 Okay, hi everybody. Thank you for coming this morning. I'm Sonia. I work with the OpenStack Foundation in community management. And what I do is part of my role as I overlook user groups. I look at the ambassador program and that's the thing we're going to be talking about today. So you can find out all about it. So firstly, the purpose of the program is to, well there's four reasons why we made it. The first one is to improve communication between us, with the user groups and the foundation. So there's user groups all around the world. There's a map and you'll see all the pins in like almost every country. And it's very hard for us at the foundation to keep track of everything and to know what's going on. So by having the ambassadors there in each region, we can have a communication point and they have the fourth point, the local knowledge. So it's an easy communication as they know the customs and the culture and they are able to put feedback back to us so we know the users are happy or if there's an issue, we can address that. The second point is mentoring and advice. So the ambassadors are a great way for user groups to have a contact point to be able to do whether they need help, getting a speaker, where they want to seek sponsorship. Any one of those number of things, if they need help running the user group or need advice, they are there to provide that. And the third one is advocating for OpenStack. So they might attend events, they might be going and spreading the good word about what OpenStack is and what it can do. A small example of that was FODSEM in 2017. In the left side, we've got a couple of ambassadors pictured there doing a great job advocating for us, the OpenStack Foundation and the technology. And yet lastly, as I mentioned before, local knowledge. So we might not have the exact local knowledge for all the regions around the world, but by having the ambassadors there, they are there to help us get that communication solid. Also just being able to be, for it to be smoothly, less conflict, less lack of understanding. So see, we do have ambassadors all around the world and we have a second one coming in the US, but they are there to literally give us that global coverage that we simply can't have and we very much value them within our community. So we're going to look at how you can become an ambassador if you're actually interested in heading down that path and becoming an amazing leader within the OpenStack community. So firstly, start participating in your user group. There are many great ways that you can get involved. If I'm sure, if any of your local user groups, you head to them and say, hey, can I help out? There'll be certainly something for you to do. So you start getting involved, you start understanding how it all works and then you, myself, might step up and become a leader in that user group and start sourcing out sponsors, start taking on those great roles that help the user group thrive and participate in the community. So then you hit the leadership front, you might be the user group leader or a co-organiser and you might guide the group through the process and your group will get to the official user group status, which is a big part of becoming an ambassador. It shows that you're able to get a user group thriving and working and meeting constantly for the cadence of your region, whether that means it's a month, once every two months, but by doing that you see you can get in your own region something happening within your own geographical space. You've got a great thing happening. So then we know you can also do that for other user groups within your region. And then finally you fill out an application and then we find out what you are doing great in your region. We're looking for things like, hey, what's your vision for the European region? What's your vision for North America? What can you do to help make all the other user groups get to the space that you did with your own user group? And then we'll have a look at that and say, yes, have you got a reference? Great. And then you make it into the program and then you start doing the great things that you did with your user group in that region and you're helping to make OpenStack thrive and make it an even better thing for the rest of the groups in your region. So one particularly helpful link is the groups.openstack.org slash ambassador program. You'll see a list of all the ambassadors and how you can contact them, especially for your local one. You'll also see a number of different links about whether we're looking for, hey, whether it's sponsorship. If you're trying to do that for your user group, are you looking for speakers? You have a lot of helpful tools and advice that will show you the different things you can do as an ambassador and you can fulfill them before you even apply so we know that you can do it within your own user group. So we hit the Q&A point already. Does anyone have any questions at this point before we keep going? So I've actually got some of the ambassadors here as well. I'd like to ask you guys a few questions. Do you want to stand up? So we've got three of them, three ambassadors, when you will stand up and, yeah, come to the front, that'd be great. I get you guys to talk about what you do. I'll just come over here, then you're in the video. Come into this space. Yeah, hi, I'm Erwin Galen, ambassador for Europe. So I'm running the French user group since more than five years. And we work with Martin to help the user group. So we are helping new groups, also managing existing groups. When in some countries, for example, you have few groups, we can make the link between the people. And I will also help new regions. For example, in Africa, there is lots of new user groups. And we help them to create some content to also find some sponsor. Because if you take the example of groups in Africa, they said, how can I launch a user group? So we explain the format, when to organize an event. And also we can, with our contact connection, we can provide them, for example, some resources, some server for workshop. So we try to be a catalyst to help user group to launch and after at different steps to launch or after to grow, simply. Okay, hello, my name is Martin Kish. And I'm actually visiting Hungary in Budapest. And I'm also started with an user group there. And what we are trying to do with Erwin that we are trying to, on one side, connect the user groups with the foundation. But from the other side, we are also trying to cross promote OpenStack in different channels and in different events. Basically, I think I was participating in this Dorf in the LinuxCon event, where we did this FOSDEM event this year. So OpenStack got a very nice presence on these events. And I think from one side, it is a brand building story. Hi, my name is Marcel and ambassador for South America. And as Erwin and Martin talked about, as ambassador, we helped some user groups to create new meetups and new events and a vocation to OpenStack in some locations. So I have a question for all of you. What's the best part of being an ambassador? Me personally, I'm very happy for when after the first event, the organizer said, I thanks a lot for because sometimes we have some people who contact us from the website and they don't know at all how it's not how to organize an evening. But what will be the target? How do I let some space for a sponsor or not? This could be simple question for people who are organizing big event for a long time. But it's very important decisions at the beginning of your group. Because, for example, if you let too much space for a sponsor, they will completely eat your, you have to be independent. If you want to run lots of meetups for a long time, it's more easy if you're independent from sponsors. You need sponsors but only from a small part, for example, to pay beer or something, but not to trust or not to show too much marketing things you can allow. So this frontier with sponsors is not easy to handle by people because they don't know. So the format some people don't know what to show. Also, in some regions, it's very difficult to get some speakers. So in France, US, we were yesterday with Lisa Marie, who is running the user group in the Bay Area, it's very easy to get some speakers. But in other regions, it's very difficult. If you take Abidjan, it's not safe in some places, some people, it's not easy to put one speaker. So also, sometimes we provide some guys remotely with Skype or hangout session. So the local user group can find some guys and we can also provide some remote session. So after this session, I'm very happy that the guy is also giving them some energy and some support. Because sometimes it's only one guy alone saying, I want to do something. And he seems that he's alone and don't know where to go. And just pushing him, say, yeah, it's easy, it's good, giving him some energy. It's very pleased to see that this action can help people. And after, if also, few guys are helping because it's not good that it's only one guy who run a user group. It's very important to have a group of people. After, it will be more easy, one guy will manage one event or you can run, organize, and share the work to do. So it's creating something that could be long for a long time. It's very good. Yeah, what was the best thing that maybe five years ago, when we started to build this story, basically, the OpenStack open source user community was almost non-existent. And in the last five years, we built up a very huge community with the help of the local user group leaders. And actually, we have more than 60,000 user group members all around the world. So not just in the States and in Europe, but all around the world everywhere. And it's not only ambassador, we're only helping. Yeah, basically, what we did that we catalyzed a lot of things inside the community. So we connected the dots and connected a lot of people with each other that had to build up this community. So I think it is a fantastic story if I'm looking back for the last five years. And what is very interesting that I think that building open source communities and user communities here in the States, it is very easy. But building it up in Asia and maybe in the eastern part of Europe, or maybe even the western part, it is not so trivial because it is very hard sometimes to get sponsors to find the speakers for the events. It is a kind of challenging task, but it is working. So when I started in Brazil, user group, we had some difficulties. And as ambassador, I think we can use our experience and knowledge to help others groups to create events. For me, it is very nice to help you with this. So I thank you all for coming up and talking. And I thank you all for coming today. So that will conclude the talk. I hope you can all get involved and be a part of the ambassador program. Thank you.