 Hi, my name is Dan Frank. I am in Google developer relations working as program manager for Communities and I have a revelation to make. I know nothing about the ends So you may be asking so why am I going to talk about the ends? Well, because the ends are great teachers in the work that we do here about how to build Systems and structures we call communities which are not hierarchical which are not down control where people call rate and communicate without actually Having a manager who tell them what to do. I went to business. Well, they didn't teach me how to do that They taught all kinds of hierarchical ways, but ends are representative of what we call complex active systems And I will show you today how can use it for your work now A little bit about me. This is the tragedy of my life If you would say I've been combining the work in sociology in HR She's called people often Google and in software development for a dozen. The eternal question is what lies in the middle of these three circles How can I combine all these three things together and I found the answer To be actually in the work I do now in the work with developer communities So I'm pretty happy that I was able to join Google the developer's ecosystem team You can say it's part of a dev rail where we go to individual countries where we partner with community influencers among them people like People who organize community meetups people who are talking with other developers and Making them successful But I don't want to speak about our team today. I want to speak about google developer groups gdg These are volunteers around the world who organize meetups around google technology But also about all kinds of other open mobile and web technology these meetups are for developers They come and learn they share they meet Each other the work that these people do they do it as volunteers they do it globally in a very centralized and Global matter. This is a photo from a pre-io summit as you can see The movement is large. It's very active. They do about one event every hour. You would count it very statistically People have too many groups in sahara, but the rest of the world has been covered The gdg have been around for about 10 years I would say with the biggest growth happening in the last Five years. So what characterizes gdg's first as I said are volunteers are open anybody can join a gdg as an organizer anybody can come to an event They are non-profit if there is a fee charged the fee is used to cover whatever expenses the organizers have Another characteristic of gdg's is that they are very local meaning that main structure of a gdg is a chapter Which is organized usually on a city level But it can be even on the district level or a university in the city It's usually one two four five people The guys and girls here on the photos are from bg ukraine Which are people from multiple chapters who got together to organize A defest in ukraine last year, but they came from all kinds of chapters across ukraine So for gdg's the main focus and that's very important is local chapter They are self organized to be as google as their partners don't really prescribe the level of organization. They should be Ideally flat in the sense of leadership and hierarchies, but they organize all kinds of ways. This is gdg netherlands Also, you can see it's they are pretty diverse Not everyone here on the photo is a book is a man Not everyone is a developer not everyone is dutch even and looking at the photo not everyone is even 18 years of age The diversity in the sense of different approaches is very important for gdg's The role of google or google developers organization is that you are partners to gdg We don't own gdg. We don't direct gdg. We really strive to maintain gdg's independence or google By partnership, uh, we mean that we are helping them with setting up the infrastructure instance of system Sometimes sponsorships the growth uh happened since 2007. I was very privileged to be in the group We just started the first meet i'm prak venreper did a meet in silicon valley very shortly afterwards There was also me in uh the philippines actually happening Uh, so it happened all pretty much at once at three very different places around the world And it grew to this incredible size as of today in the mostly past five years So it helped this growth. How did it happen without any ownership any control any Directedness and this is what brings us to the complex adaptive systems Which are very well illustrated by these four systems. I am bringing up here the traffic in uh southeast asia where cars go and people go without any traffic light any Traffic sign any police and nobody gets hurt. Uh, it's uh observed on the markets on financial markets Where on the end of the day you get very complex Value without any formula however complicated because there is a difference between complicated and complex What's complicated can be predicted what's complex like these systems and like community work can't be really predicted We we can also see now we are coming to the ends right we can also see it at ants colonies There is no boss the queen mother isn't really directing the ends. Hey you guys go and fetch this insect this day You guys repair the left wing of our colony. It just happens sort of spontaneously, you would say But as you'll describe later, there is a system and finally it can be very well observed in The flock of the birds which create incredible structures, but there is no design There is no plan to it What is common for all of these Things and I'll be asking you guys a little bit later. What do you see there is that it's independent individuals or called agents in Uh, the theory who make choices and decisions on their own There is nobody telling them what to do and on the end of the day or the life of ant colony You see something beautiful and quite uh complex created, but without the The structure being predefined refined or without the control being imposed over the individual actors or agents Now what do you guys think? Uh, I mean when I see the pictures I see that there is a combination of the same two to the southern side of the individual That's coming from the individual there is no prescription What what should be the end state what should be the the value of the stock market Couple other things No central authority Emergent order you have studied textbooks, but you are right. Uh, somebody on the back So so you can totally get it and the thing is the moment that I saw this I realized Hell this is exactly how we actually helped the gdg's group And I realized that I want to learn more about this system because if they can do it That's not what they taught me on business school, but that's how actually great incredible results So I found out this whole scheme is called complex adaptive systems anybody heard about complexity systems They're actually quite a big theme across the disciplines computer science biology physics mathematics social sciences community work from today on and basically it says The hierarchical models don't get inspired by them. Look at how the ends with and basically the the the model says is that reverses the action and creation of stuff So instead of a social committee give the order and command. It's the interaction of Independent locals It's a simple They call it agents in the theory who interact Who decide their own behaviors and that's very important as well like nobody tells them what to do They just give them some rules some resources. I mean the system And then the end Makes the decisions They need to interact The interactions need to lead to feedback adaptation and finally you have emergence You have actually the final product that otherwise would dictate it from the Top two from the very few sessions I saw here today about the communities I saw so my references to this model without actually making the conscious link So I want to that's the whole point of my presentation today. I want to show you how you can actually Look at the work that you and I'm probably not going to bring any new revelations And see actually how this model can apply to what you do and give you many more answers to various individual questions So let's look at the three main areas one. How do we work with the Agents so if I say agents, I will need probably the community members Which in our case for double groups, it's community organizers for you It will be contributors basically the people who form the community How do we create this so that they are empowered to act? This the next step must happen, but they actually interact together And the third thing is that we support emergence Any complex adaptive system like our communities or GGs Must be able to support this for the emergence to happen You can't have emergence Even if you have agents without the feedback and interaction So a couple examples, can you remind me again how much time I have? I'm a little bit Track, you don't know Then it's not perfect So the first one about agents these are some gg organizers. I have no idea what's happening here But it was one of the Decisions behaviors that nobody controls. So it just happened. So three things need to happen. This is the first one You need to I would say they have to be same but different It's very electrically, right? So the enemy must be same in the way of sharing the same values For us in gdg is the value is you must be passionate about clergy You must be passionate about exploring that with other people You must be doing it from your intrinsic reasons like somebody in here Must have full strong integrity And that's about it We are very And by we I mean the gdg leads the organizers are us in google supporting them. We are very Strong about this. We really don't want people who don't share these values manga at the same time everything else is Optional they can be young old. They can have gray hair. They can be underage. Whatever But there needs to be some gateway. I know many communities don't have that gateway for the communities of our size. That would be a little bit Risky because as I was later culture drives the decisions and culture is driven by the shared Sort of set of values in the people of the community So we have some gateways again after regional distributed Sometimes is the chapter organizer who sort of like screens the organizers Sometimes they delegate's role to us to the regional elites in the given countries Sometimes it's uh by other means, but basically there is some step they need to make by the way This is one thing that we don't speak about much How do we get rid of the rotten apples, right? Let's put it this way The simple answer is that need to be clear rules Clear description if certain behavior happens if somebody lives in a way XYZ and that sort of isn't corrected We will ask this organizer to stop calling himself or herself an organizer. So this is one thing the age selection the other one Because remember they will they will make decisions on their own So you need to throw them into a system and this is where in google are quite I would say instrumental. So We provide simply rules. The rule isn't the best word. It's more like the property of the system So basically the the rules for the gdj organizers is that in order to be active, you have to do one event of a quarter Uh, you have to communicate with the rest of your peers. You have to let us Meaning the central system know about what you guys did and That's probably pretty much it There are also some limits, right? So if you don't prescribe what to do you also have to tell The agents i'm not seeing ants anymore. What are the boundaries of their playground? So for us for example, we say The the activities you do and we just say events event. Maybe it's an event. Maybe it's an online activity But it should be non-profit It should not be salesy. It shouldn't like sell any company's products like directly including google's Uh, there are some legal and sort of compliance requirements. But again, that's it. We say He are the various rules. He are very simple means the beauty of the complex adaptive systems is that the individual organisms are fairly Non-complicated. That's really this. So you don't have to have huge requirements of the individual actors But if you put them together in the right system, they actually create this beautiful flock of birds things And finally resources. So every single of our little ants The great organizers, they know what they can get from google. They know what they can get from the rest of the community They know how to work with other sponsors, etc. And this is the All what they need to know, right? So you need to know the right people You need to put them into the right system and finally they will make their own decisions Nobody will make it for them. What drives these decisions? It's not necessarily the system. The system is just playground But it's really the culture. So I can't I can't stress how important What you call culture fit Is and by that's a term that we also use in google a lot when we get google's and also they get to freedom So we're working for the culture fit the culture fit in our in our meaning Means that yes working for the values But you know what if we are all the same that would be not just boring But the system would die like as any biologist would describe the system, which is not diverse Is doomed to fail in the sense of changing external environment. So The diversity is not diversity in the sense of like social entity or gender It's more like on the way thinking of approaching things. We have just developers. We encourage designers Entrepreneurs to join the community as organizers The other part is that the culture must be maintained. We are in the about 10th year of gdg and this starts to be Uh a theme for us. How do we make sure that the culture which was like created on the early days Is forward one is it's the onboarding, but you have all things like stories heroes T-shirts, I've got logos and it's sort of like there is the value So this is the first thing, right? simple onboarding simple rules and limits which creates the system and the strong culture which tries the Decisions because you won't be deciding for them. The second one if we have these people How do we make them interact? This is from a uk summit about two weeks ago three things Um the and I've seen this actually on a couple presentations here today being a topic How do we get people to contribute? How do we get people to communicate with people? Well, here's a it's like a golden formula, but we saw Actually as the from fedora show a couple hours ago She said for the new new comes to fedora project. We want to make sure That they learn mean to be more empowered We want to ensure that they can immediately and easily start contributing was the contribution part And we want to make sure that they are aligned with the values of fedora coding b. Hope I did the quote Right. Well, this is the same for google developer group stuff the same for any committee This is the reason why people join committees. They want to find their tribe They want to be back to people and they want to contribute stuff So again, uh in our case We really Strive to make this uh easy for people The examples of failed permits besides gdgs also in uh google We support a program for the other communities called to get with google developers, which i'm running and uh This is a program for other communities to get connected to us and get some of the resources we have available for them We tried to stimulate interactions of them. It didn't work Like the forum the description board we set up we moderated no interaction. Why? For two reasons one, there was not a strong identity Like they are like what does the chava user group from chile has the same with uh, let's say Uh enjoyed user group from iberia or nothing, right? So the identity was there the contribution was also difficult like they if they shared something There was not a clear understanding how the other groups will use that learning for So we actually cancelled any ideas about building a tribe from it It must be easy I can't stress this more. I think communities implement very difficult systems for people to interact and communicate So for us the easiness is done by the diversity of channels Because they are so hyper local we inspire the communities to communicate on the channel level So that if there are two or three organizers that they meet very often they share stuff Ideally they should also show on the national level when it goes to regional and global level There is quite a bit of noise contributions may not be necessarily relevant So it's actually the order of uh importance also We and uh, I heard it a couple times here on uh for them as well the importance of face to face Meups like nothing can really replace that. So again, that's the role that we play in google Something which the community may have in the heart to do it themselves So we fly together for one day or two days or three days to share to learn to have a conference similar to ours And finally let's be safe safe in the sense of people being included in wolf v uh Most of it organizers in some regions are trained in the training. We have internally it's called unconscious bias And it's one of the things how people actually unconsciously may create At most here of normally in inclusion, right? It's it's not conscious people may Say star do star which they don't really mean but it's not even in the right way on their side or It don't come across well and there are more things like this the whole theme of Gender inclusiveness for example from fells into this how to make somebody a presentation called self save those spaces Or we'll have how to create a safe space. That's very important Finally may the learnings used and reused Uh, this is again a big theme for us Um, we are building we are helping the communities for example build something They go gdg wisdom where they actually capture some of the interesting learnings from around the world find a way to distribute it to Others I need to speak up a little bit. So let's go to the final part. So we have the relatively non complicated agents So like well, we have the interacting because we want to interact the interactionals are easy and safe So finally, let's get some work done out of that, right? This is from defes. Uh, anybody heard about defes? Some of you so last year we like 300 conferences It's usually one today conference purely organized by the communities It started with from very humble origins in India and grew to this By the communities we just supported what we saw happening in the community world. We in google We didn't really invent the format at least in the way that is happening today So what needs to happen of course The agents why they're interesting that the uh stuff happens and this is I would say very important for you guys in our community So one constantly evolve stuff The the structure must be flexible. For example gdg is meet up with us But now we see groups actually doing online meets for example We see groups doing non-me up activities That's okay. That's sort of like fills within the simple system the culture So what maybe there will be something like the next big thing will drop from it The roles you are now looking for people in the non-organizer role who become mentors for example coaches to ours and again It fits the overall stem. You just observe, you know these blooming Slack for divine now exploring which we didn't do last year for communication And again because the organizers suggested it discount So for us gdg this is not such a big theme like for the software contributor community Where you would have like forked projects and you know needed to merge branches attract but for us The important part is visibility So the first got scaled up to the whole rest of the world Because the defense organizers had a way in india to share the success to other organizers. They were visible and Other people listened so it wasn't just some spin books because they found it again. That's coming back the interaction was valuable It was valuable for me to read some crazy email from somebody in bank or about how they did uh their uh defense And uh, finally reputation is a big thing. Uh, it's a huge theme If people are able sort of to create like noble collaborations and you don't tell them who should collaborate with Then it's a lot about reputation. So again Make individual contributors Revisible that's another thing. I keep hearing here make contributors visible make sure that the community most Who is somebody who can create stuff? and finally sometimes People tell us so like how do you like have ggs to speak about gross stuff? I don't know. Oh, oh, oh, oh like like this is not the way we do it The moment that we as a company would tell an independent community what to do. We are done in the partnership I mean if I was community organizer, which used to be uh, I would just Worked out because the community organizer they want to do things for intrinsic reasons, right? So we want to support them in that we want to have people who are passionate about technology And we want to give them stuff which supports this passion. So for example, there is this uh Out uh next conference happening, uh in march We provide quite a bit of content and support to communities which want to organize a streaming party But we don't require the companies to do that There is no punishment of any kind if they don't do it and there is no benefit Like increased status if they do it. We just give us an opportunity. I would say signal The challenge then for us as a company as a partner is to make sure that the signals are compatible with what the organizers want to which in terms requires us to be a very Good communication with organizers to understand. What is it that they want? Okay? I should finish. This is the model If you have any questions or comments, I knew I would be over time. So go to this document Actually people in the video in the future. Hello, wherever is the camera? Also, uh, I will be monitoring this in the future if you have any questions any comments any Experiences from your site of the story. Please share them with us. Thank you. Bye