 How's everyone doing? Are we ready? Okay, so it's great to be here at the the open-source summit I mean so many so many friends and so many new faces. I'm really excited to be here today Jim already touched on this there's a little bit of background for those of you who I haven't met before I I'm really passionate about how we build communities and I served as director of community at github at Ubuntu and for XPRIZE And these days I run my own consulting practice where I work with companies to help them to build communities Either external so developer communities or around a product or a service or inside of an organization as well And part of the reason why I did this was because I really wanted to expose myself to as many different organizations as possible So financial services or consumer products or hardware or whatever else, you know And it's just been a real thrill to kind of work with so many different companies So one of the reasons why I'm really excited to be here today Is that we're launching a new conference as part of the open-source summit called the open community conference? And you know, I want to say a big thank you to my friends at the Linux foundation for us to do that for us to To kick this off and I'll talk about this a little bit later on But I first of all really want to touch on part of the opportunity about why this is happening We've seen a huge growth in community and ecosystems in the last few years in particular And I've been working in this since about 2000 and it's just been a continual growth in interest and excitement from organizations to participate and invest in building communities And I think part of the reason why that is happening is that Companies are becoming more attuned to the opportunities that with that they're available in communities This includes, you know building a better user experience and shaping how you engage with your users and your customers How to bring in feedback and build enhancements that you deliver out to people? How do you scale out support? How do you help the people who use your software to solve their problems without just hiring a support team and just having those People do it. How do you build a better brand? How do you become more well known in the industry? We say this every year at the Linux foundation events when new companies kind of appear They participate in the community and they become the talk of the town if you will and this all results in basically a greater level of market Opportunity and just better technology and that's what we all really want so We've seen the numbers that kind of support this black ducks put out this survey a few years back 78% of organizations running open source 66 Building open source for customers 64% Participating that's expected to grow to 88% by next year and to me this is this is phenomenally exciting Right, this is exactly the kind of investment that we want to see but when you zoom out a little bit and you look at Participation not just in open source But in social media in 3d printing in mapping in other areas We see these hockey stick curves where people really it taps into a core psychological interest in Collaborating and participating with other people as Linus says people want to do meaningful work wherever that may be so To me this offers really two types of value and I'm going to use Wikipedia and Linux as an example of this and I think this is particularly interesting for those of you who are a little bit less familiar with this Think about these two types of value that your organization will kind of get from this The first is what I would call just content and activity. So for example Wikipedia 22 million plus articles hundreds of different languages these articles have been translated into or on the Linux side of things you get Tens of thousand developers across hundreds of different companies collaborating together many of which compete with each other So fundamentally you're creating stuff. You're generating material that's of value But then the second thing and this is something I've learned a lot particularly as a consultant is is There are just the core mechanics and the measuring sticks that we have in business, right? And one of those key mechanics is money So Wikipedia valued at tens of billions of dollars by the Smithsonian the Linux Foundation determined that if you to rebuild Fedora, I think it was With commercial software development methodology will cost about 11 billion dollars to do this so it generates material it builds a better engagement with your audience and It has significant financial benefits to an organization as well. Now. This is great, right? This is the kind of stuff We want to see There are though Some wider opportunities in this and we've seen this You know one of the things that I've been doing a lot of research in is how we apply in these mechanics of how we build Communities not just in open source where this is very familiar territory Harley Davidson their owners group the SAP community network over a million members attracted to their ecosystems Proctor and Gamble created the being girl community Which is kind of designed for teenage girls to ask sometimes awkward questions. That's been expanded out to 46 different Countries and then the Random House figment community Where their participants are creating hundreds of thousands of pieces of individual content? So we're seeing the right kind of trends The difficulty and this is something I see my work is there are common common challenges that apply to this One of the one of the first ones that I've noticed here is that the difference between accidental and intentional communities a lot of the success stories that we see are where someone built something and then this community flocked around it and Then they have to deal with scale like how do we react to this? How do we scale this up? And that's often where you see some problems happening and it's also built this misnomer that if you build it They will come sadly people often build it and no one shows up, right? So we need to be intentional in the way we think about our communities and how we design them The other thing that I've noticed is you get this disconnection between the executive desire For for a community in an ecosystem and then the tactical delivery of it I see this all the time where community managers join a company They start doing work and they think they're doing really valuable work But it's not really moving the needle in the same way that the executives want to see and I think we need to bridge that gap And set those expectations more effectively Also, and this is probably going to annoy a few community managers in the audience. I think we need to up our game Like blogging social media organizing events that stuff is really important But we need to look at communities as an end-to-end experience How do you have someone join your community as an individual member and help them to be successful as they participate through it? And that involves designing an experience and fundamentally then balancing the the expectations between companies and communities This is where we see the most of the I think difficulty in organ in open source Because there's a company who always have way more information than your community Now the way I tend to think of this is I've kind of designed what I call my community participation model And I'll provide an overview of this The basic way in which I think of it is you first of all think about the kind of personas you want to attract developers advocates Translators whatever it might be and then what you do is you try to determine How do we get those people to a first successful piece of work a first contribution and we design an on-ramp that gets them there? This is an area where so many open-source projects and companies kind of get it wrong It takes ages to get from one end to the other if you can't get someone successfully Participating within an hour in my mind you need to redesign your on-ramp Then what we do is we pull people in we get people participating to their first contribution Just something of value that's interesting to them and also adds value to the community but at that point we now need to keep them participating and Contributing significant and sustained contributions and that's where I think we delicately Design a set of incentives and rewards that keep people moving forward and these need I think to be intelligent This shouldn't be crass just throwing t-shirts that people doesn't necessarily get you anywhere It's a it's the intrinsic rewards as well as the extrinsic as well Then of course we measure all of this not just the the incentives and the rewards But the on-ramp and the personas and the kind of contributions that we're seeing and also importantly when people participate through this Is we foster leadership some of the greatest leaders that I've ever met. They're not executives They're just they're just active participants in organizations because the leaders will then inform and guide the rest of the communities It goes through this through this process now If you want to hear a little bit more about this just as a side note 11 o'clock today I'm going to be doing another talk in diamond ballroom 10 and I'll dig into this in a lot more detail Now I want to talk about this for a second part of the reason why I wanted to do this conference is because In my work I see I meet people all the time already had conversations this morning with people who are doing phenomenal work in designing and building communities and engaging and I learn from from these folks all the time as we all do from each other But I don't think this information is packaged up into easy easily consumable pieces like my old boss at X price Peter Diamandis once said it's not about having all of the answers It's about having the right answers that are easily consumable So part of the goal of the open community conference is to provide a place in which people can Deliver that kind of best practice and it's really divided into three areas one is People who are going to get up and they're going to speak if they're going to share their experience of Building communities in their organizations and elsewhere and share that in a very accessible and applicable way The secondary here is of course networking meeting people Hallway track all that kind of stuff all the things that we're all familiar with at conferences that networking pieces so valuable And then the third component here is collaboration is I want to engender an environment where people are going to say Well, we've got this problem and we've got this problem Why don't we get together and see if we can collaborate see if we can solve these problems The one thing and then I'm going to get off the stage that I'm really excited to see here Is that when I started talking to the Linux Foundation about this conference and we started bouncing this around as an idea? It was a little bit of uncharted territory There's a lot going on at the open source summit and there's a lot of other conferences too And I was really delighted to see that for this event We had a hundred and twenty submissions just for the open community conference and for the Prague event Which is happening in October we had 85 plus submissions there So one this made my life difficult picking things which is a good problem to have but Two for those of you who are here today who didn't get your papers selected I just want to say I really appreciate you submitting it Sorry, you couldn't you couldn't speak but as you can see there was an awful lot of demand for this as well and Here's just a few highlights. I mean this is just a few examples We've got phenomenal people from organizations like Liz from Esesphere guy from from Autodesk We've got topics on on building open source programs offices bootstrapping communities metrics licensing the whole gamut So this event is going to be happening it happening as one of the tracks It's happening throughout the open source summit and I'm looking forward to meeting all of you If you've got any questions feel free to reach out to me drop me an email grab me in the hallway Whatever is necessary and have a great event. Thank you everyone