 Thanks everyone for coming to the second edition of the open source contribution panel. So I'm really happy to have you all as panelists and you as an audience to discuss about open source contribution in our daily business in our private lives. So yeah I'm looking forward to the discussion and I will now open it with just a quick introduction who you are and what's your first memory with contributing to open source and what motivated you to participate in open source contribution. Yeah my name is Josef Davernig I work at UNIC and my first memory of open source contribution was in Nicaragua where I helped co-organize the first trooper camp there and it really inspired me to be able to connect with so many people from local communities so that's why I'm here. My name is Josef Davernig and I am the project lead for triple commerce at Centaurot. My first experience of contributing was I was 13 I was using GNOME and the new browser at the time didn't have a website I was learning html so I figured I would create something for them it was terrible so I show up at the mailing list and I say oh look here's the website I'm proposing and they tell me it's terrible and they show me there's a group I can join and I realize open source also has a process you can just dump code on people. Four tests forward a few years later I started messing with triple and I started using my first module so that was triple five and it escalated from there. My name is Michael I'm the CTA of the Macy Group and in my first experience I think was Rupal Contember at the code sprints before Dave and yeah there was a guy there his name is John Albin and I walked in and he said like do you know responsive and I said like yeah I've done some responsive stuff so he gave me a code like some code to review and I did it and then at the sprints after that it was live committed on stage by trees that was the first time that Rupal had the responsive stuff in there that was triple seven and that was my first contribution since then yeah that started the whole thing and yeah today we have all companies that are based on completely open source everything. Hi I'm Julia and I'm the community manager of the Thunder distribution and I'm the non-technical part of the Thunder team so no coding at all so my first contribution was being trapped here to the triple con this time and so I got the first credit for my team and I'm really proud of it. Hi I'm Sally Young I'm a senior technical architect at Lullabop if you haven't heard of we are a triple agency I the official version is that I contributed the smiling pack for PHP BB 1.0 so if you've seen like the green guy with the grins that still everywhere that's me the unofficial version going back a bit further is more embarrassing I used to be really into friends the TV show and I used to hang out on the the forums yeah and I got really into the forum software so we used to hang around on those they were in Perl it's before patches they used to write forum posts explaining where to copy and paste things to people I'm old thanks everyone so the Julia you mentioned your the newer contributor to the team a few of us we have let's say maybe a few more years of experience what's the biggest blockers that you have encountered so far when it comes to contributing and how have you overcome them maybe we can start the union thanks for me it's I think two aspects for one thing I'm no developer so this whole infrastructure that's a bit of well I was afraid of it don't understanding things don't understanding issues how things work what are tickets how are these things actually working that's everything new to me and these are things you work every day with but for a non-technical person that's everything is new but really everything is new I learned about github about merging the full requests everything was new to me I've never heard these wordings before but really helped me was the contribution sprint but it was not a code sprint but contribution spent I just realized that I can do something as well me as a non-technical person and a lot of people helping me I think a buddy for great thing and other people from people agencies we work with who asked for my help so I get the feeling that I can do something because before I just thought what there's no place for me contributing no one's interested in what I can do and I really appreciate it now there are also ideas of giving credit to people doing all the coding work like organizing or helping organizing events on reading texts things like that are not coding I was just really intimidated by everyone everyone seemed so smart they were always talking about lots of things I didn't necessarily understand and I just thought if I threw my hand to the ring I'd get laughed at and actually that's one of the reasons as well I never used to use my real name on the internet because I didn't want people to find out where it was and just be like who's this silly little girl trying to help out but I think over time I realized even if someone's posted some code on the internet it doesn't necessarily mean they know what they're talking about either and when you realize that like everything changes it's like yeah you can feel free to throw stuff up people probably aren't going to laugh at you and they will hopefully get you seriously that's how mostly they do yeah I think for me it was similar that at the beginning yeah you feel like you don't know anything and I think going to events and going to the contribution days and actually realizing that the people behind all these usernames behind all these many contributions that they've done on Robolador they're just regular people and talking to them and understanding that they're super grateful and for you to help so I think that was really nice and specifically in my time I helped out in the multiple initiative and that was Galbor that basically just was there all the time and if you had a question or if you didn't know anymore and yeah you go to him and even if it was a silly question he helped you and I think that's what we are now trying to do is to be open and if somebody comes to really try I think that was the that's a big step for somebody to ask for help so make sure that if somebody comes for you to help that we are open to them and even if it's a question that we answered already a thousand times for that person it's the first time so that was for me really nice what I had at that time and trying to do the same now for me back when the game was still virtual when I was disconnected in Serbia the trouble was understanding that there is a process that's a process needs to be followed and that process is going to take more time than I anticipated just because I got something to barely work doesn't mean that it's finished or it's immediately going to be accepted and I think many of us have had this experience of frustration at an issue taking too long or one of our ideas just taking too long to accept it thanks when you look at yourself or maybe the people that you work with what strategies to inspire you that help embracing open source work and also into the personal schedule the work schedule I think for me it's really about getting people to not only contribute once but to make them to understand that it's a real process like like we just heard that if you just write one patch one time one trip or any other open source and contribution it's nice it's great but it's really something that has to come along so explaining people that they should really like either follow the issue if somebody replied to them that they should go back or on GitHub and I think that's really the the part that I think if we as I'd say business owners or so it's not just like trying to do one-day contribution that's that's nice that's awesome but it's really a process that has to continue and that almost has to happen almost every day it's just a couple of minutes maybe to reply shortly or to test something additional but it's not just going in and doing one thing is it's not going to be very successful and rather trying to yeah tell people that and also that they should focus on one part like and you cannot do contributions to every part of Drupal like and so but if instead if you try to focus on or try to find your own special idea or things that you want to get really good in that is going to be a much better experience and to follow up on that I think that both as individuals and as companies we need to create the time for open source and for following the process it's not just about contributing when we have time but it's also time to be created just like we do not do security or reviews when we have time we accept that it's a fundamental part of the work that we're doing same with being a part of open source I do a lot of client work so for me I was trying to make sure that my clients understand that the contribution is important so if we're working on something and we fix only for contrival core and that patch goes back to Drupal it's still part of our work to help get that into Drupal as well it will make the maintenance for the client easier later on if it's already there then I'm going to have to apply a bunch of patches or maintain a bunch of forks for that code base so if once you've posted the patch even if you've done that as part of your client work it's still ongoing it's still part of that project and so the people I work with I hope I can impress upon them that you don't have to now maintain this for life in your spare time if you're still working on this project and it's still relevant you should still be doing it as part of this if you have the time because a lot about finding the field where you can make an impact where you feel like you can be the expert and you can really help and do something that and that you feel valuable and feel like an impact and that's a good thing to understand and that helps to get into that. So I've kind of chosen you because I know you but I also know your companies and each of them like has a little bit different approach to open source like what do you think sets the approach apart from what do you really like about the open source contribution approach that you follow in your companies? Could you maybe explain that a little bit? Centaur's case might be a bit different I know every company likes to say they are open source first but we really grew out of open source in the sense that all of us started by contributing to open source projects making money from open source projects and then deciding to create an open source project that we and others could profit from and because we started from that it made sense that we always thought about open source first even if we are doing something with limited use to others we'll still do it on Drupal.org we try to make sure all of our processes are transparent and I guess that's transparency and that's unwillingness to take anything prior to what sets us apart. Yeah I guess I have two hats on with one is the hosting part which is completely open source we actually started them not open source we started proprietary but then at one point we realized that first what we have nothing is really proprietary so we can open source it and second is that many of our users that use the hosting platform they actually liked if when it is open source they like to see what we're running and so yeah we switched over the open source and like you say it forces us now to be much more more process oriented we cannot just like release a version without a changelog because everybody could see that and so it's it really sometimes there's times I'm like why do we do that all open source but it also like forces us to really to really use it and then the other side and so we also have an agency and there we really try to to tell customers as early on as possible like we just heard that contribution is an active part of it that and that the customers cannot even say no to contribution it's just going to be part of it if they request a feature and we and it involves a block or so that this is going to be part of this and at the beginning it was early hard but now customers actually like that they understand and they almost start to request from you that if you write a patch for a for a country module that it has to go back into the code because they realize that this will make the maintenance easier and all that stuff so it's really trying to teach the customers more and more of what that when they decided to do use open source it's not just a decision to use free software but this actually also includes a lot of additional work to make it better under distributions that it is an internal project of the german publishing house who got border media and when we open sourced it we kept this kind centralized decentralized strategy so we have the standard core team which can focus completely on the standard distribution and on working on the distribution and on the modules and on core and everything we need and our units are doing the project so that's a very good situation for our team because they can really focus on contributing and on making people and core content modules and everything we use better that's what's special for us so a lot of what we only work 13 client hours per week and then the other 10 are for internal calls and whatnot and whatever you want to spend your time on is that's learning things open source contribution because encourage this world yeah so some people will spend that time contributing others won't there's no sort of pressure to do it we like to share what we've learned a lot so you can try to our blog we like to write about all the things that we've learned we also have a side company called they change their names they still think of them as triple as we and they are now called ocio labs that's it so yeah we we like to teach and help that way but we definitely don't pressure people to do it which i think is really nice because i've kind of seen other companies where they're just it's already mentioned earlier like you make a patch but i i would feel bad if people i work with then felt obligated to have this burden of maintenance around their necks like for the rest of their lives in their free time you don't really encourage that kind of stuff that's a nice segue so today we had breakfast and and julia mentioned that she now realizes how much history some of us already have with open source contribution and when brought up the topic about that people get burned out because maybe they feel obligated to maintain the projects and the projects are growing so yeah how do you all deal with burn out situations or what strategies do you see in the community for people to take better care of themselves when it comes to open source contribution feeling a lot of the burnout is unavoidable because we are in such situations where there's always a lot of responsibility and a small number of individuals but actually one of the best ideas i've read recently was developed an article that's talked about setting expectations which for me is the most important part communicating to people what they can expect from our project and how they can help is this a weekend thing for me am i just sharing something cool i've done or is this perhaps a core part of my business am i looking for funding or am i looking for a job or am i just looking for more people to contribute code and i think it helps a lot because we admit not just to others but to ourselves what we're very prepared to do and how much we are prepared to commit but also at the same time i think that that we need to resist the urge to constantly market our projects it's fine if our project is not for everyone it's fine if people sometimes choose a different solution because we cannot be everything to everyone and we cannot destroy ourselves trying to be that yeah i think about making expectations adding to that is also that's something i had to do myself is not be afraid to say now like if somebody asks for you for a feature on let's say on the Drupal issue queue or somebody brings up a bug and you really don't have time what i used to do is just like ignore it and hope it goes away and it doesn't because it just comes back and you every time you go to the issue queue you see it again and it brings back that like oh no i should work on it but you can't and so and just going in there and saying look i don't have time and close it off like get over it i think that's much better because for the person that asked the question they know or for them staying in limbo is also very hard like will they ever going to be done or not so i think that's and that's really just if you don't have time you go into it i it's not going to be me closing off if somebody else wants to help right but i think yeah yeah so try to say no or learn how to say no that's a big a big part that'll keep your sanity i i'm fairly good at walking away from stuff so i i think if i'm getting a bit bombarded by things i really don't have a problem ignoring them which probably is a very responsible maintainership but i also don't feel obligated to random strangers on the internet to look after them um i uh yeah i look like i'm very tired i haven't like more coffee yet there was something else but if you say something then i'll try to remember what it was oh no sorry i didn't remember i also like don't it's kind of a buoyant set like i don't really feel the need to grow things all the time i also feel like that a bit with the drupal project it's always like the goal is we have to get bigger all the time otherwise we're a massive failure it's like a very uh capitalist view of things i suppose but i'm just i'm happy if there's a smaller number of people who are you know pleased with using whatever it is i'm working on i don't really feel like i need to take over the world with my javascript library or whatever i remember when i when i try to push contribution for for the teams i work with we we came up with systems like okay we mentioned the time that you spent in your private life with the time that you can also spend contributing and when i look back at those ideas uh and decisions we took um i think it's also really a bad practice if we expect people to spend their private time um because you know people have families or other duties or maybe people are even not privileged so that they have so much uh free time to spend open source contribution and that's also a topic that has been featured more and more in the last years do you see examples or do you have ideas how we can make our contribution space more diverse uh with relying less on the privilege of people having free time or or paid jobs i think for me the the most important one is accepting that code is just one part of the contribution and i think that's one thing that we at the company try to really do so that if if people say i would like to help but i don't want to write code but i can organize an event or i can take meeting notes of any of an meeting or i can go to the triple dot org and do translations like there's so many different ways of contributing and i think just saying that and telling people that contribution is not about code that's one part i think we have to be much better in the triple community to um to um with all the credits and all that system to make sure that this gets recognition but i think just opening that up and already helps four people that maybe say i don't want any code stuff and i think that's yeah i'm giving like people time i think that's really cool like hearing that other companies just give you 10 hours for then you can decide within that to do and because it's really something that needs a step by step like you can't expect of somebody doing a keynote at a triple con as their first contribution that's not going to work i mean you can try with um so yeah just and allowing people to also like talk about their successes and failures like if something was really stressful talk about it and um yeah give people time to grow i can only kind of talk about this within the context of durable um so it's not too generic but i i think we need to stop trying to build so much community consensus on every little thing that we do um and by that i mean uh say a proposal has been made for for something but then you have to spend time fighting five loud mouths in the issue queue who have infinite amounts of time and i think there's always this expectation that we have to make sure absolutely everyone is very happy with what we're doing before we're going forward um and i think sometimes we might get better results and allow more diverse people to to participate in those if it didn't require such huge amounts of time to like appease everyone so i think having some more leadership like leadership could have a little bit more push on directions that we're going in i think it helps to um to live the things we're talking about so it's for me i'm not taking a person um it's fine that everybody says that you can't contribute other than with code but uh really i really understood that when uh people did that when i was in the triple con and saw there was a table about marketing i'm like oh okay they really meant what they said um i realized what i can do and what helps as well is um from my perspective that we said in the beginning sometimes you're afraid because you don't know what you do is good enough um maybe i thought about it it would help to have like a mentor you could ask before because really to the whole world so is this enough is it fine and people will say yeah of course it is but i'm not brave enough to just scream it out into the world here have a look but i've done no no okay i think a lot of people don't are that uh brave and maybe it would help to have like a a step in between so you could ask like a tiny football mentor um get what opinion about it i think that attracting new contributors including new contributors is a skill of its own and the triple community is going in a good direction in that sense i mean it's not simply about telling someone you know drag up a chair and start typing and there needs to be a very active efforts to help someone learn how to contribute and and learn what they need to do uh on the other hand uh i think that many of us have been in this whole thing very very long uh i have and i'm not from an underrepresented group uh which means that will always benefit from trying to get more feedback from the people who are new to this who are underrepresented and then see how how we can improve the things that maybe we cannot even see to add as well it's all like very well attracting new contributors but you need to make an environment that's nice for them to stay in so if you know people who are having really shitty behavior you need to go out of your way and call them out on that um call them in um and you know don't pan around on twitter with people who really suck you know because it just like it's going to make people from under represented groups not feel safe in your community so everyone needs to participate in making that happen um could you share a highlight maybe when you look at the last weeks um some nice achievements that you have seen like maybe by your peers or by the community that you think we can be proud of in terms of contribution motor mail today uh claro got in um which is really cool so it's the new admin you i um it was an experiment to watch all day yay um so you can go check that out i was like i'm peripherally involved in it because it kind of came off the um j s admin you i but it's been amazing to see all the work that that team has done and uh we've been using it on the prototype as a current project i'm using and every time i get a new update through composer it just like looks even more incredible than before so they've done such a great job for me it's the media initiative and all the other initiatives our team is working on and to see that their work as um well that things are happening there that we look at for me it's this event like there is a lot of change like for the people that maybe know triple cons used to be very differently organized than this one and just seeing the advisory committee that i was part of but also all the track chairs and because there was a lot of like unknown and things also organized in last minute and people really stepping up and doing stuff in a really short amount of time that we usually had months for now we maybe had weeks for and just just that's the really nice thing i have for me to see that so many people are coming together and and accepting the fact that it's going to be meetings are going to be horribly misorganized and chaotic at the beginning but if we all work on one common goal we can make such an event happen and i think that's that really showed me that that that's like i don't know it's hard to say but that's what the community is really like that that common positive that's warm knowledge or that's warm power that we have working together that's just every time is so crazy to see and that one single person could never do it and but also hold we're so strong together that's really nice to see i must be predictable here highlight the triple commerce community because it's incredible to me to see the 1500 people on the slack channel helping each other exchanging code advice bringing each other in and teaching and just being self-sufficient and yesterday i randomly walked into a commerce buff and it had over 50 people there it was led by Brad and Eric and it was just magical to see how self-sufficient and amazing they all were before we open this up maybe for a few questions from the audience the last question from my side is what's something that you haven't figured out yet for yourself when it comes to the social contribution it's something that you would like to yeah to make a step ahead saying no i was like this triple con because i've only involved it like tons of stuff and i was like okay this triple con europe i'm going to do nothing nothing at all no no talks and i'm sat here right now i ended up helping with the track chair i'm emceeing on wednesday for the trivia night so come to that um i was like the chill triple con idea it's just gone completely up the window so yeah i need to say no any tips on that please where we are i haven't figured out how to convince publishers project managers product managers and from the packaging houses to not only use open source but also contribute figure out how to focus on the positive more than the negative on what we achieved and not what we still need to achieve that might be more of a personality trait thing but also very often when we come to these places we tend to focus on everything that still needs to happen that it's normal but but sometimes that too can bring our motivation down or maybe just make us too worried and it's always a marathon and never a sprint so it makes sense to ensure we can survive like decades doing this yeah i'm trying to decide which one i pick but and it's actually about the focus like it's just it's so easy to do a lot of things at the same time and i realize that if you do that that all of it goes down like the productivity total goes down so i think it goes back into saying no but also saying no to yourself like that it would be really cool than i work on that or it'd be really nice to now do all those these other things but just saying i can still do them but maybe later right now i'm focusing on that part i think that's what i personally struggle a lot and it has definitely there were times where i was better and i would say right now i'm horrible in it can definitely agree on the focus saying no would also help me are there any questions from the audience that you were not able to cover please use the microphone how do you how do you stay motivated i when i do things with open source it usually ends up with being a very small doing a very small thing that scratches niche and then losing interest because there are like a hundred other things that also interest me how do you keep your motivation to work on one specific thing and bring it together figures a lot about making the the chunks of work small small enough that i can get immediate pleasure from completing something so that means instead of planning this six month effort in my head that's going to destroy me three months i need to figure out what i can do today or in this hour or in the next 30 minutes and then after that figuring out what we charge cycle is sometimes if i complete something that was long and hard i need to focus on a quick win to get myself started again or vice versa so i think it's a lot about listening to ourselves and how we approach work in general yeah maybe adding to that what i try to do is just accept that sometimes your work or your week will always consist of positive and negative things and what i try to do is like at the end of a week pick a date wherever you went weekends and i try to like look back at the week and see like do i overall did i like that week because i think focusing on one individual piece can be very negative like we just heard before and if i tell myself yeah the last week was overall positive or overall i liked that week then i just continue or sometimes i really feel like no that was really bad or in overall i'm not happy then i try to change one piece of that but i think yeah just accepting that sometimes you have meetings you don't like or you have work that you don't like and i'm trying to look more as like as a whole thing than individual pieces i'm at the very beginning of my journey and i'm still highly motivated well i really like the idea that i can make an impact i can change something and being part of something bigger i really like that idea i say it's okay to not be motivated to follow through on things that you put something out there and you probably help someone else and that's fine and if someone else wants to use that and pick it up it's you know don't feel obligated to have to do that forever on the other hand if it's something if it's something that you think would be worth following through on because you have some other goal in life like i don't know i want to i want to learn this particular system and contributing in these ways will help then i think if you write it down a piece of paper or keep it on your desk or whatever and if it's the things that you're doing i'm going to help you with that goal like great but if not then yeah don't worry about it it's fine i understand that okay um okay so it's moderately a two-part question and and it's going to get a little bit to what is it you leave okay but you it's earlier so there's a few things that we we have done in the dribble community and the open source communities at large have attempted to do over the years to recognize and give credit to those who contribute so for example dribble dot org profile has what you contribute to and how many commits that you put it on and docs and things of that nature we try to put them up on the keynote uh like the trees note and list some people there so that's one part in the bleeding into the second part of the monastic sort of what you feel about these things is that's the community trying to give credit to those who contribute via other ways you know some recognition the other part is how do we help publishers project managers product leads non-developers non-contributors or non-community members recognize how important that contribution is so i'm curious from a contributor standpoint what are those things whether it's the profile or the keynote speech or things that has resonated with you and said hey that was a really nice symbolic gesture or a really nice gesture something i couldn't have received without contribution and could any of those be used on the other side with business owners and leads and people paying our paychecks to want to say like oh wait i want to keep paying you because you do that did that turn into a question or i think there's multiple facets to that yeah i think from a business point of view i think we need to do and as an agency now i think we need to do a much better job in explaining our customers what it actually needs to use open source like to explain them that it's not just software that you'll get somewhere and it's perfect and it will have box and they need to be fixed but that they that you need to contribute back so and i think for many of our customers they have no idea what they're actually getting into and on a positive thing like not i know i don't want to say that open source is the bad way but just making sure that they understand how this community works and maybe bring them to these events like we tried that it's hard but we succeeded and these relationships if the customers definitely have been much much better so that's like the business side in the other side i think if you are in this issue or if you are in a position to decide to use somebody else let's say you you hire an agency to to work for you maybe right in there that you expect that agency to do at least x amount of contributions or you expect for them to i don't know go to Drupal comms or like just adding these and these these are tiny small pieces that we can do now but i think over time more people will start to expect or to to make contribution part of the choosing a company or choosing an employee and i feel like it's it's something that's going to take years but it's small steps so we're almost out of time last comments from each of us i would like to add that explain that a big part of my job explaining open source and explaining that it's not software for free but it's high quality software because you have this big community it's that's the point of the source it's not for free but that's not that's not the point that you have a big community an active community that's the point it's not cheap it's high quality and i try to explain that and what we do is also what we said well helping the makers so by talking about it talking about contributions they do about modules they do about things they do so people will learn about it so and that's well what we tried to do to help contributions as a marketing kind of thing i think the credit system have a lot of really big flaws i don't necessarily know how how you could do it better um gosh so you kind of have the same problem with github like people are looking at people's github profiles and if they're not like a sea of green then they think like maybe this person isn't what i was hiring i think that's a really bad way of doing things because like obviously we don't all have equal amounts of time to spend on github or triple.org contributing things i also know the credit system gets gained by you know people making much smaller um like spelling corrections as opposed to someone who spent like a really really long time fixing like a multilingual system or something and they're not really fair comparisons to make either um the other side of that is that i know some companies will pay people to work on core because it will help them get up the marketplace because they'll have more issue credits but then that means you've got people on triple.org with not necessarily any kind of thing that they need to get fixed for for someone's actual website so maybe that's not a great thing either because they've just got infinite amounts of time to you know write essays and stuff like issues but then i i think like that there's not actually many people we're in a position where they can get paid to work on core either um i really like when we highlight people in the community through keynotes and presentations and stuff like that as for a better i there are parts of the credit system too and i really like the way that we're accrediting people who organize events that attend meetings and everything now as well that's really good but i think uh yeah the system needs an overhaul somehow but i don't know how to fix it shortly saying that there is an issue on triple.org that talks about that so if you have opinions ideas solutions going there because i think yes i agree we should make it better it's very meta it's contributing to the contribution credit credit and you will get you will get a new year's credit to the credit system i think it wasn't immediately obvious when we were creating the credit system that we were creating an economy we were creating a currency and we need to be careful about protecting it from inflation we need to be careful about how we distribute value and that's going to be a very difficult discussion and it's not something we can improve by doing quick fixes and changes in the middle of the night so it needs to be a discussion and see you on this. I would like to thank all the panelists for speaking for participating we're ready to um continue the discussion thank you for organizing this yeah hi yes Thank you.