 Hi there. My name is Denise Cooper and today I'm here to talk about change agency for open source program officer people or Ospo people as we say before I leave this intro slide I'm going to point out that my Twitter handle is up there at the right in case you were live tweeting for me and the advance to the foundation for the opportunity to give this talk. Alright, so in the last slide and in this one you'll notice that one of these things is not like the others. I think that's how most people that work in open source program offices feel inside their companies, because we're typically doing something different than the rest of the company doing. And so it requires kind of a different mental attitude and in a different approach in general. But I'm going to be advocating not just to do your Ospo work, but to do work that actually pushes in the direction changing the culture or the practice inside your company, because it makes your work so much more interesting, but it is also kind of the reason that we're there. So open source is something that unites us. We believe in transparency. We believe in massive peer review. We believe that this way of working is the better way of engineering and we also believe in contribution and generally in leaving the campground a little bit better than we found it. But in order to be that person in a corporation that has different beliefs, you have a lot of intestinal fortitude personal ability to carry your beliefs forward, even in the face of criticism sometimes. So right now the world on fire, and this is a better time than ever before to be a change agent because changes on everybody's lips changes wherever headed. People say that in my experience revolutionary change is rarely as effective as evolutionary change, but you kind of need both you need the revolution and then you need the years after it to regroup and institutionalize that change before the next revolution. What we're seeing right now is another step in the path to fixing some historic wrongfully. And here I'm talking of course about black lives matter not about. But interesting that they're happening at the same time. Most of the tips I'm going to give you will serve you through any kind of crisis, global or local, but it's just, let's just acknowledge that this is a great time to be a change agent. Most people think that leadership is identifying the shortest route to the change that you're trying to get to, and then leading the company down that straight path, but even some of the most famous institutional change agents couldn't do this. So for instance, Steve Jobs had real ideas about how the new Apple was going to work, but getting a whole company full of people to do exactly what you wanted them to do is a trick, you know, it takes a while. So for most people this this path is not nearly so straight. It feels to me more like a slalom like a giant slalom. So you can see the course, you can see the turns coming, but the combination of velocity and that day's condition, your condition as an athlete, means that every turn so just a little bit exciting because you might fall out of control. And it might really look like you're out of control a lot of the time to the outside world. So think of your job not as not as leading down a straight path towards a glorious future but more like dodging those curves and getting to the bottom of the hill in one piece. That's a little more accurate for change agents. Now, the Ospo as a construct started out as a thing that lawyers did. And those of us that weren't loyal, but we still worked in the Ospo we were kind of like clerks to the lawyers. And it was around fear of open source and a desire to control the effects on the company. These days, most Ospo's are not that anymore. In fact, we always kind of, we were more like this. We're sort of, you know, boldly going into a new future. And we're also very good looking and multicultural. But this is in our heads. This isn't necessarily how we're seen by the rest of the company, right? Although leader of an Ospo it's great to cultivate this feeling within your team. So there's the job of, you know, flying the Starship and there's it further. The icons represent for Ospo efforts, some of them older, some of them newer, where an open source program office got together to actually affect change in the world. And that's kind of what I'm advocating for in this talk. So I'll go quickly through them. The one in the lower left there that is the Google summer code, which was started by the open source program office at Google. It was definitely a step beyond what they what their remit was the right idea that they could kill a bunch of birds with the same stone. They could increase people's goodwill towards Google in the open source community. They could increase the size of the community by mentoring students into famous projects. They could get some work done for the projects. They could preview potential employees by watching how those kids were working this summer of code interns were working within those projects. So it just ticked a lot of boxes. Now it wasn't the smoothest road in the world. They got it all established and started and then they realized they didn't know how to pay people around the world and they had to sort of do that in real time. But that's that's an Ospo embroidering on the regular path. And it's my favorite example, but these others are great. The robot one that's outreachy. And that of course originally out of the GNOME foundation, which isn't exactly an Ospo but most open source foundations are kind of like large independent Ospo's in a way. So that stormy Peters realizing she could have an effect on the diversity of open source from where she was sitting just by launching a program. And again, it started small and grew over time and is now quite famous. The one in the upper left that is the to do and that was a group of Ospo's getting together to write down what they were doing that sort of best advice best practices for how to run a corporate effort. And before they did that work there weren't a lot of roadmaps for people that were finding themselves suddenly. So that was very valuable work. And then the last one with the mask on that is FOSS responders and that was started very recently by my former colleague, Dwayne O'Brien, and some other folks who noticed that open source projects would be negatively impacted by the inability of the conferences, for instance, and some other difficulties are rising from the pandemic. And so they raised a fund, and you can apply to it if your project has run into trouble directly because of the. So there's four examples for you of people sitting in their Ospo's thinking about how to change the world, right. This is the one that I have been working on for the last five or six years. I started it while I was at PayPal running their Ospo. This is my own personal version of the logo for Inner Source. Inner Source is the source methods as regular engineering methods inside proprietary companies. I didn't invent that I definitely resurrected it from relative disuse. And this talk isn't really about that, but I am making the point that I myself am a person who wants to do more than just run the Ospo. And so here's a quick view of Inner Source Commons. If you're interested in looking into it, this is a nonprofit that we set. We started last year as we were disassociating ourselves from PayPal and becoming more of our own thing. And if you're interested in buying open source methods inside of companies, this is a great place to start. You can also start by the information I'll have on my last slide. But back to being an Ospo change agent. At some point, you're going to have to dive off the cliff. There's going to be a moment when you're comfortable when you're taking a risk and you feel like you're taking a risk. But it also is going to make you feel you're alive. It's probably worth saying your appetite for personal risk in your job before you take this jump, because you don't want to find out that you can't handle after you jump, right. So spending a little bit of introspective time, maybe sometime looking at your finances, looking at your prospects, one of the pieces of it that I always give to change agents is always be interviewing. Even if you're not planning to leave the company you're working at, even if there are good reasons to stay, it is worth knowing you could leave if everything fell apart. It helps make you braver, right. So, first of all, think about your own personal assessment of risk. And this is a standalone module that I often offer if this is of interest to you contact me and we'll talk about how I can spend with you on this step. Then you're going to have to go looking for air cover. So air are people who are more powerful in the company. And they will help you fight the battles that you have to fight at the top with their peers, people that are that are being obstruction obstructionist about the change you're trying to affect are usually coming from a place of misunderstanding or fear and they will often listen to their peers more than they will listen to you. But you may also occasionally order to make an omelet you have to break some eggs and it's really handy to have somebody you can appeal to who is going to keep you from the chopping block. I will tell you that for the entire time that I worked at Sun until well I was a year or so for five and a half of those six years, somebody tried to fire me every quarter, every quarter. And it was usually a lawyer, but some as a VP or somebody else, and it was super helpful that I was on walls into your office basis with the top lawyer with the CEO with a VP in my own division and in a few other divisions, those friendships that those connections mean more than. So I highly recommend that you find some air cover also handy for getting budget because those people always have budget and you can often get pieces of it from them. But then you also have to think about the ground cover. This is a famous grand cover called red clover that is useful for fix region in your depleted field. But I want you to think of each of those little flowers as an individual person who is at your level or maybe below your level in the company and is interested in the change that you're trying to affect because they can see that it's going to make their lives better. This is a real phenomenon and in fact I know of at least one of these guys who completely changed a Fortune 80 name brand company on his own. And I'll talk about how later it's possible to be a ground link and change the company it's just more lift. But if you're in an Ospo you're not a ground link you're you're perceived as a manager at least a middle manager. And so you want to bring these people along with you because they're going to be your willing helpers as you enact change. There's the middle. I've been reading I read a lot of books about management as people you know develop thoughts on it. This of the frozen middle is thinking about what the role of the middle manager is most middle managers are working hard to maintain the status quo. Usually they're very interested in keeping the people that work with them employed but they're also just naturally more likely to try to defend the current castle than to embrace the change that you're talking about. Now it's not a blanket statement you will find middle managers who will be helpful to you but you're more likely going to have to work around or through them with the help of your air cover and your ground cover. And I've been accused of maligning middle managers unfairly. But my experience is they mostly see your projected change as a dumpster fire coming their way. The I had people in tears when I started talking about open sources son claiming that I was changing the companies that were not going to be useful and even today sometimes people accuse me of helping to kill son. I will tell you that I gave a keynote at North American Apache con last year and he said two really important things to me. One was I was the front row. So he really was just talking to me. One was that in fact son was it's most efficient from a software value capture perspective after they'd open sourced everything because they stopped fooling around with bullshit licenses and started just writing straightforward support contracts, which made a lot more sense and turned out to be profitable. The other thing was if we had not open sourced everything that wasn't nailed down at son, it would all be lost now because at least that was James's feeling. He said we wouldn't have Java now if we hadn't done it. And he thanked me because he fought me while while it was going down. He didn't really want it to happen but now he sees it was a good thing. So be aware that these people are going to be pushing back from a real place of concern and you have to honor their concern, but you also have to find a way around them. And I will admit a personal bias when I see a picture like this. I don't think about the miles that lava flow traveled through farmland and housing and forest. I just see new earth being built. I love that this process is so generative. But if I was a farmer or I owned a house that was in the path of that lava, I'd be very focused on that destruction. And so, you know, it's two sides of the same coin and you just have to honor them. One way to mitigate concern is to treat everything scientifically as an experiment. And I'm really serious about this methodology. You want to choose a small experiment that is likely to be controllable as in not going to get out of hand, but you want a hypothesis, you want to write it down, you want to set up an experiment that proves your hypothesis. And you want to measure the things that feed into that proof. You don't want to exhaustively measure every aspect of what happens, although you do want to note the unintended consequences that happen because they're part of the story. And then after a certain amount of time, you want to revisit original hypothesis and evaluate what you learned in this experiment and then pivot and do another one. This step approach has a way of containing your risk, although eventually you're going to have to dive off the cliff, but you can learn a lot by working in this way and you can do a lot to prove to your company that you're doing the right thing. And what you want to prove to them is the value that you're creating by doing this new thing. Are you saving them time or can you see how saving them time is going to be part of the practice? Are you saving them money or are you creating new value? Did you innovate in a way that's going to get more money that they wouldn't otherwise have gotten? Did you do quality in a way that makes the consumerians better? All of these things are value that can be created in one of those experiments and you want to package that up and evangelize it to both your air cover and your ground cover and to the middle managers if they'll listen to you. But really it's your air cover and your ground cover that you're trying to sell these ideas to. One more thing that often you find when you start doing change, which is that your newest employee, your intern employees love suddenly having this agency happening, gives them hope that changes are coming in the company to make them more comfortable because they're typically not super comfortable with the way that corporations work and why would they be? I mean it's over many years and it's usually pretty weird, right? So if they decide to leave because they see no hope of change, then you've wasted the time that you spent recruiting them and training them. So it's better not to have that happen. This becomes a real value that you can quantify. And then of course there is the famous outside-in marketing, which I used a lot at Sun. This is where you take the ultimate risk of saying something publicly that your company didn't approve because you want them to be the popularity of that message reflected back by the public. It's a really risky move, but it can be really, really powerful. And as I say, I'm a big advocate of it, but I also knew ahead of time that I could survive if I got fired. So I suggest again you do that assessment first, right? And then last and maybe most importantly, you're not going to get the same validation that regular employees get. It's just the nature of change agency that they like to shoot the messenger. And you're going to find yourself not doing as well in your reviews. I often tell people to get the best deal they can going into a company because it's really hard. It's a long road at that next piece of recognition. Remember I said that somebody tried to fire me every quarter for five and a half years? Well, in that last six months I started to notice that the people that used to try to fire me were suddenly claiming credit for all of the risks that I had done and taken. And it really hurt my feelings for the first month that I noticed it. And then I realized that it would have meant was that I was winning. If I had not had the internal compass, the internal navigation, my north star to say, I know that this is a good change that I'm enacting here. It would have been a long five and a half years. And so you have to have that animus inside you and know that you're doing the right thing. And it's helpful to have friends, it's helpful to have an association like our friends to do. But at the end of the day it's on you to keep yourself happy and to know that you're heading in the right direction. And believe me, it will come. As I was leaving Sen, they offered me a vice presidency. I would have gone, you know, director to vice president skipping a lot of steps. Now I decided not to take that path and went on another path. But it will come if you keep working and keep reporting that value back and work forward as much as you can. And it's a totally rewarding journey. So I hope you will undertake it. Now I think we have time for just a few questions. So I am going to go ahead and let the conference put me on live screen. And let me just give you a one last screen here. This is my information. And also if you were interested in that inner source thing, if you go to that URL you'll find a lot more about it as well as well. So let's go to the questions. Great. Don't see myself yet. There I am. Hi there, those of you that are here. I am very happy to continue to answer questions. The ones that I've gotten so far, I got some love for the event, for the talk. So thank you for that. And also got some queries about whether the slides will be made available. And they will, if they're helpful to you in particular. Does anybody have a question that they, you know, burning question they'd like me to answer here that isn't already in the queue? If I could have asked, I will have, we have think about five minutes. So feel free to type. Let's see what else can I share with you while that's happening. Oh, I didn't say anything about the difference between whether change agents are born or made. I actually think they're born. I have coached a few people into becoming change agents, but it wasn't a pleasant experience for them. Like it is for me. So, and I was that kid that, you know, was rearranging the, the playground when I was a little kid, like I've always been a change agent. So I think it helps if you come to terms with the fact that you're just wired that way. And, and that that's your best role. Okay, here, Nick would like to know if there's any advice for starting over due to company restructuring or fluctuations and leadership. You mean when your air cover disappears? That actually happened to me at PayPal. The people that hired me, almost all of them left the company before I did. And I had the CTO that hired me take me aside on his last day and say, you should quit. But I had already lined up the conditions that were going to make the launch of intersource possible. And I didn't feel like I could take steps back and then start again at that moment. It was the momentum was already going. So I decided to stick it out. It was not a pleasant last two and a half years. In fact, I was talking to Dwayne about this last night. And he said, I don't know how you did it, boss. It wasn't pleasant, but I had a goal in mind and I stuck with it. So take care. I think that the PowerPoint slides are going to be made available in my speaker area. I have to send them to the Linux Foundation. Still, I didn't do that because I had sent a prerecorded thing. So just a sec. Let me see. I think I saw another Nick question. Is that true? Oh, this is a little bit tricky. This, this tool. So I'm trying to find the other questions. Okay. Let's see. How do you own it? Yeah. How do you balance community and company interests? It's an interesting question. The best community managers are always accused of going native by somebody at some point in their career because walking the line between what the community wants and what the company wants is always, is always tricky. Right. What I try to do is suss out what the right path is and find allies who agree with me about that path. And I think I've, I've spoken before about the outside in marketing. My, my, the way that I did that at sun was I would faithfully reproduce whatever the messaging was that the message people had given me and they changed all the time. So it was a lot of work to remember them. I would faithfully say that message and then on stage, I would physically take a step to the right or left and I would say, but this is what I think. And I'd make it clear that I wasn't speaking on behalf of the company that I was expressing personal opinion. And then I would usually step back to the center and restate, you know, another time what, what, you know, why I thought the company was in good faith and whatever it was that they wanted me to say. But what I was doing was making an opportunity for the community to say, well, what you said is closer to what we believe. And that could then be reflected back to the company by them, not by me. There were people inside of sun, especially the people that made those messages up who felt like I wasn't behaving. And at one point, I, and I think also Simon Phipps were not allowed to speak for a while. We were, we were kept from speaking, but there was a speaker handler named Jim Grazanzio, who is now a community manager, which is, it was a great transition for him who saw that the outside world wanted to hear what we had to say. Like they, that we were the breath of fresh air in the messaging at that point. So he put his job on the line and continued to give us space. So sometimes change agency really feels like a game of strategy, you know, like a very sophisticated chess game. And the best you can do is make sure that no individual pieces get sacrificed without their complicity. If you know what I'm saying, including yourself, right? It's best if you put yourself on online first and then always be warm and generous about your company. It doesn't play well to air grievances with your company in front of the world. And I don't think I ever did that. I think I was, I was more, I was, I was being the change I wanted to see, but hopefully in a way that didn't damage son's credibility. And I don't think it did. I think at the end of the day, it never did. It is a balancing act. It's one of the hardest parts. And it's why it's a really good idea to already know your internal compass and where you're hoping to go and why, right? Because you're not always going to make people happy. Guy. Yeah, helping the guy wants to know how to help middle managers not be the kind of middle manager that you work around. I have had some limited success at making friends with middle managers and getting them to believe that I'm not undermining them by letting them in on where I think the future is headed and helping them figure out their moves, if you, if you will. And that's, that's certainly a real possibility. I've also coached a few managers of my own. You know, I, of course, I also had middle managers trying to corral me at various times and I've, I've shown them with some clarity that maybe they're misguided in their assessment. That's the nicest way I can put it. You have to appreciate that middle managers are, are trying to do the job that they think that they were given. It's super helpful if your air cover can help you tweak their understanding of their jobs a little bit. And you have to assess the culture because if the middle manager has been profligate in its new initiatives, you'll find that it's harder to gain the trust of the middle managers because they've been through so much failed change that they're just not interested in taking a risk again. So you have to, you know, you have to play that by ear. That's worth looking at when you're thinking about joining a company. What's the state of the middle managers and how likely are they to at least some percentage of them to become your, your allies. So, and I've been a middle manager as well. It's not an easy position as, as most of you that have done it know, it's, it's a tough balancing act as well. So you got to have some compassion for that. Likewise, these days, I didn't call it out, but product owners are having a really hard time right now as agile kind of displaces some of the functions of the product owner. And yet they're not given good tools to do their new job very well. And so they're, you know, they're playing it from the hip. A lot of them and they need a lot of help to not use the wrong tools to get what they need. You know, this is the whole problem with executive escalation. If you get your friend, the executive, your air cover to call somebody else's air cover and force them to do something. You're also breaking the system. So you got to be a little careful how you use that. So anyway, how are we doing on time? I'm guessing that we're almost at the time where I have to say that you can meet me over in the community area number two on the Slack. And let me check with Grace and see. Grace, is that right? Okay, great. Yeah. See, I've got a, I've got a clock running here which tells me roughly where we're at. So I don't want to take up time that belongs to the next speaker. I'm going to go ahead and go over to the Slack channel and I hope that you guys will follow me if you want to have more conversation. And thank you so much for showing up.