 sometimes on stage. Also, this is very humbling and intimidating, but I walked out of my comfort zone at some point and then lost it and I don't know where it is. So we'll just give this a go. So this is hopefully a little less, maybe a little less intense, not hopefully, but I work for companies that do open source. I've been doing that for a while. I work for a company called Pivotal and we make a lot of open source. But I do have feelings about that and about the success of the open source community and making it work for everyone. So let's explore that journey a little bit. So I do have a content warning. Mostly this is about like hashtag my life, but isolation and abandonment and religious context is something that we might discuss. And also online harassment, which exists in the world, unfortunately. Also, I might discuss corporations as if they were people, which they are definitely not. Lauren already gave this joke. I did not know that was coming, but that's cool. You know, whatever. So hello, friends. I'm Casey, which was already mentioned. And I have feelings about these humans. The smaller ones are my children. One girl and two boys, Evelina, Casey, and David. And this is my opportunity to express to you why I care about open source and why I have feelings about it. So we're going to dive a little bit into my past. I've been doing open source work for 15 or 16 years now. Much to my surprise, a couple of folks came to this conference that I've known that entire time. I got started back in the Perl community very, very long time ago. And it's really been fortunate for me that I've had some friends for that long in open source. But when I also got into open source, I was also a part of a very insular, isolated religious group. I had grown up in that organization. Everybody looked like me and had similar characteristics as me. And it was what I knew. And then I got into programming, and then I discovered the Internet and Usenet and started meeting people who are very different from me. And I don't know, you know, I obviously don't know where everyone comes from, but there is a technical term for, in particular, something that might be described as a religious cult. It's when your friends, your family, your job, and your faith are all among the same group of people. And that was a situation that I found myself in. And that was the situation that I was in when these three people were born. And, you know, I thought it was okay and normal. And that was a situation that I was comfortable with. The reason that I became uncomfortable with it is because of my exposure to the open source community. Stockholm syndrome is when, you know, you're in prison, but the door is open and you can walk out at any time. The door wasn't open for me until I started to learn about people in the open source community. People who are different from me and interact with them and realize, I like these folks. And they're good and loving and caring. And, you know, that's not everyone. And I was fortunate to find people who fit that description. And so when these folks got older, my children, I realized through my exposure in the open source community to many people who are very different from me, that I could not raise them in a situation where that was normal and okay for them to be isolated and to think differently and perhaps poorly of people that didn't just look like them and have similar characteristics. So it matters to me that open source works and works for everyone. Not for myself, but, you know, for my children and for you. I got a tremendous benefit. The benefit was when it came time to abandon that isolating group that was not healthy, I could do it because I had one aspect of my life that wasn't fully owned by this isolated institution and that was my friends who quickly became my family. Just to sort of finish up the story, when I did choose to leave, my wife at the time and I just chose to leave with my children, we did actually lose all of our friends from that group, all of our family, certainly our faith. And I didn't, I lost one aspect of my job, but that's a little bit inconsequential. The only family or the only friends that I didn't lose were in the open source community, and they were my lifeline to hang on and to get through a very hard time. So I want everyone to be able to experience that if ever you need it. I hope that you don't, but if you do, I want that to work. How does that dovetail into corporations and open source? Let's find out. I don't know. So the scope of this is actually open source as a corporate strategy. So not necessarily, you know, you as an individual programmer working in a company and also doing open source. That's awesome and interesting, but there are corporations where open source is a strategy. Pivotal happens to be one of them. I'm not going to really talk a huge amount about my company. You could characterize Docker as a company like that. So there have to be bi-directional benefits. The company derives a lot of potential benefits from operating their software as open source software. And there are a lot of upsides for a company. They have a lot more privilege, not the least of which is money, but certainly a large amount of resources on almost every spectrum. And when you choose to open source your software and a community begins to engage with you, the community has to derive benefit as well. And that has to be a conscious and deliberate choice on the part of the corporation to make sure that the company or the community also derives benefit. So some ways that this works are that if you do your software development out in the open and truly make it open source, there are recruiting benefits. As a programmer I can see how you actually operate your software delivery lifecycle. How do you do your development? I want to know that stuff before I join a company. I can also get to know potentially the people actually who are already there and whether or not they're the sorts of folks that I might want to work with. But on the other hand, you know, the individuals both in the company and potentially out in the community can also derive career advancement benefits. You can certainly get better at what you do. That's really good for you. You can get recognition. And you should get recognition out in the wider community. We'll talk, we'll take that a little bit further in a moment. Open development and trust from customers. So this is one that folks don't think about a whole lot I think. If your software is open source and you're doing open development out in a community, the advancement of your software is an open and known thing. If you've ever had an enterprise level vendor where you desperately wish that they were implementing a feature that you wanted or needed and you had no idea when it would happen and you had no guarantees from them, you might understand the frustration of a very close system. I think it's important to have an open system, especially if you're doing open source, but there's a great benefit in that your customers can actually have insight into the growth and advancement of the software that they depend on. So that's a good thing for a company. And open development is, I think, good for the community as well. So how do we do this? That's a good question. So I wanted to draw a couple of distinctions. Uploading your source code to the internet is not the same as having an open source project. Making GitHub a dumping ground and hoping that that just magically creates a community, that isn't how that works. I mentioned earlier that you have to be deliberate and you're going to see potentially a theme for me that being deliberate about the decisions that you make are very important. And also, open source software doesn't magically generate a community. Once again, you need to be deliberate about growing a community, going out and reaching the community. Your community should be comprised of the people or organizations whose problems you're solving, whose pain are you relieving? If you're building software and you're putting it out there in the world, hopefully it's relieving a problem, it's relieving a pain. And your community will probably be comprised of the people for whom their pain is fixed based on your software. So healthy community is cultivated. You have to be deliberate. So I wanted to talk about a few strategies for corporate participation. I'm going to try to focus in the slides on positive strategies that I think advance, being a good corporate citizen out in open source land. But we should probably also talk about the anti-patterns and the things that are the other side. So one is establishing independent governance. If you're a company and you've built something that is important and you want it to be open source, and that's part of your strategy, it should probably the intellectual property and the governance around the way the project works should not be owned by you. You're at this point a member of the community. It's not your community. And if you establish independent governance, and, you know, I should make this joke, like, everybody look under your chairs, you have a foundation. I put a foundation there. Everybody gets a foundation. It's funny, it's funny because it seems like it's, well, it is happening all the time. But a foundation is actually a pretty reasonable approach. If you're a company and you've built open source, establishing independent governance is something that a foundation satisfies. The Apache Software Foundation accepts software contributions and inclusion, and then that is actually independent governance. That's another way that you could go. This builds trust in the community, then the community knows that they are an entity that actually owns this thing and can manage it and make decisions about it. Again, it can't be your show. It has to be the community show. You should plan for long term support. And what this actually, this goes back to not being a dumping ground. As a corporation, as Lauren said, your job is to make as much money as possible. The software that you think is going to help you achieve that result today was probably not the software that's going to help you achieve that result in two years. You may get bored with your project. The unfortunate bit is that there may be a whole community and ecosystem built around the need for that project. You should plan for your retirement as a company. As a company, you should expect that you're not going to be there the whole time, and that's okay. But you need to figure out who's going to maintain this software and have all of the privileges and the rights and responsibilities for it if it's an important thing for a larger community. She engaged in meaningful collaboration. Another anti-pattern is having a one way stream that you create this open source ecosystem. And the only way that it gets any additional benefit is by you giving a gift to the community over and over again through continued releases that are completely controlled by you. But you're just so benevolent. You're just giving it away. Aren't you so wonderful? That's not collaboration. And that's not community. That's users. And if you want community, you actually have to participate fully. There are a couple of ways that you can do this. But this is where I think it's particularly important to understand the cost of setting up an open source community, especially if you're trying to extract it from a corporate as a benefactor or as a starting place. There are a couple of scenarios that I've seen that work particularly well. I've seen a company that runs a bootcamp that is of no cost. But if you want to understand how to hack on their software, you can join their team and actually work on the software with their engineers to be part of the team. You don't have to pay for that. And you just come into the office and join some sprints. That's a good way to learn. It's really hands on. Chances are if you do really well and you wanted to switch jobs, you might be able to get a job there. And that's good. Ideally, well, I should say you have to be able to invest that time. And not everyone has that. But it is nice to offer that. Another thing that you need that you can be aware of is that community management and responding to pull requests and responding to ideas for the direction of the software takes real effort. And you should build that into the time for your software engineers. If they're going to be supporting and working with a larger community, then they need to be active with that community out in the open. Responding to pull requests, working on documentation, having meetings with members of the community about a feature or the direction of a sprint. But it takes real effort. And it's certainly not necessarily in the best interest of the company from a financial perspective. But if community is your goal, if open source and it successes your goal, you need to spend time on it. Invest in the contributors for their benefit. There's been a lot of talk about this. It's actually kind of nice, the convergence that we've had at this conference. I think that a lot of the points I wanted to make have been made by others already. But if you have contributors who are investing themselves in software that you're driving some financial benefit for, as has been stated a number of times here, you should actually provide some sort of compensation for that. The most obvious one is actual dollars. And I think the reason that dollars work best is because it gives complete freedom and autonomy to the individual to decide how best to use those dollars for their own benefit. There are certainly other things that you can do. You can pay for their trips to go to conferences and speak about this project. You can pay for their hotel rooms. You can sing their praises far and wide and make sure that they get as much recognition as possible. And spend your actual marketing and PR dollars on lifting up your individual contributors' reputations on the community. And this one I think is the most important is you need to be prepared to fight harassment. If you're a company that's building open source software, that means that most of your paid engineering staff are probably actually doing work out in the open, in open source, and are subject to harassment. Also, potential contributors that don't even work for you are subject to potential harassment. This is an unfortunate reality. This is where I will highlight a specific example because it was good. Recently an engineer at Docker came out about a great deal of harassment she was encountering out in the community. And their CEO made it completely clear that law enforcement was involved and that the company would spare no expense in legal expenses to ensure that if they could find the people responsible for that harassment, they would be prosecuted. And I think it's important to know that you need to be prepared to put up real money, real time, and real effort to fight harassment, no matter who's being harassed. So this is sort of a rundown establishing independent governance, planning for long-term support, engaging meaningful collaboration, investing in your contributors, and aggressively fighting harassment. So that's me. So, right, let me see how much time I have. Let's see about seven minutes. Okay. So this is where things get a little fuzzy. I have a couple of other things that I'm hoping that we can all talk about. So this says, Dear Majority, Be Deliberate. I want to kind of tie back to one of the things that I see in the open source community that I'd like to make a call to action for people who feel that they belong to majority groups. I feel that I belong to a majority group, at least one majority group. And I made it, I just want to tell the story. I made a decision early on. I've been going to software conferences since about 2001. And one of the decisions that I made as I realized just how vast the differences are among people and out in the world and how interesting that was was that when I went to conferences I of course and naturally saw people that superficially were very, very much like me. And one of the decisions that I made out of my own curiosity was to never join a social group where everyone was the same. So I'd like to ask, and here you know among this group, I imagine that that we all probably do a pretty good job of this, but maybe for you know the folks watching the stream later, never join a social group that where everyone looks just like you. At software conferences what this means for me. This summer I went to one to a conference it was pretty big and at lunchtime I had to walk past seven, seven tables of people who look just like me until I found a table that had at least one person. It happened to be three people who were not just like me. And I sat down and I had an excellent conversation at lunch and it was really wonderful. I've had some benefits so you know if you're worried like you know what does this do for me. My professional network is I'm happy to say like profession it's wonderfully diverse. It's when I go to conferences the people that I meet that are my friends that I've met before most of them don't look like me. They don't have the same background as I do. They don't come from the same country as I do you know whatever it is. So I'd like to request again that majority folks be more deliberate about the decisions about who you're spending your time with and what sort of experiences you're getting when you're out and participating in the technical community. We have a choice and we could we could make very specific choices not just for our benefit but for everyone's. I shared this idea with a few folks here and I was reminded constantly and it's totally true that every every group that I join I I bring down the diversity numbers. I don't have a choice it just is. So just quantifiably if I'd have to if I'd like to have the lowest negative impact on diversity numbers then I should join the most diverse group if they'll have me right. If they'll have me. And so I'd like to I'd like to encourage everybody to do that. I think it I think it's a good a good thing it's worked out well for me. Survival is not mandatory. So Deming is a is an economist and statistician Edward Deming and he says survival is not mandatory change is optional. So when whether it's a corporation that's trying to participate in open source and do a good job or not do a good job or whether it's an individual who's trying to make make conscious and careful to sort decisions about about how we participate in open source. You know evolutionarily we have to be opening we have to be open and we have to embrace diversity and actually take action to make it better. It's an evolutionary problem as far as I can tell that you just you just can't avoid it like if you don't change you know you'll be this little dinosaur here. So I think that you know it's it is an inevitability hopefully happening faster than than not that and as an open source community the experiences that I've had that I've been fortunate enough enough to have that have made a big impact on my life that everyone will be able to have those and thanks to a lot of the work of everyone here. It would not be hyperbolic to suggest that the open source community in my experience saved my life and so with that I do want to say thank you and I want to thank you for your time and if anyone wants to talk by the way about the religious stuff I'd be happy to do that I'm not triggered by that anymore but sometimes I find that people need to talk about things because it it's familiar to them as well I'd be happy to make time for anyone this evening if you needed it and with that I think I'm finished and I have time for one more thing okay thank you all we have like four talks right now I'm doing a an ignite talk at velocity next week or the week after and I'm talking about changing changing the way we talk about culture fit I think a lot of people talk about this I believe that we need to derive a distinction between the rituals that we enjoy doing with other people and the values that we hold and that we care about with the way that we we work with others so this is kind of my my pitch at velocity but I don't want to only represent my voice so we don't we can't have everyone call out but if you would be willing to my DMs are open so you could you could DM me or you could just throw it out on Twitter I would love to know a ritual that you enjoy about your the place that you work and also a value that you hold dear and to give you some examples pivotal loves ping pong that's a ritual I like coffee a lot and I also like craft beer those are rituals that I enjoy but they have absolutely nothing to do with what I value in my co-workers and my collaborators and the people that I'm creating with I value I value continuous learning and empathy and a sharing culture sharing everything from success to failure so if those are some examples and I don't know if anyone wants to do this but if you do I'd love to highlight things that you hold you hold dear as values about work and collaboration and how we do things together and also rituals that you enjoy but I'd like to start drawing the distinction because we should we should hire not just not for culture fit but for value fit that's that's my that's my pet so thank you for for hearing me out