 Welcome to another OpenShift Commons briefing, and as we do on every Friday, this is a transformational talk from Red Hatter's external folks to Red Hat. We've got a great group of folks who keep coming back every Friday to have these conversations about changing organizations, dev ops, dev security, dev sec ops, and all kinds of other wonderful things. And today, I'm really pleased to have a colleague of ours, Michael Ducci, who's recently come in and is part of the global transformation teams here at Red Hat, and he's going to talk about why change matters more than ever now, and a bit about the importance of dev ops in this new world that we all live in. And this is a reprise of a speech he gave a little while ago with a few tweaks because every day things change more, and things shift even more, and how we deal with all of that around the world, and how we can apply some of the things we've learned from the dev ops world and cultural shifts. So I'm really looking forward to this talk and to the conversation with Michael afterwards. So I'm going to let Michael introduce himself, tell you a little bit about his background, and deliver the talk, and then afterwards, please do join us for a conversation about the topic. So Michael, take it away, and thanks again for taking the time today. Yes. Thank you so much for having me, Diane. Always, always good to see you again, and good to talk to you again. So as Diane said, my name is Michael Ducci. I'm trying to figure out how to advance these slides. Technology, how does it even work? Finally figured it out. I don't know what was going on there. So as with computers, you know, as they say, how do they even work? So happy Fridays to everyone. Or good afternoon, good evening, good morning, depending upon where you're at in the world. So I'm Michael Ducci. I'm a co-founder and organizer of DevOpStay's Columbus. I also helped found DevOpStay's Minneapolis. I have a broad background in systems administration, capacity planning, sales engineering, community development, and so forth. I've done almost, it seems like, every job in a software company over my last 20 years. I'm also an avid runner as well, and also an avid woodworker. And before 2020, I was an avid world traveler, but of course, everything has been changed. So 2020, what can we say about this year? I think in the prep, in the green room, Diane was talking, and she went to bed and everything was, you know, well, kind of normal, normal for 2020. And she wakes up and there's yet another curveball that we've seen presented to us. And it seems like every single day when we wake up, while we are adapting to this new idea of normalcy, we always tend to wake up and have this saying in our head. And of course, everyone knows what this means. But really like 2020 has been a constant cycle of us asking ourselves this question, you know, what the fuck, what is going on in our world where every single day there's something new and new challenges that present themselves to all of us. And so when I originally gave this talk back on July 9th, everyone, I'm sure, knows what these numbers were back on July 9th. So July 9th, almost three months ago, it was 12 million who had contracted the coronavirus and almost a half a million, or just over a half a million, people that had died from the coronavirus. As of October 2nd when I looked at the numbers, it's 34 million, 34.5 million, and over a million people who have died from this virus. And it really, when you start to put these numbers in perspective and really think of just in three months, we've almost tripled the rate of infection and we've doubled the number of people that have died of this horrible virus, really starts to put things in perspective. And when you see it presented like this, it really starts to make us think, you know, what can we do and how this has impacted us in some way. And, you know, the world has been forced to respond, you know, we've all had to change our day-to-day life, we've all had to adapt to work from home, we've all had to adapt to schooling from home, parents are hard, it's hard for parents to find childcare and they're having to juggle a job and kids in the house and giving them school and all of those sorts of things. And it's interesting, though, is that as we've been forced to respond to this kind of what was leading up to 2020, especially in the United States, I won't necessarily speak to the entire world, but we're more than divided than ever as a nation and, you know, on multiple fronts, but primarily the political front has us really, really divided. And it's interesting that this division is happening at the same time when we see that our communities are kind of falling apart and being shattered not only by kind of the division in our communities, but also the virus has caused our communities to be shattered as well. You can't go and see friends like you used to. The winter is now coming and things are going to be much colder. And so being able to do that social distancing picnic you were able to do with your friends over the summer, those things are not going to be available to us. And so what's interesting is that our communities have been shattered not only our online communities, but also in our in-person tech communities and those things like that and having to put all of our events on hold. But also this comes at a time when we need them most, right? And this isolation and this inability to see people and this inability to interact and see your friends and have that human connection. It's really, really somewhat ironic to me that really been this perfect storm of all of these things coming together. I'm going to take a step back and I'm going to talk a little bit about DevOps and digital transformation. I kind of want to set the scene here a little bit around how I think us in the DevOps community and us in the broader tech community can really start to ask ourselves some pretty poignant questions around how do we respond to this. So really where DevOps really came about is this idea of the rise of cloud and mobile computing, right? So we all of a sudden have all of these computers that we have to maintain. We realize as IT professionals, we need to change the way that we work. And really also what's happened is with the rise of cloud and mobile, now that everyone has one of these in their pocket and these smart phones these days are more powerful than some people's laptops in some cases. And now you have this idea of the connected consumer to where this is the brick and mortar now. This is where you want to try and reach your consumer. And so with this rise of the connected consumer, we've had this rise of this idea of digital transformation. And so DevOps is really a response to serve digital transformation. So how do we make it easier to deploy our apps on a continuous basis to these devices so that we can get these features and functionality in front of our end user and understanding that that's the feature and functionality we want to actually deploy. Is it useful? Is it going to give us the business impact? Are we able to reach our consumer now in a digital way? And the really interesting thing is if you think about DevOps and what the core tenets of DevOps is about and I would say, we can talk about automation, we can talk about measurement. We can talk about bringing in lane principles. But whether if you're talking about internally inside of your company or externally in the broader DevOps community, DevOps is really about community. It's this idea of bringing people together from disparate backgrounds, understanding what their struggles are, not only from a technology perspective, but also the human factors of things that really influences how they interact with that technology and use that technology. And that's one of the things that's been probably the most powerful for me as I've been involved in the DevOps days community over the last seven years is really this big sense of community that we have. Not only the external communities like the DevOps days community, for instance. But I've seen over the years how companies when they start to adopt this DevOps methodology or these ideas and practices of DevOps inside of their own organizations, the communities really start to grow. And I think that's something that's very beautiful that we have in the DevOps community. But the other thing that we've talked a lot about in the world of DevOps is this idea of empathy. You can look at empathy from a couple different perspectives. It can be ops having empathy for developers and what they're trying to go through in the struggles that they're having to actually package up their code in a repeatable fashion so that ops can deploy it. It's development having empathy for operations and the job that they have to do and the governance that they have to bring in as part of that application deployment process. It's product having empathy for the end user and really getting feedback from the end user and doing something like user-centric design or behavior-driven development and those sorts of things as well. And so it's really about kind of understanding each other and understanding what we all have to go through on a daily basis just to do our jobs. And also understanding that sometimes we have bad days because we do have all personal lives. And I think this is one thing that's really been highlighted is as everybody's had to shift from this work from home mode, the empathy has really had to go up across the board for everyone. We have to put up with interruptions on conference calls because we don't have spaces in our homes sometimes to have our own office. Kids are interrupting and things like that. And it's really been interesting to see how nobody cares about the dog barking on the conference call anymore. Nobody cares that the baby cries or anything like that. We've really taken a change of mindset and being more empathetic. And I think that's one reason why is because we're all in the same situation and the entire world is going through this exact same thing with the coronavirus. And so if you take a step back and think about DevOps and DevOps is about community and DevOps is about empathy and DevOps is in service of digital transformation what's interesting though is digital transformation really kind of focuses on this idea of capitalism. And I won't say whether or not capitalism is good or bad. This isn't a debate on capitalism versus socialism or different economic models. But the interesting thing is is you end up creating this kind of tension between digital transformation and DevOps. And we have this big community idea. We have this idea of empathy. But then when we're actually going to deploy that application, it's all about how can we get eyeballs on this device so that hopefully consumers will go and buy our company's product. And digital transformation is really about this idea of consumption and how do we drive consumption. And so my slides are messing up just one second, sorry about that. And so what digital transformation if we really look at digital transformation and what it's about is it's really about or how it's manifested itself. It's can I get a car easily? Can I order food online? Can I watch my favorite shows or can I meet someone handsome like Ryan there? And I ask ourselves really like what does digital transformation do to serve the people, right? So while all these things are great, there's a certain economic barrier that you have to get into using these things. So not everyone has the advantage of using Uber on a day-to-day basis. Not everyone can fly from Amsterdam to San Francisco well. Very few people can fly from Amsterdam to San Francisco right now. But if in a normal world very few people could do that as well and having those economic means to actually take care of your life or to have these things that are kind of bonuses in life, right? And make people with a certain economic status better. And so I really ask ourselves, you know, what does digital transformation do to serve the people? And I think this is one of the things that's really been highlighted to me by this whole COVID crisis and then the coronavirus crisis. If you look at what the states had to do to try and respond to the unprecedented number of claims of unemployment in the United States, we really start to see that digital transformation really isn't serving a lot of the basic needs of the people. And there's lots of good stories though also that's come out of this of how we have been able to use digital transformation to deploy contact tracing apps in certain places throughout the world, to deploy applications to help people's lives and make people's lives better. There's a good story that I heard about a bank and, you know, they were getting a lot of traffic to the account summary page and it was a little bit too much traffic. So they wanted to try and find a way to cut that traffic. And the reason why they were getting all this traffic is people were kept logging into the website to check to see if they had gotten the IRS $1,200 stimulus payment. And so what they were able to do because they were able to work in a more agile way and I think this is a good way of using digital transformation to serve people is they gave you the ability to say sign up for a text message and they would send you a text message when the IRS treasury line went in your account and they were able to send that push notification so that you knew that the check was there and they didn't have to constantly go in and constantly be checking their website and putting too much strain on their website. And so the other question is, you know, what does digital transformation do to serve the underserved people and how can states and governments use digital transformation to really start to make sure that the underserved people in our world or our communities are actually served? And so what does digital transformation do to serve the underprivileged, the poor, the oppressed and society as a whole? And through my experience, you know, traveling around the world, I think I've really met one person whose organization was using digital transformation to really serve those people that needed it most. And this was an example of an app. There's a gentleman by the name of Sam who used to work at a company that created an app where homeless people could use this app and they could actually go and look to see where's the nearest clinic, where's the nearest place shelter that they could sleep, where's the nearest food bank or food kitchen where they could go and eat. And they were able to get access to all of these social services through this application. And I think that's a great example when we start to ask ourselves, you know, how as IT leaders in the industry, we can start to use digital transformation in these principles of DevOps and community and empathy to actually use technology to serve people rather than use technology to drive consumption and to increase capitalism in our society. So, kind of taking a little bit of a shift in 2014, we really started to have this movement and we really started to, I think, have a higher awareness around inclusion and diversity, but not just inclusion and diversity in the sense of are we making sure that there's enough women speaking at a tech conference or something like that. But really, this movement started in 2014 with the shooting of a gentleman by the name of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. You know, right or wrong, we don't need to get into who Mike Brown was or anything like that. But regardless, another black man's life was taken by a police officer. And at that time, what really came out of that was this movement of Black Lives Matter. And for me, this was kind of a poignant time to really, in 2014, to really start to think about race relations in the United States and how there's this systemic racism that happens. And sometimes it doesn't even happen intentionally. There's just cultural biases that we've baked in to the way that we think and the way that we act. They kind of manifest themselves in this way to kind of keep the status quo going. And 2014 was really interesting to me because as I watched those protests in Ferguson, as I watched what happened with Mike Brown, you know, Ferguson was an area that I was quite familiar with. Well, quite familiar with in that I used to drive through there every day as I was going to university from where I lived in St. Louis to the university on the northwest side of St. Louis. And if you've never been through those communities, it's really hard to understand what those people go through. And I had a few friends in those neighborhoods as well as well. And so just a little bit more about me. I grew up in the inner city of St. Louis. I went to a school named Roosevelt High School. Roosevelt High School had the, I guess, honor, if you will, or unwelcome honor to be the first high school, public high school in the state of Missouri to have armed officers walking its hallways. There were a lot of gangs. There were a lot of drugs. And it was a really hard educational experience. I actually ended up dropping out of high school at the age of 16. And a lot of my friends were black. And we experienced, you know, kind of this systemic racism on a day-to-day basis. We would get stopped as we were walking down the street just because of the way that we dressed, just because of the color of my friend's skin. I was put into that same bucket and harassed the same way that many black people in the United States are harassed on a day-to-day basis. And that really, that shared experience in my teenage years really kind of helped me begin to understand what those people go through. You know, by no means am I an expert on this, or do I say that I've experienced the same things that a black person in the United States do by no means. But having that small bit of shared experience has really helped me have a broader worldview about this. And if you don't know about St. Louis, you know, this is an article by, I want to say, Gawker, where they asked the question, is they were actually looking at many cities throughout the United States to kind of find what is the most racist city in America. And St. Louis is definitely up there. I remember as a youth, there was a big controversy because the KKK wanted to sponsor a highway cleanup along Interstate 55 on the south side of St. Louis. And there was a lot of controversy about putting the sign up and all of those sorts of things as well. For a number of years, St. Louis had a Fourth of July parade, which was called the Veiled Profit Parade. And if you look at the Veiled Profit, the whole Veiled Profit community and kind of secret society was all affluent white people. And the Veiled Profit, if you go and look it up, the Veiled Profit looks very much like a Ku Klux Klan member in their white robes. And so how do you have this community where African Americans or black people can be welcomed when you go to the Fourth of July and the Independence Day parade and the Independence Day parade is named after this really, really horrific figure in this horrible secret society. And to give you a little bit more color about St. Louis, of course my slides aren't working, but it goes my punchline. So to kind of understand how divided the city is, and this is still very true to this day, so white people avoid North City, black people avoid much of South City, South County, and West County, and that's that. Probably being black and driving through a city like Leduc, which is a very affluent part of St. Louis, or even worse, St. Charles, or in some places, Jefferson County. And the fun part is that the metro area just keeps getting more and more spread out as white people move further and further away from the scary black people that populate the city and the inner ring suburbs. And another thought from this article, so these are comments on that article that I showed earlier, as a black person that grew there, grew up there, fuck that place. And the thing is, if you've never been in those communities, if you've never been in someone's home who lives in those communities, if you've never seen what people go through on a day to day basis, it's very, very hard to understand. Not only are you living in a neighborhood that's blighted, maybe you're of a certain economic status or socioeconomic status, you don't see opportunities, your schools are some of the worst schools in the country. It's very hard for you to understand what people have to go through on a day to day basis. And the very important thing to understand is this just isn't about St. Louis. This is repeated over and over and over and over again in our inner cities and our urban areas where people don't have the opportunities and aren't presented the opportunities to actually raise themselves up out of poverty and to raise the socioeconomic status of their families and their communities. And you have to really kind of ask yourselves, you know, how do these people get the opportunity and how can we actually begin to help lift people up rather than continue to kind of oppress them with the systems that we've built over time. And to kind of put this in perspective, I feel like I skipped a slide again. All right. And so to kind of put this in perspective, using numbers and just not pictures, but, you know, the real medium household income from 1950 or about 1968, it looks like, until 2017. And you can really see the economic disparity by race. And I don't think most of us really understand what it means to be a different color in America and how this actually impacts your day to day life and the opportunities that you have and the ability for you to pull yourself out of those situations where you are in poverty. And if you look at, you know, African Americans, Asian Americans, or I'm sorry, blacks, they make $40,000 where Asians make almost double that. And, you know, whites make $28,000 more. And so it's very easy for us to say economic opportunity has spread when we see all of our friends who look like us having these good jobs and things like that. But it's very hard to understand what other people actually have to go through when you begin to break it down. And I think this is very poignant. And one of the things that has really crossed my mind as I look at this is we work in tech. We get paid extremely well to do what we do in tech. And we've had for a number of years been talking about gender balance in tech and getting more women involved in technology. And which I think is a great thing, you know, that's still to this day that women make 80 to 75 cents per dollar that a man makes. And that gap needs to close. But that's not the only gap that needs to close. We have a very unique opportunity to make sure that when we're hiring and we make sure that we're building our communities and we're able to build our in-person communities once again, that we're making sure that we're reaching everybody in the community and not just the people that look like me. And then the other thing I kind of want to look at as well is as we look at like what are we doing to begin to actually serve people. This is public spending as a share of national income. And so you can see that the growth since the 70s has really been about taking more and more of our national income and putting it into law and order. And in many cases we've been reducing the amount of our national income that we've been putting into Weerfield welfare and social services. And the other day in the debate and, you know, we don't need to say whether if you support Biden or you don't support Biden or who you support, it's regardless of that. But Joe Biden made a really good point in the presidential debate the other day where he said he doesn't want to defund police. He actually wants to fund them more. But he wants to fund them in a way that the social, the police and community policing starts to transform to where it's much less about law and order and kind of keeping these communities in check as it's being treated now and us versus them mentality. But how do we have the police have ownership in those communities and how can we begin to bring in social workers and other people to actually help lift these people? So if you would think about how the funding would actually be, it's not necessarily about defunding law and order, but it's shifting money and providing more money to make sure that these social safety nuts are there and making sure that the welfare programs are there. We can actually begin to lift people out of poverty and their socioeconomic status because if you can get one or 10 or 100 people that all of a sudden have good paying jobs that helps their family, that helps their extended family, that helps the broader community and they can reinvest that money into things that actually matter to them and community services and resources that actually matter to them as well. And so it's this idea of do we invest in control or do we invest in uplifting people? And there's the same that says, you know, a rising tide lifts all boats. And to go back to kind of the economic example, for the longest time in the United States, we've had this viewpoint that if we give tax breaks to the wealthy and of course everyone knows this called trickle down economics, if we give more money to the rich, then they're going to spend more and they're then going to reinvest it in the economy and they're going to eventually it all trickles down. But there's also the economic idea that if you invest in those that are lowest of us, that the rising tide will lift all boats. And I think it's really important for us to ask ourselves as we move into this election cycle, what are and as we go to vote as we're filling out our ballots, is what are we doing to actually make sure that we're lifting all boats and that we're making sure that everybody in the United States have opportunities like we do, like we're very privileged to have in the tech community. And so I really think that we really need to think about this idea of destroying these systems of oppression. I think we really need to have a long hard look at ourselves and ask ourselves, what do we do on a day to day basis to make sure that these systems stay in place? What can we do as individuals to start to break down these walls and break down these barriers and break down these things that you know what, we don't even realize that we contribute to. We contribute to them through our unconscious biases that we might have, whether if you're screening resumes or something like that and you just automatically push one aside, you know there's little things that we do every day that kind of contribute to this and do we ask ourselves every day, am I doing something to make sure that I'm breaking down these walls and breaking down these barriers every day? And I really think we have a unique opportunity to do this and I think as we start to go into the next year and as we hopefully start to come out of this coronavirus pandemic, we have this unique opportunity to ask ourselves whether we're going to make the world a better place and whether we decide to lead this change in our communities, not only our tech communities but our broader communities at home and the places where we live and the communities that we live in every day. So with that we'll open it up for questions but I want to say thank you very much and thank you for taking the time to listen. Well thank you and it's very poignant and very timely talk and I really thank you for taking the time to share it and if folks have questions in the chat or if they want to just raise your hand and I'll unmute you and you can join in. I think it's really interesting, I mean destroying our systems of oppression and digital transformation in the same talk but one of the things, the takeaways and I think we've had a few talks with Jabe and other folks but the idea of DevOps culture and ideas and digital transformation and applying them to these problems of like policing and creating empathy between the police and who is policed and breaking down the barriers to those conversations with the different social work and support services and reinventing and reimagining how those processes are that's very much like what we've been doing in the DevOps communities and you know and we have the skills. I came out of the Django and Python communities and even Drupal back in the day and you know XML and like a lot of the skills that we promoted to create diversity within our tech communities can be reapplied in the real world shall we say outside of the matrix or whatever that is that we're living in right now but I think that's one of the key things is the shared experience and creating that empathy and so those were the hardest things to do between ops and dev and now they're very hard when the world is so deviant so maybe a little bit about what you think we can do to create those points of empathy in the real world. Yeah so kind of going back to your point on you know Django and Python and PHP and you know I've been a contributor of open source communities or a participant of open source communities and a contributor over the last 20 years and what's really been interesting to see is these communities aren't local to the United States these are global communities and you know you're definitely right about this idea of creating the shared experience within that open source community to where then we can begin to empathize a lot more with others you know I would probably say the much like the open source communities the easiest way to start to build empathy and building that shared experience is getting involved somehow. I have a friend who was telling me a story of how she volunteered at one of the missions down in El Paso which helps immigrants and refugees at the border and she's not American and she's really really began to empathize much more with what those people going through when you see it firsthand when you actually see that these people have absolutely nothing and they've given up everything that they had in their home countries or what little that they had in their home countries with this hope and this idea and this dream that they were going to come here and make something better for themselves and when you begin to really see that and the the point of view that she gave me is that if she'd never volunteered like that she wouldn't have that shared experience of really understanding what people go through and as I drive around kind of out of Columbus where I live and seeing people with signs that I don't necessarily agree with let's put it that but they live on a farm they live in the middle of nowhere they don't have that ability to have that shared experience and the only way that you're going to get that is by getting involved and getting into those communities just like how we build the shared experience in the Delos community or in the open source community it's all about going and finding a way that you can get involved and that that kind of you talked about the connected customers and that and I sometimes riff on this idea of continuous connection but creating the spaces to make those connections it get it's harder in a COVID world when it's all via zoom and virtual but there's still ways you can get out into your communities but I think one of the things that we try and do at least at Red Hat and in the OpenShift Commons is to create spaces for people to connect whether they're virtual or you know text messaging or TikToks or whatever it is but meeting people where they are I mean you can't you maybe I can't go to El Paso and be there to you know help in food feeding or clothing or supporting people with services there but there are things you can do and you know and I think that's really one of my goals now in knowing that I have these privileges that I have access to these tools is to create spaces where you can bring people in who are economically underprivileged or education and offer these things up either free of charge or do the mentoring online with people there's there's a lot of ways we can contribute but I think the other there's a ton of free resources I think as well right so like if you think about our broader communities and you know as a tech person we could very easily start offering online courses right we could we could get people in the community together we can get them on a zoom call we can start walking them through a lot of the free resources like you know OpenShift.io or anything like that where we can really start to educate and teach people how to use technology and enhance their careers right and I think that's why you know like Women Who Code and Blackset Code and other things like that as well are great communities that really we can find ways to contribute to or help out or financially support or whatever it might be and so there's tons of opportunities just within our tech community beyond just the broader community. I think that yeah and the the other tie-in to digital transformation is capitalism that you were chatting about earlier talking about I love that but I also love you know the awareness that not everybody has access to the technology so these kids who are trying to do you know told that they have to do the online classes and they don't have the the money for a laptop they don't have yeah they don't have Wi-Fi and you know there's there's a huge digital divide in the United States with access to like I'm I'm sitting in a rural community in Canada north of Vancouver and I have fiber optic right that's that's privilege the the TELUS CEO moved in and built a house up the up the coast for me and we became the first rural community in all of Canada because he wanted his summer home up there love you tell us thank you very much I'm paying my building but um it's it's that kind of becoming more aware of where where it breaks down yeah I saw yeah I saw a great thing about I think it was um Singapore uh that um the elderly didn't have cell phones so they created these for contact tracing for COVID so they created these things that look like a tile or a little GPS thing that had the the app embedded in it so they didn't have to be on a cell phone but creating new things like I mean it is also big brother supervising and watching this but the grandmother who was being interviewed it was obvious that she one didn't even have you know a flip phone to use and wasn't going to do this so how do you do contact tracing for the elderly or the infirm um and and someone came up with this brilliant thing and you know as long as it we don't have them dogged to us for the rest of our national and definitely one of the more vulnerable populations that need it probably the most yeah as well yeah the the idea of access is um is definitely one that we've thought about in the tech community for a while um I remember the one laptop per child program when that came out in you know 2001 2003 time frame um and I remember thinking and this was before I had ever stepped foot outside of the United States uh and I remember thinking like well why why is a laptop so important for someone who lives in Africa or India or or wherever it might be and it was like shouldn't we be you know investing all of this money in food and other resources that these people could use on a more media basis and um you know it was always explained that like well if they can get on the internet then they can learn how to make a well they can learn how to build a farm they can learn how to do this and I still didn't really get it and I didn't get it really until I traveled outside of the United States and I went and went through some of these communities I mean literally just driving through these communities and really understanding the economic disparity that exists throughout the world and and once I have that perspective it's the idea of like yeah that access is extremely important to them and that access is very important because if they can get on the online and get on the internet then they can educate themselves and they as I said they can really start to lift uh their boats up by uh bringing that tide up around them yeah I think one of the other things that's happened um with COVID um and is when they do when people have access to events one of the things about not traveling to events uh or gather you know OpenShift Commons gatherings or summits or whatever it is is that that getting managers to approve your travel paying for the travel the hotel the cost of registration has all been blown out of the water I mean it's kind of democratizing access to um mentors and tech talks and hands-on workshops and all of that and and building those tools out and making them making building more awareness of them and doing more of that it's it's it's not really a stress on the system to scale up a hands-on workshop you can live stream as Chris Short's been doing tons of and anybody can access it it's free and it's freely available so it's like these kinds of innovations and I think it's an opportunity for the tech industry and probably all the corporate marketing events teams in the world to reinvent themselves in a way I mean to take advantage and we have you know obviously we haven't found the perfect conference tool platform yet I think it's yet to be built if I try one more I'm going to scream but it's like the the idea that we now have all of these tools we can build the apps we can build platforms that are accessible that are you know not firewalled and because the content this this video that you're watching now later is infinitely reproducible and infinitely replayable on the long tail of YouTube or wherever it is and it's accessible for anybody to watch and as long as they have decent Wi-Fi and internet access and I think that computer and a computer or you know some sort of device device yeah access to a library that's not shut down due to COVID or you know whatever whatever it is the public resource that we can make available there's so much we can do and I really hope that some of the lessons that we learn from this pandemic and chaos in the world is how to take advantage and build better more open and scalable tools for sharing information and educating people and giving access to technology it's been you know kind of the promise of platform as a service I'm just going to say this is that when I first got in to pause back you know nine years ago or whenever that was when we had our first you know Ruby on Rails platform as a service off a Heroku's launch or whomever it started it was that it was going to make it super easy to deploy an application to build an app to build a mobile app and it has but it's still there's still barriers right and we can we can do better and I think that's a lot of us in tech have a lot of experience building empathy between dev and ops between management and dev and ops and end users and building communities and you know applying them and taking the time now taking a step back from our day to day jobs and really reaching out and and creating some of those connections is really I think kind of the most important thing we can do right world this hard to interrupt but the world needs more of us to interact with the world now more than ever yeah right like it's it's imperative right because I put I put a link in chat the flag behind me you see over my head is the city of Detroit flag I'm from you know outside Detroit and you know they still need laptops at the schools they still you know are looking for funds how easy is it for you know you to go out to your company you know big tech company and say hey do we do donation matching and then just set up a $25 a month you know donation just your local public school system just to help them out anything you know women of women women who code Blacks who code any of those organizations will happily take donations to help them build right like it doesn't have to be a heavy lift necessarily and you know you can live stream with a phone now right like so you have a phone you can teach people how to do something in tech right like you can help somebody out right now you really can yeah and I think and I and if you go back and look at that chart that I showed it's like you have the opportunity to make a significant impact on somebody's big yeah well there's also you know I was just watching a recap of the the call for code winners and stuff and like Emily Brandt a shout out to her did you know kicked off a domestic violence tracker app and you know there were a number of other ones as well but you know the the thing we can do with the tech that we have and the skills we have at our it can have a huge impact and and I think that's that the other you know there's so so many things that we can do with the tech to help others and the spaces whether it's corporate or individual or community-based stuff that are out there sharing that if you can't leave your house or your community the zoom stuff is amazing it's just you know being able to set up that you know I did it last night another zoom to connect with a bunch of people and you know it's just it gives you the sense of community and it happened to be vmware women women in vmware invited me a redheader to a meet a meet virtual meetup which I thought was great and very yeah that's awesome that's the other thing that you know Adam Jacob of chef kind of taught me is like and we're all in this together and so we might wear different jerseys as another friend always would say but always be kind to one another always be welcoming to one another it doesn't necessarily matter that I have a red hat jersey on today and you have a vmware jersey on we can still be welcoming and invite others into our community it's it's like I tell everybody right like I wear many hats at red hat it's not just the red hat right like Diane perfect example right like open shift common she doesn't just wear one hat at red hat right like there's there's a lot of things that we do out in the community that everybody can help do and can actually improve your community right here right now I think the other challenge is burnout as well I mean we're six months into the COVID crisis and one of the reasons I really wanted to have Michael on here is to sort of re-inspire me I'd heard your talk earlier and to really to do more because I think at a certain point we get inured to the craziness to the chaos we wake up in the morning and there's another like oh my god could that possibly have happened overnight I just went to sleep right and some of us aren't sleeping very well and and it shows but it's like I think we have to be careful that we're not burning out that this is I don't want to be a doomsayer or anything but it's it's probably going to get worse before it gets better and was as we go into flu season as we watch things spike and and I'm saying that from up in Canada but my family is down in Massachusetts and Los Angeles and so I'm you know watching things go you know hey we're and you know we have to take care of ourselves take care of our families and our health but also be able to figure out how to engage with our communities and in safe and healthy ways and help lift up other folks it's been it's a challenge to keep inspired and on on topic with you know creating these communities and spaces for folks and so like next week on Transformation Friday we have Sasha Roseboom coming on Rosebaum sorry divine ops and we're going to talk about creating allies and you know some of the experiences that we've we've a lot of us have in common around being trolled and dealing with things around that have can we can use those in today's conversations you know when we watch the divisions between folks how do we how do we bridge those gaps between people and and I think those are skills I mean I'm really grateful for you know the experience I had in the Python community um and Django and Guido and you know he may be a benevolent dictator for life or I think he stepped down from that role but the openness with which they created that community and and my luck at being a Python developer um and coming you know basically coming out into that tech community and being supported and having spaces those those kinds of things we can do for our underserved communities we can take those skills the things that we learned in the open source and the other day I don't know Chris if you were on the the TOC call the CNCF TOC call and I missed it yeah Paris Pittman was talking about the contributor ladder so yeah I really like the idea of like on first this is you know this is a tech thing but for open source communities creating these actually documenting what it's what the ladder is to get up to be a contributor to actually explicitly actually mention that in a meeting before this in our case uh marketing meeting like there's not a great documented way there will be like how do you onboard into the community right so like getting that message out there is something we have to work on right like GitHub is not great at discoverability right like you've got to actually market some things in a way right like it's it's interesting that we have to do that now yeah and I think that's part of part of it is um that there's in this this case it's about getting some uniformity onto the onboarding um and becoming a contributor process across all of the CNCF projects um some of them do great jobs and others not so much and I jokingly said that they all needed life coaches every every CNCF project needed a life coach or a dev ops coach kind of yeah because and you know that's really what I think as community people and open source um dev rel and dev ops people we do you know we try and help people do that but to have some uniformity in that and I think that's true like there's a lot of um websites out there and we probably should have a resources page here of things you can do in your community if you're a tech person or you know to to to donate to be participatory and these things into help but a lot of the problem is finding them right and knowing how you can become that contributor and how you and so I think the better job we do in the tech of making sure that those are explicit and clear and fair um um and then once we know what the steps are coming in and mentoring people who want to be there at each of those steps is really kind of key to and I think you know I keep coming back to you know that statement you made Michael dev ops is about empathy you know it's like if we remember how hard it was to make our first contribution to package our first python you know pip you know doing you know very first things and have empathy and then realize empathy plus all of the the different things in the world that people don't have access to the training that even the the language and every time we use and make up yet another acronym that is another way we need to decode our world and make it accessible yeah I just want to touch on something that you you mentioned and kind of as we think about like the tech community and open source communities you know um Diane you and I have known each other for nine years at this point now um and I can remember you know going to conferences and it being a much different world than it is now right uh and I I think we sometimes get hung up on like we constantly we need to improve we need to improve diversity inclusion isn't where it should be and I'm not saying by any means that the problem is fixed but it's really interesting to see that when when we as a community as a whole we've decided to make this big shift and this big change around diversity diversity and inclusion thank you like we've made a lot of progress by a lot of people in the community saying that this is not acceptable anymore we're going to make changes we're going to make our communities more inclusive and more diverse we're going to make sure that uh that just all doesn't look like people like Chris and I um and so I just kind of want to think that we should reflect on that and by no means are we done doing that but we've shown ourselves that we have the capability to make those changes if we just put our mind and our effort and start thinking a little bit differently about the way that we act and the way that we treat people in our community absolutely I think that we've done we've done a huge amount of learning and growing inside of the tech community there's tons more to do um but I think the skill sets that we've developed and the the conversations that we've had whether they were hallway conversations or panel conversations about d and i um and the way that we've grown it by making you know understanding the myth of meritocracy you know all kinds of things that we've we've had to grow ourselves um and mentor people along the way to to grow them and I think all of those skills um we need to now redouble and apply through this current set of um you know very tough circumstances that people are going through right now and and realize that where we have privilege and we have a lot we're sitting here in nice heated houses you know with good internet access and um and yeah the ones that need heat have it those of us that have it yeah it's it's really amazing um and I think my whole goal now is just to see where we can create spaces create engagement and communities that support each other and um reach out and support and bring bring along other people too um because that rising tide that lifts all um we're the ones um it's not just the moon that's making the tide go up and down we have to make that tide rise and bring people along 100 percent so um I think we're almost to the end of our hour um and um Michael if you have any final words um no I just I guess the one thing that I would copy out this with you know it feels a little awkward that it's uh three white people having this conversation but I also think that it's important because um you know we have a responsibility in our communities um to make sure that people that look like us understand what's going on and getting some perspective into our communities uh is is extremely important uh and I also you know understand there's a long way for us to go as a society to improve these things but if we don't start having the conversations um if I'm not talking to people that look like me about this conversation then um um it it's never going to happen right and and we have to start having the conversation all of us are responsible to have this conversation I think uh which is why I wanted to have this talk today yeah well thank you very much I think we can't rely on others to educate ourselves and we have to take that responsibility for that and I think that's the gist of of what we're you're saying and what I'm trying to do here too is not to push it on someone who's underserved or in an in in a place to make them have to educate us um and I think that's there's and I that we'll be continuing this conversation next week about creating allies and being good allies um with um Sasha um divine ops and um hopefully we'll just keep this Friday cadence of conversations going on um and and do that self-education and bring in guest speakers so if you're listening out there um please do join us again um next week um and every Friday for um at noon eastern and nine a.m. Pacific for these sort of when I call Transformation Fridays but um maybe they're Empathy Fridays um might be the better way it's creating empathy and connection so thanks very much um kudos to you um for for taking the time today and we'll um we'll put this up on YouTube very shortly so thanks and um thanks a good problem all right take care