 Hey, everybody. I'm really glad to see you here today. As you can well imagine, this is a pretty big topic, I think, of conversation for a lot of people. And it's definitely something I think about every single day and the work that I do at Red Hat. So let me tell you a little bit about myself. Currently, I work in marketing communications on the events team. Before I landed at Red Hat, I actually worked in higher education administration and also in arts administration. And I'm also a published writer and poet in obscure literary journals that you've never heard of. Part of the reason I talk about that aspect is that I'm very interested in storytelling. I'm interested in pieces of the story and how things fit together. And I think that's a really important component when we're talking about community and corporate and the things that each side cares about. So as I said, I sit in corporate marketing and events team, but I also have a dotted line relationship to open source and standards, which is embedded in the office of the CTO at Red Hat. So what that means is that I'm embedded in two workflows at Red Hat. I'm embedded in the marketing communications workflow where I go to weekly meetings. And I'm also embedded in OSAS, where I also go to those weekly meetings. And so I'm in two worlds simultaneously. And it's a slightly schizophrenic existence as a result of that. But one of the things I think that's really wonderful about being in that situation is that I'm privy to the thought process that happened in corporate marketing and also within the community space. Because there are universes that overlap. But sometimes it's really hard to find places where they overlap and also to find ways to prioritize and a way where they can meet in the middle. So I was thinking about, well, what are the stereotypes of community versus corporate? And in some ways, when I first came to Red Hat, like I said, my background was in higher education. I was working at Duke University before I came to Red Hat. And one of the reasons I was really attracted to Red Hat was its open source ethos of collaboration, community, transparency, all those things. I was like, wow, this sounds so wonderful. I want to be part of that world. And then when I was told you will be managing community events, I'm like, perfect. I'm like, I want to be in that space. Originally my position was supposed to be just under the office of CTO, but due to some shuffling around, they revamped my position to go into corporate marketing. And it is a little bit more formal. I'll admit that. It's something that I wasn't anticipating because I thought it was going to be sitting in the community space where I could live the ethos of love and not money. But of course Red Hat's a business. Red Hat has priorities that they're trying to make sure that they can fulfill the obligations that are required of a public traded company. This is a really funny slide that Matthew Broger, who actually works at Red Hat. He's now at opensource.com. He actually presented this slide as a part of metrics. And I actually kind of laughed a little bit because I was like, well, it's pretty reductionist in terms of kind of the visual presentation. But it actually, I think kind of encapsulates a lot of the perceptions that you'll see when talking about corporate versus community, right? And so community hugs and more hugs. And so the big question you get is like, well, where's the value in community? How can you provide the value of community to folks who don't necessarily sit in the community space every day? So when I think about kind of the different aspects of corporate and community and the stories that each side has to tell, part of what I think about is I think about the fable of the elephant and the blind men. Are people familiar with this fable? I mean, it's a pretty well-known fable, but what it is is it kind of encapsulates people kind of just feeling they're part of the story, right? And they're very, very attached to their part of the story. Like it's like, I know that this is a wall and you cannot tell me that it's a rope or a spear or whatever. Like people can be very, very attached to the story that's in front of them. But the thing that's really, really I think important to remember is that they're not necessarily wrong. They just have the piece of the story in front of them. So what is it that you need to do to make sure that people have other pieces of the story? And I think that's part of what I want to talk about today is figuring out strategies for people to think of a way to really present it to the other side of the house, whether you're dealing with product marketing, you're dealing with people who may be potential investors in your community, you're trying to ask for resources for your community. I mean, there are all sorts of reasons why you want to be able to present the community story in a way that makes sense to the corporate side of the house. So before you have a conversation, there are lots of things that you have to kind of think about. And these are very real things, right? So some of the things that I've observed when we have conversations or people are kind of missing the mark and understanding each other is that sometimes we're really missing the obvious or we're afraid to state the obvious. And so this is kind of a list of some of the things you want to address. And so I'm going to go into an anecdote in terms of what I've had to kind of present. So like I said, I work in community events. I'm part of the events team. The rest of the events team does not work in community. They work on events that are run by analysts, our partners like AWS, Microsoft, Cisco. So they're very sales driven. They're very formal. They're focused on a much different audience than community members. I mean, they may be part of our larger ecosystem community, but they're not what we think of typically as community, like for instance, an audience maybe, like at DevConf or a KubeCon or an open source summit North America. So my story is that I've had to deal with a lot of new people coming into the events team who have never been exposed to community, have never been exposed to open source. So the story that I have to tell you is that I had a new director that came in and she was looking at my events and my metrics and she's like, you don't feature products that some of your community events. Like I know she would have this event called Flock which is a Fedora contributor conference. She's like, it doesn't look like there are any booths there and you're not featuring products. Why wouldn't you feature products at a community event? Like she was not, obviously when she was saying, I'm like, oh my God, this person actually has no idea what they're talking about. And I felt immediately like, whoa, I had to kind of take a step back because I was like, this person is now coming into my space and telling me I need to start featuring products because she was like, you need to be featuring products because you're a Red Hat employee. You need to be doing this, this and this. You need to be measuring sales ready opportunities. I'm like, I said, okay, there needs to be a timeout and I have to do some education around this. And part of what I had to identify in this situation was kind of what were the full fears and concerns that were at work there. Some of the fears and concerns were related to her being able to deliver on her job. Like she was overseeing events. She was seeing, okay, the metrics that I'm familiar with are not being represented by the events that she's doing and that causes me concern. I'm worried, I'm new. I want to be able to deliver on my promises to people. And so it's very, very important because it can be very emotional response when people come to you with things that they perceive as gaps or they, and we'll talk about some of those scenarios that we see in that space where there's a lot of conflict. But it's really, really important to kind of take a step back. What are the fears and concerns? What were the gaps and knowledge on my side and her side? Because I'm like, I'm obviously needing to understand why she's afraid, why she has these concerns. She needs to deliver on something. I knew I was delivering on my part and I needed to show value to what I was doing. Another thing that I think is really important is that we're all human beings, but when we go into a conversation that's really, really difficult is we should assume good intent. We want to assume that people actually want you to be successful. They want their project to be successful. You're interacting for a reason because you're trying to achieve some sort of aim that there's consensus about, okay? And so it's really important to release defensiveness. Sometimes it means having to take a few moments to kind of reassess, but I think it's really, really important, like I said, to just really list out and be honest about the things that need to be addressed. And this may be a multi-step process. So I put this slide up as kind of an example. I ended up doing a presentation for marketing communications and also for this particular new person and it's kind of a variation of what I have to present because we're onboarding so many new people in the red hat space. But I wanted to explain what were some of the differences between technology and product, the emphasis on culture, the emphasis on competition and competition, and then the rapid change that happens in the space. So there's not always a lot of consistency. For instance, KubeCon was like an event of like 300 people and then it ended up being like 8,000 people this past December. So when you're uniting the story, there are a couple of things I want people to think about because it kind of helps wrap around like what is it that I need to start with? And there are two parts of the story that I think a lot of folks care about. One is the quantitative part of it with numbers, maybe metrics. I think it's also very important to identify competitors and collaborators. I find that people actually overlook this a lot. They don't think it's important because they know the people they work with but the people that you're talking with may not know that hey, by the way, we actually partner on SUSE on the upstream. You would be surprised a lot of people wouldn't know that in the Linux space. And then also the qualitative aspect and I'm gonna go ahead since I'm running out of time. We need to talk about intangible, intangible value. This is one of the things that I see a lot. Community doesn't help with selling product. What does community do for me? I think that it's basically we're giving stuff away for free and I don't understand what the value of community, I mean, and it's hard to hear something like that when you're in an organization like Red Hat because you assume that maybe people know what that is. And I think it's very important for us to talk about the value of community, not necessarily cash to metrics. Metrics for me are very hard because it provides, sometimes it doesn't provide the context that's needed. Like we always have to have context and story attached to metrics. One of the things that I think that we undersell in the community space is how community provides the basis for trust and credibility and that cannot be bought. That cannot be bought. So when people are talking about the bottom line, I always say to them, the things that the community provides is a credibility in testimonials that we would never get otherwise. One of the things that I love to tell people when they come to Red Hat is like, there are organizations that may not be customers but they're great contributors and they're great users. An example would be CERN. They have the largest usage of RDO in the world, I think. And they also use SAF, they also run Stentos and they also use, I think, versions of Fedora that they refine. So remember that community is valuable. Diversity of thought means diversity of solutions. We're solving for complexity. Nothing we do is easy. No one can do this alone. And of course we're kicking the tires in the technology. We want people to be able to experience the type of online chain. Excuse me. The other thing I just wanna leave people with is that we do have lots of moments where we're like, they just don't get it. But I'm gonna challenge all of you to find opportunities for collaboration. Part of it is if you've got teams that you know you wanna partner with, either you wanna get resources, you want them to understand the value of your contribution, is that reach out. Do presentations to educate internally and externally. I mean, provide some consulting advice. Like one thing that I think that DevCom sees you as well is that we have a lot of customers that attend this event. And it's a great way for them to see the inner workings of what open source is in a very tangible, real way. Building relationships, it takes time, it takes persistence and consistency. I don't want you to think that it's easy because this is only a 20 minute presentation. And I also wanted to encourage people to really listen and acknowledge people. Remember what people's fears, people are sometimes driven by survival needs, even when we're very intelligent and we think we're very evolved. Sometimes we're not, sometimes we're afraid of losing credibility, we're afraid of whatever losing face. And so we have to acknowledge that that's a limitation. So hopefully changes ahead. Like changes as a constant, things are always happening in this space. I would love to hear your stories. And I don't know if anyone has any questions about what I talked about since we're very, very short on time. Okay, so I'm just gonna put my information up here. This was my Red Hat address and also my Twitter account. So if you want to follow me on Twitter and tweet at me or email me. One of the things that I also want to offer to people is that I'm glad to kind of give you my perspective or if there are folks that you want to connect with. One of the things that I want to do is to be able to facilitate and enable communication across different areas. So any questions, concerns, suggestions? Yeah. Well, I mean part of it's like I said was an education. What is it? Oh, yeah, sorry. The question is like, what did I do with the person who thought flock was a really great place to sell products? I mean part of what I told her, I said, listen, this is what flock actually is. And so part of it is we walked through, like I actually went through like the website I showed her pictures and I said these folks are people that contribute to Fedora, which is the technology that feeds into Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Part of it is that there's a lot of confusion between the difference between community and then what the product part of it is. And also there's a lot of misunderstanding about the fact that community has its own autonomy. And I think that's the part that people really have a hard concept wrapping their head around. Because I think Fedora, I think two thirds of the contributors are actually outside Red Hat. And so that's one thing I also had to explain to them is that the emphasis is on the technology and points of integration and making sure things work, not just with Red Hat, but with our competitors or people that we're cooperating competitively with. And so part of it is that they have to understand that piece of the story. And I think that's the challenge that I've found the most is that it's a very, very atypical way of thinking if you've been in a typical corporate environment where you view people as competitors or as the enemy, we kind of have more of a frenemy situation. But honestly more on the friend side than the enemy side. When we had Flock, I mean, the Sousa guy comes and brings beer. I mean, he's pretty popular and we love him, right? So it's kind of like, I'm telling him like, hey, and you know what? Open Sousa also was a co-sponsor of Flock. And they're like, why would they sponsor the Fedora conference? And we sponsored their Open Sousa conference because we collaborate in a space where we're trying to find solutions. And that's the value of community that I think that people overlook is that people want to feel like they're actually accomplishing something. They wanna feel like they're actually finding solutions together. And that's the part that I think is so beautiful about the community space is the fact that all of us are working for something that's really greater than just individual self and any one organization. This is really kind of a global, kind of collective human endeavor and it speaks to everything that I want to aspire to and to a lot of people in the communities, right? They wanna aspire to that too. And so don't underestimate the kind of pull that has because when people hear that like, wow, I've never ever thought about it that way. Their minds are blown. So take the opportunity to blow people's minds. I think it's really, really important. Remember, you are experts. Sometimes having a conversation can be hard. I understand that. But if you speak about why you're truly dedicated and passionate about something, it really means a lot to people. Any other questions? Yeah. I do, I mean, like I believe in Steen. So I mean, I had a second major in biology. So I'm very science oriented. But yeah, I think part of it's like I said, I'm interested in connecting the dots and the stories. But I think, you know, people should just read more. So anyway. And I'm told that I'm out of time, but please find me in the hallway track. I'm glad to talk, I would do a little bit more about this topic. Oh, I still have five minutes. I thought you were... Oh, okay, I'm sorry. So he was asking whether or not my arts background and my literature background helped enable my understanding of IT. And I say, absolutely. But also I've entered the IT space. Like I used to manage websites for registration. So like I did a lot of website development. So like I'm not afraid of command line interface. I'm not afraid of terminals. Like that I don't find it intimidating. And so I think part of it that's important is that there has to be natural curiosity on both sides, right? Like I think curiosity is a word that I've heard in several sessions. And I think it's really, really good to have curiosity. And also curiosity coupled with assuming good intent. I think that's really, really key because I think it's really hard when someone I think encroaches on your space and they question about why you're doing something a certain way. That's really, really hard. Especially if you're really emotionally attached to the things that you're doing. And I think a lot of us who are doing work, we want it to be meaningful if we're in the open source space and the community space. Like we want to feel like what we're producing is something of value. And I think, you know, acknowledging that in the people that you're interacting with, whether it's actually at work or at home or in your regular space, I think goes a long way in furthering what you want to do. Okay, any other questions? Oh, Rebecca, yeah. Yeah, so Rebecca was asking, how does the change of perspective being more on the corporate side? Since I've been embedded in the corporate side from the beginning as well as in Keeney's side from the very beginning, I think the one thing that I thought was very interesting was that I really saw lots of gaps in terms of how we were understanding community from the marketing side. So we like to talk about open source. We like to talk about community. We like to talk about collaboration, but we had people marketing that couldn't name any of our communities. Like they couldn't even name Fedora. And so I was like, okay, that's kind of the concern because we actually need to know our history. And so one of the things that I've done now is I've taken upon myself to try to do onboarding with a lot of our new people. And I'm hoping to do some more information kind of sessions for people because we're still continuing to grow as an organization within MoreCom. It's really, really hard because there's only one of me and trying to scale that out. But I'm hoping that we can spread the work with people who are interested in doing that kind of stuff. So yeah. I'd like to put that question around. What are your challenges when you're dealing with community people and having them try to understand the commercial side because there can be systemic and cultural resistance to. So Brian was asking, what are some of the challenges for community to understand the corporate side of the house? And I think part of it is that, we are in a business, like Red Hat is a business and I like having a paycheck. I'll be honest, I don't wanna pay my mortgage. I think part of what like, my role when I deal with communities is having them understand what the corporate priorities are. So for instance, I run Community Central within Red Hat Summit. And one of the things I wanted people to understand was how do the communities map to our products? Like people were not connecting the dots for Doran Santos was related to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. They were not connecting that to RDO was Red Hat OpenStack platform or Forman was napping the satellite. Like people were actually not seeing those things at all. And so one of the things, and I think there's still room for improvement, but one of the things that I'm hoping to accomplish as we continue Community Central and Red Hat Summit is for people who are thinking you have conversations, for instance, with the product marketing side. Understanding what product marketing is trying to do. And then also mapping stuff out in the community space. Like, hey, here's some of the things that we know that customers are interested in or users are interested in and we're doing that. But we also have this space where we're allowed to break things and it's a playground and that's what's great about community is that we wanna have contributors and we want to also be very innovative. And we're also listening to what people want on the corporate side of the house. So part of it is that when you show that you care about every part of the story, I think, first of all, you're doing advocacy for your community and product marketing is like, okay, they get it. So part of it is that the conversation is like, I don't think they get it. I don't think they get it. I mean, for instance, I had one event where I had a community booth and product marketing came in and said, we're taking away the community part of the overall booth. And I said, time out, you can't do that. First of all, this is a community event and if we take away the community pod within this booth, we will completely destroy the credibility as an open source company. And I just said it that way, because I said, we're an open source company. It involves community pod stays, right? So part of it is advocacy that needs to go both ways and I'm not out of time. So thank you so much for coming to my talk. I really appreciate it. And please find me, jmodriagatredhat.com and Jen Innovate, thank you so much.