 Hi, welcome everyone to your community manager, but what do you really do I'm Nancy Lancaster senior open source community manager at VMware where I manage to open source projects Tanzu Community Edition and Carvel. Before this I worked at CNCF where I worked with all the projects on their main chain and track sessions, the co chairs program committee, all the speakers and sessions for cube cons and related events. Hey, I'm Karen Chu. I'm a senior community PM at Microsoft Azure focused on the cloud native upstream team and I've been in the space since 2015 and I've worked on a number of open source projects, including helm brigade Cressa open service mesh and more. And beyond that I am part of the Kubernetes kind of content committee. I am part of the CNCF tag focused on contributor strategy and I am part of the CNCF ambassador program. So by a show of hands who here is already a community manager. Oh, wow. Cool. And who here has absolutely no idea what a community manager does that is more. Also some community community managers put their hand up. We're also missing. We don't know where we're going. So a community manager could mean a lot of different things, but here is what we know to hopefully lessen the vagueness of this vital role and open source. Okay, so in today's talk, we're going to talk about it broken down into four main categories when it comes to community management work. So we're going to talk about maintainer and contributor experience events, social media and project health. So first, let's talk about how the community manager is involved in the maintainer and contributing contributor experience of an open source project. Well, open source projects engineers maintain the technical aspects of a project and community managers maintain and support the culture of an open source project. These are some of the things that are related to how we do just that. So code of conduct, contributor guides and docs, member health and contributor summits. Okay, so a code of conduct outlines the roles of engagements between community members and depending on the maturity of your project, you may already have a code of conduct committee. But until you get there, oftentimes this work can be taken on with the community manager alongside maintainers. So having documentation that guides the public on how to contribute to a project is important in supporting the contributor experience. So others are aware on how to contribute to that particular project as well as know how to eventually become a maintainer. After their creation of that documentation, the community manager will work to review and maintain the documentation as that project evolves. And when there isn't documentation or they're out of date, it's not only frustrating for contributors who are trying to contribute to the project as a attempt to submit PRs. It's also frustrating for maintainers who may have to go and fix any crucial errors that were created because the contributor processes have yet to be updated or outlined in the docs. And here are some examples of some contributing guides and docs. If any of you are interested in templates, CNCF Tag contributor strategy has been making templates available for use by any projects. These aren't necessarily specific to like you being a CNCF project. So if you're an open source project, these are just kind of general recommendations that we make. And real quick, a quick shout out to Tag contributor strategy. If any of you today are maintainers, this is a tag that you should check out. It's a great way for project maintainers to connect, discuss ideas and learn from each other. And like I said, the tag has developed a bunch of really great resources, including best practices, guides, templates and more. And you can find everything you need on that link. So along with documentation, community managers pay attention to maintainer and contributor turnover. And to combat this, we as community members will support them by showing appreciation for being involved with the project. Sometimes that's recognizing them through social media, Twitter, blog posts. Sometimes we'll send a contributor swag for their efforts. Other times we may show appreciation by having a contributor of the month program to show a little bit more appreciation for a contributor who might be a little bit more active for that particular month. Or we might actually start some sort of ambassador like program or a champions program that highlights contributors that are a little bit more enthusiastic about the project and want to get involved as much as possible, but not necessarily become a maintainer. And it'll be like top recognition, a lot of benefits added to that. And some examples of what an ambassador like program can look like in the open source community is a doctor captain's program and CNCF ambassadors. Okay, so as we know, events are tangible way in which we support maintainers and contributor experiences. And as an example, this can be executed through contributor summits, which are events aimed at bringing together new and old contributors to learn how to interact with the project. So contributor summits, they can vary in how they're executed, but sometimes they include workshops, AMAs, social events, for the feather sessions, contributor awards and more. And this leads us into a more in depth conversation about events. So events are a great way to strengthen community relationships and by definition bring people together. There are different formats for events and given they're generally similar in nature, it often makes sense for a community manager to be the person to pick up the project management aspects of executing them. So a big part of community management as they relate to events is having your project participate in relevant conferences, like this little one called KubeCon, if your project is involved with Kubernetes or other collaborative technologies. And as a community manager, we'll work with the maintainers to submit CFPs on time, keep track of all the upcoming deadlines and event dates. If their talk is accepted, we'll work to promote that talk. If there's an opportunity for the project to have a presence at a sponsor booth, we'll work at all the logistics of what that looks like for a maintainer and community engagement. And lastly, we'll send out surveys whenever possible and have feedback retros to go over what could have been better, how can we improve next time for either our presence at the booth or what our talk could have been about. And this is what it looks like. It's a lot like herding cats in that trying to get maintainers to come up with a topic to talk about, submit to the CFP on time, make sure that the maintainers are where they're supposed to be at the conference. It's a lot like herding cats, and it can be difficult, but the role of the community manager is to be there to know when and where they're supposed to be, guide them where they're supposed to be, and just make sure they're organizing the project's presence. Cool. So next we'll talk about meetups. In our space, meetups are a good way to learn about technology regularly and locally. So community managers can help identify and facilitate speaking opportunities, sponsor food and drinks, help locate locations to host meetups and make sure that speakers have swag to share with their audience after. Next are workshops and webinars, and these can be in person or oftentimes these days are online, but the purpose of them is to educate community members in an interactive setting. So with the Pulse and their projects, community managers can often identify and manage when they're necessary. So this can be when you have an upcoming feature that's worth highlighting, deprecations, when there's a need to highlight like how to get started content if you have an influx of needs. And users, things like that. And since these kinds of events tend to be cyclical, it is a good idea to fine tune your project management skills and kind of continuously gather feedback and input, because again, these are often things that you may want to continue doing again. So one of my favorite things to organize is a gathering in which the only purpose is to bring people together, bring the community together to interact with each other. I may organize like a brunch or a happy hour during a day or evening event, a conference that the project is participating in, which is a little bit more formal in the setting of like I have to figure out what venue, when time, what food might be served, how many people can attend, et cetera, et cetera. Or it might be a little bit more informal in which, so something like what I'm doing here at KubeCon. I'm simply tweeting out our location during lunch with our maintainers so people can come say hi, hang out. You know, it's just a really great way like events like this, gatherings like this. It's a way for us to get to know the community, have them get to know us without the focus just being about what we're doing in open source. So another favorite responsibility of mine is coming up with unique swag that are related to the events that we're participating in. The role of a community manager needs to identify when creating unique swag is necessary. So for example, if your project is participating in an event like GopherCon, how can you tie in the Gopher to the logo of your project and create a unique item out of that to pass out at the event? The community manager also needs to request and work with the budget and then start all the logistics of designing, approving, producing and distributing those new items. So for example, at KubeCon Copenhagen in 2018, I made custom Azure bike bells because the Danish are known for their biking culture. And for this conference, they are stuck in a warehouse, but I made orange hats that have an embroidery of an orange slice made with the Kubernetes wheel because this is Valencia. They're known for their Valencia oranges. Yeah. So next, let's talk about social media and communications. So communication with your community can happen in a few ways and we're kind of breaking it down into one-way communication versus two-way communication and then also official public relations. So one-way communication is often used for making announcements and requires a different mentality from two-way communication, which Nancy will talk about next. But community managers can work with a variety of channels such as Twitter, blog posts, videos, et cetera, and depending on the content, manage the necessary workflow to get things out. They're not necessarily always the ones putting out the content, but they can be there to help facilitate that whether it's working with maintainers to write blog posts, make videos, demos, et cetera. So one of the responsibilities I think that most people think of when it comes to community management is monitoring discussions as they happen on GitHub and Slack and Google groups. And these are considered two-way communications in which discussion back and forth is encouraged. So as a community manager, your role is to monitor for any violations of code of conduct. Maybe look for any questions that go unanswered. Pay attention to questions and conversations that are happening in the internal Slack channel that your maintainers are in and saying, hey, this needs to be put into the public space so we can be transparent about what we're doing. And then also pay attention to any new community members that may join those channels. You can reach out to them, introduce yourself, welcome them to the community, and then give them information about how to get more involved as well as how to attend community meetings. Cool. Next is public relations. So communication through an official PR channel usually happens at like a corporate or foundation level. And this can often look like looping in PR whenever it seems necessary, keeping an eye on consistent messaging and identifying when there are issues that need to be dealt with at a PR level for liability reasons. So our last topic covers the community manager role as it relates to the project's health. And keeping track of the project's health is vitally important. There's some key components that may affect your project's health overall until documentation maintenance, community meetings, user diversity, and other metrics that we'll outline next. So health metrics are unique to how community managers operate at VMware. We've created a guideline and set of metrics to pay attention to for evaluating a project's health. And these metrics include things like documentation quality, maintainer attentiveness, and community involvement in the project. We evaluate all of our projects twice a year, and we do not keep track of any vanity metrics. So vanity metrics like your Twitter followers, your GitHub stars, your Slack members, like none of that matters to us because, you know, at the end of the day, you can just pay for that. So it doesn't really matter. As a community manager, what I'm most responsible for is to highlight where improvements can be made after we've done these evaluations, as well as keep attention in between these evaluations and make corrections as the project evolves. Okay. So documentation maintenance. As we all know, it's natural and necessary for projects to evolve over time. And when that happens, you want to make sure that your documentation reflects that. And given that community managers generally have a bird's eye view of what's going on in our project, they can help make sure that docs stay up to date. And this also, this isn't only applied to like literally documentation. I've had a few projects that have gone through logo refreshers, and it's the same thing where I've had to go through and make sure that our logos were consistently updated across the board. Yeah. So another responsibility I have that Karen doesn't necessarily have is I have to actively pursue getting logos from users and add them to our adopters file. I'll reach out to new community members, I'll get to know them a little bit, and then I'll ask if they're comfortable with sharing their logo on the adopters file. Oftentimes I met with no legal reasons not able to do it, but it's still something that I actively pursue. I also have a pinned issue in each of my repos that asks folks to share more details on their own accord, how they're using the project, and optionally add a logo to their comment as well. It's difficult to get a logo, but the responsibility of a community manager on that side of things is just something to keep in mind if it's something that you would also be wanting to do for your project. And then lastly, community meetings. So community meetings are a great way to hold consistent conversations with your community and also put faces to names. Often community managers can be the ones that manage these calls, and this can look like updating the weekly agenda, reminding people that the calls are happening, hosting them, and anything else in between. Yeah. So in conclusion, community managers all have very similar responsibilities to support their open source project, but do not think what we've said here today is comprehensive. This can all be based on individual skill set. Some community managers are a little bit more technical than others. Karen and I aren't that technical, so it's not a requirement. If you're considering this path of community management, there's no concrete way to do it, hence the need for this talk. Some projects require other responsibilities, other projects do not, and there's really no required background experience other than having a familiarity with open source culture. Contact switching can be wasteful and because community management work is relatively consistent across open source projects, it's effective for us to do the same work across multiple projects. So as you've heard, Nancy and I both manage several projects at once. What we know and what we do for one project can often be applied to other projects. And then also when people see that your project has a community manager, it provides legitimacy to the project because it shows that there's genuine investment in the project beyond just like the technical investments. Yeah. So you're a community manager, but what do you really do? The answer, as you can see, is probably all the things that you're not thinking about to make your project successful outside of software development. Community managers provide a consistent experience and are the glue that holds that project together and keeps it from falling apart as it evolves and grows. So thank you all for attending today, both in person and virtually. I also want to say thank you to my co-speaker, Karen Chu. It's been so fun working with you. Here's where to reach us if you want to contact us and also some additional information that we recommend. So there's a book called Working in Public, The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software. It kind of gives you a really holistic view of all the different people that would be tied into an open source project, all of their experiences. And it kind of helps you become, I think, a better community manager when you know how other people are interacting with projects. There's also a link to the project health guidelines and metrics that I mentioned in my talk earlier. VMware is hiring for community managers, so if you're interested in the role, please come find me. I'll give you a little bit more details about that. And CNCF project templates are up there, and be sure to leave us feedback on schedule.com. And then one final thing I want to say, final point that I want to drive home is Karen and I manage projects that are seen as in competition with each other. So Helm and Carvel. But the truth is Open Source is all the same team with a lot of similar software, and it's open to all on how they use it. Part of being a community manager is going to bat at the company to be the voice of Open Source. To not put Open Source projects up against each other. So Open Source is about working together and not against each other. So thank you, and we'll open for questions now. There is a mic in the middle over here if you want to line up for questions. There's a mic in the middle of the room if anyone has questions. We have 13 minutes for questions. Hi there. I'm Hannah. I'm the community manager at NGINX, and I'm doing some of what you all talked about and seeing just the breath of responsibilities. It feels a little intimidating right now. I'm really impressed that you're managing multiple at once, and I'm wondering, do you automate a lot of your work? Do you have templates? How do you actually organize doing that much work on that many projects? Yeah, I'll answer first. So for me, for a conference like this, a lot of my projects are in the CNCF ecosystem, so I have three projects that are part of the project pavilion. So I often use Asana to just do project management for events. So I have a template that's just for conferences. I also have a template that I use for meetups, like sponsorships of smaller conferences. Especially for things that are repeated for coupon, the ask for things are often the same every year. So that's kind of what I use for templates. And then similarly, when we have new projects that get announced, I have a project checklist that I do. And then if there are colleagues or other teams that are launching new stuff, because I am stretched pretty thin, I also try to utilize my checklist so that it's like a self-service thing that they can try and adapt for themselves. Yeah, do you have an answer? I don't automate a lot of things, but I do use Asana. It's a lifesaver in a lot of ways. Not sponsored by Asana. But probably the only thing I automate is meeting reminders. So in Slack, I'll set up reminders for that to make sure the community knows when they're happening. But other than that, yeah, I don't think I automate. I also use TweetDoc to automate social media posts for my multiple projects. That's another one. But I'm sure there's lots of things you could automate, right? Because that was one of the things we talked about. It's just like a lot of this is consistent, like relatively consistent when you work with multiple projects. Does that help? Yeah, it sounds like templates are pretty crucial on here. Thanks so much. Hi, it's Voidix from Acuity. I come from a little different angle. My question would be in smaller companies that run their business on open source projects, it's often the marketing slash technical writer slash community manager slash dog maintainer slash evens organizer person. And it's hard to do all this stuff at once, but from your point of view, what would be the most important thing when it comes to handling community? For example, in a project that basically has several hundred of community members, a couple of companies contributing. And from a perspective of a person who is one of these companies has some community interactions, but also is doing marketing, etc. So what would be the first thing that comes to your mind when a marketer or a technical writer should pursue to do in terms of supporting the community? Well, first and foremost, just making sure you have documentation laid out that you can point to for the community as far as code of contact, how they're supposed to interact with others, how they're supposed to contribute to the project. And thankfully, we have templates out there that CNCF has available. So, you know, free to use that the beauty of open source is that you can copy and paste from any open source project. And it's, you know, it's allowed and encouraged. I think that's why I like the very first thing I would would want to do off the top of my head. Like, instead of a concrete answer, I think the mentality that I would share is to like put things into place that you don't need yet. But may right, like down the future and like Nancy mentioned, like the code of conduct thing. This is something you want to think about before you have incidences, right? If you're an open source project, you probably want to think about governance before it's something you have a customer ask about. So my recommendation again is more of like the mentality of laying the groundwork for things before you actually like need to address it. Hello. My name is Ed. I work for a large virtual machine company. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the differences and similarities between marketing and community management, maybe at your respective companies. Yeah, that's a big one. So I'm kind of an interesting community manager in that regard because Carville does not really have much marketing involvement. I am all of the things for Carville, but for Tanzu Community Edition because it carries the Tanzu brand, it has all of the marketing and everything regarding that. But I have to constantly guide them on how to communicate in an open source way, you know, try to get them out of the old ways of how to market to like in a corporate way. So it's a matter of teaching and it's a very like teachable moments because interacting with the open source culture is vastly different and old school ways of marketing. They just don't understand that. So with Carville, I'm very fortunate that I can be the voice of Carville on Twitter on anything I want, you know, help with blog posts, all sorts of stuff. But when it comes to Tanzu Community Edition, that's when I'm more so just guiding like and I have one-on-ones and I'm in the marketing meetings for that project, making sure that the voice of open source is still recognized. Does that help? Yes, it does. Thank you. Can I add to that? So I joined Microsoft via an acquisition like five years ago. And as part of that, like I was doing community work, but then like product marketing at a big company existed. And so there was a lot of discussion around like what the division of work would be between product marketing and what I do, which is community management. And so the way we kind of broke it down was all the product stuff falls towards product marketing. So things that make money, right, where you have customers, whatnot, that falls under product marketing. And then my division of work, and I am very fortunate, like I purely focus on open source. So all of our open source projects, which we, you know, differentiate between products and projects, the projects fall under my space. And it's like, like I kind of think as like, think of it as like I do marketing for open source, right? And so, I mean, obviously the way I do that is to be very different in that like open source has its own culture. But the division of work was kind of drawn there between product versus project. Yeah. That's helpful. Thank you. Hi, I'm way too short for this mic. So I'm just going to do this. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the role of a community manager in the broader CNCF ecosystem participating in things like, say, the Kubernetes release team. Or SIGs or tags, like, where can a community manager contribute to things beyond their specific project, but fit their project and their community management in? So I guess like, I don't, so I do stuff beyond my projects as well. Like I mentioned, like I'm part of the Kubernetes go to the committee. I do stuff with CNCF. And I guess like my involvement hasn't been so much as it is like me investing in this stuff because it ties back directly to my projects. But a lot of it has been just like going into these other spaces that our community provides and picking up skills that I can then bring back to my community has been super helpful. So I don't know like serving on the Kubernetes code of condo committee, right? If I ever have something happen in helm, I have a better understanding of that now because helm doesn't have a code of condo committee as of right now. But because the larger community has all these learning opportunities, I can kind of step in. And yeah, and then like with like the CNCF tag contributor strategy, I work on like different templates for projects. And again, my projects can use them, which is helpful for me, but also, yeah, like, I guess that's kind of been my involvement. It's kind of like taking all these opportunities in the space and kind of learning what I can and then hopefully bringing that back to my project when and if I need it. Yeah, I would say from those health metrics that I brought up earlier. One of the things that we have in there is how are the maintainers and the community manager involved in projects and open source culture outside of their projects because we don't want them being siloed and only focus on their project. So are they contributing, are they participating in SIGs? Are they contributing to other open source projects? So they have projects of their own, et cetera, et cetera, because it gives them an opportunity to engage with the community as a whole and not just be so focused on their open source project because we want to be able to give back as well and not just completely focus on our own project. All right. That's really helpful. Thank you. We have three minutes, so let's finish the questions. A really quick one maybe. So if I become a community manager, can you maybe outline from a perspective of a career? Like if I work for a couple of years as a community manager, I enjoy it really much, but then what comes next? Like do I become a senior community manager or like what are some roles where community management experience can really help me further down the road? I think if you're a community manager and you're attached to a company, each company will have different aspects of how you will climb up the ladder. My community management role is in the engineering department and you're in the... I'm in the PM, Oregon, Microsoft, so it does vary across companies because some will report into marketing or DevRel. And then you have a team of community managers that you work with. Yeah. So us being an engineering, we kind of follow almost an engineering ladder. And if you want to become staff community manager, sometimes that entails other things like learning Kubernetes or becoming more technical. There's other ways to increase, like how to advance your career in community management. So maybe just adding to your skill set. Like what I had mentioned before that some community managers are more technical than others. And I would say that that is an advantage over me for sure. I have also seen some people go up through like the Osbo ladder, like the office of open source programs office. Sorry. Yeah. So that's also another route. Again, it kind of depends on what the company like org structure offers, but that's a route, right? And then like I said, marketing or DevRel. So it's hard to say and a lot of that is just kind of like how you carve out and like define your role within your company. Good stuff. Thank you. You're welcome. I'm also short. Firstly, thanks for the talk. Really great. I'm Natalie from Wayfair from the Osbo, so great segue. We have a project in the CNCF ecosystem and I'm struggling right now with figuring out what the breaking point is to having the team look after their own community management, our TREMMA team and myself and my team versus hiring a specific community manager. So when is the time that you think a dedicated community manager for a project needs to come in? That's on you. You've got CNCF projects. Do you mean like would it be someone that like your company, are you asking like to justify your company hiring one? Yeah. So in terms like workload and like when do we branch off from the Osbo supporting that or like the engineers themselves versus having someone dedicated? I guess I would think about having a community manager as soon as you start getting other people involved in your project like from other companies or just like out in the community as opposed to like when you're starting off and it is maybe just like your co-worker. Just because like I said a lot of the work that we do is like laying the groundwork is like if you come in later it's just going to be harder to pick up the pieces. And then also like I mean part of community management is that marketing aspect right to a certain degree and so it's just like you can build all the work but unless that work is being put out there by a community manager. You know people aren't going to find out about it right so like it is an inflection point in order to grow your project so I would do it earlier than later just because like you know your developers are going to be busy working on it. They're not going to be able to do like the you know like having the contributing docs ready or whatever or like you know setting up talks and whatnot like that is that will be your bottleneck at a certain point because yeah you're going to want to put your stuff out there. So I think that community manager will be the best person to do that because like I mentioned earlier right the context switching is very costly. And it's less context switching when you have a community manager because so much of the work is just tied in together it's all like interdisciplinary yeah. Yeah I would. Yeah I would. I just echo that as well. Having a community manager as soon as possible makes more sense I think than waiting too long because because that way the community manager gets to know some of those early contributors and fosters that growth in the community and those relationships early on. To find the culture. Awesome thank you. Last question. All right so I'm a I'm a I'm a founder of a commercial open source software company right so I think we am where and Microsoft you know very big company I use also to work in a big company in the off ball. So what I found is that a lot of learnings that applies to the big company doesn't apply is when you want to build a community from scratch right when you don't have any social network of a software you want to expand your social network. And sometimes it's just the lessons that we learn from the big companies doesn't apply to the small company. I would like to ask if you can give some advice on you know for start up well you know because right now we have more and more commercial open source software start up and do you have any suggestions suggestions for them. You know what for what you have present like which which part is applicable to small start up and which part is probably you know you want to delay it a little bit because this only makes sense when you have a well established software or when you have a well established community. I can go first. Yeah. Okay so I have been at Microsoft for five years but Helm started when we were at a start up so I didn't like we did kind of start some stuff from the ground. But I would say I know like coming to conferences like this it's really expensive to like have a booth and things like that. If I were you and your startup I would probably recommend doing more of the local things like I said right like speaking at meetups locally I think are a great way to get out there. Because like going to an organizer and be like hey like we have this talk like do you think it'd be interesting blah blah blah like the cost of that is relatively low. I mean speaking or it's just like spending your sending your speaker there to speak there is that cost and like maybe sponsoring food and whatever but that is going to be way cheaper than like getting a sponsored booth. Right. Like I think you would go further in terms of your mileage there. And then also just smaller conferences because like this one's obviously very big but there are small conferences like the DevOps day series that are all across like the US the world. And again they're local you're going to get more intimate settings to kind of talk to your community members. And again I know many right when your startup that is kind of the big thing. I think yeah I think those are great ways to get started locally and yeah just intimate settings. Don't forget that they exist like they're still valuable. You may not reach as many people at once but you will get a deeper relationship from those conversations. Yeah I would agree with that perfectly said. Perfectly said. Thanks a lot. Thank you. All right we got to wrap up but thank you everyone for coming to our talk.