 All right, thanks. Thanks again for your patience must be I just got this laptop two weeks ago. So who knows? So again, my name is Ray and you can see my Twitter handle there if you want to Connect with me or DM me. I've been at GitLab Almost 15 months now. So not that long although we've gone through a lot of I mean changes since I joined. I mean, I think when I started we were at about 300 350 people now we're well over 850. So we more than doubled in size. So it's kind of I mean It's a good problem to have and to it to a certain extent, but it's been a fun fun journey and before GitLab I was at the Linux Foundation for about four years I didn't have a full-time community management role But a bulk of my time was probably working with various communities in the networking industry What I've noticed in the past Three or four years the community management I'm you see a lot of community manager types in different open-source communities When I started I think a lot of people were doing this sort of on the side like I was doing like you didn't necessarily have like a Full-time person getting paid to do community management role like you a lot of people sort of volunteering You may have like several people in the community Working as a team of community managers and I don't know like how many of you know, John O bacon He's like pretty well known in community management space. He's a great guy He runs once a year. He runs a community leadership summit a weekend before Oskan I mean he took a break this year because I think he was just getting He was just overworked this year But when I first went to CLS in 2016 a lot of the discussion was I mean community managers Like how do I justify what I do? How do I justify my role to upper management or even to the community at large? So that was sort of the discussion in 2016 a lot of the like a breakout session There were a lot of talks about that When I went back two years later the discussion evolved more into Where like what's a career path for community managers and then which group do the community managers belong to? There's a fit under VP of engineering. Is it marketing or is it something else? So it really grew into like almost like a full-time professional role, which is which is great to see as I mean one of the person that's really passionate about community management So the byproduct of that is now you're just like every other colleagues like in marketing like in DevRel So you go through a lot of these like a performance management discussions with your with your managers I mean not because you're gonna get fired, but you know like you're you're a full-time professional So, you know, I started at GitLab June of last year like December January sort of our performance That's when we annual performance discussion happens. So I started thinking about this like since June of last year Like what did I do? Like did I make an impact in the community? Maybe I was going through a midlife crisis too, but I asked a question on like, you know, how do I sort of? discuss like what I've accomplished over the past six or seven months and And I've talked to other community managers and I've seen a lot of read a lot of articles and What I've noticed was that there's a lot of focus on discussions on metrics Like I mean, there are a lot of metrics in open-source communities like how many developers you have how many commits you've gotten But what what I realized was that a lot of what we do It can't necessarily be measured or or very easily anyways. It's not easily quantifiable. So you need to have a lot of Thinking into those aspects of your job. That's not easily quantifiable So I want to spend bulk of the time discussing having a discussion about that I want to make sure I know I got a little I start but also want to have Plenty of time for discussions towards the end or love to have hallway conversations as well so What's our job? I mean, this is not a complete list of what we do So I broke it into like two groups like one on your left is Our aspect of our jobs. That's relatively easy to sort of quantify you or you see a plenty of metrics things like You know, how is there growth in the community? Are there active number of developers? However, you want to quantify it in your community? It's that's relatively easy to measure Things like how many people you onboarded either through like like things like like sprints that you do at KDE or or onboarding sessions that that's some of the communities do A lot of communities do sort of some sort of a health assessment using using metrics and numbers and I think like I mean I first some of the discussions already here. This is my first Academy, but I'm you always all obviously go through like a lot of process improvements even if it's things like like improving your wiki page and and You know making onboarding easier I mean some of that could a lot of that or a lot of that could be easily measured in terms of like numbers and metrics But the things on your right I mean, that's my obligatory cute baby picture or a toddler picture is like a lot of it A lot of the stuff that you do is like not easily Quantifiable like am I creating a welcoming environment for a lot of people like a lot of new people to join and that's not Necessarily easily quantifiable. I mean there are some metrics that people use, but I think those just tend to scratch the surface and One of the things that I I like to do as a community manager said that I need to be Representative of the community like within get lab like I mean that we have thousands of contributors that are contributing to get lab that are not employed by Get lab, but I need to be their voice right. How am I doing that effectively to my management and to my colleagues and That's not easy to quantify necessarily I mean you can talk to our members and see what kind of job I'm doing But that's you can't necessarily put a score on that and the final thing and this is important one Especially open-source communities. I mean members join your community because it meets their intrinsic needs I mean a lot of people aren't getting paid to contribute to to an open-source project, but for whatever reason they're passionate about the technology Or they're passionate about, you know, what your community stands for What you really need to do is that making sure that you're satisfying their intrinsic motivation for Whatever reason they chose to join that you're commuting the first place and that's really hard to quantify But I mean that's one of the things that that I try to ask myself now and then and say am I making a difference so So with a lot of communities we have a lot of metrics at get lab And this is sort of the dashboard. I mean we hired I mean I work with detergent for a long time Even when I was at the Linux Foundation But this dashboard is still like in working progress. I mean this took like months to bill I mean it wasn't like I hired detergent and we had all this data To analyze the data and the reason why I point this out is that when I was at community leadership summit last year After my presentation somebody came up and said can you recommend four or five metrics that I can use for my community and My answer to that was like well, it really depends. I mean it's not really that simple like I don't have four or five golden metrics That you can use for every community But it'll depend on on the community But even within the same community the type of metrics that you look at might be very different like a year from now Just as an illustration. I mean when I first joined I Mean I first wanted to know who these people were like I mean we have a lot of people outside of get lab that are contributing But it wasn't necessarily easy to figure out who these people were So identifying them how much contribution we're getting over a time period And I mean sorry, this might be a little hard to read like I focus on like a median open days So are we doing a good job like closing the merger quest that are coming in from outside of community? I want to compare between median open days for MRs that were opened by get lab employees versus people from outside of the company I knew there would be a difference, but I wanted to make sure that For get lab employees. It was two days, but for people outside. It's like 25 days That's that would not be acceptable, but I mean luckily the the the range of like it open days that I've seen are have been pretty decent So this is like some of the metrics that I focus on in the early days It's not that these aren't important anymore, but my focus areas are different to that. I mean these are I Mean the the chart on your right This is sort of the backlog the over like a cumulative backlog that we've had over the period One of the reasons why I looked at that was Like I like I mentioned before we more than doubled in size I'm especially an engineering hasn't made any impact in the backlog. That's why that's one of the things I wanted to see And the other thing I looked at recently was We a great thing about our community is that we have a lot of our customers that are making Contributions to get lab in terms of code I mean they they find it easier to change a fix a bug or add a new feature by doing their work directly Versus just you know opening an issue and hoping somebody would pick it up. So I wanted to You know closely identify who those customers were in amongst like a community of contributors So I mean it took a couple of slides But the point is like in even in terms of like a metrics stuff that are easily quantifiable that what you look at today You may not look at it as closely like next year You might have different areas or different processes that you want to focus on So just want to leave it at that and talk about What I mentioned before So what about things that are not easily measured and I listed some of the possible scenarios Like I mentioned like do we have representation from underrepresented communities? I mean not just in terms of like people like committing code, but things like like if you go to an event like this You know, is it basically all guys talking at at conferences and that's usually not a good thing good thing to see You want to have like a fair representation from different groups. I mean that's in some aspect that could be measured But I mean I went to a session a couple of weeks ago And it was titled how to be a good ally and one of the things the speaker from Autodesk His name is Guy Martin. I've known for a while One of the things he He talked about was that we tend to focus too much on like Speaking but we also need to encourage people from underrepresented communities to sort of lead like initiatives or projects But they don't sort of source projects, which I didn't even think about So I mean there are other areas that we probably can look at or set new goals for because I mean good example is Yeah, we want to restructure the wiki But should you volunteer yourself or do you want to find some other people that you think would be pretty good at like Leading the new effort rather than having the same four or five people like leading your initiatives within your community So I thought that was like a really I'm a good example of how we can enlarge participation from different different community members And I mean this the third and fourth bullet here sort of goes into intrinsic motivation So does a charter or the mission still reflect? What a lot of people believe in so I mean you start with the mission for your project or or goals But you know does that still make sense or does it need like does it need to do a better job of reflecting like new members of The community so that's something like you probably want to pay attention to And set some type of goal for And I mean sort of associated with your mission and goals is your community code of conduct I mean community code of conduct. I think we've gotten through thinking this in terms of Dealing with like, you know, abusive languages or even violations at events But it community code of conduct really needs to reflect your community or your aspirations So, I mean, that's something that that you probably want to I mean You know, I shouldn't be dealing with community code of conduct when there is a like a foul language that's happening on forums or at events So some of these like a scenarios that I talked about that's hard to measure The one other reason why it's hard to measure is that it's it's not as easy to get feedback on how well we're doing in these areas So, I mean surveys are great online feedbacks are helpful But I think the challenge with that is like a surveys are helpful for like a like transactions Like I'm buying I'm buying a shoes or I flew on the plane and you get a survey on how was your how your home I experienced was So it's easy to sort of quantifies like a transaction But in the community, it's not a want to it's not a transaction with somebody that I'm not going to meet Like it's it's you're gonna have a long-term relationship with these people So the better mechanism is like going to events like this and having hallway conversations or having one-on-one Conversations and one of the things I'm trying to get better at As I'm getting, you know, well settled into my job is to having one-on-one conversations Even if it's over a zoom with community members rather than just trying to sit behind like issues and merge requests to have a communications I mean, you know, you shouldn't be too much of a burden for me to spend few hours a month like it talking to different community members over the phone So that's something that I'm trying to be better at and then get a better sense or get a better pulse from the community. I Know I'm quickly running out of time so How do we like, you know measurement for for these areas are hard, but you should still set goals, right? I mean trying to set up, you know, create an inclusive community. I mean, maybe what I need to do is Do a better job of having people like a new people especially from underrepresented communities like leading different initiatives in my community Or featuring them in a blog or during interviews I mean one of the things that I realized a couple of months ago was that a lot of the blog posts I was doing was featuring community members They were all guys and that's that's a problem It wasn't like I it wasn't something that I did it on purpose, but I realized that after a while and that's you know That's something that's easy to fix, right? and And as as you work towards these goals What you might want to try out and what I'm trying to do is do a different type of experimentation I talked to somebody at open source on a couple of weeks ago Jana Jana Gallus. She's a yanna gala. She's a professor at UCLA She talked to me about doing different type of a B testing when I reach out to Contributors even even for things like recognition It's like different using different type of communication mechanisms or or even different emails So that's something that I want to try to do to make sure that You know how I communicate with community members or how I'm conveying the recognition awards there's a difference depending on which mechanism I choose and You know and then once in a while make sure that it's try to try and see what kind of impact those different type of Experimentations have made and and towards meeting those goals I just want to leave you with two quick quotes quotes. I don't want to look at read through them But I mean basically, I mean I kind of made this point What I try not to do is focus too much on what's quantifiable Because just because it's quantifiable doesn't mean that it's important And I mean Simon Sinek is somebody that I didn't know about until about a month ago I was just looking for a quote or Graphics that shows that you need to focus on people that not numbers and this quote just kept popping up and If you haven't heard of Simon Sinek I watch encourage you to watch find his YouTube video He's like the third most watched person on YouTube apparently and I didn't even know about him So I thought these were helpful quotes for me a good inspiration I know I'm out of time, but happy to take questions if you have time or You can have a hallway conversation You