 Hi, everybody. Yeah! Good, good. Is anybody tired? I'm tired, but I'm happy to be here. Yes, team tired. Welcome to our panel. Community leaders tell all everything you wanted to know, but we're afraid to ask. As you can see in the title, this is a conversation. It's not just a monologue. So feel free at any time. As Lisa mentioned, you can tag us on Twitter. You can put up your hand. I will have a microphone. I will run over to you. Shout out to the folks in the universe that are online joining us today. Anyway, just a couple of ground rules before we get started is for the folks that are online, close captioning, as with all the talks here in KubeCon. In terms of the Q&A, the easiest for us will probably be just centralizing things on Twitter. But as well, if you want to follow up on Slack, tag us in the channel KubeCon Sessions. And like I said, we can continue the conversation there. We can also continue the conversation in the hallway. We'll be around for the rest of the day. And if you really, really behave, does anybody know Dominique, who's sitting right here in the second row? You may know her. Do as anybody that knows her knows that she sings really well. Dominique is an amazing singer and musician and DJ. And she has kindly volunteered that if everybody behaves well, if we get minimum seven questions from the audience that she will sing a song with me. And I will play the ukulele, which I have over here in my bag. So like I said, you have a good incentive to participate. Anyway, that being said, folks that we have with us today, we've got Kim, we've got Lisa, we've got Sharon. I'll have each of them introduce themselves briefly. And then we'll jump right into the conversation. Before we do that, though, we just kind of want to pull the audience. How many of you have a community or work in community? In terms of the different kinds of communities, are we talking about a product-based community? In any cases? Are we, in some cases, perhaps a community of practice, of practitioners sharing knowledge? And then open source. Open source, cool, cool, cool, good. So we got a different mixture. That's nice in terms of our backgrounds and profiles as well. You also see a fair amount of different experiences. That being said, oh, and of course, code of conduct, respect the code of conduct, or you will get kicked out and you will not be able to listen to Dominique sing. So don't do that. I think, yeah, very quietly, yeah. Good. And also want to mention this so that I don't forget, we had the pleasure of being on the Cloud Unfiltered podcast. And you'll be able to check that out in about a month, having a conversation about some of the things that we talked about today. It went so quickly that we're going to be organizing another session to continue the conversation, as well as the things, the learnings that we will be extracting from today's panel. That being said, oh, sorry. That being said, let's turn it over to Lisa. Can you just introduce yourself, tell us your community story, in about one minute. Go for it. Sure, hi. And hi, obviously, if you don't know Dominique, you might know DevOps Dami. That's how I knew you. And this is the first time we've met in person. So it's incredible to meet so many community folks in real life for the first time in years. I'm Lisa Marine-Amphi. Community knows me as Lisa. I, by day, work for Cacoage Labs. I organize cloud native containers in the San Francisco Bay area, which started out as the first open stock community, then became one of the largest CNCF open source communities. And we talk about mostly end user stories and all kinds of showcasing some really awesome talent that's in the community. But by day, I run develop relations at Cacoage Labs. Hi, Sharon Zitzman. I run my own company called RTFM, please. Yes, read the manual, where I do developer relations as a service. But not as part of my day job. I do run a couple of communities out of Tel Aviv, the DevOps community in Israel, and the cloud native and open source communities in Israel that have been running for more than 10 years, both of them. One of them started as the open stock community and pivoted into a wider scope of things. And yeah, and I had the pleasure of meeting a lot of the community folks in the room here through the community work. And I think that community can take you from local to global if you do the things right. Oh, we are on. Hi, I'm Kim McMahon. Right now I'm at Cisco. I've been there for a couple months, and I was brought in to help build out our open source marketing, although when I do write marketing in my plan, I do asterisk it and put a disclaimer down at the bottom of that, just FYI, if you ever want to try to educate your leadership on that. But as well as build community from our open source projects into our products. So it's kind of a little unique role. And some of you may know me from my time at Cloud Native Computing Foundation, where I did the marketing and community. I see a few nods there. So hi, everybody. Hi, everybody. Good. Excellent. Nice round of introductions. I'll actually leave this one to you as well. First question. I feel like we're in a game show. So first question. One of the things that was very overwhelming for me when I got started out in community was what was I actually being asked to do? It sounds like pretty crazy, right? But what are the expectations? And how can we measure them? Very often we talk about things like engagement, metrics, et cetera. A lot of folks are going through that right now in KubeCon. Badg scans are one metric, but what is that really mean in terms of meaningful conversations, et cetera, et cetera? So in terms of communities, starting out from the beginning, talking about goals and thinking about the metrics that are associated with them. I like each one of our panelists to talk about that a little bit. You go first on talking about goals and also how those are linked to metrics. Perhaps some of the metrics that maybe are overlooked, the process of establishing goals, what's your experience been like with that? This is kind of like when you asked me that question about CNCF yesterday. I feel a little bit on the spot. So without telling too many tales, we don't really have a community. I'm in the Emerging Technologies Group, and you probably have seen Cisco here for a long time. And yes, we do open source. But they brought me in specifically to do this. They talked with me, and we're like, oh, we must have her. So what I didn't have coming in, I had a grand plan of what you should do when you build a community. But what I didn't have is what our organization was trying to accomplish as we're building that community. So for me, it's been iterative. So I look at here, here's some metrics, and here's some plans that we can do that make sense for community growth. But then it goes back into leadership. And they're like, no, we don't want to do that, or no, we want to focus on this. And my plan has been very fluid for the three and a half months I've been there. So I use some of the very typical metrics. Yes, I do count GitHub stars. Don't hate me for it, but it's a vanity metric. But it shows awareness. I split my metrics into five categories. Awareness, activation, sign up for a download, adoption. You're using the product, forgot, and then retention. I forgot the last one there. Oh, I think it's an engagement metric. Like, are you talking with the community? Have we identified those community leaders? So if you kind of break it up, I broke it down into what our marketing pillars are for the organization, and then looked for different metrics like the stars, like the number of people joining the Slack community. And I'm going to give a big shout out to DAU, MAU, right? It's a metric that I learned from working with JoNo, daily active users, over monthly active users, to look at what the health of the community is. And out of my whole 1,700 Slack people, how many of them are actually contributing? So there's a lot of things you can do, but really try to break it down as to something that is achievable. So you keep your job. It's good to keep your job. Good answer. Great answer. So I think that you really need to be very conscious of the type of community that you're building. And so you asked questions like, what is the focus of your community? Is it a product community? Is it a practitioner community? Is it an open source community? And this will define the different metrics that you actually are qualifying, right? A good friend, Amir Shavat, who was the head of developer relations at Slack for a very long time and started his own company that was acquired by Twitter, said it took them a very, very long time at Slack to understand that the metric that they were optimizing for was daily active tokens for them when they wanted to build kind of out their platform and have more API integration. So I don't think there's a one size fits all for every community. I think, depending on the type of community you're building, if it's a practitioner community, it doesn't quantify itself in numbers. It quantifies itself in the amount of people that derive value from your community, and that can be 10 people, and that can be 50 people, and that can be 1,000 people. If you have a certain core of people that are coming out every single time you have an event or a meetup or a conversation and they wanna be actively involved, that can be very, very meaningful. So it just really depends on what you're optimizing for. If it's a business and product focused community, it can be adoption, it can be upsell, it can be success with your product. If it's a practitioner community, it's the value that people are deriving from the community and in the DevOps days community, we call that the law of mobility. If people are choosing to come and be an active part of your community, that's meaningful. So it really depends on what you're optimizing for. Respect, good answer. Solid, strong, Lisa. Oh, our answers are being, okay. The other metric, I was just gonna see how long it took one of us to mention John O's name. He's been a mentor for all of us, and that was about what, a minute and a half. We were gonna turn it into a drinking game for how many times it was mentioned, but we would be drunk. So thank you to all of our mentors who have helped us get to be able to create and build these incredible communities. They've said most of what I would have said, the one thing I will also caution is when you are asked to build a community, because once you put developer advocate or technical evangelist or community architect on your LinkedIn page, you will get hit on by no less than 15 recruiters a day, because every company all of a sudden has decided they need a developer relations department, they need a whole bunch of developer advocates, like no matter what type of company it is, everybody needs this, and I'm sure you've all experienced this. And what I always say, and those recruiters, by the way, will have no idea of what type of community they're trying to build, what type of person would really be good for that if it's going to be a good fit, because we all know the pain of it not being a good fit, it's pain for everybody involved. So one of the things that I always ask the recruiters just to kind of generally make them go away, but also ask the companies is, why are you building this team? Why do you think you need developer relations? Why do you think you need developer advocates? What are you trying to do? And a lot of times, they don't know why. This thing was started by what? Guy Kawasaki at Apple 16 years ago or something, it didn't even exist until recently. And you could ask 20 developer advocates what they do and what they should do, and you'll get 20 different answers, right? So it's still being figured out. And so getting that definition upfront and setting those expectations will make your jobs so much easier. And especially when you're at a corporation, because okay, we're doing this in open source communities, that's actually the easiest, trust me. That's, you've got an enthusiastic community that wants to come, wants to contribute, wants to do stuff upstream. And we can talk about all the ways you can get involved in open source communities. But when you're doing this for a corporation and you're in theory being paid to do it, which I've only started doing recently, most of my life I was doing this not getting paid to do it, but recently I have been putting that position where you're, you know, win the hearts and minds of every developer. Like how many times have we heard that, right? What does that even mean? Every developer, right? That doesn't exist. So you really have to ask about 15 more questions after that and define what your goals are, what you're trying to achieve, and then you can figure out how to measure that. And there are tools out there. There's some great tools. A lot more exists today than they used to exist. But first make sure you set that expectation. That's great. Oh, we've already got a question. So that's very great advice because I used to work for a company that were very much like, oh, awesome. We need DevRel. We need some community management. Please come and help us. And I forgot to ask these questions and then find out like after six months or something what the person left. And then I was left with having to deal with a lot of, well, sea level people were like, why, what are you doing here? So my question to you is if anyone in the panel has experienced this before, if you have joined this company and then all of a sudden they changed the goalpost because I've seen that in the market recently where DevRel and that kind of stuff is the first thing to be slashed if something changed in having to have a reduction in force or something like that. How do you deal with or have you dealt with leadership change in the goalpost if they are, you know? Who wants to take it? I'm happy to take that first. I'm actually gonna take it from the perspective of being a freelancer and running my own company and I've experienced that vis-a-vis many customers. Before I was a freelancer, I was actually higher. I was at different companies. I was the head of user communities at Snake before that Apps Fire, before that Cloudify. But a lot of the things that I've learned in that respect is that you have to be very deterministic about the things that are in scope and out of scope and you have to be able to communicate that very, very well. And that's kind of how I work with my clients as well. I say to them, these are the things that I do as developer relations as a service. I'm not a developer relations for hire, for example. Like I'm not gonna be a face of your company and promoting your work. I'm kind of on the back end and doing a lot of work and execution. But you have to be very, very explicit about the things that you're gonna be doing and the things that you're not gonna be doing and how you know how to, and then you reverse engineer how you measure success. And if we spoke about the previous question, which was like, what are the metrics for success? You can say, okay, if these are the goals that we wanna achieve, these are the tactical things that we need to do, these are the strategic things that we need to do, and these are the things that are in the scope of what I know how to do. Anything that's out of this scope, we can outsource, we can work with other people that have the skillset to do these things. But you need to be able to know what those things are and define them very, very well. Because then you're gonna set those expectations. And the goalpost does move, it does move a lot, and they'll say to you, oh, but that's not what we wanna do. And you say to them, okay, so tell me within the scope of these skills that I have what we wanna achieve. And so that's true also when you're working as a freelancer with clients and you have 10 bosses and it's true when you're also in a company and trying to define expectations. I think it's a very rare company that understands the value of community, very rare, right? And we know who they are because a lot of them are here. So it feels like, oh yeah, but it's very rare and especially when you're going to smaller companies and there's roles like developer advocates, technical evangelists that people don't really know what we do. It's hard to measure, so it's hard to really have that slide of your impact. It's getting easier, but it has been incredibly difficult. The goalposts move all the time. It's like shaking, you know. So aligning your goals to the goals of the company if you're getting paid to do this. And then if that leadership changes, that's your first phone call. And making sure that your goals are still, figuring out what the new goals of the company are and then creatively figuring out how you're aligning your goals to that because you need funding for these programs. And so you're just gonna have to stay on top of that if you're doing this inside a company. And you know you have unrealistic expectations coming at you or you have expectations of you to be part of the sales force which is definitely not what our jobs are. So setting the expectations of this is what I am doing, this is what I'm not doing. And showing them how it's aligned to the company goals and metrics as those change. I think that's what Kim was sort of reflecting in the beginning. If you can't make some kind of a case around business value, regardless of the goalpost and the changing figures in leadership, it's probably gonna get pretty uncomfortable pretty quickly because so what are you doing here? And then you add to that the lack of understanding about what community is. Because like oh so you do social media. It's like no, it's so much more. And but I don't blame people for saying that because it's still something that's, the maturity level varies a lot depending on the experience in the organization. Kim, did you wanna add something? No, I think, no, everybody covered it. Great. Did you get your question answered? Yeah, good. I just wanna add one tiny thing. I think that this is true for any role. And I think that a lot of roles are undergoing this transition of understanding how your role brings benefit to the business. And this is true also for engineering. A lot of times engineering, we're sitting in like the basement writing their code and they didn't understand what features they're rolling out, what value it brings to the end customer. And we're seeing that it's very tightly coupled with the business of success today to understand why you're here and why it's strategic to the company. And you need to be able to know that inside and out. If they wake you up in the middle of the night, you have the answer to that question. Why is my role strategic to this company? In any role? Okay. Next up, I wanna ask in working in community, one of the things that I learned later on is you're gonna have to deal with conflict resolution. There are going to be conflicts. There are gonna be disagreements. There are going to be moments where egos can get involved, things of that nature. Taking a step back, the importance of empathy as part of building inclusive communities, I'd like to know your experiences, any stories you'd like to share about moments of dealing with those conflicts and on top of it, establishing empathy from the very beginning. We have people from different countries. How many of you, English is your first language? All right, so we got about less than half. So with that in mind as well too, sometimes someone might say something that translating directly could be taken as being offensive, all those different kinds of things. How can people that work in community build that additional empathy to be able to, like I said, be more welcoming and make sure that everyone is being protected. Who wants to go first? Well, I'll go ahead and I'll take the corporate side here. So my empathy is around my coworkers, I'm in the engineering organization, so many of them are engineers. So I had a recent situation and he'll watch this video and thank me for it on WebEx messaging later, I'm sure. But we had a situation that this individual did not agree with what I wanted to do with the plan, with the community plan. Just one individual and we went back and forth for three weeks and I kept trying to explain to him, this is why we need to do this. Yes, it's not perfect. No, it's not the perfect open source community, but this is as good as it gets in this kind of timeframe. And at the end of the day, he went above my head and killed it. And so now I am backing up and I am putting together a six page plan of what we're going to do and I'm gonna make sure that I get my SVP approval and so that if I have somebody who doesn't agree with what I wanna do from community, I have it explained why I'm taking these steps, why I think we need to do this platform or that platform or go to that event. And then I also have approval. So it was really important to help him make him feel like he had buy-in, but at the end of the day when I didn't have approval, he was able to stop it. So you get that buy-in with these conversations and then you make sure that you document and get your senior leadership approval. So that's the corporate answer. Let's get a real answer. No, no, that's a great answer. I actually wanna unpack it twofold because I feel like it's not exactly tightly coupled with the question. I wanna tackle the question about kind of the conflicts and also the empathy. So I've lived through this many times and many times the person that I was in conflict with would be the CTO and co-founder of the company. And it's like, who am I little, you know, Deverell or whatever it is, trying to bring a position versus somebody that's very powerful in the company. And you have to be able to find, even like a compromise or a way for both sides to be satisfied. So if you have differences of opinion for how to, for example, do a certain thing, sometimes I would say, okay, let's try both in a limited scope and measure. Let's see which one performs better. What is the better, yeah, exactly. What is the better approach? Which community is more excited? Which examples are better for the community, et cetera? And if you do that and you kind of find that way to work with the person that's creating the conflict, sometimes you'll actually get them a lot more excited about like kind of when they see that something is delivering better and they'll get behind it and then you have all of their engines behind whatever it is that your idea was or you'll actually stand corrected and you'll be like, oh, I was wrong, you're right. Okay, that is the better approach and let's do it that way and you'll put all your engines behind them. If you work together with somebody, it's a much easier way to unpack kind of the friction and get and work together and find something that works for the company, which is the end goal for everyone. But on the side of the empathy is one of the things that I do wanna say in that respect is that oftentimes what's very much overlooked in the world to develop relations and develop experience advocacy is actually bringing that feedback back into the organization and that empathy of the user and the end user. A lot of times a lot of strategic initiatives that the CTO tell you you need to do is not tightly coupled with what the community needs or it doesn't come from a kind of the community feedback and the empathy with the user. It's some kind of strategic initiative with some company that they think it's high value or you'll get all kinds of like these strategic initiatives that take engineering resources or other resources that you don't really understand how it brings value to the end user but you need to be that voice for that end user. You have to say, well the end user is experiencing difficulty on this, this and this platform doesn't have enough examples to get started with this or getting user guide is not great and you have to be that voice for the end user and create that empathy within the organization so that they know who they're delivering value to and who is actually the person that they need to be thinking about when they're building their product. Like that. And on the first side with a conflict resolution is that if you're getting resistance it means someone is passionate and energetic about something. How can you channel that into a different direction and also with what Kim said, get the buy-in. If it feels like it's just coming from one direction the ability for it to be sustainable is gonna be limited. I think a big part about with communities is that if it's just one person doing all the heavy lifting and building then you're gonna get burned out. We'll probably talk about that later. As much as possible getting as many folks in there as you can. Going back to the side of conflict resolution as well as the A.B. testing but also thinking about what are their objectives. If they're going to the board or investors what are the metrics and goals that they have? And so in order how can we get everyone to be rowing in the same direction? Lisa. Those were all kind of corporate answers and if I think I understand the nature if that question come from Twitter the one of the, I think that the user may have been asking about community. No, no, and that's what, no, no, it didn't come from Twitter. It came from me. But they answered on that side and then you can answer it more from the internal community. I think a lot of people here run user groups or have run user groups and or run communities where the community is external. It might be online. It might be meetups that people are coming to. And when you have a situation in that kind of environment it's very different than what my colleagues described of your job and you're trying to get stuff done within your corporation. And it's really, really difficult because we are, we are empaths all of us. We are building community, inclusive communities and there will be conflicts. And as you mentioned, sometimes it's not, it's English is not your first language and you're writing in English and something comes across wrong. Sometimes it is just flat out inappropriate because online communities even happens more because that doesn't seem, you know, accountability. Like no one's, you're not looking someone in the eye when you're saying this. So it's easier to say inappropriate things or to say things in just an inappropriate way. And then there's just also flat out harassment. So you have that. And we've all like show of hands here who runs a meetup group? Yeah, keep your hand up if you've had a conflict in your meetup group that you've had to do. Yeah, so like no one put their hand up. So we've all had to deal with a very uncomfortable situation. And you don't wanna lose any member of the community. Like this pains me when I've had to do this. It is the most painful part. It's kind of like if you're a manager and you have to let someone go. Like it's the worst part of the job but you have to do, you can't let things happen because you have to keep your entire community together. Sometimes you have to make an example out of something or someone for the better of the entire community. So and if you have a Slack community and someone says something and a lot of times it's targeted at you as the community manager and more often than not me in our corporate Slack channel from the community. And I always wanna give people the benefit of the doubt. And I always wanna just DM them and say I don't think you meant to say that or that you might not realize how inappropriate that is but then my other colleagues and coworkers in my DevRel team are like, at least like you cannot, we have to have a zero tolerance policy. You cannot let that behavior go, like it's just- No exceptions. Yeah, exactly, like one and done. And I'm like, I thought it wasn't that bad. And then they were like, what if they had said that to me? I'm like, oh man, no way. I would have, well, why don't you have that same policy towards yourself? So that's the hardest part. And while I will boot someone out of the community who has violated the code of conduct, I will also take the time to try to explain to them so that when they join the next community, they will have a learning from it and hopefully they will be better and they're not just trying to be a jerk. So there's lots of ways you can handle it. And if you wanna talk about this more, you can come find me or any of the other, your colleagues that have raised their hands on that one. It's the hardest part of the job, but it's super important. Yeah. Good. We still have, we need more questions to get Dominique on stage. For real, we've got a question. Just before the question, I just wanted to add to the Meetup toolbox. What I found very helpful is learning nonviolent communication. It's, and that usually helps. I do run a Meetup group, but it's not corporate. It's on my free time, so. But the question I have comes to the tool. When we started user groups with OpenStack, we all used Meetup. Is that still the tool to use? Do we have something better that's not Meetup.com? Yeah, so I know the CNCF moved everybody over to Bevy. There's pluses and minuses to everything, but what we ended up having to do is do both. We have never been able to get away from Meetup.com to answer your question in the US. I don't know about other parts of the world. Bevy hasn't really worked. There's been other tools that people have tried to develop themselves. We're still on Meetup.com, and so we have to have our own YouTube channel where we post everything after. We have to have, you have to have your yes and. And by the way, what Chris was just talking about nonviolent communication is sometimes in the United States it's called Compassionate Communication. There's a lot of books out about it. I can give you some examples. It's an amazing tool if you can learn it. Sometimes we hear nonviolent communication. You think, no, I didn't punch anyone in the face, but Compassionate Communication, empathetic communication, question-driven learning, listening, all of these kind of fall in the same bucket. I mean, I'd just like to add to the Meetup.com is that what I've found, and I run a lot of my communities on Meetup and other places, but I have to be everywhere. I have a million different channels because everybody consumes something else and it is what it is. So there's a newsletter, there's the Meetup, there's a telegram, there's a WhatsApp now. There's a Discord. So it's kind of trying to be everywhere all at once because everybody consumes kind of their knowledge from a different place and knowing that things are happening and that's the hard part. That's the chopwood and carry water of community where you wanna try and tap into where everybody is. We use Meetup just kind of as a place to have a banner of that this event is happening, but yeah, we do communicate it out and broadcast it out across many, many, many different channels. If you need somebody's real name because now after COVID, nobody lets you in their building without showing your ID and your vaccination status and all of that, you have to use a Google Form because meetup.com you can have any name you want, right? So you have no idea, people show up and they're just like one initial or a picture of their dog, you know, so you really have to actually have a second thing and don't forget about Twitter, right? Like you need to socialize it out afterwards. You're done? Thank you. I wanted to kind of like also add a little remark. You have in the open source communities, conflict resolution workshops that are very valuable even though we've done this type of work for a very, very long time. So that's a good tip. I did it recently, it's really helpful. I had a question on how you handle it within your communities. If, for example, somebody's been asked not, remove from leadership positions or not to attend certain events, how you handle it when other people in your communities set up events? Like how do you communicate that to people that are organizing your events that some people aren't allowed, for example, to be there? Who's not allowed? If somebody's infringed the code of conduct and they have been removed from the community. So that has happened in our community. First of all, we have some practitioner kind of like groups, like we have a DevRel IL group which is like a lot of the DevRels in our local community and when somebody was being really like inappropriate at a few meetups, it was communicated out and people gave a notice that this person is not somebody that you want to lend into your events, be aware of this is the name and be aware of it and so like a lot of the practitioners share knowledge in that respect and you should have, I would recommend having like kind of a group of peers that you can tap into and share that kind of knowledge across the board especially if somebody's being violent or very inappropriate so that, you know, obviously you want to keep your community safe. But that said, obviously you can only control your own community, you can't control other communities and so you can only share the knowledge that you have and hope that people will, you know, use that. I just be super careful with that though because we don't really get to be the judge and sometimes it's one person's opinion against another and we've had CNCF ambassadors kicked out of the community and it's silent, right? They don't say anything about it and people have asked that question and I'm like, no, I actually think that's the right thing because it's one person's opinion against somebody else's and maybe they did learn from that situation and maybe they're a really valuable member of a community and they can be valuable again, not in that community because zero tolerance but we don't want to just say you're done for the rest of your life, right? You want to give people a chance to learn and grow and hopefully they will, right? So it depends on how bad the thing was. So, Love's Effect is a corporate view and in regards to the metrics for the community of practice, you said where you are the most important and my question is basically how can I really in some way prove that it happens, that that value is being created because yeah, I know developer A has been working for something on weeks or months and developer B is just taking this and saving the company like half a year or whatever and how can you prove that? It's massive value but it's nowhere to be documented. Yeah, I'll answer this real quick and this is something that we can probably continue and talk about like forever on metrics, right? So there's so many books on metrics. Joan O's, Mary's, I mean you can read these books and get ideas on how you want to track the effectiveness of your community. There's great information out on opensource.com as well and then of course the Chaos Group, right? They're part of the Linux Foundation and they do a lot of work on metrics. So to summarize and so we get to the next question is that it comes back to what your goal of your organization is and I came up with metrics and I'll be happy to share them with everybody. I'll throw them in a blog but I came up with some that's going to show progress in our community based on where we are right now, right? And where we are right now is I need awareness and growth. So I'll be happy to show and I think we can continue this conversation because we can go forever. So great question. I'd like to ask each of you and actually you as well but what do you each see as the biggest blind spot that most communities have? Like what should communities be doing that they're not doing right now? So from here there's two sides of that question. So one of the biggest blind spots and this is one of the things that I often tell companies when they ask me like we need to build a community, we need to build a product community. The amount of work. So first of all, be very, very cognizant of the amount of work that goes into building a community. It doesn't like flourish overnight. The numbers that I've seen companies say they wanna grow their communities to in a certain amount of time just like, oh, that's science fiction. So that's one thing that you need to communicate very, very well and the other half of it is fostering new voices. You often see these communities where you see the same people over and over again talking about the same things and that's the area that I think that as when I was talking about like kind of the privilege of our community being strong and big and well funded at this point, we do put a lot of resources into helping people craft good CFPs and mentoring speakers and other things to enable other folks to get more meaningfully involved and even through like the work in the community. So some people wanna be, start getting involved in being organizers or being on the team or whatever and they don't even know where to get started. And so we say to them, come be a volunteer on the day of the event, see if it's exciting to you if you feel like you wanna contribute more if you wanna do more and you enable kind of that on-ramp that we were talking about actually in the podcast and make it really, really easy. What you call meantime to a low world for contributing codes and meantime to community enabling them to have a really easy on-ramp into your community and get involved. I did actually wanna answer your question very briefly on the engineering part. So oftentimes it's a developer advocate's job, right? Sometimes a developer advocate has a theory about something that can benefit the client or the user and wants to kind of change the way that something is architected or built or some kind of feature that needs to be created and they don't know how to prove that it really brings value. And this is where user zero and design partner zero become really, really important. You can demonstrate it by actually dog-fooding a lot of the things that you create and then the people that are actually using this new engineering feature see the value of it. But also you can also kind of test it with those design partner zeros. You can say, okay, I'm rolling this out in a very kind of controlled way to certain users that are high value to us and they'll tell us if the experience with this feature is better when it's written like this or like this and then you can actually bring the value to the users and the management. Okay. Yeah, and find out what tool that your company is using to measure, it could be common room, it could be orbit, newsflash, it's salesforce.com in most places, find a salesperson who has access to his salesforce.com. If you spoke at a conference, add your name to that conference. If somebody tweeted out about an amazing thing of code or you solved a GitHub issue, whatever it is that you can attach your name to to that customer, get that documented in salesforce.com just pro tip. To answer Johnna's question, burnout, I mean something you've helped me with a lot. We talk about it a lot, mental health and yet it's still, in my opinion, one of the biggest blind spots. So hit me up afterwards, we can talk more about that and thank you for helping me through a lot of that stuff. Good. Kim? Oh, I thought I was getting out of answering the question. The biggest blind spot. Boy, I don't know. I think you took that. That's okay. I don't really. We can continue. But no, he just told me we have to stop. So to be continued. No, no, one thing that I would say, I agree both on the mental health part as well as what Sharon said, the amount of work that it takes, these things don't just fall from the sky and getting those first thousand users or hitting those initial metrics is really hard. And a lot of trial and error and that's where the burnout can come in. I would say one thing that I definitely got wrong was not doing qualitative analysis and not just quantitative in the sense of jobs to be done interviews of I go out and talk to different community members who are at different levels and different profiles to get direct feedback from them about how I'm doing. That's something that I think all community members should be doing as a way of alleviating the stress of only looking at numbers. Go out and talk to your community members and that's a way of building champions, ambassador programs, things of that nature. So that's what I would add. That being said, thank you very much. Wonderful questions, great panel. Give yourselves a hand, you rock. Really, really good. As mentioned in the beginning, we will have the podcast coming out in about a month and we will have further conversations about this. We're really easy to find. Hit us up on Twitter, Slack, et cetera. Keeping wonderful people, stay hydrated and enjoy the rest of CoopCon. Cheers.