 Yeah Working home You know despite this sort of So almost almost how many of you would be in the other category So So there's been a lot of studies done on this sort of thing and you know you find that when you have diversity overall your Overall your company's feet better It actually impacts the bottom line which is most important to the blazers But you know let's let's be honest with ourselves. It matters to the hoodies to because We have a living to make Extensive booty collections and t-shirt collections to go along with them. So the deliberate diversity of the open-stacked community is Is you know very much intentional we work hard to recognize those non-technical contributors and then all that they do for our community whether it be marketing or product management or Testing which is a technical contribution, but can sometimes be viewed as not so much It's important that we maintain kind of a cohesion For our community and especially when it comes to the summits You know having the business side the blazer side and the hoody side working together side by side So we don't wind up Disappating and going off in a separate direction. We have a common goal now whether it's you know a regional diversity or you know the role within the company or culture or age or gender It's all good stuff Well, at least it could be all good stuff It would be really nice if magically Reality is if you don't set up the conditions for success Diversity does more harm So a company that is or an organization or a community that successfully integrates diversity does better But if you just stick a bunch of diverse people into a room, and they don't know how to communicate And so it turns out While we were working on They do a lot of things like the International Space Station if you stick a bunch of very diverse people Small metal to have different gender different races different languages different skill sets different countries And they can't figure out how to get along somebody will die And so the their their pressure to understand team cohesion drove them to do a lot of really interesting research teams teams can coheave Cohesify It's not even word. It's totally made up word It is now in a couple of different ways, right? So there's what we typically think of as team cohesion is is social cohesion means we like each other we get along we drink and This is really the basis of of the early sense of community that we had with open stack It was all built around drinking. We're really good at social cohesion the other the other The other aspect of that is task cohesion So bringing a team together Focused on a task and when it comes to development work, this is enormously important So if you can, you know, put all of your wood behind one arrow Get all of your people going in the same direction on your team doing development work That's absolutely crucial to your success. It's it's essential and necessary So you wind up with this this scrum of developers all moving in the same direction And when you have that then you have this forward motion you get this momentum And it's incredibly important to the task at hand and sometimes that task can be Incredibly deep and and require a lot of thinking and you can't afford the kinds of interruptions that you know You might get in a typical office space So what's interesting about that that NASA data is that these the both of these things are helpful social cohesion helps But it's not necessary task cohesion is absolutely necessary and it you know, there's all of these vague understandings of how it works, but really what it comes down to is an understanding of a common goal and Mutual respect that everybody on the team is moving everyone else towards that common goal It doesn't you don't have to like them. You don't need to be friends, but you need to believe that everyone is contributing We're gonna come back to this this theme a couple of times here So social cohesion which we've done historically really really well is harder to do the more diverse your community is It's actually becoming harder and harder for open stack to be built around just social cohesion Just us liking to drink together Sometimes we try we find out not everybody involved in the community is an alcoholic anymore This was really easy early on Texans and NASA people are all raging alcoholics But not so much anymore and Canadian and Canadian But that's not the reason we're highlighting this issue right now So I want to take a weird little digression here because we're in Asia and talk about the collapse of the Mongol Empire It did collapse and it didn't collapse Because it was defeated externally what happened was the Mongol Empire conquered everyone they thought they were going to conquer they really reached the the limits of their expansion and They defeated their common enemy There's a trick you see in sports teams all the time when whenever you're trying to build team cohesion very quickly the easiest goal the easiest shared goal to establish is an external common enemy and and It will hold a team together as long as the enemy survives But as soon as you defeat them as soon as you win Your team will fall apart if the only shared goal you have is defeating that common enemy and For many intents and for almost all intents and purposes open stack has won We are now at this moment. We are the most vulnerable we have ever been for Losing task cohesion because we no longer have a really simple external common enemy But we're like we're not just about killing X And and this is what exactly what happened to the Mongols when they had defeated everyone They were going to defeat they they split up into several different empires and started fighting each other They turned on each other as as new enemies and they started building walls back up inside The Empire between the different groups So the net of that is that drinking is no longer enough Which is sad because drinking is really near and dear to my heart and I'm gonna let Ever take a little intermission here and give you another perspective on this whole angle So from from drinking to food and and restaurants things we all love right so there's a common fable in It's a common fable known throughout the world, but it's particularly relevant in doing agile development and It's the story of the chicken and the pig so one day a chicken and a pig are walking along a path and The chicken says hey pig. I was thinking we should open a restaurant together. Okay replies the pig Maybe What would we call it? What's the whole idea behind it? Chicken says How about ham and eggs? Perfectly reasonable sounds like a good idea. Come on. Let's do it. This will be great. We'll make a mint the pig says I Don't know I'd be committed, but you'd only be involved So I think it's it's clear here that you know when you take Bacon from a pig the pig does not survive that process but eggs come freely from a chicken and The chicken survives happily. In fact, it's just normal So there's this this idea of the level of commitment between the parties involved And this has been the the thought in agile development the the typical thought in agile development that developers hoodies are the pigs When it comes to putting out new features, you know executing on those tasks that the chickens have put before us The chickens are typically regarded as the managers the blazers. What have you? But it's the developers who are doing the work the ones who are assigned with deadlines to hit To work with other developers who may not necessarily be in our own organization, and they're the ones They're the ones with their necks on the line. I'm not gonna Don't cross this line. Just don't cross the line. Whatever it is. Don't cross that line. Got it. Okay, so You know it winds up creating a bit of friction between the two Because well the the chickens are clucking When it comes to planning out new tasks new features It's the developers who have to get it done and they say, you know what that just I can't make that happen The amount of time you've allotted stop clucking, you know I'm the one who gets the final say on what happens with this feature because I'm the one doing the actual work But I don't know if that really tells the whole story anymore Especially with respect to the open stack community I think it's a lot more involved in that and we have to think a little bit deeper about how we relate to one another In the open stack community So I think we have a we have a new idea which is that in open stack everybody's on the dinner plate We are we are bacon wrapped chicken breast and This is from a personal perspective, you know, I'm a blazer guy, but I I started one of the first open stack companies and I Would say my bacon so to speak my chicken meat is is definitely on the plate open stack is the future of My company it either we succeed or fail or die as a team and I think we're seeing this more and more in the ecosystem Whether you're a developer or not Folks are all in on this bet. It's not a oh, this would be cute and wouldn't it be nice if if this did well We're we're in the boat together. So open stack is is now will be referred to as the bacon wrapped chicken Coming back now to this challenge of saying, okay, we've we've got to get mutual respect We've highlighted that there are some stereotypes already that are ubiquitous and we all like to do agile We believe in DevOps and we're all scrum like and move fast and TDD but this philosophy that then that that Some of us are the other side of the plate or the you know squawkin and cluckin How are we gonna improve this task cohesion, right? So this is the most boring slide. I don't even like bullets. I just figured I would need one slide That's all bullets. These are some of the common barriers to group cohesion and The the summary underneath these it's clash of personalities or it's a conflict on roles or it's a breakdown of communication or its power struggles Disagreement on what the mission is is the number one problem and and there's there's a solution that addresses all of these problems That's kind of what we want to focus on next so we think the solution is simply understanding each other and There's no silver bullet to this. There's no bullet points to this Understanding each other is hard work. It really is it's Understanding others perspective opening your ears opening your mind I Could take it to opening your heart even in some cases making yourself vulnerable in the community putting yourself out there I mean that's actually what I have personally found doing open source development is putting yourself out and open into the community and Making yourself vulnerable a pull request is a little piece of you as much as people tell you You know, you are not your code When you put it out there and you get those reviews and the minus one start rolling in it's it it cuts you know, and it takes a while to Really understand where the other developers are coming from or possibly, you know, what's motivating them You know, you always got to kind of look for that motivation behind. Oh, you know They want more performance or you know, maybe it doesn't quite jive with something. They're trying to do For their organization, you know, it could be a product manager. That's saying, you know what that Conflicts with something that we're trying to do so it's a matter of understanding each other's perspectives and I've found that's one of the hardest things to do in development is understanding the perspectives of your users of the other developers of the managers the blazers that is and it's a matter of just Maybe sometimes taking a step back and Looking at the bigger picture looking at the bigger community and thinking, okay So I do have this one overriding need right now, but is it in service of the wider open community? so it's just Bringing yourself into the community and opening yourself up to it now Specifically when it comes to we're in the hoodie and being a developer advocate, I actually kind of where Do do a bit of different things. I mean I most of my time is actually development focus the majority Which means really like 50 60% the other part of it is this guy here doing the the dance up on stage At conferences and user groups and wherever else I can reach out to developers and other people And it's it can be a very heads-down thing when I'm in development mode I really kind of take things week to week It's I can't even do things kind of day-to-day. It's a matter of getting my head into a problem About a week at a time saying okay, you know what this week I'm devoting to development because anything less you wind up Not gaining the kind of momentum you need to really knock out a feature especially if it's a bigger feature and Getting the kinds of interruptions that happen in a usual office setting I mean I personally find even just visual interruptions sure you can throw on Set of headphones and you know kind of zone out that way but I will literally sometimes sit in front of my screen like this so I can literally see nothing but code and Doing that you're your perspective quite literally narrows, right? I'm looking at this piece of code I'm very focused on these optimizing these six lines and to you know a good loop that makes sense That would make sense to other developers as well so Again going back to zooming out a bit and understanding that in the larger context That's so crucial. That's so necessary to understand what you're doing in the larger context and remaining open to the possibilities That are endless within the entire open-stack community So my name is is Joshua McKenzie and I'm wearing a blazer and I I used to be a developer And I've gone through this transition of like what is the difference between maker time where you get to have four hours of time And everything disappears except for the code and manager time this is a program term right manager time is everything is scheduled and it's scheduled in pieces and Your expectation is this meeting is followed by another meeting Which is followed by another meeting which is followed by another meeting and I always know what I'm gonna do because I'm a look on my calendar And that's the next thing I'm doing And that's really powerful if you're driven by a to-do list of things that you know will only take an hour You're just gonna one after the other after the other. It's very much synchronous. It's face-to-face. It's structured and It's it's from the outside in in the sense of most of my time I spend talking to people using open-stack or interested in using that about what do they want to do with it and They're very far away from the code in some cases. They don't even know what language it's in They don't even know the names of the project. They don't really care. They're interested in can it accomplish this goal and So this this tension from the the outside in view versus the inside out view of like I know this one line of code incredibly Well, I've been working on it for 14 hours Probably clearly aware of the entire call stack and how this ties into every other piece of open-stack right now But if you make me stop thinking about it, I probably don't even know my own name That that tension that the thing to highlight here is This is not a bad and good side, right? These are two different views of the world and the combination of those two views of the world is what makes Open-stack a really powerful community most open-source communities Don't let blazers in the room and this idea is the developers by themselves are going to achieve something amazing and that's Not universally true. It turns out. It's very true if the developer is building something that solves the problem that they themselves have Because whether they realize or not, they're also then the product guy. They're the definition But it's an there's an amazing number of people working on open-stack who don't use open-stack who just it wasn't It's not a tool. They were trying to use they weren't it was not a problem. They were they they experienced personally and So having this perspective of hey, there are people Involved as well as the development did that whole mesh is pretty important. So we started thinking about okay Well, what can we do to to work together on this a little more? so Coming together in that that's from all moving forward in one direction needs to include everyone The developers and the managers the hoodies and the blazers so Jules Blaskey has a great quote here about communication and It's not about what programming language you're writing in whether it's Java or Python or C sharp or Node or what have you whatever the flavor of the day is there's always going to be something new and something great and something shiny For you to get out there, but the question is can you communicate your ideas? I mean, that's really what we need to do and it comes from both directions both hoodies and blazers need to be able to communicate their ideas effectively and sometimes when Hoodies are communicating with each other they can communicate through code But they need to recognize and and understand that other perspective from the blazers that you know what they don't communicate in code They can't start the conversation with a pull or a quest, you know, it's face-to-face or a phone call or email or whatever is appropriate, you know These are the ways we need to engage with all of the other members of the community in order to keep things open the the flip side of that from the from the manager side is Is to trust the developers to be doing the right thing inside the code? And the this has been a common theme in in product management for years tell them what you want not how to build it And this idea that the the farther outside the more of an outside view you have the less you actually know About the details of the bottom. It's impossible for it to be otherwise So don't trick yourself into thinking that because you deal with customers you understand the insides of open stack or or you should How many of you are familiar with the term bike shedding? bike shedding okay, so The long story short there's a big company building a nuclear reactor and the engineers have designed the entire nuclear reactor and Very detailed blueprints are going up through the organization for approval processes It goes up through some some middle managers and the middle managers are ashamed to point out They don't really know anything about nuclear engineering anymore, so they fixate on the set of outbuildings Around the the nuclear reactor and they're like well, you know Maybe we're concerned about some of the safety issues here or some of these details here We should escalate this so they look like the correct So that gets escalated and it goes all the way up to the board and eventually The only topic that the board is concerned with is this one particular bike shed These guys know nothing about construction at all. They don't understand nuclear They don't understand buildings, but they do understand paint and they all have an opinion about the color But the bike shed should be painted so what trickles back down through the entire organization is that yeah? The entire nuclear reactor is fine, but if that bike shed is not pink you're fired No, no if that bike shed is not move blue. You're a degenerate, right? Yes, it becomes in a Bike shedding is the worst possible thing you can do as a manager Which is to in to focus on a detail that you have no business Even pretending to understand you like well. No obviously clearly that API call should be You know that should do the syntax of that rest ability got it These communication styles all of these pieces of how we work together are Challenging and they're interesting and and they come out of this this question of diversity But there is one more thing Which is we we've kind of been lying to you. We've we've framed this in this idea that this is hoodies and blazers And the reality is that it's just an enormous ecosystem, you know, it's not just product guys and developers There's marketers and there's testers and there's folks who write documentation and there's the user committee and there's Every possible flavor you can imagine business development people. How many of you are like partner alliances people? I can bash on them, but they're part of the community too, and this is what's interesting is There are three thousand four thousand something like that people here The ecosystem is incredibly diverse because that's what it takes and so we have to focus on What is that shared goal? What is that unified understanding of our task so that we can maintain cohesion in this community? Because our task is not to go and crush somebody anymore. We already did that. They're all dead This is the Mongol Empire So the you know the task that we have to come back to What is that task ever right? So like I was talking before about zooming out and getting that wider perspective while let's zoom out all the way and Right back to the open-stack mission statement to produce the ubiquitous open-source cloud computing platform So ubiquity means both public as in rack space or private as in fist thing cloud Conquering both areas. We've done a great job of conquering the the private open-source area We're working hard on conquering the public area, and we need to Cohes around cohesify cohesify around The mission statement again to give us Purpose and drive on the task ahead on the task at hand And so we can all move in the same direction and continue with this great momentum that we have so I mean we we can't say it again and And we can't say it often enough Open open open and and really that is what open stack is all about those are the principles it was founded on and we need to constantly remind ourselves of those principles because you can see if you're You're reading the mailing list and and watching the some of the different keynotes and some of the different presentations The walls are starting to go up in a lot of places Company and organization has identified their niche their market, and they're saying you know what we got our piece You know now we're gonna start putting up the walls, and you know what this is our piece This is our niche and they started losing that perspective So it's really a matter of not only Not putting up those walls in the first place, but starting to tear down the existing walls that I've already started to go up This I mean I'm just coming back to the the Mongol Empire as well right the the reality is We are still a whole bunch of smaller communities inside open stack, and if we don't have good Cohesion one of the things that helps with with task cohesion is a sense of identification with the group right we need everybody inside open stack to Think of themselves as open stack people not nova people or cinder people or business people or developer people or members of some core team or members of the ATC or members of the TC or members of the board open-stack people and That is the moment at which the Mongol Empire ended was when people didn't think they were members of the Mongol Empire They thought they were part of the Mongol Empire or of the Black Horde or of this particular group this family this lineage not the whole thing and We we have to allow open-stack and have all of these separate sub teams because there's no way to organize it otherwise This is not there's way too big to be one project, but it has to be one community Otherwise we were just So I mean the the closing statement for that Probably is that this is this can't ever be us in them. There is no them. There is only us and That includes that includes everybody right so the takeaway for you is in every interaction you have this week Every design summit session you sit into Every talk you go to think about how you can make sure that this is one team Think about how this can be an us and us working to solve our problems together And not an us and them where I have to win and they have to lose And then we have time for a bunch of questions if folks are still awake. I've got a question So when we talk about us What exactly are we talking about? I mean are we talking about us? Get hub comm slash open stack No, we're talking about the whole open stack Ecosystem all those bits and pieces of software that make open stack easy to use easy to deploy Easy to manage. It's an entire ecosystem That's going to keep us together and keep us winning and becoming the ubiquitous cloud computing platform So it's not just about get hub comm slash open stack There's an entire ecosystem of software out there that all of the companies that are part of open stack Need to be conscious of and using and contributing to There are there actually any questions because we could ask each other questions for a while. We're pretty funny Yeah There's a there's a really this is one of those nuanced and complicated and balanced points that I'm so happy brought up We have been arm wrestling this since before we started open stack, right? Because we made an initial decision that NASA to use the Apache license and rack space made the same decision independently to use the Apache license which meant there is no Legal authority to insist that people give back. It's a moral imperative and it gives us this balance to say We're actually not hostile to commercial interests But what we're hostile towards is a lack of participation a participation to be really complicated We really knew what's an open stack is to my knowledge the only open source community That is actively and proactively willing to include folks that mix commercial and Proprietary and open source software and hardware. So, yeah, we're all part of this community that moral imperative the idea being we keep it As open as possible and the community pressure the peer pressure is what causes people to contribute Right. Yeah, they're inside and every day they're meeting in the design summit And they're talking to the other people about what they want out of the community and the community is going Yeah, but what are you going to give us back? That's so much more powerful than a legal imperative the legal imperative It's just it's an us and them argument forever. You're stealing from me Right, whereas the us and us is how do we feel about treating ourselves in the community? We do have a carrot and stick approach to it, too We still have the trademark policy and we have some interesting language now around Thou shalt use certain pieces of code and thou shalt not use code that isn't somewhere in upstream in certain cases There are ways to use the trademark to encourage it fairly Aggressively, but the carrot should always be that this is the right thing to do This is how we think of ourselves. These are our community values. Is that we give back any other questions? Did it is that totally boring? Are you just not as like that's obvious. Come on We thought you guys were going to talk about like, you know, where you get your blazers because that's a great blazer Which I'm always happy to talk about I heard Hong Kong's a great place to get blazers. Yes, it is and hoodies So well, thank you very much for your time folks I will cut you loose a couple of minutes early so you can drink more coffee. Actually, maybe if you would talk amongst yourselves I know you're about 50 50 hoodies and blazers Maybe just pick a hoodie guy or a blazer guy next to you and be like, hey, what do you think we could be doing better? In the summit in every sessions We're gonna have this week. How could we work together as a team so nobody feels like why are they in my room? We have that on every survey is like why are all those guys in my room? That's I mean come on. It's not your room. It's their room, too, right? We're all open-stack Thank you very much. Thank you