 I'm Teresa. I'm so glad to be here. I am a software developer. And this is my third time actually attending open source summit. And I'm here with my sister at Biona. We're together from Dakota Gulf team. So we decided to elaborate on this topic because we're affected a lot from different tech communities within our country. And today we will be sharing our story on how we're giving back to other communities. So we live in Kosovo, which is the youngest country in Europe. Even though we're not in Europe yet, it has a population of around two million, where half of this population is under the age of 25. We both studied computer science at the University of Brisbane in our hometown. And due to the lack of communities and job opportunities, we had to use armored based scholarships to move to the capital city of Kosovo, which is Brechtina. And there we both attended lots of hackathons, workshops, startup competitions. And we managed to create a network with lots of value. One of the most amazing experiences I had was being an exchange student in the United States, where I was inspired what the community is and what it means and how important it is to us. So that was a time that we started to put more effort into things that seem to have significance in our society. From that experience, I had the chance to build up a great network with different backgrounds. And that's how we started to build up communities. After finishing my studies, I've got the extensive support from the United States Embassy in Brechtina. So the first thing that we started to do was to start up the community of girls in coding because we knew where we started from and we wanted to make sure that we can have a difference on this starting point for other people in our hometown. So Koda Girls was the name of the first hackathon that we did three years ago. And the idea of organizing this event was to start and engage youth in our community, especially girls. And what they could have more opportunities and practice in different schools and build the network without needing to spend their scholarships, of course. This hackathon was an event where 26 girls from all around Kosovo came there to work on coding challenges and build up a great network for their future. So during this event, they had the chance to go through GitHub accounts, blogs, open source contributions, Linux and Debian. Our main goal for this hackathon was to give them a grant at what you can do using free software and that is how we set up this event. The participants were mostly students, so they were new to the industry, so they needed to be informed what is happening out there. And what's being part of this kind of event is the same as being part of an event organized by huge corporations as long as you work on something that is making a difference. So these participants were divided into five groups and each group was assigned to a technical challenge where they had to work on for two days. And these challenges were open source projects that were selected by the mentors. So the groups had five mentors available to guide them through their projects where they were going to work on. These mentors were people, entrepreneurs, developers and people who were working on their own startups or their own corporations which were focused on building software products and services. So they had the chance to work on their blog projects, push their changes on their GitHub accounts which was new to 90% of the participants and then continue to presentations and networking. So this is one of the ways that we started and we continued with other parts of the story such as Google Summer of Code, Coder Girls The Second and our company, We Tech. We were able to catch and create main values within these communities including soft skills, technical skills and preparation for the global market. Which I believe, I do want to tell you more about those. Adriana? Can you hear me? Continue with the second part of our work with the community of Coder Girls. Let me just fix these headphones because I'm hearing myself. Okay. So we started as soon as I explained with our work in the open source and community in our home country. We both started like we both studied computer science in our hometown and that was one of the reasons why we were able to get to know the tech world and have the opportunity to win different scholarships and move to the capital city of Kosovo, Pristina so that we can be part of bigger community with different opportunities to learn to be active in different workshops, NGOs, etc. Why we started to be the focus on the communities is for a lot of reasons. And some of the successes that were follow up after our hackathon was that three of the participants were accepted at the Google Summer of Code. And that reason was that story was very, very amazing because us as a new group or two girls that started from scratch have to organize a hackathon and then using that hackathon, all of the girls that were part of it and the mentors, we kind of created the community to work together and stuff such as we went on and participated different workshops, hackathons, startup challenges, etc. I have to mention that in Kosovo there are plenty of NGOs who work a lot on giving the youth the opportunities and the resources. So having it a success or an outcome which is a global organization such as Google Summer of Code internship, getting into the list the Kosovo country for students having from this place is an amazing opportunity. So that kept us on working, that pushed us on working more on developing our communities. And I will have to share, I will share some specific experience that we built besides the coding, codecalls NGO. We started organizing the Toast Monsters, we started organizing the Toast Monsters Club Pristina in February last year for the first time and it was the first club in all of the countries in the Balkans. I will share in the end why I'm sharing the story, it's all connected with the communities that we are part of or that we created. Due to the network that we had, we were able to use that so that our mentors or people that we know from outside of Kosovo were supporting us and pushing us on doing these projects. When thinking about codecalls that we started from scratch, it is an amazing opportunity for others to see us doing that work and we kind of got a lot of feedback and one of that was us girls from Kosovo which was not developed in the field of technology being true leaders. But what exactly does being a true leader and that from the time being and the time went very quickly, we are now here a year and a half later and we are organizing two meetings per month in the Toast Monsters Club. One of the things that was really successful or that kept us on continuing these meetups was the values that we wanted to share or to create for our members or people who were attending our meetups. The three lessons that I learned while I was building these communities together with Chandraiza is one of the things is providing value first. Some of you might already know the Toast Monsters program, how things work there, but I will explain a little the program. They provide an agenda where a lot of roles are part of the meetup, so people who attend the meetup, they will have a specific role and they will work during the meetup. They will have to be interactive with one another and in that way they built their own path to developing the skills that they want to, such as managing leadership, communication skills, and speaking of course. If they want to be speakers, evaluators, or if they don't want to be in front of the audience, then they can have tasks that are in the backstage such as organizing the meetup, dealing with all the social media posts, etc. That gave us a lot of opportunities when it comes to winning the people to come again and again in our meetups and that value was very much used because everyone who came, they shared their own experiences, their own values and they went from each other, like they learned from each other. The other thing is that community needed leaders and why was that is that for us to be there, we had to create some kind of a tactic knowledge sessions where the network that came up again and again can have reasons why they are showing up consistently. One of the things was that if now we have members, then they continued they wanted to have their own space to influence others. So for us as leaders, we needed to take a step back and provide them the space, the opportunities for them to take the role of a leader or an organizer, etc. So that they can influence others and invite other people to join the meetups. That was one of the things that kept on growing the community and making it bigger so that other people will we're joining again and again. The other value was for the culture that we had inside our meetup. That was one of the best things because for building to build communities, it was very important one part when it comes to having relationships in between the members. The relationships between the members were very important because they had to have a reason, as I said earlier, to be part of the meetups. So in this regard, having a systems belief, norms and rituals that are bigger than yourself, than myself, than others, having a bigger role and a bigger purpose. So together as a group, we can work towards that. These kind of kept the group together and kept the communities, the community work and be consistently on their activities. Why am I sharing it is that when we organized the Codergals hackathon, it was very interesting seeing people that are very interested to develop their skills, technical skills, but didn't have the ways to get in touch with others or get to talk with others, express their needs, express their purpose and asking for help. And due to the activities that we did with Toast Monsters was that the same people were attending our Codergals activities and the Toast Monsters activities. We were a bunch of students or let's say programmers, coders who wanted to develop their public speaking skills, leadership skills, etc. So it kind of get into together as a whole that it worked very good to raise on focusing for Codergals and the coding sessions and me focusing on the leadership, public speaking, etc. What we are planning is that we are continuing the hackathons that we did in 2017. We did up until now only two that were bigger than the small workshops that we did. Now it will come the second biggest hackathon that will be later this year. It will be Codergals second, which this is the kind of would be the same format. But for us it will be achieving some new purpose or some new goals when it comes to having a close relationship with communities, organizations that are in Europe or in the U.S. Because why is that important is that when we are inviting people coming to our country is that our youth will have the opportunities to connect with them, to ask questions, to get resources and to kind of get the feeling how it is to be in a global market. That's the reason why we need those people to come in Kosovo because Kosovo doesn't have the opportunities to go out because we don't have visa liberalization. We are a new country in a developing mode. So for us it's always a great opportunity to organize events, organize conferences and invite other people to Kosovo. At the same time we would have to create, we would be very active in organizing, building communities, technology, public speaking, etc. And then getting out of that is that preparing our youth to be ready for the global market. That was our main theme from the beginning on organizing events, organizing meetups, getting the right skillset to our youth because they don't have the necessary tools as same as we didn't in the beginning. And then have the opportunity to work even in those special times like the coronavirus where everyone is working remotely. Why not preparing for the global market target to work on projects or companies that are globally known and work from here, from Kosovo. That is our main goal into all the community work, all the organization, public speaking. And then the company that me, Chunri Sun, I founded the VTech company, which gives opportunities to students or community members that we have in the NGO to work on projects that we outsource from Kosovo. So that was kind of a really huge success for us because from the other conferences that we attended earlier, because this is our third time attending the Linux Foundation open source summit conference. It is a really, can you hear me? It is a really great opportunity to be part of this community because we won a lot earlier. It is our third time, as I said earlier, and it is our first time being a speaker. So excuse us for not getting prepared in time for the technical stuff and for our topic that is all about communities and our work together here in Kosovo. For you might be a simple or a small work, but for us it is a huge effect on our country because we are a small country and our youth is like 80% of the population, so we need it the most. For more information, we would like to connect with all of you who joined our talk. So we will write to you and share our slides and share our information and we will get back to how we can network, how can we use the opportunity to share our plans and future events that we might organize in Kosovo. And invite you all in here so that you can share your experiences and your background with us. I think that was all from my part and our talk. Okay, so anybody who has a question now is the right time to do that. We'll be here to answer in you. Okay. If we have any questions we can answer now. I would like to share more stuff. We have more time, so if we have questions we can answer them. If not, I would like to add more information regarding our protocols and geo and how we can get in contact for our future events. The main sponsor for us is the U.S. Embassy. The U.S. Embassy supports us on organizing the big events. The other events that are smaller for the community works meetups monthly that we organize them on our own efforts. And our main interest, as I said, is to get into the right resources or right resources or communication with people who want to support or get into the development workflow for helping countries in developing mode that are or exist different programs to help girls in technology have diversity in different projects, for example, and from the Eastern Europe, then it will be a really good fit for us. We you can find us at the codecalls.github.io. Of course, we will share information more in the list of the attendees. So we'll get back to you and with our future plans. The other information that I would like to share is the second edition of the codecalls hackathon, which will be this year. Our main focus is always in the open source world to contribute in different projects and at the same time learn and have the right experience that we want to have. So if you are someone for that works in an open source project organization and wants to contribute in the way that we could organize and create a community here in Kosovo for that project, we can talk and we can work toward that thing. That's how we did with Debian. We started with the codecalls. We started working on Debian issues in 2017. We invited Debian developers here in Kosovo and then after that we attended for three times in a row the Debian conference, which was in Taiwan and Brazil last year. And it was a really huge success for us as a community because one of the successes was that we applied to host the Debian conference in Kosovo for 2021 and we won the competition with other countries that were long time Debian contributors and big communities. We want to have the conference and for the first time in the local team of Debian conference we are four girls who will organize the event and will work on hosting the event for about five to eight hundred people that will attend. Because as you may already know Kosovo is a really good part of Europe. It is close to kind of everyone in Europe and even in the East. So yeah, that was a really huge success for us as a codecalls community to win the bid for hosting the Debian conference. From that, that's how we started working on open source community projects where we could organize and held our like built from scratch different communities of open source in Kosovo as I mentioned earlier. If we have any questions then we can answer you right away and if not, I think I guess we have a comment here again a little more time to give an overview of our work as a community in Kosovo. And if you want to reach out to us please go to the codecalls.github.io and you can find our contact there and of course we will be writing to the members list here in the conference that are live and reach out to you to see the opportunities to collaborate. Okay, so if no one else has questions we just can end up here and feel free to reach out to us on the channels that I have not told you.