 Thank you all for returning to our community leadership summit XLCA. We're going to start with report backs from our conversations that we had before afternoon team. Then we're going to reconfigure and go into our afternoon conversations. We can renegotiate whether or not there's sort of a thing we want to talk about, but if we don't have to, we can get into it because they're not going to actually have any issues. So do I have a volunteer from one of the groups to do the report back? Me too. We are volunteers. Unless there's any concern about doing so. Okay, stop chewing. Thanks guys. I can hold it. So I've literally just copied that back onto the wiki now. So we were working on burnout primarily. We focused on burnout, the warning signs of burnout, the manifestations of burnout, strategies for avoiding it, and strategies for escaping it. We did not end up covering retention, recruitment, succession planning, sustainable pipelines and handovers, creating engagement or having a separate life outside of FOS. Pretty much. We did end up covering health and well-being with an emphasis on mental health. So we got a lot of individual items that don't make sense to go through, but in terms of responses to burnout and stress, the strategies for dealing with that seem to fall between two categories, either withdrawal or working harder, and the withdrawal could be either from the particular project that you're bending out on or from everything, and similarly for working harder, that could mean doubling down effort on the project that's causing problems, or working really hard on other projects, which might be important, but it's not as urgent. So procrastivating, for example. A lot of common themes that came up in the strategies for dealing with stress, solitude came up a lot, exercise came up a lot, and getting back to nature came up a lot. There's a lot of other details that we need to go through. I think the nice thing that we had is that, mostly thanks to my everyone had input into our responses. So I think in terms of having a low stress sort of working group, that worked well. So I've copied and pasted all of my notes up onto the wiki. I will need to go through and manage them a lot. Thank you. So we spent the session talking about recognition and how we do it, how we don't do it, how we would like to do it, and what it looks like and feels like. And we talked about some of the areas in which we currently provide recognition, like when we recognize code contributions, when we recognize translation contributions, sometimes we recognize art assets, even less we recognize QA work and review work and the stuff that we're not yet really recognizing are all the bomb fuzzy stuff that we don't have words for because we're not recognizing it yet. So we don't understand what it looks like, but when we see it we go, that was really cool. So we tried to look at the ways in which we use tools or systems to track those and to provide recognition on them. And do I hand over now? Sounds good. Excellent. We can hand back to you. One of the pieces was to actually ask each of our people what they like individually, as an individual, how they like to be recognized. And there was a real theme in that which could generalize to our community. People tend to like one-to-one. They like having face-to-face feedback. They like it verbally. And verbally in this community also meant email, Twitter, anything online as well. So that was a free-for-all on how you interpret verbal there because we're globally online kind of thing. It was also kind of important that the feedback be timely. Now clearly if you see someone six months later, that's timely for you because that's when you could do it. But having something timely, the place you do it, the media, which we discussed, it's also very important that it be very specific to what they did. Excuse me, Donna, I'm going to use you as an example. Donna, that presentation was great. Well, that doesn't really tell Donna what she did well for you. Donna, I really liked it when you welcomed me. I felt really included. Now she knows what she did specifically and she knows that, well, that's a skill I'm getting a really good handle on. And maybe in her own world she can use other skills or continue to develop a welcoming, but it's up to her now. The other thing in giving back feedback was also as appropriate to link it back to the goals of that community you're in. So, you know, I like that bit of documentation because it meant that data could happen and that fulfilled our visionary goals. So some of the ways that we currently recognize people in the community are giving people commit access to repositories, giving people maintain a status on projects. Sometimes we mention people in release notes. Sometimes we mention them in author files. Sometimes somebody will just jump on Twitter and say, look at this cool thing this person did for this project. Isn't it wonderful? Some of the other forms of recognition, which don't kind of fit in with that set, was when somebody else just uses your code, whether it's merging it into the project or taking a library you've worked on and building something cool on top of it. And sometimes it's obvious that the person who wrote the code is recognized through. Sometimes it's just, oh, look at this cool thing I made and then you look on it and go, oh, that was using my bit of code and I feel really validated through that. So if we can start linking that back and saying this is the project that enabled the work that I did and sometimes that's organization level saying thank you to Project X for your library. It was wonderful and it made everything better. What else did we talk about? Examples? Yeah, so some of the examples of cool stuff which probably fits more of the woman flushes and one idea that was just absolutely amazing. There was a conference that happened and not all of the team could come to it so at the end of the conference somebody had bought a bunch of postcards and just said, okay, write a postcard to somebody who's not here thanking them for a contribution they made and they sent them out at the end of the conference and the bit that just makes me feel so wonderful about that is knowing that you are missed is an incredibly powerful emotion and saying, hey, look, we're sorry you couldn't be at the conference but here's us recognizing that one, you weren't here and two, you did cool shit. So anybody who's getting this from the live stream, we're not doing that. At the moment, we're tweeting at Peerwall saying it's amazing the stuff that you do where really sad you can't be here, put fires out in your work, because you were actually doing that, you couldn't be here, but you're amazing and we love you, keep doing cool shit. Absolutely. If you're watching a recording of this, tweet at Peerwall, because she's awesome and you know it. I think we can move on from that. So yeah, doing really specifically, some people really like public recognition, some people really like quiet recognition, sometimes it's important to ask people what recognition they want and I think for a lot of people that will be, I'm just going to sit in the corner and know that somebody has asked how I would like to be recognized and I can't actually say things that would make a difference to me. One of the conversations we had was about somebody who was working on a project within an organization, but they had a third party developer who wasn't part of the organization doing work on it too and they could buy a present for all of the people within the organization but because of the laws around gifts and that kind of thing, they couldn't provide the same gift to the other developer and they weren't really sure how to recognize it and the suggestion was just ask them and say how would you like to be recognized. And similarly, the whole idea of the recognition and giving the feedback isn't for the leaders of the group, and the leaders clearly have a role to model this and also to help the newbies understand that that's what we do here, this is the way we recognize but it's for everyone to start doing to everyone. Yeah, definitely there was discussion of top down as well as bottom up, as well as sideways, so a leader recognizing your work means one specific thing. One of your peers recognizing your work means another specific thing and one of the people who are reporting under you or reporting, one of the people who you are leading saying you're doing a great leader thing is quite rare and is completely amazing when somebody says thank you for dealing with the problem stuff, thank you for being the umbrella because it can be pretty thankful or thankless and we are grateful when somebody comes up and says thank you for dealing with the problem because it's hard work and that probably helps a lot with burnout. Sorry? Yes, there was another example from another conference where somebody got a set of post-its and just wrote thank you notes to random people or specific people or groups in general and just put them up on a wall somewhere so we're doing it. We don't know where or when or how it's going to pan out but that's a thing that we've decided we're doing now and sometime after this session we'll probably find a whiteboarder. I want to find a wall and do it the hack away but apparently the cleaners might come along and fix all of our fun but maybe we'll find something a little more permanent for that. It's got a red shirt, it's in hand. It will get sorted, there will be a space. It may be official, it may not be. Yes. I think that's it from us. We will try to type our notes and put them in the Wiki format. Try to. Thanks everyone. And yes, please do try and get it in the Wiki in one way or another. Don't worry too much about the formatting as long as it's in there. Wiki fairies may help with the formatting after the fact. That was really wonderful. I'm now wishing I had been a fly on the wall in both of those conversations and that's particularly why I want the Wiki of those notes. And the burnout notes I already had a quick scan of. Brilliant. So that we've got some kind of record of the richness of those conversations. So we have another couple of topics to take us out for the rest of the afternoon. Problem behaviour strategies and life cycle growth from forming into morning what's up there at the moment but if you want does anyone want to shift gear? Look at something else that was up on the board more than those. Is everyone sort of having a bit of my brain is full moment? Yes. All right, everybody stand up. Hands in the air. Hands down. Turn around. Now sit down. OK, hands down. Brains now should have a little more oxygen flowing through them. Do we want to stick with problem behaviour strategies and life cycle growth? Hands up, yes. It'll do. Anyone? No. Desperately no. No, no, no. So on we go. Life cycle growth. What's the other thing? Morning something, something over there. Refer back to was it too too distracting? Do you want to sit out in the hallways? Just have a eyeball. I think you could really safely use the hallway there. There's some people talking but you'll talk over them and it'll be fine. All right, so I think we're meant to finish at five in the morning. Yes. An hour for discussion. Back at five for report backs and wrap up. Yeah. And can't reiterate enough the value of getting the notes done. And the four roles that I talked about is the gatekeeper, the timekeeper, the note taker and the facilitator. I really want to make sure that within the groups from all the people who are involved it's really easy to kind of sit back and just listen but we want your voice as well, especially you quiet people who you generally have pearls of wisdom to share so please share them. And for those who take on the gatekeeper role if it looks like there's a quiet person who's got something on the tip of their tongue and not willing to interrupt, interrupt for them and let them speak. I'm very guilty of this so I feel like I can tell you all to do it. Go forth. Enjoy. So I don't really have a well written summary like last time because we've just finished taking the notes and stuff. So I think a potential problem with this group is that we all were going in there with quite different groups and problems that we wanted to solve. So it was at times difficult to sort of step outside of the particular problem that you were wanting to solve and try to see the problem from someone else's point of view. Yes. So we were discussing life cycles and growth. So this was groups. Meetups. This was projects. So particular open source projects. This was conferences. So some of the interesting things in that is that at least with the conferences you do actually want an explicit wind down period like you really want to manage this is going to finish up tidally so that people will actually talk to each other at the conference and be able to work again in a few years time to run the same thing again. Yeah. Any utopian dream donner I know. So similarly to last time we went through a lot of problems and a lot of potential solutions to it. And I'm not sure. I think there's some potential solutions to some of the problems. So when you're writing down the problem and I've sort of paraphrased it is problem hurting cats that the solution is going to be kind of difficult. So things like how do you get a bunch of engineers to actually care about user level problems and essentially what you're doing is you're trying to make the developers not be selfish and not think about users in terms of other developers and think about users in terms of actual users who are using the software and one of the potential solutions there is bringing on user interface user experience person into the core team and give them equal sort of billing problems. Some basic sort of stuff about starting up groups and things like that and I think the overall thing about starting up a particular group was you don't have to get everything right the first time. You don't have to have the answer for everything rely on your group a little bit ask questions and get feedback and because a group is meeting regularly it's not like a conference so you can make a mistake in one meetup and fix it in the next meetup. So I've got notes for all this so I'll shove it up on the Wiki in the same way and clean it up a little bit later. So our team dealt with problem behaviors and strategies and we decided that we were going to first define what problem behavior was. Problem behavior might be violation of code of conduct refusal to admit that there's something wrong that you're doing something wrong and anything that prevents communal growth and causes some kind of conflict we decided to deal with only that it was out of scope to deal with things that might affect people's livelihood so we didn't want to deal with workplace conflicts for example and stick to just communities. What else have I got here? We wanted to focus on solutions so we didn't really we wanted to try to avoid singling anybody out and also having a complaint session about the problems that people had we wanted to focus on their problems it doesn't necessarily matter what they were this is how we dealt with them. What else have we got here? I think one of the biggest things that we got out of our session was that having a code of conduct is really important. Most of our solutions came back to we have a clear set of things that are acceptable and that aren't acceptable and that means it's something to lean on when we want to enforce it. It really helps psychologically I think to know where your limitations are and whether you're overstepping your bounds or whether you need to potentially amend your code of conduct to deal with certain issues. One of the things about the code of conduct is that you have to look at the people need to look at the intent of the code of conduct one of the issues that we were discussing was that the code of conduct was being taken very literally which meant that you have to deal with you'd have to write a 40 or 50 or 60 page document that says you can't do this you can't do this. When you do this it must be done this way and that's obviously unfeasible and so you have to have some kind of reasonable expectation and everybody has to have some kind of reasonable expectation that well let's look at the spirit of the code of conduct as opposed to the exact phrasing. Stuff that's worked for people is I think the biggest thing that we discussed was that we just have to have a discussion with we have to raise the issue and one of the biggest things was raising the issue early possibly privately possibly publicly depending on the particular scenario but you need to raise it with the person first and because a lot of the problems are just that the person who's exhibiting them doesn't realize that they're doing something that other people find problematic. Some people want to avoid conflict at all costs which makes it difficult to want to deal with these kind of problems I was one of these people and it dawned on me at some point that while I'm not dealing with this conflict I'm kind of in mental turmoil because that person does that thing it's a bit unacceptable I wish they wouldn't do it I'll just not worry about it and it just got worse to the point where I was kind of beating myself up about it and so it really is best to just get it out of me early a lot of people are quite reasonable so sit them down and have a quiet conversation so you're doing this thing it's a bit weird what else have we got some people have mental disabilities and others are just wilfully unpleasant and dealing with people who are both of those particularly when you want to be an open community that accepts people from all walks of life including people who have physical and mental disabilities and when somebody who you're trying to explicitly include is causing a problem you do everything in your power to avoid having to kick that person out of that community but sometimes it really is the only option and you've got to recognise that is the case in some scenarios how are we doing for time a little bit more a lot of people who exhibit these problems externalise the blame and push it back onto the community your code of conduct is insufficient and you've got to recognise when that's happening as well and say you know what there's a reasonable expectation here you're expecting too much of us the reality is that unfortunately you are the problem we aren't going to wear the blame for it and we need you to do something about it you need to be confident in having a solution you need to be willing to take to deal with the repercussions this is made a lot easier by having a code of conduct or having some kind of token an example was the white ribbon which is that for prevention of violence against women yeah so the male lead campaign to aid violence against women so having any kind of token or code of conduct that you can presents your values and you can stick to and say this is what I stand for and I won't be silent about it is a really good shoulder to lean on saying this is not acceptable you would need to deal with it rather than just being silent about it and the last thing that we discussed was what would you tell your past self having dealt with various conflict what would you say to your past self to deal better with that in future and I think the biggest thing was deal with it earlier have the discussions earlier have a code of conduct as soon as possible ideally before any issues arise take a code of conduct from the feminism wiki or whatever have something that you can that defines what you accept and what you don't accept so that you can point at that and say this is what you're doing and it's wrong I think that that pretty much wraps things up is there anything that I missed guys cool thank you I'm now in the tricky spot of how do we kind of wrap up what's occurred today and what do we want to take away as our kind of closing thoughts so I think like we started we did a quick kind of intro I think I'd like to just finish up by hearing from each of you what you're going to take away as your sort of I don't know what's the opposite of an introduction your outro, thank you outros and what did you say your takeaways that makes me think about Chinese noodles though that's not such a bad thing is it? speakers dinner that's next look I don't want to talk a lot I really just want to say one thing and a very heartfelt thing and that is thank you really mean it can't say it enough for coming and for contributing thank you all and thank yourselves let's have a little round of applause before we pass the mic around and I also say to continue to engage the community leadership forum dot something you know Google it use your search engine of choice there's a forum that Jono Bacon runs where these conversations are going on going and sometimes they're in fits and spurts around an event like this but others kind of trickle along so I'd encourage you to kind of be part of that global conversation and seek that out and see what else is going to be all invariably come across articles or resources that kind of inform these discussions or are grist for the mill for thinking about these issues then you know let's share them and let's keep talking so I'm done again thank you I'd really like to hear your thoughts on the day and what you're going to take away the word support so supportive leaders is a thing I'm going to spend working for and working out what it is and isn't yes support in doing all these things burn a lot so that it's in that context I think take away is definitely communicate and collaborate don't keep your problems to yourself there's a whole community out there and talk with your community I learned that burnout is a thing and I don't mean to trivialize it by that I think more people need to realize that is a thing that can happen to everyone I realize that I'm really slow at transcribing notes I'm going to go a little bit off topic here and say that we have a bunch of post-it notes that were given to us from the desk and the most official word we have is they don't care what happens so what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask people to come and start seeding some of these post-it notes with thank yous and tomorrow morning I'm going to find a space out there and stick them up and I'm going to find somewhere to put the block with a pen and hope that other people start contributing to it and maybe I'll have a sign or something somewhere so come and start seeding the post-it notes with thank yous to people and we'll hack a solution because we're asking your name well fine so my takeaways are I had wonderful things that I was going to say so I'll go with this was really awesome thank you for facilitating the whole thing and thank you to the people I was in breakouts with you guys were great it was wonderful getting to chat with you I'm going to be taking away how to get my little community going and which I was really hoping to get out of this which was really useful I'm also taking away a blog article that I'm going to a blog article that I'm going to write as a result of something someone said in the last session one of the things I think about is culture in tech and someone said something about how they were excluded from their culture even though they were physically on site and I drew a line to remote workers and why that's not why that breaks so I have a thing to write about that but that's like random not important stuff so yeah that's what I got thank you I was part of the recognition discussion group so something that I took away from that is working on sort of a recognition culture amongst the teams that I'm part of working on that and trying to encourage that as much possible because we said that recognition is great and we're doing up the tree down the tree and across so everyone appreciates getting thanks for the work that they've done feeling appreciated also on recognition for me there are different types of recognition that people want and that you can ask the people as to how they want to be recognized I just have to express being a little bit surprised that such conversations are now taking place in a wonderful way I mean in the sector I work in we have these kind of discussions all the time but I was just a bit surprised that you know at a technical conference we're now at the point where we're talking about these things and I think that's really wonderful so what I'm taking away is I guess a warm fuzzy feeling I was only here for the final session but certainly something I've taken out of the problem behavior strategies discussion was that it is possible to generalize a lot of the problems that the people are seeing particularly coming at it from my involvement in things that are nowhere near the open source community but pretty much everything that people said they'd try to strategies and observations they'd made was relatable so I guess the thing I'll be taking away was that there are people I know from very different contexts who can be talked to about things like this I think the recognition is important lots of people obviously do coding in the system which is great obviously a lot of community people do the advocacy stuff or the umbrella work or all these other bits that the coders don't want to do so they recognize that's pretty important there's a lot of other work that goes on that's not necessarily coding or systems but I'll measure that or thank them sometimes finding appropriate ways to appreciate their work and stuff they do it's good Can I go on? You don't actually have to solve all problems there are some problems that you can just let slide and it doesn't matter Nope I got the very strong in my face reminder that there's all the stuff I know we should do implementing code of conduct that we should do before anything bad happens that I've known for ages we should do and the other thing I got was that I should really say no to facilitating when I'm tired Thank you So I've found that understanding what other people in this space are doing really does help validate what I think is already happening in the community and learning places where we can improve this being generally quite useful um it validates what we're doing and highlights where we can improve the communities community leadership yes fair enough I have to agree with the communicate and collaborate because that's I think it doesn't happen enough and communicate early is I think the key point for me and often um could I just say I was probably obvious to you guys obviously I'm not a community leader I'm just really an heavy guy but I saw you know all of you were so inviting and I just thought that was really awesome and I can see why you're community leaders and basically what I learned is you know how seriously you take the problem of including everybody and creating a good growing community where you try to make everybody happy really and that's where you run into problems when you try to make people that aren't happy happy right and I just just thank you all of you I learned a lot you know just to thank you