 on in which timezone you're currently watching this live stream of Emmerkamp 2020. I'm Anne Grete and I'm going to tell you something today about contributing and why it may seem scary and to be honest this is quite scary recording this talk but I'm doing it anyway because I really want to share my excitement about the topic of contributing. But first something more about me. I started studying psychology here in Enschede in 2010. I started doing my psychology bachelor's degree and after that I completed my master's in human media interaction mostly focused on user-centered design. After that I started working at a company called Nadab just half an hour drive from here where I started with a traineeship. The goal of the traineeship was to become a software developer and that's what I am today. I'm a Rails developer doing a lot of coffee script because we use a lot of server-side rendered templates. Currently we're moving towards something more modern using a JavaScript framework and the JavaScript framework is Vue. A lot of you would have expected Ember but that's not the case. I'm not an Ember developer nor do I do any Ember coding in my spare time but I ended up doing some contributing for Ember and it all started in 2018 when I was the Zoe on the left side of this Ember logo and I ended up volunteering. I ran around most of the time in a green shirt and during a few lunch breaks in the Zoe suit and I have to say running around in a Zoe suit has been the hardest contributing I've done so far. If we fast forward approximately 11 months we end up in Brussels at FOSSTEM. FOSSTEM is a large open source conference with over 8,000 people attending and over 800 talks. That year I joined the open source design room because design was really something that I liked and thought that I could understand. All the people there were really passionate about their contribution to open source and what I found out was that their contribution was not only not technical but it was valued. So I decided I wanted to contribute to a framework that I knew with people that I thought could help me. So two weeks later I opened my first pull request. It was for Ember and it was for the release blog and luckily I had some help. This guy helped me a lot with my PR. Even though my PR is only four lines of code I was luckily able to copy and paste a lot from the RFC. Just copying this and these four lines of code didn't make it any less valuable. It ended up on the Ember map screencast of Ember Octane and after the encouragement I got from Kenneth but also other people that read the blog I decided to write more and since then I've been writing a lot of PRs for the Ember times. Next to writing I've also been adding a lot of so we sent tomsers to the website. The cool thing is that this is not really hard. It's just four or five lines of code but it shows to everybody who has a tomser that their tomser is valued too. If we forward to October I ended up at Emberfest. After contributing and volunteering at EmberConf two years in a row I decided to volunteer at Emberfest. But next to the volunteering I also gave a talk. I gave a lightning talk about contributing and that everybody can contribute because after talking to somebody there who was surprised that I wrote for the Ember times even though I'm not in a core team I don't do any Ember development I realized that it's important that everybody realizes their value and what they can contribute to a framework like Ember. So let's talk about contributing. Contributing is something that we all see different. So some of you might see contributing as adding and removing lines of code from a repository. Others of you who are like me might view it as running around in a Zoysuit or setting up a meetup. The cool thing is there is a specification for this called the All Contributors spec which shows all the different kinds of contributions people can make to a repository or your framework. So people who are giving a talk even if they're currently recording it somewhere they are contributing to this. But also the people who ask questions on Discord. Leia is of course a huge contributor to Ember by making this all possible. But there's also a reason why people do this. There are psychological things that we can look at and learn from when we want to entice more people into contributing. And the first of it is motivation. Motivation is really important in understanding why people contribute. Social norms is something we can use to get people to contribute. And the community which Ember has and should be really proud of is something that keeps people interested in contributing. So let's first look at motivation. There are two kinds of motivation. There is intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is something from within. One thing to help people comes from within and is cool intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation might be that your boss wants a bug fixed. The cool thing is that it doesn't really matter what kind of motivation people have. If they do something from it then they end up with a feeling of satisfaction. And the feeling of satisfaction is something we as a community can enlarge in. If we give gratitude to the people who contribute if we acknowledge their contributions they will feel this sense of satisfaction and when they feel it they will be more likely to contribute to Ember. The next thing is social norms. Social norms is a psychological term that we use to describe the situation where somebody asks someone something and they say yes. So for example if Leia asks me to upload the Zoys and Thomsters to the website and I say yes that's social norms in effect. And the cool thing is that if somebody asks you to do something you already feel encouraged that that person chose you. So if we as a community invite people this way to contribute they are really likely to do it as well. And the cool thing is that they then experience the community and community is really important with in Ember. But also within the general sense of the society there are two kinds of things we can look at from a community standpoint. And the first of all is psychological sense of community. What this actually means is that you feel aligned with a community because their values match with yours. And I found some tweets that nicely illustrate that. So Scott tweeted that the principles of the Ember community are so in line with basic human goodness and that things like caring and teaching are at the core of a lot of members of the community. This really nicely illustrates the sense of this psychological sense of community. And just this morning I found this tweet of John who was really sad that he couldn't go to EmberConf but that the fact that we're now able to share this experience in a virtual world is so cool. This also shows his feeling of the sense of community with the Ember community. And then just I think two hours before I'm recording this I found this tweet by Kenneth who's sad that he was going to open up more of his time to help people to get contributing. And he wants to enlarge in the psychological sense of community for people getting started. And a cool thing is it's not only something that happens online. By organizing meetups like the Chennai made up this year or by taking a picture with all the women at the last EmberConf or by attending EmberConf last year in person we get a feeling of this psychological sense of community. We get a feeling of the values that we share with each other. And even today we have that feeling in the virtual world. There are a lot of people currently watching this live stream. They're chatting. There are people watching it in VR. And the cool thing is that this psychological sense of community that we're now experiencing and I hope you're experiencing it with me too can turn into community commitment. And the cool thing about community commitment is that it's something that makes sure that people keep contributing. Luckily a lot of Ember people tweet so I found another tweet to show you this psychological concept. Melanie tweeted I'm switching to react as an answer to the question what she would tweet once she was kidnapped to show us what happened. And this shows so nicely that the identity that Melanie has is so closely linked to Ember that we immediately would recognize this. And this community commitment has to do with loyalty. So people are willing to exert effort on behalf of this community. People will share their experiences and by sharing their experiences they make sure that they're more likely to keep contributing. So the cool thing is that if we as a community start talking to each other and exposing it to the outside world we're as a community getting tighter. So what can we learn from what I told you today. First of all make sure that you thank everybody. Of course this is common courtesy but be aware of all the people that help you when you have an add-on or when you're organizing a meet-up. Make sure that you're not only acknowledging people who create the PR but also the people that help the PR take more shape. The next thing we as a community could do is ask people to contribute to their strengths. Asking someone to contribute will hopefully give them a cool sense that they can do it. But if you ask them to contribute to their strengths they're even more likely to feel really satisfied afterwards. And the last thing I want to encourage all of you, even if you're now sitting in your sweatpants at home, is talk about Ember. Maybe not talk talk like somebody in real life but make a blog or tweet about it or fight the righteous fight at the JavaScript Reddit to make Ember cool there too. But by talking about Ember you're creating a better community commitment for yourself but you're also able to ask and invite people in to join Ember. So this is something that I wanted to share with you and I want to tell you to do it. It might seem scary you might feel really weird at first talking to people about this thing that's really important to you but do it anyway. It's not that hard you can start by just creating a PR somewhere or just writing a simple blog and as the community grows we will be there for you. Just like Kenneth was there for my first PR there are a lot of people on Discord, on the GitHub repost that will really really like to help you. So thank you, you can find me on GitHub, you can find me on Twitter, on Instagram, my slides are unnoticed and if you have any questions just send me a message on Discord. Thank you very much.