 by Don Narrow, scaling the Ansible community to new heights. Good luck. I am pleased to be talking to you today about some of the work we've been doing on the Ansible Community team to basically help grow and strengthen and sustain the Ansible community. And I'm gonna start out with some intros of our team and some of the things we're gonna talk about today. By the way, the slides are in their LinkedIn schedule, so if you wanna grab them there, you can find them. So the Ansible Community team at Red Hat, we are all kind of funded positions to work with the Ansible community and I thought it'd be great to introduce some of the people that do some of the work that I'm gonna talk about today. So there's Andre, he works a lot with collections, he's been doing some great work with execution environments and doing a lot there. There's Carol, who is really kind of, she's almost like the engine of the team. We'd be nothing without Carol. Carol does amazing outreach, organizing events and is just kind of almost like our spiritual guy. There's Anuisha, who's the release manager for the community releases and she also does great outreach. She's very active there and just all kinds of things. Then there's me, I just, I don't know, sometimes I just try and make it look like I do stuff. Carrying on, there's eight of us in total. There's Greg, who's the team lead and community architect, just unbelievable insights and experience from Greg and really he's awesome dude. She's Sandra, who's the docs lead and she's also kind of like a project manager for us and like keep us on track with a lot of things. Leo from Argentina, who does like a lot of also outreach and he's working on labs and he gets involved in some of the schools with Red Hat ambassadors, I'll tell you a bit more about that. And also Walter, Walter is, he's kind of the guy that helps us interface with Red Hat a little bit and he advocates for us and he helps make sure that like we have, and I say we, the entire Ansible community have the direction and support that we need from Red Hat to succeed. It's really a critical role there. So one of the things I'm gonna start talking about, this is all about like work that we've done in the past year to build and grow the community. And one of the things, like if you go to ansible.com today you'd notice that there's a lot of Red Hat focus content that's about the platform and products that Red Hat sells and there's not a terrible lot for the community and it exists, there's a community page. But what's been missing is the central place, like where can the Ansible community come online and have discussions. I think like one of the things we've been dealing with in the community is a lot of fragmentation and this comes in like different ways like ansible.com but also discussions. There are things that happen in GitHub issues, GitHub discussions and there's lots of decisions and chats that happen in these various places and without having a central space it's hard to kind of have a view into everything that's going on. It also makes it extremely difficult to know when a community decision happened to have like a historical record. When you get several years kind of down the line from a decision and it's like, well, how did this come to be? And you kind of, you lose that record. That's an important thing for the community to have. So we've been building a community website. Again, the links are in here. We've got some fantastic help from the Fedora community. This is places where things have come together. Mo who's here has graciously given us some great advice to help us get started. Also like Michael Scherer gave some great tips for choosing a static site generator and he's like, look, static site generator's come and go. We've had to rebuild things in the Fedora community a couple of times. What's important is you kind of like abstract the content away from that and choose tools that the community uses and meet them where they work. So we're going actually with Nicola which is built in Python and uses Genja templates and it's all familiar tools and tech for the Ansible folks. So building, this is the wireframe but if you go to our repo, you can see the work in progress. It's deployed to GitHub pages. You can join us on Matrix if you wanna get involved. We're gonna start building out the final thing based on wireframes that we've got. And this will serve as that central point for the community in the web where you can like get access and nowhere to go and kind of have a home on the internet. Along with this, we're launching a community forum discourse. Greg again has been spearheading this. I think he's wanted this for years, like four or five years at this point and coming together and again and kind of collaboration and cooperation with the Fedora community. And like working with CDCK, we will have a place where community discussions can take place and where we can have those records, historical records of decisions and like have a lot of the discussions and community topics and votes that go on. They use GitHub, which is kind of it works but it's a little awkward sometimes and like kind of the flow for like having a vote and then closing a vote and like closing the discussion and just be a little awkward. And it can be difficult for new people to get involved with that. So obviously having a central forum and a place to discuss all things in the Ansible community is gonna be great and that's coming real soon so stay tuned. So another big part of the Ansible community and the team and the work that we do are meetups and events and all the outreach that goes into it and we've Ansible community days. There have been a couple of RA this year just gonna be one in Berlin soon. The community days are just, it's a time for everyone in the community whether you're just individual contributor or not if you're just a user, if you're an enthusiast or even if you're a Red Hat customer, you can come along and talk about Ansible and learn, share and it's a place where everyone can get together. The contributor summit is more an opportunity I think for contributors to come and talk to Red Hat teams and work with Red Hat engineering to find new solutions and all that good stuff. Some upcoming meetup and events. I already mentioned the community day but there's stuff that's going on all over the place. DjangoCon should be really cool too. One of the things that I mentioned Ann Weisha, she has created a meetup organizers toolkit and this is to facilitate the community to with a set of resources that will help you plan and carry out Ansible meetups successfully. It's available here and it's also something that would benefit the Fedora community and we kinda wanna share this because it's broadly generic for anyone who wants to organize a community meetup but this is something that Ann Weisha noticed that hey, we need this. People are trying to organize meetups and it's not always going so well because they might be new, they don't know how to do it so hopefully this will facilitate a lot more in-person interactions. Leo, as I mentioned earlier, this is him at a university in Buenos Aires and he's going in and working with Red Hat Ambassador is to reach out to students and Ansible is this great starting point for open source and if you wanna be a Python programmer, if you're interested in like sysadmin, kind of like DevOps, there's something for everyone with Ansible so getting into universities is something that Leo's just started but it's really great work. So, community releases. How many, just quick show of hands because I'm doing a lot of talking, I kinda see people out there. I wanna get a bit of interaction. I like some conversation. How many have, how many of you have downloaded Ansible from PyPy, pip install Ansible? Really? Okay, okay, there we go. There we go. I'm sure some people on the virtual audience have. Well, so that's the community release and that involves Ansible Core, bunch of Ansible tools like for running playbooks as well as community collections and that release process has been handled by Anuisha Das. Since seven, RC1, she started, she was the shadow release manager now. She's the release manager. She's been doing great work with those uploads and building and making them available to the community. And of course we've had some help from friends along the way like Christian and Sandra and the steering committee. Also, one of the things that it's, this year this team has been doing is trying to open up more and give back to the community and give them the ownership of some of these processes and making sure that they not only have visibility but they can participate and they can drive this. And it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to come from someone who's a red-hatter and the processes shouldn't be behind red hat firewalls or whatever. And Anuisha's been documenting this process with the steering committee and she's also been automating a lot of it through GitHub actions and different workflows so that it'll be easier for people from the community to get in and handle that process. One of the things I've been working on is what's become known as the Docs Lift and Shift. And this is, we kind of had this point where we were trying to get like all these community doc initiatives going, like creating new content, revamping stuff and restructuring. We restructured the user guide that was just this big honking chunk of all these different topics and like being able to retrieve and find information within that was a lot of work. So we decided to like kind of break things up. So we're doing things like that to improve the doc and to get more contributors in through the documentation. And one of the things that we found was that some of the people in the core team, we were just kind of getting in each other's way a little bit, like, you know, were there sanity tests and some of the things that the core team, some of the needs that they had didn't exactly align with what the community needed. And there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of, there's all the documentation for, you know, kind of the end user documentation, most of the collections and stuff like that and like stuff that's owned by the Ansible community and the Steering Committee. So we've created separate documentation project and that's been a little controversial because some people think that like documentation should always belong in the same repository as the code and the thing that it's documenting. And that kind of docks this code approach, which I adhere to myself. But we just kind of got to the point where it just made sense to create a separate documentation project so we can really accelerate some of those efforts. And it's, so far it's been really successful. We've seen a lot of community engagement with that. And so that's been great. We've been adding like new workflows and doing all kinds of fun stuff there. Another thing that I've been working on is revamping the Ansible dock site. So the dock site just to quickly kind of disambiguate the term that I'm using here. This is just like a set of like static HTML pages. It's kind of the landing page when you go to docksideansible.com and you kind of navigate around. It's those top level HTML pages that are in front of the actual documentation once you drill down. So it's the main entry point for most new Ansible users. At the start of the year, this is a snapshot, kind of actually when I joined, I'm still fairly new to Ansible myself. And around like May 7th last year, there were these big kind of cards that took up all this real estate and they were focused more on, there was community, then there's the platform, the downstream offering, and then there was some core stuff. So it was more focused on kind of like the tools and not really taking the user's perspective too much. So we decided to create a more user journey, user centric approach. And to start doing that, we started identifying personas. And persona is just a representation of the user or the person who's looking at the content. And we defined a few, you can find them there here in Markdown, which we put everything in Markdown in the open. So it's in plain text and it's there for contributors to look at and it's not in like some kind of like slide or whatever. But we focused on the needs, the attitude and the knowledge of the personas as well. We identified them and then we said, like what do they need? What's the type of content? What's the attitude? The attitude helps you determine the level of verbosity. Say like a Python program is gonna want like all the programmatic options and their expected behavior. But if it's like an SRE somewhere, they just show me like when the red light's flashing, show me remediation. And then the knowledge also helps you tune in more and like meet the needs because a hobbyist is gonna have a different set of knowledge and say like a solutions architect. So once we had our personas, we decided to like, like what do we do with those? What's the next step? Well, I started as new to Ansible and I came over from J Boss. I've spent like a lot of my career in middleware for my sins and a past life, I think. But yeah, I was like really super familiar with Kubernetes and there's this, this for me is like the Kubernetes journey. And it seemed like a very like sort of abstract kind of, you know, this could be applied like these different milestones could be applied to most like projects with technology. Someone starts out to become aware and they evaluate and they adopt and they start using and then you scale out. So these milestones describe these progressions that you would kind of go through and we decided to start with human motivation is the first thing and we started mapping out like these the journeys against those milestones for each of the personas. Again, we've got those and mark down. You can check them out there if you wanna find out a bit more. And once we had the persona journeys mapped out like where they're each step to 10 minutes left. Is that 10 minutes? Sorry, just so I'm clear. Did quarter pass? Like 10 minutes. Yeah, 10 minutes roughly. We're running into lunch so if you run over it's fine. Okay, yeah. I've got like 40 slides here I've been practicing so I'll try it. I think 10 minutes would be good. But hopefully you guys are into this anyway and we're having everybody's having a good time. But you got the milestones and then the steps underneath them to complete them. And so we've got these things and we're gonna like build the new dock site based on these. So when somebody comes in they're not gonna see like, oh here's community docs or here's platform. You're gonna see the entry point and like you're gonna see these journeys. How do you do something with Ansible? So once we had those things we decided to make things available to the community. Again, we're trying to use tools and tech that the community is familiar with. They created this ginger dock site. Naming things is actually one of the hardest things to do in tech and I still kind of hate the name of that repo but it's gonna go away. But yeah, the ginger dock site. And when we started building the new dock site making sure the community get to it was vital. And this is actually the first thing they came up with. I went wild, I went bold at first. Part of the idea there goes back to Cunningham's Law. We wanted to get feedback from the community and if we release like, oh here's this great like really high polish site and I'm like, yeah, it's great. But we wanted to hear, we're building this for the community. And so intentionally putting some things in there that didn't really fit and like kind of like bold colors. And it seemed to work. We got a lot of really good feedback. Sandra, who I mentioned before the docks lead was fantastic and going out to the community and finding out what she hit Reddit, like Matrix. We have this docks meeting and you can see her here. But we got a lot of feedback. A lot of it was like super critical. A lot of it was like, yeah, this isn't so good but we kept going. We gathered feedback through the Bullhorn newsletter. We iterated quickly over it and over time we got more and things started to trend more positively. And then we released our journey-based Dockside. So if you go to docks.amsible.com now, you'll see there's like each of those kind of like milestones and then the steps you need that are direct links to the documentation. So you just get in and you find where you're going much quicker and it's more mapped to actual things that you're doing and your tasks. It's not mapped to like a product or a tool or something. But yeah, so this is where we, and you'll see there are sections for each of the personas that we identified. So that's some work that we've been doing. Along with that, we've actually done a lot with the documentation in the past year. One of the things that I noticed particularly when I was joining and trying to like navigate around was like, there's this whole ecosystem of all these projects in Ansible. And it was very, they were all like, some of them were hosted on Netlify, some on Read the Docks. And some of them, they were even like third party kind of like forks of documentation or like mirrors that were on Read the Docks. So you couldn't trust anything from like just looking at the URL or looking at it. Is this Ansible or is this like this third party thing which it's fine but it's hard to know if it's I guess official or whatever. And they're like marked down and like some repo. So you get the idea, there's docs all over the place but it's hard to know what is Ansible community and what is not and what can I trust. And it all looks different. So one of the things we've done recently is we got the Ansible namespace and Read the Docks and we put all of the Ansible projects under that namespace. So now it's like a consistent URL. And if you go to the Ansible Read the Docks you can see all the projects that are in the ecosystem. And then you have like deterministic URLs and there's also community themes that we've been applying so you get a consistent look and feel while you're browsing the documentation. And this really helps to kind of build trust with the community and create this cohesive identity. We've also been working on removing barriers to entry and making sure that community users can get in with Ansible and start, you know, get up and running quickly, you know, again, it's something like coming from like the J-Balls world or, you know, go in and like the first thing you see is like a hello world. And when I joined I was like, I went to Ansible, docs.ansible.com and it's like, where is that? How do I start using Ansible? And there's like a link to a quick start video that went to a red hat site and the video didn't load and then there was another link that took me back to docs.ansible, so there's this loop. I remember spending about like 10 minutes just trying to answer the questions like what is Ansible and how do I just even use it? So, you know, even starting quick start guides and getting started. Andre on our team has done a fantastic job and he's, you know, execution environments so it's just basically it's like container image that kind of acts as the control node. And this is something that we noticed was causing confusion for the community and like a lot of people didn't even know like what an execution environment is and it's this thing that gets talked about a lot more kind of downstream than in the community even though it should be available to the community so even working on that is one of kind of our points to fix and make it easier for community users to get in and start using stuff quickly. Also, Leo has been working on community workshops. I mean, combine the couple there, they're a little bit out of date and there's a red hat one that is kind of mixed with AAP stuff which is it's all good to learn from but it's not quite Ansible community and we've got some new stuff that's coming up with Instruct Labs based on like new community users is one of the main personas and then like more advanced users. So real soon we'll have a whole set of workshops that you can go online and, you know, self-paced. Now, that's kind of a whirlwind tour of all the stuff we've been doing. One of the things that I wanted to do when I came to Flock and this is actually my first lock but I've been a Fedora user for years now and I've been having conversations and trying to talk to people and like how can we get the Ansible community and the Fedora community to come together and we've learned so much from the Fedora community already and we want more of that. I think like the toolkits that we've been working on would be great to have Fedora community users using them and even stuff like Ansible tests should run on Fedora and I was talking with Cabin about all the Fedora infrastructure uses Ansible and maybe we can help there to update some of the syntax and find some ways to improve it so this is a direct call to the Fedora community and, you know, just saying, let's hang out, you know, why not? And as always, we're totally open. Please come and join us. You can find us on Matrix. You can find us on Mastodon. You can subscribe to the Bullhorn newsletter if you want to get all the info about what's going on in the Ansible community and you can also, you know, you're welcome to come share your news and add to the Bullhorn. The Ansible community weekly meetings every Wednesday. There's lots of special interest groups. I mentioned docs. I know there are a couple of documentation people in the room, some tech writers. Please come and join us. There's tons of work and if you're looking to get involved in open source or if you're like really experienced but you don't know Ansible that much and you'd like to, come hang out with us. We're on Matrix. We're your friends. Thank you. Any questions or anything? Do we have time for that? Thank, but I think it's lunch so we can take one or two questions here. Well, you know where to find us if you do have questions. Thank you very much. Thank you. We break for lunch now. Thanks everyone.