo fixes and small bug fixes these definitely add value someone once added a documentation piece to the documentation on supermarket I happened to be watching the repo when the pull request came in that was merged in within 30 seconds so those immediately add value to the project now let's talk about the converse what does not add value to a project well the first one is white space changes this happens more often than you would think so unless and it it's usually well intentioned I fully recognize that but unless a project has a style guide and someone is correcting a violation of that style guide white space changes don't add value to the project my guiding rule is that if there's white space that you don't like but it doesn't violate an established style guide leave it alone the reason for this is white space changes just for the sake of white space changes cause merged conflicts and it's not adding value to my project if I merge in a bunch of white space changes and suddenly other contributors who have been working on things have massive merge conflicts so if I as a maintainer receive a pull request that only changes white space I will thank them but I will not merge it and the second one is large features without talking to the maintainer first I find a large feature as more than 100 lines of non-test code and the problem with this is someone will sometimes I can clearly see they've spent tens if not hundreds of hours on this large feature that they really want to see but because they didn't talk to me first they don't know it just for whatever reason it doesn't fit in with the project or it's not right for the project at that particular time large features when a contributor has not talked to the maintainer first do not add value unfortunately so we've covered a few things that add value and a few things that definitely do not add value and it certainly would be nice if every pull request fell into one of those lists but more often than not pull requests are for things that sometimes add value to a project and things that sometimes add value are small features which is something that's not a bug it adds new behavior but it's less than 100 lines of non-test code and the next one is large features if you've talked to the maintainer first we have had and Habitat particularly had some very significant features added by community members it was something they needed for their own workplace or their workplace used our projects we didn't have the time to add it in so they went ahead and used their work time to add it in for us so these sometimes add value so the question then is if these things sometimes add value how do you determine which is the case at any given time well when a pull request comes in and you're not sure of the value it helps to ask a few key questions the first is does this fix an existing issue if it fixes an existing issue that I've had users complaining about but I just haven't had time to fix it that adds a lot of value especially when multiple people have requested the same thing the next question to ask is does this replicate work that is already being done elsewhere occasionally multiple people will submit pull requests that have fixed the same issue and you as the maintainer then have to compare them to determine which is solving the issue in the best way for that project at that particular time and then the third one this is really the key one for me is does it affect in progress work Habitat is written in Rust and a new version of the Rust linter came out and someone immediately ran it on all of our code it made hundreds of changes and then submit that as a pull request unfortunately we had people who had major features in progress at that point again it comes down to merge conflicts really if I had merged that in even if it technically was the correct way to do it right then the value would have been negative because it would have caused the other work that was in progress to be more difficult and that's really what it comes down to a contribution returns negative value when it makes other contributions harder and a key thing I stress with people is sometimes the contribution will be the superior option purely from a technical standpoint but again if it makes our contributions harder if it makes communication harder if it affects in progress work it doesn't add value to the project as a whole an open source project's value is more than its technology now when a pull request ultimately starts adding value it's absolutely crucial to one communicate that there's nothing that's really, I mean there's two things that I would say are there's nothing worse for a contributor than those one is closing the pull request without explaining why and the second is leaving it open because you don't want to tell this person no and you don't want to tell them why so it's crucial to communicate it in a supportive way and this is because open source projects live and die by community engagement if someone's first experience with their project is awful chances are they are not going to come back and they might warn others to stay away from your project I have I don't publish it but I have a list of projects that I do not recommend people get involved in because I know the maintainers have been very difficult and sometimes downright abusive so it's crucial whenever someone opens a pull request even if it's something I can't use even if it's something that does not add value at that time even if it's white space to always always always say thank you I need to recognize that number one took the interest in my project which is very flattering itself and two took the time and energy to submit a pull request chances are they're most likely a well-meaning human being and I need to thank them for that effort now in addition to saying thank you it's absolutely crucial to always always always say why again there's a little more frustrating for a contributor to spend a lot of time on a pull request even if it's something they really should have talked to me about first and then have it just be closed without any explanation of why or have it just left open now sometimes it's because of a technical reason sometimes it's because it conflicts with in-flight work sometimes it just isn't the right direction for that project at that time regardless of the reason it's crucial to always at least give your contributors the benefit of knowing why their work was not merged it's just cruel to leave them in limbo so these three parts of managing contributions determining value and communicating that value decision are some of the hardest parts of open source again because they perhaps more than anything else touch that intersection of technology and humanity both the humans using the technology and the humans creating the technology and even though these parts are the hardest they are also the most vital they are what separate a successful project a project which lives and evolves and grows that people stay engaged in from an unsuccessful project where engagement tapers off and the project dies so open source governance again it can seem like an impossible job sometimes I wonder if it really is an impossible job but there are ways to do it that make it more likely to be successful what I hope you take away from this talk is even though it's never going to be easy it's like technology in general I mean something I experienced being in the devout space people come to me saying well if I adapt this devout technology all of my work is going to get easy right? no it's not it's never going to be easy but there's ways to do it so that it is possible and less painful so thank you and I am under obligation to mention that chef comp is coming it's May 25th through 23rd in Seattle Washington and I'm going to put my contact details up I'd like to open for questions I have some chef comp related prizes for good questions so let's open it up I've got five of them so we need five questions yes sir right the absolutely right right so the question was around dealing with people who are abusive on open source pull requests that does happen there's two ways to deal with it one you do not ever have to stand for abuse when you're giving an open source contribution that is a gift to the project and the community involved in it if they are being abusive I encourage people to walk away but the second is as a maintainer to make it less likely that happens I'm always afraid to talk about this in a talk because I'm afraid I'm going to get trolled because you have a code of conduct in your repo and I know people like to say well jerks don't read a code of conduct they're not going to respect them anyway but it's a lot like having a plan for evacuating a building you hope the building is never going to catch on fire and the fire is not going to look at the code as to whether it doesn't care trolls don't care but it means that the people who are in the building in this case that maintains the project they have a plan for what happens when that happens right right there are some people who why people troll is an interesting question usually there's not a good reason for it I've done that it sucks I've permeabanned people from communities for that reason there is a point where you need to do that because again it's horrible for an open source project's life to have people making life miserable for them on it so sir how would you like a free path to chef comp that's alright alright well I'm going to hold on to that then but let's go to another question yes sir yeah I know on everything would it be a good contribution for myself to go ahead and try and fix that and make a separate PR or should I try contacting the maintainer of that and I'm kind of at that point where it's like I don't want to love this I'm at a point where I it's a good feature the question is what if you submit a pull request and it shows some tests failing the automated test but they don't seem related to your change it's not going to bug the maintainers if you reach out about that to be honest and the second question was should I submit a separate pull request to fix it if I can fix the test oh my god yes please if there's something that's been continuously failing that I have just not had the time to fix you will be my favorite person for that entire day possibly my entire week if you fix those so yes absolutely would you like to free pass to chef comp absolutely yep so take this card to the chef booth or email the person on that list and tell them you were a chef comp winner and they will get you hooked up with a pass any other questions yes sir very much so thank you how do enterprises learn from the kind of interactions between teams on open source projects and how does that apply to interactions in between teams in say close source environment a very big enterprise environment so I've worked in some enterprises I worked for Lexus Nexus and the problems we had in actually I'm not sure if I should say that but anyway the problems at enterprises in between communication so the thing about open source is I didn't really like when GitHub had this model but it was social coding open source forces you to do it effectively it forces good communication patterns it forces you as much as possible to use automation to check whether things are failing but in particular it forces you to be declarative about how you get started with this project how you're expected to use this project I think enterprises can learn a lot from that a problem I've seen at enterprises where I've worked with was there was one person who knew the entire system who could never be fired no matter how they behaved because no one else knew it and they wouldn't teach them that I think open source shows that anyone should be able to come to your project whether it's in-house or external and be able to get started contributing on it immediately so I think that's the main thing enterprises can learn the question was I think it was I've never seen enterprises implement that and you're wondering why the word you just said there is the key to that sorry go ahead your word to use was in enterprises there's someone who owns pieces of the code and that's I think what makes it hard is when people feel ownership over a piece of code ownership can be positive in that you want to see it working well but feel like they have to put walls around it so no one else can touch it that is a people issue which is very very hard to counteract and there are some luminaries in that space Jennifer Davis comes to mind who has done a lot of writing her book is the DevOps handbook effective DevOps thank you I recommend that book for information on how to do that deliberate communication is harder I think that's one of the big problems but it's better for companies more deliberate technical communication more human to human communication but it's harder at first and I think that's why there's some hesitation would you like a free pass to chef gov another question what do you do if someone has their credentials to your website and then rage quits and won't give them up the best way to avoid that is by having multiple people with the same credentials so they can kick someone out sorry say again I would say you need to move it to a different area you need to move it to a different hosting service or a different way of hosting at that point that also could be illegal for them not to give their credentials up so I don't know if you'd want to go down that road but that is a possibility yes sir oh sorry one sec would you like a pass to chef gov you can also give it to someone else yeah yeah head on over to the chef booth or email that address there yeah alright yes sir go ahead question was if you have an open source project and you don't have contributors how do you grow a community meetups or technical meetups are always looking for speakers I highly recommend people go to them and particularly ones that are more beginner focused and speak about your project and invite people to contribute to it one of the best things you can do is have a contributing guide detailing exactly how someone gets the development environment set up and what's expected in pull requests that's a great way to do it but go to meetups present it talk about it at conferences, talk about it on Twitter I work with a lot of more junior and intermediate developers they are always looking for open source projects to get involved in where they're not going to be called a noob or more horrible things so that's what I would recommend would you like a pass to chef gov you can also give it to someone else just make sure you either stop at the chef booth or the person on there about setting someone up for that yes sir, I think the question was how do I approach presenting open source governance to stakeholders, managers or six sigma type projects I'm not familiar with six sigma unfortunately so I can't speak to that but it is selling the value of open source governance to stakeholders is something I've had to do and the answer is this makes this project work better which makes our bottom line better you always have to connect it to business value if you have very business oriented people they will not listen no matter how good it sounds to do something unless you connect it to business value so you could say this will turn features around quicker this will result in bug fixes being quicker this will result on more people contributing in the code base that's how I would put it what's the return of investment value on metrics search for return of investment on open source there's a lot of great articles out there that can help you do that one thing we do at Chef is we track the number of contributions both from internal employees and external employees I present that quarterly to the executives of the business during the executive business reviews to show this is how we're growing this is how the number of contributions is growing this is the quality we're getting and that helps them see this is something valuable to put any resources into would you like to pass the chef comps alright it is there you are go ahead and email the number on there or stop by the chef booth email the email address on there I don't know why I said email the number alright well thank you everyone I'm going to stick around for at least a few more minutes if you have some questions or want to talk more but thank you for coming thank you for staying through the last session of scale have a wonderful day