 Good afternoon lovely people. How are you all feeling? Thumbs up excellent thumbs up thumbs up thumbs up very good thumbs up over there only agent Ricard has no thumbs up Thumbs are otherwise engaged. Oh now thumbs up very good. So it is 345 and I do like to start on time But there's not a lot of people in the room Shall we see if any other people want to get on the boat before we take off or shall we set sail? One person just made it Yeah, that's what I'm sort of wondering Hola We could And we're gonna chat a bit Nice and easy So what's consensus we wait a little bit? Or go two minutes Two minutes That's two minutes No minutes. All right. Well, just in case you were wondering what session you've come to you have come to the tools for talking session And this is a core conversation is Every one of you in the right place right now so far so good Remind me to slow down by the way. I listened to my presentation of last time and it was like Ching So I'm going to try to talk more slowly, okay So tools for talking this is very meta. It's the core conversation track The title is tools for talking and it's a talk This uh, this is amusing to me or was amusing to me at the time I submitted the session I Have a hashtag so, you know, feel free to extend the the meta-ness of the conversation about communication to social media channels Hash tools for talking This is not meant to be read. This is the for the fact that this session is being recorded I like to put the session abstract on a slide so it's easy and Referenceable and plausible and you can see what this was meant to be about There's also a bit of an outline there of how I hope the session will go I'm just going to refresh my memory Yeah, that's what I had in mind So just by way of a little bit of an introduction Probably about half of you. I don't need I actually know you for those of you who don't know me My name is Donna Benjamin. I'm also known as cut a club So you can find me on the Twitters and on dripple.org and on Skype and various places Also at Gmail if you want to get in touch with me cut a club is my handle from last century I also chair the community working group and It's that work which really led me to Want to give this kind of presentation or more correctly host this kind of conversation Communication is something that comes up a lot in our work in the community working group in terms of conflict resolution in terms of Resolving the kinds of issues that get raised the way we talk to each other the tools that we use All play a part and that was very instrumental in why I wanted to do this I've also I also sit on the board of the Drupal Association. I run my own business. I have a few other roles I'd like to say I have five jobs one for each day of the week It gets a little intense sometimes so why do I care about communication and Why do you all care about Communication you've come to this talk And if you read it carefully if you read the abstract and not just the title and the program It said at the bottom that there will be some participation Yeah, so you're up for that so Why do we care about communication? Why would we spend precious time at Drupal con? talking about talking in Terms of actual tooling So just to repeat for the recording Joel says that you know, we have two main methods of communication in our community We have IRC and we have the issue queues the issue queues aren't really weren't really designed for communicating They were designed for issue tracking more IRC is a communication channel and we wonder what other kind of tools they might be so what sorts of other Why else why are we why do you care about communication to come to a session like this? Megan Vicky Vicky Yep, as a designer Vicky's worried and I share your concerns that the Drupal world doesn't talk enough to Other kinds of communicators such as designers. Yeah Yeah, talk to Morton about design and the issue queue Megan you had a Struggling with communication itself and the challenges that the balance between what's intended and what's received and these things Aren't often can sometimes be different and how what are some of the ways we might look at look at that. Yeah other other contributions Why do you care about communication? Why have you come to Drupal con to sit in a session called tools for talking? Is that for good to sell what we are supposed to do so it cost counter reaction When we communicated the things correct way and solve these things to people who are working with us And they started to believe what we are doing That's when things change dramatically So I think that this is one of the reasons that you should care about communication Okay, so I'm going to try to summarize that is that as a as a team leader you were working in Thank You Allie you're working in a In a situation where communication was really important and you the communication worked in one way But then wasn't really filtered through the team in another and that then at a later point in time A better communication process was brought in into into practice And you were able to see the results were dramatically different from actually having a better process for communicating Thank You So I'm going to use a mic because I like people using mics I'm here because I have my own stack and tools for communicating But I'm interested in what everybody else everybody else's stack is like Thank you, and that's good practice This is going to be a challenging session to run in this way with a single mark and an apologies now for anyone listening to this After the fact there are going to be some dead spots as we actually have some group discussions But we're going to then have feedback and I'm going to work with a Archiving team later to see if we can just cut out those dead spots from the recording for the future archive So we don't need to worry about it in the room. Okay? So when we do report back though, we will be using the mic But the group discussion pieces will obviously just be nice moments of reflection for those watching the video Okay, so moving on Communication is a fundamental kind of human thing. It's a bit of a truism You know and why would I say it but we have you know We've all been given ears to hear and eyes to see and read so we have oral cues We have visual cues we read we watch we see body language and facial expressions We have mouths to speak and actually use our voices and you know, and it was actually Theo who reminded me It's also about the feelings that we have about communicating and when we're communicated with and I think that comes a bit to what Megan was saying is sometimes the feelings that we Our responses to what we're hearing may not necessarily match with the intent of the communicator and all of this all of this mixes together, so What I really wanted to do was break this into two Sections I want us to think about the tech tools that we use and so Joel's point to Using issue cues using IRC and there are a whole bunch of others Some of them are synchronous some of them are asynchronous real-time some of them let us hear tone of voice Let us see facial expressions You know the last one meet-ups and camps where we get to be face-to-face and read each other and we you know The role that that part plays so the actual methods, I guess that we use Technological methods, but then the other part that I want to also get into and explore Are the human tools for talking there have been? Communication skills and strategies and approaches and ways of responding to human behavior There's a whole range of these tools and this is by no means comprehensive. This is just some that I'm aware of There are a few more that I'm aware of that. I haven't put on the list this list, so I'm not going to come to you and say that one is the one that you should use what I've been What I've taken from a bunch of these is there's some really common elements in in all of them Some of them have actually the same message, but also they all have different elements and I'm kind of It's messy in my head But I feel like I pull on different tools at different times And just like the tech tools like sometimes IRC is right and sometimes the issue cue will do But sometimes we need to go to a hangout the kinds of Communication skills and strategies and approaches also you might need a different tool set for different scenarios So far so good Okay Now what I really want to do So I kind of go into the human tools a bit more I don't think with this audience that I really need to go deep into explaining what IRC is to any Does anyone actually not know what IRC is? Very good. Thank you the internet relay chat. It's a real-time chat forum. It's been around a long time It's being replaced by things like slack and hip chat and whatever but yeah, okay So what I want to do now and for the recording we're going to have a group discussion now So you probably want to kind of pause shortly after this And what I want us to do is kind of to huddle into groups and talk about the the tech tools that we use And what I what I would really like is if could someone could take some notes in that in during that discussion So that we can have a bit of a report back So we're going to have two separate discussions one quickly on tools One quickly well the tech tools and one then quickly on the human tools And then a slightly longer discussion on bringing those together and whether or not some some of the human tools Content fits better with the tech tool kind of content and yes, please use your feet if this isn't for you Please feel free to go somewhere else. That's fine by me. It's not going to be for everybody I I I appreciate that so Probably I don't know probably about three groups. I think this sort of cluster here cluster here and See if it's it's like a two or three over here. I'm not sure So I want you to the thing about the tech tools in specifically is To actually tease out why we use one over another What are the kinds of The kinds of discussions we have in orc What's the nature of the discussions that we have in issue queues, right? So that sort of you know really kind of tease it out to see what those kind of key criteria are So we'll do that one first and then we'll come back to the human tools so gather up Okay I'm going it's this is always harder to interrupt the conversations because I think they're really good ones But I do want us to move on to more of the the human tools for talking Now I've got a quick list here, um, and I I just want to give a quick summary of each of them I can't possibly cover the breadth of these But I also want to get as we go through each one a bit of a show of hands if if you're familiar With any of these approaches as we go through. Okay, and I know my my guru on one of them is in the room So I'm hoping that some of the others are familiar to you as well So powerful non defensive communication and I have a huge amount of gratitude to Melissa for introducing me to this because It is a really useful set of Tools for thinking about communication and more about how we respond and how we choose to respond I think is the real depth of this is Responding in a non defensive way is really key to not escalating into conflict A lot of the time. So this one's really powerful. So anyone who's familiar with this one before today Two of you. Okay, great. The next one is a little bit more commonly More commonly known is non violent communication anyone familiar with this one Few more. Yeah, so one of the things I think is interesting is there's there's definitely parallels between these two So you see observations Making observations is really important in PNDC as well as in NVC and then the the way you kind of respond to having made those observations is a bit different Active listening this one's even more widely known. Yep much more familiar Um, and and this is one of the ones where our online Communication tools really don't let us do that physical part And how we have to compensate for that is sort of one of those crossover areas that I want to explore Now I've put too many don't there's way too many words here, but who's familiar with appreciative inquiry? Okay, only a couple of you on that one It's less about Um pure communication skills and more about I guess a holistic approach to taking a positive Um Looking at things in a positive way and focusing on the positive to kind of move things forward in a more positive way to Bant rather than trying to figure out exactly what went wrong. Let's abandon that and focus on what went right It's a very crude summary, but Forgive me Transactional analysis Anyone familiar with this one? Listen those all the things. Yeah This was this one is actually the first that I was ever Familiar with because I was given a book called ta for tots when I was actually very small And the the parent adult child is a way of summarizing The nature of our interactions or our trends our communication transactions And whether or not they're at an adult to adult level Or a parent to child or a child parent the kind of different interactions there Who's familiar with ta? Couple of you The drama triangle and its flip side. Um this one this one when I was first First exposed is that the right word to to this one? It really was a real aha moment for me is to kind of get drawn into this and you don't really understand What's going on and you've been pulled into a what is actually a triangular kind of Transactional relationship with with someone or a group And the flip side is to take a more positive angle of it is to call the empowerment dynamic Instead of having victim persecutor and rescuer you have a creator a challenger and a coach To take a more More functional way of exploring that dynamic Who's familiar with either of those both Yeah, just the previous one. Yep And um and this one actually I've only just sort of come across even though it's just really a nice really obvious one The seven seeds of effective communication and actually I did see a nice little graphic which had a boat and Anyway, uh Carrying on clear concise concrete correct coherent complete And courteous which is kind of nice compared with the others there. It's it's a really nice collection of things so um That's really uh, I think that was yeah Those That one um just as you know a collection and they're probably others and so you know Many of you were familiar with one or more of these So, you know in the notes and perhaps in the feedback if there are others that I would I would really love to hear about them And share so what I want you to do now is just like we kind of explore the nature of those tech tools that we use How might some of these sorts of tools be used more effectively in our community to improve the nature of our communications Like this is a core conversation and came out of my work in the community working group that we were seeing Coming out of frustration of where we were in the cycle to be honest But the communication was key to either solving those or understanding those issues Sometimes poor communication was the cause of an issue. Sometimes great communication resolved something that had been Interactable, you know looking at something from a different perspective. So again, let's huddle up into our groups Share what you know about these kinds of tools and if you know of others Talk about perhaps the the commonalities between them and perhaps some of the outlying ideas over to you Pause the recording. Okay What I want you to do now is To you may have already been doing this but to start spring together those threads of the actual technology tools that we rely on and the nature of These kinds of approaches like not necessarily any given one of them But how would we how might we start to take some of the knowledge of this kind of stuff and apply it to the real Challenge that most of us, you know, we most of us have to communicate day to day Using tools of one kind or another our opportunity to get together and actually talk to each other and eyeball each other Like we're doing now is so slim in our community that we have to rely on these technologies But can we bring some of the knowledge from those other Strategies and approaches into when we have to communicate with these tools That's where I want you to bring those two threads together now for the next probably 10 or 15 minutes What I also want you to do though is to Come as you come to the end of that conversation is to bring it together because what I'd really like us to do Is to report back via the microphone from each group to just have a a bit of a quick summary of the kinds of insights That you've come to after this conversation Make sense clear Go Okay We're ready to do a bit of report back for the for the broader group and for our friends listening at home Anyone want to volunteer to go first? We've only got three groups. Yeah. Thanks, Megan Hello um From our group Well, do you want to hear from all of the brainstorming or just this most recent? Well, I was kind of hoping that the final one would bring bring together thoughts from the first so yeah um We kind of came up with the idea that communication really Goes through the interaction type you need so Email is asynchronous whereas a phone call could be immediate or intrusive also at the same time and A timeliness immediacy and the type of response desired kind of dictate what we use when um We also talked about one to one communication versus one to a group or many to many and what type of tools are useful And also public first private communication Like twitter and irc are very public whereas an email would be assumed that it was private um For active listening online When someone's typing you can say yes or okay kind of like you would in a conversation where you acknowledge that you're listening Use emoticons ask questions and follow-ups Uh with newer communication tools. They're more sophisticated with for example read receipts and um Not an answer means something now because delivered and not read is different from delivered red in no response um You can humanize online reactions I adding a person's picture next to comments in the issue queue So you know that you're talking to a person and not just an anonymous troll um and then um Kind of trying to stay Grounded when you're interacting with people online Any other from the rest of the group want to shout out any other key bits that Wanted to reinforce or no noddings all good. Thanks so much. Thanks so much Okay, and in either of the other groups want to do the middle spot Thanks, Becky So we had far fewer people. So we sort of were a bit more focused on one or two particular areas um, what we were Sort of the discussions came about with the first part were um our problems with sort of the issue queue and irc with the former that um, you know Things get buried and that you sometimes don't want sometimes it encourages sort of negative comments There's you don't have things such as you know plus one or you know I like that it's easier to sort of be negative or giving comments With irc, um, even though our team, you know, are mostly developers are saying it's the issue of it being Just overload you go in and there's just too much you have to turn it off And it's also um in ephemeral that you know, if you suddenly drop off you've lost everything There's no sense of history. So it can potentially be quite a sort of disjointed experience um So sort of thinking about ways to um, you know to improve that sort of some of the things which I think the other team Discussed came in having things such as being able to just have you know, plus ones or um acknowledge things I think as I was saying with the more sophisticated tools And um, I think that was sort of I'm trying to think if there are any other things that we discussed in terms of solutions Short and sweet Thanks Vicki And our and our final group Have a volunteer share back your thoughts Everyone's looking down somewhere else anyone No one Please pretty please You're being volunteered Ali All right, melissa. Thank you I'd say for the first part when we were talking about tools We started with just um the tools that were being used either in the business or just how many there are And then spoke a little bit I'm not even sure we put it in these terms, but now that I think about it About how much disclosure is required in advance So when you're in the issue queue You kind of have to put your whole message together and to put yourself out there and then you wait and there's latency When you get into irc, you don't have all the nonverbals, but you can still correct a misunderstanding Quite quickly so it doesn't sit out there misunderstood for a really long time potentially So there's the opportunity to go back and correct and then when you're talking on a hangout or face to face You cannot even have to disclose before you see they're not getting what you meant at all And maybe you want to back up and try again So we talked a little bit about that and then as we talked about the peep which is kind of people process not tool exactly but Then when we were talking about the people processes We went pretty quickly from these are all about our personal style of communication But they sit alongside decision-making structures And so we spent a little time talking about Actually most of the time talking about the decision-making structure More than we did about the human tools for talking because they're related in in how they work Very nice. Thank you any other It's that Thank you all so much for that even even in those summaries and I managed to pop into You know eavesdrop a little bit on some of the conversations But even in those summaries there were definitely elements that I hadn't really Gone into deeply in my thinking before this so Some of the key ones that that kind of really resonated for me as you spoke me megan was speaking about the using using Acknowledgements in irc like just to acknowledge that you're still there and you're listening you may not have something Necessarily to respond but an okay a yes and an act effectively you know just those sorts of little kind of things and You know vicky's note about you know how the tendency with irc is an example where you can just lose The conversation because of the nature of the technology and some people might use tools to stay online all the time But you know there is this kind of disjointedness about it and and earlier Sorry, what was your name? Christian was sort of saying that you know, there's there's a sort of Intimidating nature to irc that there's this huge long list of names there and it can sometimes really feel Like you go in you say something and then there's kind of crickets You know was that was it something I said or is no one awake? You know there's this sort of element of unknown You know and I really like that bringing in that sense of the decision-making structures alongside these kind of processes and methodologies is yes, they are they do either support or Distract from you know what the the work that might need to be done the decisions that that might need to be made so thank you all really Very much for you know Humoring me I guess and you know having these conversations and taking these insights further I guess now I I kind of want to give you all a job to do And that is Taking you know the big this is basically the beginning of a conversation and a way of thinking about the way we communicate now There are some heavy hitters in the room here today um, I really want to Recruit you I guess to have a more intentional and meaningful um Way forward in the way that we communicate how we might carry this conversation through our community To improve it generally I think a lot of the kinds of issues and conflicts that i'm seeing in the community working group really could be uh easier If we were more intentional about the about the way we actually communicate But it's not an easy meme to spread Right Which is why I need help And why if you have bothered to come to a session like this Um at dripple con I'm waving at you And thank you for you know putting this on You know if you if you've come and sat here through this session that you know, how might we You know, and this is I think another opportunity just to hear some last thoughts How might we take this forward into our community? How might we be more intentional about the way we communicate? Thanks, kane I'm going to use the actual microphone I don't know the rest of the group might Disagree with me, but Really the way I'd like to take that out is to have some kind of standard Right, one of the things that we've seen recently that I thought was pretty useful if not perfect is we have issue q summaries now Right, which say hey, this is why this is important. This is what remains. This is what it breaks. This is what it changes Can we have something like that for responding to issues for asking for decisions to be made? Right some kind of standard that we all just agree to that says okay when we interact in this type of situation This is the model we're going to follow and the example that I had is if you're submitting a medical paper to a journal Right, you have to start with research. You have to start with Here's the prior art Here's the status of things when we're talking about leukemia treatments, right? Here are the knowns Here are the successes. Here are the unknowns. Here's what we're going to talk about And and we don't do that consistently. I don't think so if we had a if you said hey, let's try this model I'd Be excited I like that idea or if we can come up with a model right, but can I subscribe to your newsletter? I know I really do and I wonder how we might take that forward I mean if we do have we do have coding standards Can we have Communicating standards and like the the issue the issue summary as a template when you go in as a tool to support that process so yeah Maybe we should file something in the community working group issue queue to say, you know, this this this is some work we could do to support To support that kind of work. Thanks. Can awesome Melissa I like that idea and I'm very supportive of it I just want to acknowledge that I think that it's at Deep odds with the narrative of the duocracy and we talked about that a little in the group The idea that you just get in there and do the work and Everybody is able to contribute and I think that there's a tension that we would have to pay as a community to reconciling A research-based experienced expert approach, which again, I am not arguing against this All right with the hey, you can this is approachable This is easy because clearly with the example from the medical Community we're talking about specialists and we have become A community of specialists and I don't believe that our identity as a community has caught up with that interesting reply But I think I think we do have and we talked about this too I think we have positive models for this already in the community And if how many of you have committed participated in a security issue? So what happened in a security issue? Of course is someone files it it gets reported and then the experts on the security team then reach out to subject matter experts Generally either the maintainer of the subsystem and or the module maintainer. I still get pinged I'm in maintainer dot text for node access. So if there's a node security issue I get pinged to review it right and then the process of course is you know the person who's Owns the responsibilities Takes on the the task of trying to fix it But that's then reviewed by another subject matter expert And then reviewed by the security team and then coordinated for release So, I mean, I think we do have some structures for these sites sorts of things. They're just not standardly applied Right. I guess I should also say that I actually hate the issue q summary And I never fill them out because I don't have I don't feel like I have enough time And I so I'm contradicting myself is what I'm saying That's a very human part of communication. So I think we've got time to hear tim and then we are out of time So, yeah, thank you all but yeah tim I just like I really like your idea Melissa's and Well, you know the whole everything about it I just there was interesting I was talking to Kathy Thays in the previous session about Trying to you know add something to the issue q to convey to people Like what basically whether or not they should bother working on something So like if this is it's a you know a major task for 8.0 Of course, you should spend the time on it But if it's some like minor feature requests for 8.1 Not everyone seeing that page knows that they Probably shouldn't spend the time on it today because it's not going to happen for for years But the the problem with that and the same thing with like the issues submission guidelines and the thing that says Don't put public security issues in the queue is no one reads that And I think we'll need to find some way. I don't have the answer But we need to find some way to convey it that isn't a block of text And I think that's going to be a huge challenge even if we come up with great guidelines and you know and they're easy and and not stressful and Not biased against on the English speak native English speakers and I'm all that if we take advice from Natalie's keynote this morning We should put pictures of food next to the guideline Sounds good Thanks, Tim. No, it's really really useful. Okay. We we are right on time I can has feedback, please um I know it's a really different kind of session to what we usually have at dribble pond So I would very much appreciate you taking the time to actually I've just done a you know a short url. That's just my session node Please Share your thoughts and it doesn't necessarily have to be pure session feedback if you've got some further thoughts to share And you want to share them with me? Privately then then put it in the evaluation notes If you want to share more publicly then perhaps leave some comments On the node and you know we can we can pick up some of these threads I think I will follow up with an issue in the community working groups Just to you know explore that idea and some of the pros and cons that we might hit there, but Really Can't express my gratitude enough that you know There were actually people in the room for this topic And that you were all so willing to engage in and participate in in discussion because You know, I'm this I have this discussion in my head. So it's really nice to hear The kinds of thoughts of other people some that resonate and Match and some new and some challenging ideas too. So thank you very much. Give yourselves a round of applause