 All right, that's right, the introduction. So this is actually a very exciting story. I will tell you all about how I know Hina and why we are on this slide together. Long, long time ago in the other galactic, I met Hina on DevConf and we first became friends and then we became a team members. Therefore, we are on this slide together. But before we really become a team members, we first went for the whole night concert in Vienna and then had a lot of time bonding on the yellow bus that goes between Bro and Vienna. That was exciting. And I would recommend this for all of the onboarding practices that you really like, you know, do something fun with your teammates before you really start working on the actual project. Hina, off to you. 100%. And here we are years later, still doing this stuff and being realistic. I think one of the really awesome parts about why we're in our roles but why we're still friends at this point is we're not talking about utopias or frameworks. We talked about life. We talked about our emotions, our perspective on things and that's actually a very important part of how we work in a team, right? So communication and honesty. Honesty meaning, for example, hey, stand up, bring us with no value. We do this every day and it might or might not be miserable but that honesty part of it where you're safe to say, I don't know, I know what the intention is or I don't even know what the intention is but I'm not getting any value out of it, are you? Is such an important characteristic and specifically in our roles, that honesty and that direct feedback is so important for how we work and it carries into not only work, it carries into friendships, family, with family, take a little grain of salt. Your mom probably doesn't want to hear all of your honest thoughts and if she does, she's probably a very loving mom that's very open minded. But aside from that, at the end of the day, we found that the reality is extremely important for success. And so that's kind of where we are with this meetup. We wanted to actually talk about what is reality and how can we learn from each other? So that's my two cents just as a small introduction and I'm gonna pass it back to you, Dami, in case I missed anything, let me know. No, I think that Hina, that was right on point. This is just the opening slide here. We'll be doing the mentee for collecting some contribution and feedback from everyone else and tapping into the collective wisdom of DEF CON here where if 1,700 attendees, I hope that there will be some traction here. So that's just the opening slide, but you can take your mobile device and go ahead and just scan this QR code here and get into the app that will let you communicate with us if you not necessarily wanna directly be on the screen and be in the talking mode right now. So once you have done this and we know that we have other people to contribute with us, we'll move ahead with that. We have a little ice breaker. But before we move on, I wanna see if we have anybody interested in this kind of interaction from the beginning. So yeah, I'll ask you just to tap the hard icon on your mobile device to see that we have people ready to dive in. All right, that seems to be working fine. Here we go. Yeah, just a disclaimer. This is fully secure app. You are sharing your feedback anonymously, so you don't have to be worried about any input providing there. This is not going to be used further. It's just to streamline the cooperation between Hopin, Hinadomi, and Menti, and Paweo, right? So that we have the easier time on facilitating all of this. Yeah, so we have five people in the room. What do you guys feel? Should we go ahead and start or wait a little bit more? Well, I guess before we go to the next section in the chat, if you don't wanna share your audio, does anyone have anything that they wanted to add onto or share before we go into our fun spots? And trust me, the next few questions are gonna be fun. We're gonna make you think. Silence for me usually means proceed. What do you think, Dami? We can go ahead. We'll dive into the ice breaker, and this is just going to be one-time thing. So this is a quiz, but all of the answers are correct. And we just see what is your train of thought on some subjects. I'll go ahead and start with the first question. You should be seeing content loading on your phones. What would you rather do for the rest of your life? And there are two options to choose from. And now we will see how everybody's thinking about the current setup, or would like to have their setup be done in the future. So yeah, majority of the room is into idea of working remotely for the rest of their life. What can you say about that, Hina? This is your default setup, right? I've been working remote for over five years. Oh my goodness, almost six years. And my answer would have been a little bit different before the pandemic. I think if you live alone and you don't have family or kids or anything like that, absolutely I would work remotely, especially if it was somewhere beautiful. But given the COVID pandemic in office, doesn't sound that bad anymore. I don't think I would mind commuting to the office to get away from people. So contextually, no COVID, lots of space, no people in my house, I would absolutely work remotely. But add in another person, give me the office any day. Yeah, there are definitely perks to both of the things right now in the pandemic times. I think that like from the branch side, because this is where I'm located, there is a lot of people being interested in renting the office on the top of the current office that they actually have. And this is just outside of Red Hat, not necessarily what our folks are doing, but also a lot of people being interested in the co-working spaces where in their own time, when they really feel like they would just go and have this differentiation of the, let's say the activity, like I'm going for a call or a meeting outside, not necessarily to do it again with the people, because in many cases you are alone in that space, but just to change the routine. And there's some interesting concept running around on Twitter too, people working remotely but still trying to take a commute on the bike every morning to just stay in shape and do something differently, not to be stuck all the way at home. Hina, do you have something like that that is helping you to separate the work time from the real lifetime, let's say? Absolutely. So for me, I work with folks that are a majority in Israel and for no, some Europe, but most of the time, I have to start my meetings very early, but one thing that I've done is, at three o'clock in my afternoon, I block off three hours, even if I'm gonna write an email three hours later, at three o'clock exactly, because there's still some daylight, I put on my headphones and I go for a walk. And the reason for that is, especially in this pandemic, I'm very transparent, these walls that I love, I have all my artwork and my coffee station is back there, it feels like a prison if you don't do anything else. So for me, at three o'clock exactly, headphones, even if it's like going to the shop to buy tomatoes, I'll do it, I force myself to do it because I realized not having things or plans when I was working remote in the past, I would make an effort to go do something and socialize more, have a lot of things in my social calendar. But recently, this is the change that took me from hating the space that I was working in to, I love it again, but that two to three hours that I've blocked out gave me the mental capacity to love it. I move a little bit and my remote life is very much more manageable. So I really don't mind working remote. I think I would still prefer to work in an office, more of a hybrid, but I considered joining like a WeWork. And then I realized my finances don't support a WeWork. So that's my long answer of, I've considered it, my bank account said don't pursue a co-working space, but at minimum to mitigate, I do like a commute every day at three o'clock in the afternoon. That's an awesome idea. I didn't think about this. I do the commute every day of the tram in Bruno anyway, so maybe this is the part of it. There you go. But there is another line of all of this happening remotely right now and also relates to work. There's the meetup space and our meetup is just one. Meetup of many that is happening remotely that otherwise will happen in the office or in person. And I think this is the real silver lining because there could be possibly people that would never think about joining this meetup or other meetups globally. And now we have this amazing opportunity to just Google it and join through meetup or any other meeting client and just be a part of the greater global community. And you don't have to travel. You don't really have to be a part of the specific group to join them on the one and one-off basis. So you can be at the meetings in London next hour or in India and become a part of the global community. This is something that was not happening before and something that I'm very excited about. Talking about this balance between, would you rather for the rest of your life, I would like to keep these remote sessions happening and being open for the rest of the world as long as possible. All right, this one we'll move on to the second question, the quiz question for the audience. Remember, there are no wrong answers. Everybody's getting points for all of the answers here. So let's move on. Question number two, if you could have a superpowers, what would you choose? Teleportation, invisibility, or super strength? This is a good one. We didn't plan for having discussion on this, but I think we should discuss this. Oh, what do you think, Hina? You know, I didn't think super strength would get much traction, but invisibility, especially for people that want to know what's going on in a room without having to be physically present, probably that would at least get one. I would teleport, even though I still want someone to choose invisibility. Where would you... Teleport. Next, how far is there a risk in this one? Because if the answer is no, I've always wanted to go to see the Shire in New Zealand. Hina, can you say again, where are you going? I think that's something cut off your... The Shire in New Zealand. So it's a super nerd alert. I really want to go... Where else? It's cold, I would go to Bali in a heartbeat, Hawaii, beautiful places. If you told me the Northern Lights are showing up, and Sweden right now, I would teleport for five minutes, put on some clothes really quickly, teleport and then come back home to a warm place. Well? If I may join the conversation, I just... So the only thing I would be afraid about the teleportation that we got a little bit lazy to travel and the traveling itself can be a very enjoyable experience, right? To get somewhere on your foot or on the train or something. And I would be afraid that, even though I chose teleportation as well, that that would kind of disappear from my life and then I would miss something without really realizing I'm losing it. So, live by live. Pavel, imagine about all of these meetings that you could join at the same time. You just meet from one to another. Too many choices to choose from, you know. Too many possibilities. Maybe that will be overwhelming for the one. Yeah. Dami, I don't think I'll be using teleportation to go to meetings. I'd be using teleportation to go see people. That's the thing though. If you have, you know, several people that you wanna meet up with you but they don't necessarily go alone. Can you call in their silver book? What do you do? You can't go to those meetings. I don't know. No? But here's a caveat. You can't have everyone teleport with you so you still have to travel. For example, Micah, I know you have kids. Your kids don't teleport. You still gotta drive them to, like, sacrifice. We're the only ones with the superpower. Can I hold them while I teleport? Is that enough? Like, strap them to my back? They won't come with you. That's danger. I'm wondering if there's a limit to how far you could teleport. Like, are we talking interplanet or just, like, across the continent? There are no limits here. We are all preparing to be surprised at this meetup. I was surprised that Hina didn't mention intergalactic travels. Yeah. You know, it's never been on my mind but another nerd alert, I love the expanse. So if this meetup turns into an expanse meetup, I'm so down for it. But now that I'm thinking about it, absolutely I wanna go to all of these planets and space stations. Yeah. Ancient aliens is the meetup I would like to join. Yeah. I was reading something recently, and Nasa mentioned that they are thinking that there are 50 para rewards that they are spotting on somewhere there. So that would be interesting. Imagine that trip. Oh, man. 50 new possibilities to explore. Yeah. You think that there would be comparable human life forms as aliens? That would be something better, Hina. Yeah, better. Oh, I hope so. But what if we're the best ones? Isn't that a little disappointing? That's how we like to think, right? I don't see everybody in the room. Do we have somebody who is in the room, in the meetup room but they didn't have a chance to join the mentee yet, Fabio? You mean someone who is in the room but they are not sharing? There are 20 people here all together. Oh, wow. Guys, go ahead and just use your browser on the phone to go and be able to interact with us in that mentee app here. All you need to do is input the code so you can actually provide your feedback as we go. Because of the next slide, we'll learn more about each other roles and what we are into and what are we doing for our respective organizations, what is that is driving us on the daily basis. And then we'll base our meetup discussions on that and your ideas. And we hope this will be an interactive event. So if you can, go ahead and join mentee.com and use the code 50962511. And that will get you to the voting sharing screen where you can just provide your input. So there can be visible here on the screen but there will be anonymous. And just one note, if you don't wanna share your audio or video, first you can ask to join without having to join via video and we are completely on board with that. But if you have some thoughts you wanna share, for example, you didn't vote in mentee but you wanna tell us about which superpower you wanted to choose and you don't wanna share audio or video, we are looking at the chat and we'll happily take in your thoughts. It'll challenge us. For example, that note that Sally made, the second that I get off of this meetup, I'm gonna start thinking about which planets I would wanna try. Yeah. So the thing we did here right now for like first 15 minutes or so was just a little ice breaker to get everybody going and being comfortable with this format. But we evolve as we go. And I feel that at the end of this meetup in one hour or so, you still will be here with us. This will be really like free flowing concept. Everybody will be exchanging their ideas and thoughts. We just wanna get you going here in the safe space. So what is going to happen next is I'm going to move to the next screen or not. Ah, and there is some feedback. Mentee says you didn't vote in time but maybe for the next question, it's gonna be okay. Let us know if it's not. I'll need to stop Sherry for one second. The thing that happened here right now is just, this got really a little bit because of the update. So I will just get this fixed soon and we will move on with the presentation. Just give me one second. That's okay. We can also, while we wait, think about how to give Ben Cotton teleportation powers. I feel like if there's one person based on this chat that should go somewhere, it's him. How do we get him to escape? I know you have kids, will they let you escape? They own superpowers to prevent you from using yours. Kids superpowers. Make sure parents do not have fun, right? Yes, we will put the code to the chat, yes. Right. All right, Nancy, go to the chat. This is a technical problem here. I have all of my screens frozen, what happened? In the meantime, does anyone have any good agile jokes or work-related jokes? While we fix this, the solution will be, I will go ahead and give you the link and you'll try to share the content or even to Pawe, but I think that you could be more comfortable with this. And in real time, you're seeing one of the challenges working behind the computer in general, right? So do you have that in our Domenica, just from the presentation, the code for the server? MenT.com? I think I saw it on the presentation of first slide. Maybe we just, we can just put it to the chat and it's gonna be easier for some people. Okay. Technical difficulties, everyone? No, it's fine. We don't really need this presentation to keep going, but I'm sharing with you right now. And then, I don't know why the back froze right now. This is that mysterious part of all of this. We're getting a lot of snow here where Micah and I live. Well, we live in separate houses, but the same area. But coincidentally, my husband's name is also Micah, so that's how we do it. But yeah, we're getting, so if it's 30 inches, it's about like 0.8 meters. How would you say that in everywhere but the US? Would you say 0.8 meters or like 80 centimeters of snow? Probably almost a meter. Is that a meter? Almost a meter of snow. Almost a meter, that's what you say. Almost a meter. I dropped the link through the WhatsApp. Okay. I would say miserable, yeah. We've been getting a lot of snow, which is really impregnant. A lot, yeah. Where do you live? North Carolina? No, I live in Northern Virginia. Oh yeah, it's a lot. It's like one inch. No, it's been like, well, it's definitely not the amount of snow that you all have, but it's like a good six inches, seven inches. It's horrible. I used to live in New York as a kid and that snow was taller than me. Grandpa, I was a kid, so I wasn't as tall as I am today. Man, I never wanted that. I never wanted that. I wanna move to Mexico. So it's telling me the presentation is no longer active. We can go rogue. All right, let's rely on the pool in the hopping. Pavel, now you will do your magic. Please support us with your magic. There is a pooling option for this session. Can we have like open-ended questions? Or you have to provide the number of choices there. But because what is that we wanted to do next is to learn from our audience. What is the role in, what is your job basically, but not like a common created by the HR, but what is that you are actually doing? We wanted to learn more about people who are in the audience and see what is the group of people interested in talking with us and learn more about each other. Is this something we could do? Pavel? Three texts. Maybe in the... No, so if you want to have open-ended question, let's just ask it and ask people to answer in the chat that would probably be the easiest way. All right, so let's do that. I am at this situation right now that I can hear you, but my screen is totally frozen. I cannot get out of it. So I'll probably have to reboot and get back to you. And I will do that immediately. But just so we have people going and I'm not a blocker. All right, and I'll try to hold down the fort in the meantime. Preface this with an example and then we'll ask you all to do the same in the chat. So as an example for the question that Delmy asked, which is, what do you actually do? My job title, I think it's technical manager. And then in my team, it's called Agile Practitioner. But the reality is, what do I really do if I gave two words for me? It would be a listener, a professional listener and challenger. So I listen to teams and I challenge the way that we work. And so those would be the two words I think I would use to summarize. Granted, if I had an hour, I would have a better answer. But off the top of my head, a professional listener and challenger, it's my job title. So now we ask you to do the same in the chat and get as creative as you would like. Duck Aligner, Tinkerer and Maker of Tools, nice. Cat Herder, whoo, a lots of hurting and aligning. Oh, nice, chaos to order bring it. Do you all, if you're visualizers, I have so many images of ducks surviving the apocalypse with a magnifying glass, that steampunk vibe duck where they're tinkering with things based on all of your answers. All right, keep them coming. And I guess what I'll ask you all is, in addition to that, this job title, how on a scale of one to 10, how easy is it? One being the easiest and two being hard. And I know it'll vary, so average it out, right? Some days you're just like, I can't do this, it's so difficult. And then some days it's a one on a scale of 10. Feel free to keep telling us about your job titles as well because they're very interesting. I can relate the cell's answer. That's 10. Having to relearn everything every time I want to do something. That's, I've gone through that recently. What a challenge. So you are an embodiment of constant learning. That's your way. You could say that, yes, Pavel. Nice. Bye, Sally. A lot of you all have had many kind of cat herding and stuff, lawyer. That's a cool one. I actually wanted to become a lawyer until I realized how much y'all read so many legal documents. And then I was like, let me stick to engineering. And then I left engineering. I said, no, all right. The 10s, the ones that are above seven. Are you exhausted? The fours? Actually, everyone based on your difficulty is there a correlation between difficulty and exhaustion? And feel free to share your audio or your video or just keep monitoring, we're gonna keep monitoring the chat and I'll try not to say too many dumb things because this is recorded, but I will. I will. I don't think I can relate or correlate difficulty with exhaustion and that my exhaustion level is more correlated with external factors due to the pandemic right now. So, I mean, I guess maybe that does weigh into the difficulty as well. So they are, I scratched my original answer. They are related just in the inverse fashion. But I can relate to that. I mean, I don't think that my job is that difficult, but if I count all the other factors happening the year and the previous year, I am exhausted. And of course the work is adding to that. And if I wouldn't be working, maybe it would solve the problem, but if something else wouldn't happen, it would solve the problem as well. So definitely adding to it, but not definitely just because of the work. And that's it. Well, I hope Dominika can rejoin us, but now I'm gonna ask the hot topic question. The reason why we all have this meetup would be really helpful, which is regardless of your industry, regardless of agility, process related things, we wanna know what helps and what harms the way you work. And for some context there throughout my experience, and it's been over 10 years, even though I still think I'm 24 years old and have no business doing adult things. I've learned the easy way sometimes, but mostly the hard way, that there's not a solution that works for everyone. And in addition to that, those solutions that work for some teams won't work for other teams. And the solutions that don't work for some teams might work for other teams. I'm gonna use words like scrum here, which is I think anyone that I've ever worked with really hated the word scrum. And so we started taking them apart. For some people, video stand-ups every day were phenomenal. They loved it, they loved syncing. For some people, they didn't want video stand-ups. They didn't want any stand-ups. Some people wanted to track all of their work in a certain place. For others, email was good. For others, video calls were good. So along the way, and that's kind of why I call myself a professional listener and challenger, I've learned that it's completely fine if something doesn't work for you or something does work for you. And you can't necessarily scale those good habits. You can learn and experiment, but you absolutely cannot say this framework or this set of rules has to be implemented across every single team because it's the one that works and it's the one that will definitely be okay. That might be true in an area where we are all robots, we are all programmed to think the same. We have the same exact factors too, meaning that the same lifestyle, the same amount of time, the same language skills, the same financial skills, the same brain styles, right? You have left brains, you have right brains, you have a mix, they're all always gonna be different. So until you can control every single factor, you can't have a standard process, right? So that's, and Dami, welcome back. I just started leading in with the question about, tell us what are traits of a team that is really helpful or traits from a team that haven't been helpful and you can go from anything from the way that the team communicates or the personalities from the processes like Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, you can go as granular as standups or the way you do them. We wanna know, give us your thoughts and let's talk about them. Give us your experiences. So when I dropped like five minutes ago and all of my system crashed because of the update, that was not expected, sorry for that, that's what you have when you test in production. So I have funny thing here. Somebody managed to go already to the next slide and introduce themselves who they are. And maybe this is somebody who is already with us in the room, but I wanted to share with you because look at that. This is what you should be able to see the mentee. And we have a DACA liner among us and people who build staff and the principal program managers. And I'll encourage everybody else in the room also participate and tell us, what is that you think you do or what is that people think you do or how do you identify yourself? And in order to get to this voting part, you just go to mentee.com and you write in the code. I can actually also share the ring in the chat here. Where's the chat? Here, it's loading for me. And while you do that, I'm gonna try to figure out how to react more than a light. Let's see. Correct. So it looks like I'm not allowed to have the chat. Ah, it's, I guess it's gonna be difficult to ask folks are they having problems getting into mentee? So let me just, I will write this down the codes to the chat, okay? Just keep the slide there so that I can see it. Okay. Sounds like my role. We have three people contributing. We have 15 people in the room. Get in folks, share your things with us. We wanna know who you are. So we can make this more interactive. It can be something you think you do or something other people think to do or even something, you know, funny. That's actually very true. I'm sorry for interrupting you in the middle of the flow. No, no worries. You guys get the first question going. We did have some pretty good conversations about this. I think it might be worth going to the next question slash slide, cause that's where we are right now. This is interesting that if you look at this word map here, the mind map, it looks like a description, the HR description of the principal program manager. Yeah. Cat. You build it to order, you add bin. You hold the cats. You basically manage a house and you align ducks. Is this, I think this is pretty up to date of what is happening, no? I like the cat admin title. That's cool. That's awesome. All right. So here's one more. And this is what is, we actually wanted to focus on today. Today's meetup that will find out, that finally got us to the point after this prolonged icebreaker here of what is that you learned so far that actually helps you work efficiently within your team setting with your team members. And that doesn't have to be something that happened during current work, but something that really like work in the past. Maybe it's some other jobs you had, part-time jobs, college jobs and the kind of volunteering experiences you ever had. Is there something that you really like and you recommend for others? I like micromanaging, I'm completely getting there. Good, because you are terrible at that. Just to see who's listening. All right, this session gets zero. She said micromanaging is a good thing. And it's recorded, so you get it. Oh no. Legally? Did I just get on the hook for saying that? We have a lawyer in the room. I think you are fine. While folks are filling in their answers, Dummy, have you had anything that or any like one or two traits that helps you work efficiently in a team setting? This is the thing. I think we've covered some of the things on the board. So I don't want to take it from the other people, but basically I agree on what are the expectations and how do we define the work that is done? What are the ideas that we collaborate together and where is that, you know, we have a single contributors and how can we learn from each other? And this is for all kinds of jobs. You know, just for disclosure, when I was like in after high school, I had a restaurant job and I worked as a basically I worked at the salad station and then I graduated to the floor or to the front of the house and it still required some of the same skills that I need in my current job as agile practitioner. So now it's all there. We need to communicate with people and, you know, just see where you can fill the gaps, how you can improve the flow of everything that is done to actually expedite the one thing that the customer wanted. That's how I see this. Can I help you? One of the things that for me it, I think it carried through my entire life is respect, especially from leadership. And my concrete example is my first job, I was 16 years old. So in the States, you can get your job where I was living at 16. I needed money for stupid things. I wish someone had told me put this in savings. And it was one of the best jobs. It was called Five Below. It's a cheapo store. So it's probably parents' misery and parents can like, it's a kid's store. You can buy everything for $5 or less and it's all junk. And I loved it because it was like, I was the consumer of that junk. That's where all my paychecks went. All of a sudden management started having a lack of respect for us, a lack of, their tone was harsher. They wanted us to do everything on their terms. We're 16 year olds, we're 18 year olds. It was all young kids. We were gonna do the work regardless, right? We had to stock the shelves, we had to clean. We had to ring people up with a smile. That's it. But the tone switch really rubbed me the wrong way. And I hated going to work every single day because that manager that was nice, all of a sudden became so mean and made the environment miserable. I was making $8 an hour at that job. And I just said, at one point, I was a 16 year old, so unhappy with my job at this magical unicorn place. And as an employee, you get 20% off. So my joke was, even though it's called five below, it was four below for me, which made it more of an incentive to always work there for the rest of my life. I thought I could have died there. That management style left such a sour taste in my mouth and there was a lack of respect that was the really horrible part of it. So I then went next door and I saw how happy they were and I realized how respectful the whole team was to each other. Even if there are things like you have to clean the toilet, right? They- But having that experience, did you actually use something that you already learned in one position to change the way you discuss things and how you communicate with your next manager? So for me, one of the main things, never, ever, ever take out respect. I left that job. I took half of the team from the five below, literally next door to Modell Sporting Goods, which is no longer in business for a 25 sub raise. And I never will look back. Anything I do at the end of the day and I see it working this way is if a team has a mutual respect for each other, I have to respect you and in return you respect me. They will be most of the time successful because you don't have to love each other that you work with. It's okay not to be best friends with your colleagues. It's never okay to not respect them or at least work in a respectful way. So that is the, I think, one of the foundational traits for me that I would carry through. And that's my story. And this is the relationship between you and the management, Hina. And what about the relation with you and other team members? Do you have some good stories there? Well, I think that the respect thing, it's not necessarily just me in management. It is me and my team members. And I have bad stories where I was working a job and I had said a curse word and my colleague didn't like it. He was from a conservative family and he complained one day. He was like, it's so inappropriate that you use this curse word. Not that I'm dropping F-bombs left and right. And in my mind, I was like, man, shut up. It's just a simple word. But as a 20 year old, I was in my 20s working that time that not only soured the relationship, even though it was something so simple, I didn't have to say such a bad word in a public setting near him. It wasn't the worst bad word, by the way. That's sour the relationship. That's sour the way we work together. That's sour the way we delivered our results together. And I think that that's one of the reasons why I don't have to make compromises on my integrity, but I could have at least listened. And instead of saying yes or no exactly, I could have assessed how I interacted with that person. And I didn't have to say, yes, I will stop everything. I could have had a... We have this kind of, we have this pointed out here on the board as a relationship. I would like to hear from the person who put that on the board if they feel comfortable enough. How, what did they mean? Like, how did they create their relationship in the team setting? Is there any tip or trick they could share with us on how to make this work? I put the relationships. Yay. Is there one thing? Okay, so also, I mean, what helps your work efficiently in the team setting? So for me, it's really the relationship. If I have a good relationship with someone, it's easy to ask for help. It's easy to provide help. It's easy to communicate about anything. And it's just, for me, at least, it really creates the pleasantness of working with these people. So I am trying to build a relationship with everyone I work with. And it's not always easy. Different people want like different things. And, but I think it's important that we try to not look at our colleagues only as a person who works with us, but as a person, as a human being, try to learn a little bit about them, share a little bit about ourselves. It just makes everything easier. So Pavel, let's say that you are new to the team and what would be your tip for starting this? What would be the tip for kickstarting the relationship building within the team setting? For the other folks here? If I would be new to a team, so of course it depends now what is your personality, right? Not everyone is feeling like sharing stuff about yourself for first day or first week, et cetera. But what really was helping for me, every time I started somewhere, is try to go with the people to lunch or to have a coffee and you can just be there at least and then every now and then you can say some stuff. And being a part of these informal moments, it's really helping building the relationship. This is something we're trying to do with our agile practice team, right? To have this lean coffee meetups, even though we couldn't do this in person anymore with each other. Yeah. Was this replacing this kind of hangout? Do you think this worked? That is difficult because it's not informal anymore, right? If you have a meeting which is called coffee or whatever, it's kind of a losing this informal vibe. And I think that's the reason why it's harder than just when you see other people getting to get a coffee now, right? And you just decide to go with them. So that's really spontaneous. It has this like easy feeling. But when you have a schedule meeting, it's a little bit harder, I think. I wonder if there's anybody, if us, whoever tried to go for a walk with the co-worker, but they did that remotely. Everybody had their own headset, their own device, and they were kind of walking and talking together. Do we have anybody with this experience for whom that worked? You can type in the chat for the event. This is just like three questions, one on the top of this one here. And then we have all, yes, Hina? I think Micah unmuted maybe to talk about the lack of spontaneity Paula was talking about. Yeah, kind of, it definitely resonated with me. We were just, I was just participating in a round of interviews. And one of the candidates was talking about the tactic they had used at their company where they were using Discord, that chat platform. And he found that the people that are interested would join a channel or a room, whatever. And then they would just spontaneously turn on their voice chat and ask questions and whatnot. And it was, and he mentioned that it was more spontaneous than say like what I've tried in the past where I have these scheduled meetings of like, hey, let's have an open discussion. Or like, hey, let's have like a happy hour. And the uptake on those was strong initially, but now it's like sort of generally declined as they've kind of stagnated on the calendar. So I'm kind of formulating the next move in terms of how to build that kind of spontaneity with my team in the near future. So it's certainly a challenge, especially as we're all in this kind of remote work lifestyle. Yeah, that's right. So I don't see the chat, is there, do we have any questions or comments there from anybody else? Not right now. I mean, there were some some time ago but probably not related to this. Ben, I see Ben joined our video stream. Thank you very much. Do you have anything you would like to share? Yeah, I was just thinking about the spontaneity thing and that's the one thing I really miss about offline conferences. But one of the things that has kind of occurred to me is that one of the things that makes spontaneity work better is the ability to sort of gracefully exit that seems harder to do in like a, you know, like a work adventure sort of thing where you have to like, actually like click away from the window or you know, click the hangout button. You can't just be like, oh, I need to go talk to so-and-so and kind of extract yourself from the conversation when you're done with it, you know? So it feels like you're sort of getting yourself into that and that makes it hard to get started, at least for me. That's a great point. That graceful exit, when you joined the meeting for five minutes, like what are those beverage chats? And then you're like, I do want to go do some work now, but the beverage chat was scheduled for 30 minutes. Damn, I can't just leave. And then thinking about an excuse as to how do I, how do I find a good reason to leave or maybe that's just me. But I think this could work both ways. Think about this. You can already set the expectation that you have only five minutes time and you want to drop in and be social, but that all you got to be social for the given day. And with the dropping off, sometimes the content is not suiting your needs. And then I think it would be awesome to give the feedback to whoever was facilitating to meet up. And there could be things that could be done better and that's how we learn and improve, even in the work setting. Because not everything that is delivered by our teams is off the consumption for every single team member, right? No, it's true. But I think it's a little bit more difficult. I mean, we can definitely set these kind of rules, write them down, you can leave and come every time. But I can relate to what Ben is saying. It's that maybe subconsciously we feel that there is something which makes us feel like, we should probably leave, I don't know, or make us less comfortable. And I think if we would like to change that, we would have to really actively try to experiment, maybe kick randomly people out. I don't know, I mean, that's just a brainstorming. But just to show ourselves practically that this is fine and this is totally okay. When I'm hearing Ben's voice, but I couldn't see Ben before, it makes me believe that this yellow writing on the board is yours, Ben. Is it yours? Are you suggesting the writing on the board has anything to do with it? That one was mine. Yeah? Yeah, it's, you know, being able to affect, you know, and maybe effective communication is maybe a better way to put it, but it's really about being able to document, you know, the expectations, the status and things like that in a way that people can understand them and can, you know, especially working with, you know, across time zones and across, you know, availability, where you might, people might not be able to just come ask you right away what the status of something is. Having something clearly documented and written somewhere where people can go on their own and look and to see what's going on really helps and it, you know, helps scale too. When you started with your current organization, did you have that from the day one? Do you have the feeling that that is there or that grow as you grow in your career here? In the record, let's say. Was this always like a part of the organizations that you work with? Were you helping establish this as a good practice, Ben? A little bit of both. I mean, there was definitely some there, but like one of the things I started doing early on when I became the Fedora Program Manager is doing a weekly community blog update where it just sort of, you know, listed sort of the important things that have happened in the last week and upcoming meetings and stuff like that. And so I've made that a regular thing so that, you know, we're trying to communicate in more channels to, you know, more places so that hopefully if somebody's not paying attention in one place, they'll see it somewhere else. And, you know, so I think I've definitely tried to build more of that into the role as I've been here. Do you know any techniques to encourage this writing practice for the people who want to start but don't feel very confident in the writing abilities, let's say? I mean, like they are fine folks, but they don't really like to write or they don't have this habit developed yet. Yeah, so I've always tried to take, I've taken the approach of I am happy to edit what you write, you just need to write the first draft for me. You know, in a previous role, I was wrangling our release notes for our software and the engineers were really bad writing release notes. If I like, give me the information and I can, I can polish it for you. I just need some, you know, the raw material to start with. And that seems, you know, for people who are actually, who are interested in doing more written communication, I think if you just say, I'm happy to spend as much time as you want, as you need editing and I will help you, you know, get it to where you're comfortable and, you know, learn how to communicate, that seems to help. People are usually better writers than they think they are. And a lot of times, you know, it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be effective. And did you have a person who was helping you out at the beginning with editing? Who's helping me? When you're starting writing things? Yeah, I mean, not in this role specifically, but I've had editors that I've worked with for like writingforopensource.com and things like that over the years who have given me the feedback. I had, when I switched from a support engineering to a marketing role, my VP of marketing gave me a lot of feedback that usually boiled down to you're writing like an engineer, stop it, because I would always write, you know, very, here's the problem, here's the linear steps we took to the solution, but when you're writing for, you know, a marketing type document or really, I think for a lot of things, you actually want to put the important part in the first paragraph, because you can't assume people are going to read the whole thing. So you want to, you know, give them the takeaway and then explain all of it. And that was a hard lesson for me to learn. I would double down on this, that our editors from open source.com are awesome people and they're amazing, doing the basic jobs. I submitted some articles there and they did awesome job editing them to, and I'll encourage everybody to try if they just want to have their try in writing of how it works and sharing what their team is doing because they accept the wide range of topics there now. Very true. Yeah. Collaboration, real, regular communication, listening, empathy, mentorship and patience. And are there any like specific tricks or tips that anybody is using on the daily basis that hit over recently? Something specific. Do you, Ben, or Hina, Pavel, anybody, do you have anything that you wanted to share that is a specific practice? Actually, Micah, go ahead. And then I will share Mic. It's not something I've noticed, I've used for me necessarily, but we've been onboarding new folks onto our team. And we've recently, and we've found that the more documentation we have available of how we do things and how we work and like setting expectations early, we've been getting great feedback from our new people saying like, this is the best onboarding experience I've had because there's like this thorough checklist of like how to go from week one to like week four and it's a gradual increase of knowledge and it allows us to get our engineers contributing faster and more effectively compared to the past where, I mean, I can remember onboarding other new engineers and thankfully they're more senior, but they were constantly asking like, how do we do this? How do we do that? Where's the documentation for this project? Where's the documentation for this operation? And we would basically have to like regurgitate the tribal knowledge we've accumulated into like a chat session and we'd often fail to follow through and document it for further, for future people, but we got better about that and it's paid off in spades. So do they also have like some kind of mentoring component and built in that process on your end? That you buddy, please forward more, go ahead. They have like onboarding buddies with the people so they have so when they can go to and talk to directly if they have questions. All right, that sounds great. Conference talk or some somewhere in the universe how to build out good onboarding because I haven't had such great experiences onboarding in the, share what works. I will share mine just because it's a recent one and it resonated with folks a lot more than I thought it would. And it was a game changer, which was the effectiveness of telling people it's okay to say sorry I wasn't listening. Can you repeat the question? In my role I do a lot of facilitation. So if you're in a meeting and you're not the facilitator maybe give the facilitator that feedback but opening the meeting to say, I'll repeat your name if you just so in case you didn't hear me, right? It's okay to treat a meeting like a podcast sometimes you're human. And then just let me know let the facilitator know, please can you repeat that question? It's something so small, right? You assume that that's completely okay to say but telling everyone at the start of the meeting that they're allowed to say it and making them feel comfortable has made people more okay with showing up to that meeting, less of a feeling of dread. So if you're in those kinds of meetings where you feel like I have to go to this meeting again just for five minutes where I talk, maybe either if you are the facilitator or you have a facilitator, tell them are you okay with prefacing the meeting this way? That's a good tip Tina. We talk about a lot of meetings, we talk about writing, we talk about the onboarding. I wonder if any of you have an experience with team buildings done remotely? Something that works. Anything worth sharing? So my team, we play, we have our team meeting every other week and we always started off by playing because dictionary kind of game like the similar to the social session that Marie led yesterday. And that's always a sort of fun because there's not a lot of pressure of like let's sit there and talk to each other and ask silly questions and stuff but we're all playing a game together, it's kind of fun, it works well remotely. It's not super sensitive to like network lag and things like that. And it's not work related so it's a fun chance to kind of interact as people instead of us co-workers. So you do that on the weekly basis? Yeah, we spend five, 10 minutes at the beginning of our hour long meeting. But it's a sort of a good way to get everybody included. That sounds like a good one. I know that I attended a conference where they did like a little team building at the beginning. Both teams got basically unicorn shape in Excel and people needed to fill it in as soon as possible to color all of the blocks, all of the cells to make it resemble the unicorn as closely as possible. And I remember that it was a lot of fun to even though they didn't require that much of like, let's say creative input from you on one end, on the other one it was amazing. That sounds like a lot of fun. I have this template, maybe I'll attach it to this session, to the download so people can use it. Is the template for your team building or the basis on what you are doing, the sketching something that can be shared with the people here in the Meetup too, something that we can upload to share? Yeah, I'll try and find the link real quick and share that. Yeah. It's just, we all, we go to this website and picks the words and stuff and we all just take turns drawing and guessing. And I always win, but that's a separate story. Hey, now that wants me wanna play, can we play this now? Okay, when we are setting this up, if we are going to, I will also like to share one thing. So there is a team and they are doing, I don't know, I wouldn't say tournament, but it's like a chess couple of hours. And I mean, this team, they all like chess, so that's working for them, it doesn't have to work for all the team. But what is really nice about it is that you don't have to be there for all the hours. You can just pop in, have a couple of five minute games and pop out and it really works for this team. So this is also nice. That's awesome. You know, I don't do this, but actually my brother joined a new company recently and he was telling me about this practice that the CEO does. Every Monday, they have a picture sharing and because they're distributed, you don't have to talk about it, they're just, it's the rules, you don't have to share your kids, you don't have to share anything. But he starts just by sharing from any aspect. So it's more than just your family, right? You can share your car or nature or a dish you made. Every Monday, all they do is it's picture sharing Monday and it comes through throughout the day. So you don't even have to talk to your colleagues, but you can see what they want you to see from what they've posted and shared. And he was telling me the value of that where you don't know my older brother, but the fact that he would even participate in a team building activity like this and enjoy it shocked me. But his explanation was, well, they're not expecting anything from each other. And we get to share parts of our personality without having to explain ourselves, feel judged, feel like we're being held accountable. And it's something I haven't tried yet, but it's been in the back of my mind. Share a picture of your weekend, your week, et cetera, regardless of the category. And that means that language is no longer a barrier. Time is not a barrier. And you all of a sudden get to know your coworkers a little bit more and like them a little bit more. Then put in drawwasaurus.org. Whoever wants to play, head there. Is that the right assumption? Yes. So the challenge to everyone in the room is to beat Ben Cotton because he just told us he always wins. Watch, I'm gonna finish last this time, but on my team, they admit they play for second place. Admit they play for second place. Oh, ouch. Now are they like trying to be second place just because they know that you might make things easier or harder for them? They've accepted that I'm gonna win because I don't know. Somehow eight in the morning I am really good at guessing words. So when I have three people in here right now, so I'll wait a little bit longer to see if other people join. If not, we'll just play with three of us. Are you going to ask me to add an extension? Shouldn't have to. Continue with my browser. Is that what I was gonna say? Ah, here we go. Nothing like classic IT answer of hit the refresh button or turn it on. Yeah, I know, I'm sorry. It stopped beeping, so I was like, I'm not gonna pay, it's $64.00, zero points. Which it's not the worst, but I'm just like, okay. You can spend like half of that and get a trickle charger. Probably charge the barbie back up. Yeah, that's such a logical thing to say, Micah. I understand the struggle is real. Struggle is real. Here we go. Okay, we all have to be Ben, remember this. It doesn't look good so far. Next time. Maybe should I continue drawing something? Let me do it. I'm assuming that this is American based in case you are... Yeah, it seems to be U.S. spellings and words. You're there. Okay. Ben's just an excellent drawer, I don't know. Okay. A lot of English vocabulary on my side here. Remember, all is to be kept. Micah, go. I don't know. This is beautiful, Manikir. I really appreciate that. I didn't know what to stop. You all know that we with Hinah have a matching desk of Manikir. I don't have a mouse, so this is going to be very bad now. I apologize. You guys are good. I accept this with my heart, too. Thank you. Okay. I was also thinking Puerto Rico at first. And then if you don't know this, at the top of the screen where it says Dami is drawing, it shows you how many letters and how many words. Hinah's like, I'm just going to pick the longest word they offered. I don't know, it's right this way. Wow. It's a promise. No, no, no, I'm joking. It was the just the best. There's some artistic liberty in this one, I think. Just happy heads. I'm sorry. This is awesome. Who came up with the idea of this game on your team, Ben? I think Ludia came up with it. Very funny. I'm stealing that. Anyway, the chat is still loading for me, so I cannot wrap the session slides, but I'll put them embedded in the session description or shit. And we'll also add these links that you guys shared there. So we're just playing. We're not playing with us, probably. You'll see this game again. Excellent. Nice. We can move on if you want to do the last few minutes. I think you can set the limit on the number of rounds. I don't think I did. The hair should be up there, right? This is exactly like a regular meetup we would have hosted, except we would have grabbed you with like beer, hot chocolate and coffee. Technically, you're almost having full-scale experience where we stopped and started playing games. I think this was very fun and relaxing, and it's very easy to do, too, for everybody to be engaged. How do you make people stop drawing? Do you just disconnect them from the Internet? Automation there? This is a great drawing, by the way, Micah. I need to screenshot this one. I like the eyes. The eyes are the best. Yes, exactly. That's a big seal. Yes, this one's going on Twitter. How would you say a big seal in one word? I am the Eggman. You're right. Damlan is smiling in his brain. The question from this Meetup Fox is this, that the best way you can take to your team to facilitate the work that there is actually to a little bit drawing together, and have fun and be silly a little bit. I think that would do. That would even do for Saturday afternoon. Thank you very much, Ben, for contribution to this one. You're welcome. Ben retains his crown as top drawer. Now we know the top secret of PLM, though. Now we're all going to be like this. How do we even go as far as next time we have a job interview with anybody to be hired on the team and ask them to do this? I would be completely okay with people who are good at this game to be a part of our team. Therefore, Hina, I need to look for a new team. No, no. We're original. We're grandfathered into the process. Can I tell people what these are? Just to summarize the Meetup space here, because the other folks I just realized could have an issue like I have that the chat is not loading. What we are doing here is we are drawing in the separate window and the link to that is having a little bit of a big moment. Okay, I didn't even get it. Cool. Our time is up. But of course, there is no one behind us. So if you want to, you can still keep chatting. I guess this is just a thank you for the folks that joined. We hope that this was valuable for both the listeners and the participators. In the meantime, hit us up on Twitter if you have questions. And all in all, do what makes you have the least path of resistance in the most fun at work. That is the process to go with. Yeah, we shared the content from this Meetup on the chat. Thank you for joining us today. And have a great weekend.