 Hey, everyone, welcome back to Chicago. TheCube is excited to be live on day two of Ansible Fest 2022. Lisa Martin and John Furrier here, having some great conversations. A lot of CUBE alumni, a lot of wisdom from the Ansible community coming at you on this program this week. You know, John, we've been hearing stories about the power and the capabilities and the collective wisdom of the Ansible community. You can feel it here. There's no doubt about that. It's Ansible is nothing, as Stephanie Chair said yesterday, it's not a community. And the significant contributions that it makes over and over again are its fuel. I mean, the power of the community is what drives Ansible. It's going to drive the future of, I think, cloud in our next generation, modern application environment. And it's collective intelligence. It's a production system at the end of the day. And I think these guys have harnessed it. So it should be a really great segment to talk about all the contributor work that's been done. So I'm looking forward to it. We've got two great alumni here to talk about the contributor work, how you can get involved. Please welcome back to the CUBE Carol Chen, principal community architect at Red Hat. Adam Miller joins us as well, fresh from the keynote stage, senior principal software engineer at Red Hat. Guys, great to have you on the CUBE. Great to be here. Thank you. So we've enjoyed your keynotes, Adam, and what you were talking about on stage. The Ansible contributor summit, that summit, you guys have been doing what, this is the seven? You've had seven so far in just a couple of years? Well, we had seven virtual contributors. Seven virtual, this is the first Monday, was the first in-person. The first in-person since the pandemic, and actually the 15th contributor summit overall. 15th overall. Talk about these contributor summits, what the contributors are able to do, and the influence that it's having on Ansible, Red Hat, and what people are able to do with cloud at the edge automation. So our community contributors have always had ways to influence and contribute to the project, but the contributor summit is really a place where we can get people together, preferably in the same place so that we can have really great dynamic conversations and interactions, but we also want to make sure that we don't leave out people who have been constantly online joining us. So this year, we are so happy to be here in Chicago in person, we've had about 60 to 70 here joining us, and at first I thought maybe we would have one-third of the attendees joining online because about 30 to 40 people signed up to join online, but in the end we have more than 100 per people watching our live stream. So that's more than half of the attendees overall were joining us online. So this really shows where the contributors are interested in participating. Right, from around the world. It's been interesting, it's been since 2019, since the in-person Ansible Fest in Atlanta now, we're in Chicago, we had the pandemic. Couple interesting observations from our side that I want to get your reaction to, Adam Carroll, and that is one, Ansible's relevance has grown significantly since then, just from a cloud growth standpoint, developer, open source standpoint, and how people work and collaborate has changed. So your contributor base in your community is getting more powerful and scope in my opinion, like as they become, have the keys to the kingdom in their respective worlds as it gets bigger and larger. So the personas are changing, the makeup of the community is changing, and also how you guys collaborate is changing. Can you share what's going on with those two dynamics? I think that power dynamic is looking really good. How are you guys handling that? Yeah, so I mean, I had the opportunity to represent the community on stage yesterday as part of the keynote and talk to this point specifically, is one of the things that we've seen is the project has had the opportunity to kind of grow and evolve. There's been certain elements that have had to kind of decompose. From a technology perspective, we actually had to kind of break it apart and change the architecture a little bit and move things into what are called Ansible Collections, which folks here are very familiar with, know and love, and we've seen a lot of community work in the form of working groups coalesced around those organically. However, they've done so in kind of different ways. They pick tools and collaboration platforms that are popular to their subject matter expertise audience and things like that. So we find ourselves in a place where kind of the community itself had more or less segmented naturally, in a way, and we needed to find ways to kind of heal that fragmentation. It's by demographics or by expertise or both. Mostly expertise. And so there was an open source technology called Matrix. It is an open source, standardized, federated messaging platform that we were able to use to start to bridge back some of those communities that had kind of broken off and made their own home elsewhere on the internet. So now we're able to, for example, the Right the Docs organization, they had a group of people who was very interested in contributing to the Ansible documentation, but they had already self-organized on Discord. And what was interesting there is the existing team for the Ansible documentation, they were already on internet relay chat, also known as IRC, and Matrix allowed us to actually bring those two together and bridge that into the other Matrix channels that we had. So now we're able to have people from all over the world in different areas, in different platforms, coalesce, and cross-pollinate, yeah. And you're meeting the contributors exactly where they are and where they want to be, where they're comfortable. Yes, yeah. We always say we reach out to where they are, so. And much in the way that Ansible has the capability to reach out to things in their own way and allow that subject matter expertise to, because the technology has the potential and possibility and capability to talk to anything over any protocol, we're able to do kind of the same thing with Matrix, allowing us to bridge into any chat platform that it has support for bridging, and we're able to bring a lot of people together. And how's that, what's the feedback been on that so far? I think it's been very positive. For example, I want to highlight that the technical writers that we have contributing via Discord is actually a group from Nigeria. And they've also participated in the Contributor Summit online, virtually, joining us on the Matrix platform. So that bridge that really helps to bring together people from different geographical regions and also different topics and arenas like that, so. What were some of the outcomes of the Contributor Summit, the first in-person in a while? Great that you guys were able to do seven virtually during the pandemic. That's hard, it's hard to get people together. There's so much greatness and innovation that comes when we're all together in-person that you just can't replicate by video, you can do a lot. But talk about some of the outcomes from Monday. What were some of the feedback? What were some of the contributions that you think are really going to impact the community? I think for a lot of us, myself, and through the fact that we are in-person and meeting people face to face, it helps to really build the connections. And when we talk about contribution, the connection is so important that you understand this person a little bit about their background, what they have done for the Ansible Project, and just generally what they're interested in. That builds the rapport and connection that helps further collaboration in the future. Because maybe on that day, we did not have any contributions or anything, but the fact that we had a chance to sit together in the same place to discuss things and share new ideas, roadmaps, is really kind of a big step to the future for our community. And in a lot of ways, we often online, the project has various elements that are able to function asynchronously. So we work very well globally across many time zones, and now we were able to get a lot of people in the same place at the same time synchronously, in the same time zone. And then we had breakout sessions where the subject matter working groups were able to kind of go and focus on things that maybe have been taking a little while to discuss in that asynchronous form of communication and do it synchronously, and be in the same room and work on things. It's been fantastic. Well, developers, they take to asynchronous, like fish to water, it's not a problem, but I do want to ask if there's any observations that you guys have had now that we're kind of coming out of that one wave of the pandemic, but the world's changed hybrid work environment, steady state, so we see that. Any observations on your end on what's new that you've observed, that people are gravitating through sort of pattern of styles, or same old self-governing, or what's new? What have you seen that's coming out of the pandemic that might be a norm? I think that even though people are excited to get back in person, there are things have changed, like you said, and we have to be more aware of there are people who think that not being in person is okay, and that's how they want to do it, and we have to make sure that they are included, so we did want to make a high priority for online participation in this event, and like I said, even though only 30, 40 people signed up to join us online initially, so that was what we were expecting, but in the end, more than 100 people were watching us and joining participation in discussions. I'm sure the on-demand consumption would be good too. Right, yeah, so I think going forward that is probably the trend, and as much as we love being in person, we want this to continue that we take care of people who are, has been constantly participating online and contributing. You're meaning, again, meaning folks where they are, but also allowing those members that want to get together to collaborate in person, I can only imagine the innovation that's going to come, even from having part of the back. Right, and not to continue to harp on the matrix point, but it's been very cool because Matrix has the ability to do live video sessions using another to open source technology called JITSY, so we're able to actually use the same place that we normally find ourselves congregating and collaborating for the project itself in an asynchronous and somewhat synchronous way to also host these types of things that are now hybrid that used to be all one way or all the other, and it's been incredible. The integration has been fascinating to watch how you guys do that, and also with theCUBE, we've been virtual too. It's like people don't want another microsite, but they want a more of a festival vibe, a hub, like a place to kind of check in and have choice, not get jammed into a, you know, a forum or whatever. Hey, if you want to be on Discord, be on Discord, why not? And we do still have our asynchronous forms of work through GitHub, we have our projects, we have issues, we have our Wiki, we have various elements there that everybody can continue to collaborate on, and it's all been very good. Speaking of festivals, Hacktoberfest is going on. Not to be confused with Octoberfest, that was last month. Talk about how the Ansible project and the Ansible community is involved in Hacktoberfest. Give us the deeds, Carol. So yes, Hacktoberfest is an annual thing in October, so October, Hacktoberfest. I think it's organized by Digital Ocean for the past eight or nine years, and it's really a way to kind of encourage people to contribute to open source projects, so it's not Ansible specific, but we as an Ansible project encourage people to take this opportunity to, you know, a lot of them doing their first contributions during this event. And when we first announced we are participating in Hacktoberfest within the first four days of October, which is over a weekend actually, we've had 24 contributions, it's 24 issues fixed, which is like amazing, like, you know, just the interest and the momentum that we had. And so far until I just checked with my teammates this morning that we've had about 35 contributions so far during the month, which is, and I'm sorry, I forgot to mention, this is only for Ansible documentation. So yeah, specifically, and that's also one thing we want to highlight that contributions don't just come in code in, you know, kind of software side, but really there's many ways to contribute and documentation is such a great way for first time users, for first time contributors to get involved. So it's really amazing to see these contributions from all over the world and also partly thanks to the technical riders in Nigeria kind of promoting and sharing this initiative and it's just great to see the results from that. Can you double click on the different ways of contribution? You mentioned a couple, documentation being one code being the other, but what is the breadth of opportunities that the contributors have to contribute to the project? There's so many. So I actually take care of more of outreach efforts in the community. So I helped to organize events and meetups from around the world. And now that we're slowly coming out of the pandemic, I've seen more and more in-person meetups. I was just talking to someone from Minneapolis, they're trying to get people back together again. There are people in Singapore, in Netherlands, from pretty much, you know, all corners of the globe, wanting to form not just for the Ansible project, but the local kind of connection with the people in the region, sometimes in their own language, in their local languages to really work together on the project and just, you know. You have to create a global network. I mean, it's like Ansible Global. Yeah, exactly. You can create local subnets, not to get on networking networks. Right, yeah. Backbone. Yeah, one quick thing, I want to touch on the Hectoberfest. I think it's a great opportunity for existing contributors to mentor. Because many people like to help bring in new contributors, and this is kind of a focal point to be able to focus on that. And then to the other point, it's been extremely powerful to see as we return, these sub-communities pop up and kind of work with themselves. So on different ways to contribute. So code is kind of the one that gets the most attention, I think. Documentation, I think, is a unsung hero, highly important, great way. The logistical component, which is invaluable because it allows us to continue with our adoption and evangelization and things like that. Specifically adoption and evangelization is another place that contributors can join and actually spawn a local meetup. And then connect in with the existing community and try to help increase the network, create a new subnet. Network affects huge. And I think the thing that you brought up about reuse is part of that whole things get documented properly. The leverage that comes out of that just feeds into the system, the flywheel. I mean, that's how communities are supposed to work, right? Yes. That's what I was just going to comment on is the flywheel effect. It's clearly present and very palpable. Thank you so much for joining John and me on the program talking about the contributor summit, the ways of contribution, the impacts that are being made so far, what Hacktoberfest is already delivering, and we still have about 10 days or so left in October, so there's still more time for contributors to get involved. Thank you so much for your insights and your time. Thank you. Thank you so much for having us. Our pleasure. For our guests on John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Chicago, day two of our coverage of Red Hat Ansible Summit 22. We will see you right after this short break with our next guest.