 Is it on, you guys can hear me? Great, well welcome everyone to our talk this afternoon. Tips from community managers, effective strategies for building a vibrant user and developer community. I'm Frank Daze. My day job is VP of marketing at Tesora, the database as a service company. This panel was an idea that I had a while back where it uses one of my first principles in putting together any panel, which is you always assemble a panel of people who are more popular, famous and knowledgeable than you are. That way you have a really great panel. So today I was pretty excited to have somewhat of a dream team of community managers from the open stack world. My lone community management credential as I spent two years at Novell running social media. Probably not as extensive as the guys on this panel. Why don't I quickly go through who's on the panel and kind of give you a sense of all the great skills that everyone has. So first on the far end, Sharon Zitzman, Sharon. I got to know pretty well because we are together organizing the OpenStack East event in New York City. Submit talk. Yeah, so if you want to submit talks or you have anyone who wants to sponsor, we're getting that together. That will be in August and it will be awesome, right? She also, as you know, when you do these things, you tend to look up people's backgrounds and you didn't realize, I knew Sharon was pretty active but it really blew me away when I realized that she was involved in organizing 11 different communities in one level or another. That includes cloud, cloud online meetup, OpenStack and beyond podcast, OpenStack Israel, DevOps days, Tel Aviv, Yazzamut, Al Habarb, Entrepreneurs and Beer, DevOps Israel, okay, I'll get on the list. There are 11 of them. Welcome, Sharon. Next is Steve Spector. If he were a superhero or a wrestler, he would be known as the Spector, spelled a different way. But he also mentioned as we were putting together this that the OpenStack Foundation wanted to be on here because they wanted to release his aura of awesomeness to all of you people. Honestly, I enjoy working with Steve because as a partner of HPE, where his day job has been a super reliable member and he's always been able to work with smaller companies like Tesora and really get us involved in the community when small companies like us, startups, often have trouble trying to get out and engaged and active and make a lot of noise in the community. Next, Rags Srinivas, let's try not to butcher his name, cloud architect and evangelist at IBM. He's been a tech evangelist longer than I've been out of graduate school in August 1998. So that's not, that's good or not. You see my hairline, you guys can tell how old I am. And before that, he was working on the Death Star at EMC. That's my running joke because I worked for EMC for about six weeks after my last company was acquired by them. Along with Rags Base, Couch Base and Sun Microsystems, Rags, welcome. And finally, Nikki Acosta who joins us from Cisco Systems slash Metacloud slash Metapod, I can't get the names straight but I got to know Nikki through the fact that she hosts, one of the hosts of the coolest OpenStack podcast there is out there and very active in the community. I brought stickers. All right, stickers because that's the essential characteristic of everything. So why don't we keep, I'm gonna start it off with a softball question, which is really easy. Nikki, can you start us off, can you share 30 seconds and last can you give us a sense of the communities that you feel like you're involved with on a daily basis? Sure, so obviously there's OpenStack and the women of OpenStack and then in my spare time there's like the PTA and my neighborhood HOA, talk about community. We get along much better than my HOA just so you guys know. But yeah, honestly I don't have a ton of time to do any more than that, I've done a lot with the Austin Artistic Reconstruction in the past which are the local Burning Man folks which is a lot of fun. We do a lot of cool stuff in the community to help with green projects and art projects and put on lots of really cool events and volunteer opportunities to give back to the Austin Burning Man, I didn't realize I had a Burning Man chapter down here. Yeah, it's called Burning Flipside and it's a riot, it's so fun. I didn't know if you heard that they'd been planning something up in the New England area, they were gonna put people out in the middle of Maine where Haley is from in late January, they're gonna call it freezing man. Thank you very much, that was my joke. We'll be here all night folks. We'll be here all night, great. Frank? Hi, in full disclosure, I'm not a community manager, my title is evangelist, and I've done evangelism for a long time. I started at Sun Microsystems when I did a lot of evangelism with the Java communities. Now, my knowledge of OpenStack pretty much stops at the network layer. The moment I see something like a CID or in all that, I kind of space out. From a developer perspective, I feel like it should be very easy to install applications, scale them, and infrastructure should be something that I really shouldn't worry too much about. That's kind of my philosophy in how I approach the community, and obviously given that, I've looked at Cloud Foundry because it makes it so much easier. IBM does Cloud Foundry, they do Docker. All of those are really cool. I think last year at Vancouver, you could say anything with Docker and get by, right? Docker, Docker, Docker, and this year, it seems like it's developer, developer, developer. Everybody is talking developer these days, and I've been lucky enough to do the conversation for about two decades now. So hopefully continue that. So I do mostly family community, meaning I really don't have too much time to do other stuff, but these are the kind of things that I kind of get involved on a day-to-day basis. So thanks, oh, is this work? Yeah, okay, so thanks for coming. So in an open-stack world right now, I spend a lot of time helping ecosystem vendors, and to sort as an example, and gigaspaces and Cloudify, I think it's really important to help small companies. I spend a lot of time, and it has really nothing to do with my job, but leveraging HPE and our scale, I can really introduce these companies, and I'm a huge believer in ecosystems and success of open-stack, ultimately as companies building solutions on top and people using them. So that's where I spend a lot of time for open-stack. I moved to Boise, Idaho about two years ago, and I moved from here, which is people still quite shocking that people actually do leave Austin, not many, everyone moves here. I've been trying to get Cloud going there, we actually run the Boise Cloud Meetup Group, and we have over 200 members. You're just gonna say one member? No, no, we're doing good, we got about 200, and we've had to store, I think, you guys have well, we've had a lot of small companies present remotely, it works great. If you do cloud stuff and you'd like to present to our group, we're really happy to have you. There's actually a lot of tech talent in Boise, it's quite surprising, and I'm also really excited that I'm one of the three people bringing the DevOps program. So Boise DevOps Day will be in October. It will be the first true open source event in Idaho, and it's really good, so if you're interested in sponsoring, let me know, because we need to find money, but anyway, yeah, that's really my focus right now. Yeah, and I do give you some credit for creativity. Stephen did have my CEO at his Cloud Meetup, and he did it by a join me, I think, or a Webex, and he had 20 people on the other end, and it was really an active and engaging conversation, despite the fact that Boise's not on everyone's path for passing through. A ton of Oracle database cloud developers living in Boise, no one knew, and they beat up his CEO. It was quite a back and forth meeting, but... I think Idaho and I think potatoes. I'm still looking for the fields. It's all mountains. I haven't seen the potatoes yet. It's all mountains. Don't aground. Sure. So I guess, generally speaking, everything open source is what drives me, where I'm involved, so anything that drives that core belief, and I'm very active in the open stack communities. I lead the open stack Israel community. I lead the DevOps Israel community. I partner with other communities in Israel, like the Docker community and the Kubernetes community and things like that. We're now trying to replicate that kind of activity to additional communities, kind of bring out the best in the open networking world, TASCA, a lot of things around that. We're even launching an open source and open governance project called ARIA around this in order to really bring open source and drive open source. We're sponsoring PyCon Israel, which is the first PyCon Israel actually. So we're doing a lot around open source community building and everything that drives that and makes it thrive and endure. That's where I'm active and I really believe in. So we'll come back to the why on all this. There we go. Let's come back to the why behind all of this. Is this coming through? Okay. Let's see. We do some of these meetups because we're just interested in being involved in the community. Whereas on the other hand, all of you have this as some part of your day job. What motivates your company? I'll start with Sharon on the other. What motivates your company to invest your time and effort to try to build the community and be involved? Okay. So first and foremost, for me, a lot of what's involved in community, there's a lot of relationship building. Relationship building ultimately can drive business, but that's not the only thing. I'm lucky to work for a company that has a core value of community and open source kind of DNA. We believe that this evolution and revolution in open source is what will drive kind of the new world initiatives, kind of breaking down all of those silos, breaking the black boxes. This is what's gonna, this is gonna be kind of the next shakeout and we wanna be those that, you know, strengthen this kind of revolution. And so that's where my company support comes from this. And at the end of the day, when they're looking for the solutions that can provide these pure play, kind of open source solutions, we're gonna be able to be involved in those and have the knowledge and the know-how and bring kind of all of that value from the entire ecosystem into that kind of, you know, that force. So yeah, that's where it comes from for us. Great. So I think from HP or HPE's perspective, and it's really interesting for me because I've spent most of my career at very small companies and that's one of the reasons I spend so much time helping small companies. I know how hard it is to get anyone to listen, especially big companies. And it's quite strange to be in a big company because if I make a call to someone and say I'm with Yelp Packard Enterprise or when I was at HP, they answer the phone. And it's really quite a remarkable thing. And I think that HPE and other large companies actually have a responsibility when it comes to open source in the community. Because of our scale and our size and our large customer bases, I believe it's our job to go out and push open source, push the ecosystem and show people why it matters, how it changes the game. And so for me, naturally, just because I have a bigger voice because I'm a bigger company, same person, saying the same thing, but because I have HPE behind me, people listen. It's what's the old, there was an old stock when, this is the commercial, maybe I'm dating myself too much. When EF Hutton talks, people listen. Do you remember those commercials? Wow. Yeah, come on up here. So those kind of things, it reminds me. So when the HPE goes out and says, open stack is important, open source matters, it carries a lot of weight. And so it is our responsibility to do that. And I take that job seriously and spend a lot of time on it. Thanks. Let me give you a little bit of IBM perspective. Whenever I talk to many of my colleagues, they have spent years in IBM. I have spent a few months in IBM. In fact, last summit at Vancouver, I was not with IBM yet, but I was pondering going to IBM and I talked to some of the IBMers and they said, IBM is not really what your grandfather's company, right? No, it's completely changed. A lot of us use MacBooks. We have an active alliance with Apple. And really the goal is to be able to be successful, you have to incorporate developers into your ecosystem. How you do it really depends. And I think IBM really is going actively behind open source, not just open stack, but even Docker. We made some major announcements at the DockerCon last year. We're doing things with blockchain, which is extremely new. Cloud Foundry, I already mentioned that before. Node.js. In a lot of the open systems, open source, open systems, open governance, open foundations and all that, IBM is heavily involved. And I completely agree with Spectre in the sense that I think it's incumbent upon IBM to help as we use like Tessora and others who are part of the larger ecosystem and kind of incorporate them into the fold and see how we can go and talk to developers. Can I just ask a quick question? Sure, go for it. How do companies like IBM reconcile kind of that conflict, that inherent conflict with the business model and open source? Yeah, and that's a great question. And I struggled with that even at Sun. Obviously, I don't think we did a good job at Sun because we did a great job at open source, but we never really quite monetized it well. IBM, on the other hand, is I think more customer focused. So we are gonna go where the customer is asking us to go. We're not going open source because we wanna go. This is what the customer base is demanding and that's kind of what we're doing. And rather than kind of do a half-hearted effort, we're putting a lot of dollars into that. I don't know if that answers your question. I probably have a little bit slightly different perspective. Number one, I think the world is changing. You know, the cool thing about open source is that you do have an ecosystem and instead of having one thing from one vendor, now you have this massive ecosystem of things that you can pick and choose from, which is really cool from a business point of view. If you wanna try to do something that's never been done before, you're probably gonna need to use a bunch of different tools from a bunch of different providers. And so that's kind of cool. From the sort of community management perspective, I think community matters to Cisco because I think for the most part, I think people are starting to be immune to mass marketing. And so in order to be relevant, instead of the sort of one to many blast, you know, billboard ads or radio ads or TV ads, you know, people want to deal with people. There's still like an element of humanity that wants to deal with other people. And in order to be relevant and to reach those perspective buyers, I think you have to figure out new and creative ways to try to communicate to those people. And I think, you know, social media obviously gives us a great way to do that on an individual level. But I think from a company level, you know, it gives you sort of another channel in which to do business. And I do think there's an opportunity for people to make money from open source. I don't think a lot of companies have quite figured that out yet. You know, especially moving from, you know, hardware to software, for example, you know, buying something and running it for three to five years and then having to buy something again, you know, versus paying a subscription, you know. Any opportunity I get to pay a subscription, I'm doing it. Like I have, you know, this really cool app called Texture and it's all you can eat magazines. And I used to buy like three magazines before I got on every plane. And now I'm like, man, those are heavy. So I have like this app that lets me download, you know, all you can eat magazines for whatever, $12 a month. Like it's a different model. And I think those models at the consumer level are starting to affect, you know, the way businesses choose to do business. We want things right now. And we want human interaction. I think at the end of the day. And so I think that's why it matters to Cisco certainly with the internet of things and digitization of business. Great, great. Well, now the softball portion of the afternoon is now over and now we're gonna get into the harder questions. No, just I'm joking. I can tell you an anecdote. I worked for a company and the community manager arrived and he was doing the CMO introduced team and the CMO said, no, great. I wanted to introduce you to the silver bullet as if this guy, you know, community management is the silver bullet. It's gonna cure all the evils and all the things that the business needed to solve. One of the things I took from that is that in community management, there are real expectations and then there are unrealistic expectations. How do you deal with and set reasonable expectations? Start on this end, Nikki. What are some of the expectations you set? That's a really good question. So I had a, I'll say a manager that came to be from another company and he was a micromanager and he was like, man, we need to put metrics around what you do. How do we put metrics around what you do? And I'm like, man, and so my first inclination was to go to LinkedIn and say, how do you put, what kind of metrics are you measured upon as a community manager slash evangelist? And you know, it was a debate that happened on LinkedIn. Like it's really, really hard to do. Like I can like measure social impressions on Twitter using this program if you want, but it's really, really hard to set expectations in terms of what defines success. The one thing I can say is that, you know it when you see it. There's people in the community and the open-set community that are really freaking great at community management. Like there are people like Stephen who've been around for a long time and the Marantzis guys are great community members. Like you know when you see it, they're in meetups, they're open sourcing a lot of the stuff that maybe other companies might not open source, but I think in terms of like trying to set expectations of what makes good community managers or evangelists, it's something that's really, really hard to do. I thought it was a number of Twitter followers you had. Yeah, but that can be solved with five or for $5. I'll buy them. And I'll buy you $20,000. You tell me the country I'm making followers. But they didn't know that early on. Yeah. Managers. You have a question? If we're gonna ask you a question, I was just asked to go up to the microphone and then we can. A long time ago I was in systems engineer at Netscape and we... Whoa. I was like 10 when that came out. Oh, no. Oh, no. And we asked the same question and we realized the value of one to one and or one to just a room. And so I passed around a sign-up sheet at every time I went to talk about our old app server, app server, web server, whatever and say all these people got the Netscape religion and over the course of the quarter we counted it all up and we tried to compete amongst our patches for who could get as many legit engineers and technology influencers to buy our pitch and just with the butts in the seats. That's how we measured ourselves. The same way you measure marketing in general. I'm feeling like we should pass around a collection plate and measure our success by the amount of money we collect. They're like, do you take Visa? Next question, sure. Would you agree that the term community manages kind of an oxymoron? Because you can't manage your community. You can manage your company's community involvement, I think. I think I like what you're saying in the sense that a lot of times you got to adjust to the flow of the community. So you're not really managing downwards. You're kind of managing upwards. The easiest way I put it is, you know, I'm kind of the BS filter. I am the BS filter between the company and the developer, the developer and the community. So in other words, there are a lot of groups within the companies that I work for who really want to go and evangelize their products. They think it's the greatest in slice bread, but it's not true. Does it meet this criteria? Does it meet this criteria? Does it meet this criteria? And so on. So you have to manage the expectations upwards. And then, like you said, sometimes, again, let me take the example of Java and might be dating myself. But if you think about Java, it started on the client side, but kind of completely moved away and went to the server side. Who thought that was coming? I mean, nobody knew that was coming when we started looking at Java. So I think you need to be able to kind of be flexible. So in a lot of ways, maybe, I don't know if you call it, community manager as much, but there is definitely community management activities that's happening. OK. I don't know if I answered the question. The way I would like to answer that is I don't think it's the community that you're managing, but all of the activity around it. I like to define it in kind of my mantra, which is chopwood and carry wooder. The people that are managing communities are working hard. And they're doing all of the legwork and all of the heavy lifting in order to drive that community. So I guess it's interchangeable with the word driver. The management is actually the hard part. It's doing everything behind the scenes in order to kind of answer that need that your community is looking for to provide all of the outlets, the meetups, the events, the different interaction points for the community to thrive. So the management is actually the back end. The community is the front end sort of a thing. So that's how I would see it. I actually would want to answer also Frank's question about the qualitative versus the quantitative measurements. But if anybody else wants to answer his question, go ahead. That's fine, go for it. I think it's a really interesting question. So I would divide it into two aspects. There is the quantitative and there are the metrics and the KPIs and the traffic and the downloads and the things like that that your company wants to see like that upward trajectory on constantly. And so you have to prove that this is working. But there's also that qualitative element of when you work hard and you do chopwood and carry wooder and you do lead by example and you lead the communities that you're leading if it's OpenStack or DevOps. And at the end of the day, you have like this one defining moment that makes you feel like you accomplished something. And for us, I can say that that was today, this morning in Mark Collier's keynote, when Cloudify was up on the screen with Kubernetes, driving the revolution and container management and little Cloudify from Televiver as I like to see it. And suddenly you see that everything that you're doing with your integrations with Kubernetes and OpenStack and you're bridging these gaps and you're working in all these different communities and it has visibility. At the end of the day, like the work that you're doing with companies like HP were helping you get that visibility or these smaller companies where you're actually helping them drive their initiatives as well. And you have this moment and you say, okay, we're on the map. So it does have its effectors. There's the qualitative and the quantitative and together you can understand whether you're achieving that kind of overall effect that you're hoping to achieve through this. Great. I was just gonna add to your question. One of the things I've done running both the Zen community in OpenStack and OpenStack is a good example in the first year when it first started and I arrived at Rackspace what, a week or two after it launched, something like that. And to be honest, the people at Rackspace sort of understood open source of being polite and it's a challenge. And one of the things is I'm a big believer that in open source communities, it needs to spread fast. One of my mantras is go global and go global fast. The problem is as a community manager, you're sitting wherever it is, it's just you. And so one of the tricks is to, I don't wanna say trick people, but you end up managing people around the world that become local community managers. So an example of what we did first on is we put the map up on the website. It's still there. And the map had where people have interacted with OpenStack and then we put emails out and we put stuff saying, hey, if you're using OpenStack, go on this map and tell us where you are. And then we ran a contest, can we get all the continents filled? I don't think we ever got Antarctica, I think that was the one we couldn't get. But that afternoon I had three people from South Africa show up and hit the button. You know what I did? I contacted those people. Who are you? What are you doing? What's going on? Korea came up the second day. What's his name from Korea? He runs a Korean OpenStack. I can't think of his name, just to escape me. You know, he contacted me the second day. He then went on three or four months later. I went to Korea and we launched Korea OpenStack. He's leading Korea OpenStack, still to this day. I just don't remember his name. But the idea is part of it as a community manager is you're actually managing people around because you can't do it all. And OpenStack is a great success. I remember Collier came to me maybe the third or fourth week and says, how many meetups do we have? How many meetups groups do we have around the world? And I said, we don't have any. And he goes, well, why don't we? And yelled at me. So we went and started. And if you look, OpenStack has a tremendous global meetup community. And it all operates on its own, right? So you are managing it. You're managing it indirectly through other people. And you empower them. I remember during the Egyptian Revolution we shipped a bunch of stuff. They were having an Egyptian OpenStack meetup and we shipped a ton of OpenStack stuff. And it never got there because the country completely flipped. And for three months we'd never heard from them. And then these guys wrote back a couple months later saying, we're still here, we're okay. And I'm like, oh my God, this flipped me out. So we reshipped stuff to these guys and they ended up having an event. And, but it's those kind of things. And then you actually, as a community manager, I know you end up with a one-to-one relationship with those people and it's through them you can impact the people around you. And OpenStack to me, what I see today looking at the community is it's amazing because the community operates itself. So you make an interesting point about the kind of theory of community versus the reality of community, right? Because everyone's for community, right? We all should just get along. This is OpenStack. It's a big happy family, right? Let's be real about this, right? So I look up at the panel and I see HP. IBM and Cisco. And Cloudify. And Cloudify, but I'm saying the big brands. Oh, here. Yeah, the big brands that are, I was thinking that my point is that the big brands that are probably competing in OpenStack distribution type deals are significant accounts. And the disruptors. What's that? And disruptors. What, how do OpenStack people get along? So it's really easy for me. I've thought a lot about this and it's kind of funny because I've worked with Steven and I've worked with Rags at Ragspace. And Jeff and I, Jeff is my co-host for OSPod. We were talking today about how we wanted to like start taking bets like little squares like they do for the Super Bowl to see like how long it would be before people jump companies again. There's like this migration of people that kind of float around with different companies. Like you can't, you gotta get along with the people that you work with because at some point they're probably gonna be your coworker, your boss, or your employee. Like, you know, we all just, it's actually kind of a, still a small community. You know, even though there's what, 7,500 people here, I think they said. You know, you see a lot of the same familiar faces and you know, yesterday's coworker might be, you know, tomorrow's non-co-worker might be the next day you're working together again. So I don't think it's hard to get along. And I think that, you know, in any healthy, vibrant community, disagreements are actually good as long as they're, you know, healthy, discourse constructive and not full of personal attacks. Great. Co-opetition. Yeah. But I think the developers. You didn't like it. The developers don't co-op, that's not a word, co-op-itate. The developers in OpenStack, and I've seen it and I saw it in Zen, the developers, they're here for OpenStack. They love OpenStack. They're passionate about OpenStack. It's about OpenStack. They happen to work for HPE or we had a bunch, you got, went over to your company now, they happen to work for IBM. To them, it's about OpenStack. The tricky part comes into the marketing and sales part, which is why you don't see a lot of sales people here, because that's a different world. Well, there you go, right there. But the tricky part comes in the marketing side and the sales side, because we're effectively selling the same thing. There's differences, but it is interesting and OpenStack, I don't know, I know you sent back, OpenStack I think is one of the first communities where the product that came out of it that the company has contributed is basically identical to what we're selling to each other. That's unique and that's part of the great experiment that is OpenStack. And I would say so far it's working, although there's a lot of startups that would tell you it's not, that are gone, because they couldn't do it. Right? Yeah, so my earliest example again is I go back to the Java days again, where we had Java EE, Java on the enterprise side. And basically we had Oracle, we had IBM, we had BEA, you remember there were a few other companies who were all doing this, more or less the same bits. But really, I mean, the community drove the message. It's cooperate on standards and compete on implementations, right? So whoever did not compete well on the implementation just withered away, right? I mean, that's the basic survival law, right? You know, the Darwinian theory, really. You know, it's a Oracle by issue. Exactly. Right, right, right. So, you know, I mean, yes, there is really, I mean, the community wants us to cooperate on kind of interoperability, because I want, vendor interoperability is very, very important to me. Cloud Foundry, right? You know, I really got so excited by Cloud Foundry when I took my Scala app, took it from IBM, you know, IBM instance and deployed it on Pivotal without any changes to anything. You know, it's so easy. It took me like all of, like, two minutes, you know, to do that. And that's a very powerful thing coming from a developer. And that is what, you know, the consumers are demanding and that's what the developers are demanding. And even though we don't like to get along, you know, we really want to get, you know, we have to get along. Let's put it that way, at least in terms of the standards. I'd like to actually comment from the other perspective from the smaller companies and you can actually probably sympathize with me, Frank. But it's really interesting to me because you actually said something that's very interesting in that it's virtually the same product. It's almost identical, where the differences are virtually superficial. You know, like almost like the consumer industry, you know, our CTO who's here, Nati, speaks about this, how it's become where the power is in the developers' hands these days. Not the man in the high tower who dictates this like stack that, you know, you need to adopt, the developer wants to adopt the tooling that he's used to, you know, the new and exciting disruptive technologies and that entry point to the developer is mostly like that sexy API that they want to, you know, interface with. And the question is whether, you know, these companies in the face of kind of these smaller companies, these smaller disruptors are ready and able to kind of provide the competition, the co-opetition required in order to kind of face this incumbent challenge. So that's a... I need OpenStack to win, because if I don't, I'm out of a job. So, you know, at the end of the day, I think we all want OpenStack to win. And so when I see a community member that does something cool, I'm like, right on. That's awesome. It's good for OpenStack, which means it's good for all of us. We're coming upon time. So let me just ask my last question and then we'll open it up to questions, which is we've all made mistakes, right? We've all done things in our communities that... I make no mistakes. Okay, well, I won't ask you that, I'm sure. Can you guys share, or at least, I know people in the audience are probably thinking in terms of community management, something you can do if it's not a mistake you've made, a mistake that someone else has made, maybe, at a competitor. I think it's really tricky and risky for community managers to live in marketing. I really believe that. And I guess it depends on the company, but, you know, marketing's metrics are kind of, they're in competition with what I think good community managers should do. And so when you have a company that has marketing dollars to spend and they're expecting a certain metric or result, you're going to get a different outcome and different behaviors versus someone who really, actually, genuinely is invested in a community and wants to see a community thrive, even if it means that they're not exactly promoting their own company. I do a lot of stuff for OpenSack that doesn't benefit Cisco, and that's okay, but I think that's the tricky balance. And I've seen a lot of things that happen when all of a sudden evangelists get snagged by marketing and become marketing voices instead of community voices. So, you know, confessions, right? You know, I think I've done a lot of evangelism of technologies that were not quite baked yet. So I personally think that it was lack of maturity on my part to fight back and say, well, you know, I shouldn't be really doing that, right? That was one big thing, but I think one of the biggest things that I can see is, you know, companies have this, you know, tendency to throw open source, you know, just throw the cord over the wall and let communities happen. It rarely happens, it does not happen. So you have to build the community with the source, or, you know, sometimes it's organic, you know, it just happens, right? So, you know, there is this tendency to do that and you know, you gotta resist that temptation. I tried my level best, you know, fighting back, but you know, it's not the easiest thing to do. So I think, you know, you hit on a big point and as a community manager who's worked on two communities where the companies that participated never liked each other, it is very difficult to tell your company who's paying you money that you put the community before the company. And it could cost you your job, but that's your job. And to not do it, this is the way I say it, to not do that is disrespecting community and it's not the way it should be. And so sometimes you have to stand up and say community comes first. And that, to me, people know, people notice, because people that watch community managers, open source projects, are watched closely, right? They're all, everyone's a pain in the butt. Everyone's looking for something to bitch and yell at and the community manager's the central point for all that, it's just the way it is. And so I always felt that I would do my job completely in the open, but you will get asked multiple times to do something and that's really where, what do you believe, what do you stand for? I think that's a huge part of community management that people don't talk about. And there's a lot of good community managers and there's a lot okay, but the really good ones to me, I can name who they are and they stand out because I know they've stood up for the community before the company. To me, that's the biggest thing that you can say. Sure, last one. Okay, so I think it's more things that you need to be careful for in terms of community management. I wouldn't so much call them mistakes unless you're continuously doing them. But first and foremost, I've learned not to just talk at the community, you have to listen and you have to actually hear what the community is saying and apply whatever it is that feedback loop back into the community because that's what drives the community, inclusivity versus exclusivity. Not everybody knows the rules, some people are noobs, some people don't know exactly how the community works, but if they're getting involved, they want to be involved, so you have to bring them in to the community and make sure that they thrive in whatever is important to the community and I guess sitting back on your laurels and you take a community like OpenStack and you think that it'll drive itself, communities do not drive themselves. So if you think you've gotten to this critical mass of people and that the community is driving and thriving, if you take your foot off the gas and if you don't drive the momentum, it will die. So those are things that I find I have to constantly be keeping up and making sure that the community remains sustainable and endures. You definitely see it as a track chair, so I've been a track chair now for the past few summits and there's always seems to be this hard and fast rule that if it's a product pitch, you say no or it goes in like a different track and it's been really interesting because when newer companies or newer folks submit talks, you can tell that it's a product pitch versus a talk that actually has the best interest of the community in mind. And it might be something that you worked on and that your company did, but if it doesn't tie back to why it's good for the community, it usually doesn't make the cut. You have to go back and educate them. Right, totally. You can never stop educating Open Source because companies still, very, very few companies still get it. And in the spirit of community, just to kind of do things. One thing I like to do when I moderate and panels is try to summarize some of the key things that I've heard across today. Just one more question because he's been standing at that mic for like an hour. Yeah, let me just do 30 seconds and I'll roll over to the last question. Try to manage expectations. Pure marketing metrics and traditional metrics don't always work. There are hard benefits and soft benefits. Party role is to be the BS filter between your community and your management. I think that's a great piece of advice. It can be challenging when the interests of marketing and the interests of community management don't align. But as Steve aptly said that as a community manager, your job is to take community over company even if sometimes it's not really in the interest of your company. So great stuff. Let's take the question from the audience. Sorry for dominating the Q and A but it's the topic that's dear to my heart. I've been doing community relations myself in a previous life. So yeah, one of the things that I sometimes see is that when there is a community relations manager, as you prefer to call them, sometimes the rest of the company says, hey, great, there's this guy. He handles the community stuff and we don't have to care about it. So one of the things that I would like to suggest that working with community is everybody's job, not just the community relations manager. But the question I have, you said you don't see much marketing and sales or marketing people around here. And you said it's a mistake to have community relations basically managed by marketing or from an organizational perspective. If you had it, who would you like to report to? Office of the CTO, I think. Well, I'm doing community management sort of role now where I actually sit and lead pipeline group. So. This marketing of marketing groups. It's not just marketing. I mean, I sit in a group that counts leads. So it's very odd. I've been in engineering, I've been all different groups. I think your idea is very good but I've gotten used to the point that really no one that I work for completely understands at all what I do. So there just isn't enough career community people high enough in companies that really understand what the job is. And so I tend to get shuffled a lot. Maybe, I mean, on a regular basis. But yeah, big company. You see the open source companies, you know, like Puppet, et cetera. They have VP community that they understand. You're right. Big companies tonight. So I myself, I've been in sales and engineering and marketing, CTO group pretty much across the board and I have to agree that not everybody fully gets it. So it doesn't matter. You have to kind of make some adjustments to your message and kind of move on. That said, I will spend marketing's money all day every day and I'll give it to Steven too. Awesome, awesome. Any, what other questions? We hit the wall. Who in here is a community manager just out of curiosity? Who wants to be a community manager? We got a few people in here. Why are you guys here? I'd like to take a second and thank Frank. Yeah. First of all, Frank, do a few words about the stuff that you've been doing around the community. You've been doing some great stuff. I got a mic, yeah. I mean, the community event that Sharon and I are organizing is OpenStack East, which will be the first major OpenStack event in New York City in August. It's going to be a two-day event. If anyone's ever been to the OpenStack Silicon Valley event, it's going to be analogous to that. It'll be a two-day event. We're looking at a pretty cool venue outside of Times Square. We're going to have, we've already locked down keynotes from a lot of the name brand OpenStack users that you've probably seen speak in the keynotes here. So we're looking forward to trying to get a lot of different people involved. But we are looking for diversity of talks, developer talks. We're looking for different talks. I'm looking for user stories. I'm looking for a wide range of stories. If you have things you want to talk about, if you have ideas as well, please grab you the charon or me. We're not trying to spread the word. And this was my community management task was managing the community manager. So, and that's standpoint. Frank comes from leading the Trove Day. That's, we made the connection in OpenStack Tokyo. And then I found my partner in crime for the New York City event that we've been tossing around for ages with like Monty. Well, guys, thank you again. I'll probably see everyone down on Rainy Street, right? If it's not raining on Rainy Street. Thanks everybody. Thank you. Thank you so much.