 So good morning everyone. Thank you very much for coming here today in the morning after the game night I hope everybody enjoyed the game night last night So it took us while to set this up thing now it is all done we can kick this thing off Today we are here for the Fedora mentorship summit track This is our first ever in-person Fedora mentorship summit And we have been planning it for like last six months Initially, we thought we will have it separately But then because of the logic six reason and because we thought we will have a lovely audience like you here at Fedora So we clubbed it together Last year we did it virtually. I would like to say thank you to all the organizers of of Fedora mentorship summit who have been I have been working with them for last six months and Because of them it is possible that we are doing it here today So it's Yona Aziz. You will see her you can wave your hand stand up and You you will hear from her a lot more stories about mentorship later today. We have Akash Deep Our second organizer then we have Sumantro Mukherjee here, of course this name Everybody knows by now Justin Justin Florey we have Two people two other people also contributed and helped us in organizing this who are not here because of the visa reasons Or some other reasons But I'll still code their name because they truly helped us Vipul Siddharth and Samira With that I'll move forward So here we would like to dedicate this track to Marina She is not among us here, but we are here to celebrate her life and legacy I can go on and on through the list of contributions and the difference she has made so far She was a community engagement lead at Red Hat She was the board member at Ganon Foundation. Oh God. It is making me so emotional right now She also was one of the founder of Eda initiative She core organized the force outreach program We used her experience with outreach to contribute from to get the contribution and support Many underrepresented group. I I will not hesitate to say that if I'm standing here today Even after being at Red Hat for the last 12 years There is a huge hand and support from Marina There are many stories. I can tell about her but we are here to celebrate her life and To take her legacy forward. I would like to invite Justin here to quote a Story about Marina and then we will kick start this track with help of Yona. Thank you everyone. I Just wanted to share some, you know Context about Marina and the impact that she's had both in the open-source space and also here in the fedora community Just last month. I came wearing my my outreach t-shirt from the 1000 intern celebration that took place in multiple locations all over the world last month in Nigeria in in India in Portland in Fosse and a handful of other locations as well and That was a huge milestone because Marina was also a she was one of the original founders of what was originally the GNOME GNOME outreach OPW outreach project for women which then later became outreachy and She was a huge driving force for making that that program grow and scale to Reaching that 1000 intern milestone last year in the fedora community as well eight years ago are the fedora council added a diversity advisor seat to the fedora council and Marina was also an advisory part of voice to the fedora leadership at that time to help us Make more space for these kind of conversations in the community and in 2016. We had our first We do hack fests or pre-covid We did a lot of hack fests in the community where we get small teams together for a week and get people to do team building and work on a specific project or task and Seven years ago Marina was also one of the big Driving forces for us building the what was then the diversity team and has now evolved to the the DEI team in fedora so I just wanted to acknowledge both her presence and her her The legacy that she leaves behind both for outreachy and her impact on that program and all the interns that have come through that Through outreachy but also in fedora project in our own community where she helped be a driving force for Making these spaces in our community and supporting the team to empower them to Build a team around that diversity advisor role that was added in 2018 That was just a seat on the council, but we didn't know at the time that it's like Oh, this is actually really hard work and we need a group of people to help support that person there So we just wanted to make that space for Marina because she she passed away last year from breast cancer this is a very still very fresh loss in the community and we just wanted to Make that acknowledgement in space for Marina and her life and the impact that she's had both in fedora and the wider open-source space So I'm Really sad that we're still sad that we're missing her I would have loved that I think this is the kind of event that she would have loved to be at But I think the best thing we can do is you know honor her memory and her impact in the community and keep doing all The things that we're doing because I think that's what in the in the DEI space for fedora Because I think that's what she would have wanted us to continue doing so I'll pass it back over to our emcees, but Just wanted to share that impact that she's had both broadly and in the fedora community as well So let's share a bit how we started with idea with idea of having Fedora mentor summit why it was important for us So a mentor is someone with experience and knowledge in some area that can help someone else learn and grow So how this works in Fedora until now? We have the Fedora ambassadors project where they have their mentors So Fedora mentors help new people to be ambassadors in the project to be the face of Fedora in different events or their local communities Another way we have the Fedora mentor project which Consists in helping with let's say official internships or project like G. So Google summer of code Outreachy Google summer of dogs and so on And another one is the Fedora joint seek Which the mentors there are helping new people to with the onboarding to start their first steps in the project But we also have what can I do for Fedora? Which is more like something that you can do yourself that you can check on the website based on the skill set Which team you would like to join? You know to check more about the team page and so on but This way it's a bit more difficult because usually when you are just joining a community You need a bit more guidance how to move forward What are the teams how you can join them? Are they doing meetings what tools they're using and so on So you need a bit more let's say persistence to move forward and to do that first step to become a contributor in the project And then to become later long-term contributor and so on But of course the mentorship itself is important because you know we need the continuation we need To have more new people joining the project so we can pass the knowledge the expertise so in this way we can also avoid having bottleneck or having burnout in the teams which We have seen like in different teams for example happening. So in this way we could avoid this small problems And since is you know quite important For the project itself we wanted to focus more on this mentorship part. So in this way we could Share the experience that we have with each other to make it as a better experience So we are we are already doing stuff as we can see, you know, it's not that this project started now It's been quite a while in the community itself but we just wanted you know to Improve this experience more and to build on that Since is very fundamental part of the federalist culture So here I put it I was checking some Let's say stories that I could find from the community and how mentorship was important for them in 2018 we had the federal appreciation week and One of the ways how people could say thank you to the contributors in the community Was to write a contributor story And there you can find like a lot of stories how having someone in the community really impacted their Experience in the project how helpful it was for them having someone that could guide them around could tell them How the teams are working? How they can get more involved? It really made like a difference for for them in their journey in Fedorown Which also makes me realize that maybe we should repeat that again actually So four years ago after the console hackfest that we had I was chatting with bags and Matthew about it So we were like, okay, let's organize the Fedorown Mentor Summit It took us a while to do it actually so one year ago we did the first edition of the Fedorown Mentor Summit, which was online and virtually and Some of the numbers that I can share from last year So we had 93 attendees that joined us and the attendee score was 8.7 so that's the rate that we got from the participants how much they liked and enjoyed the event itself the top countries that joined us were India, US, Brazil, Germany and others and so Because in the beginning, you know, we were not very sure what should be The event type, the style, how we should do it. So we did it more like kind of unconference style We did have some sessions with presentations about mentoring how much it helps and so on but we also have different panel discussions So we had like different Fedora mentors that were sharing their experience we had also panel discussion with Fedora Mentis and Another one that I really liked we invited different open source projects like open SUSE, LibreOffice and GNOME to share how Mentorship was working in their communities. What were some difficulties that they were facing And some things that were working well for them So we could you know share the experience with them and see how we could help each other Which I hope that because this year it was a bit tough to do something similar But maybe the next addition to invite you know more also other projects That could join the Fedora Mentor Summit So when we were thinking about putting the goal for us for this year Fedora Mentor Summit We decided that the best would be To foster the culture of mentorship and support the Fedora Project Council strategy Around establishing a community where everyone has a mentor in Fedora and everyone in Fedora is a mentor So basically let's make mentorship fundamental part of Fedora's culture So what we will have in the agenda today After this session we will have a panel discussion About mentoring and mentorship best practices in Fedora Then after the break we will have some DEI workshops and different activities. It will be Not live stream because it will be more like hands-on. We will be in different groups So it could help us to know each other better and Then after the lunch break we will have The talk from Emmy why you should join a community and the last one will be the story-stage game so when we were organizing this event we organized it with the idea of improving conversation and To heavily depend on participation So please join in conversation as questions discuss your ideas and basically let's take something out of it And please don't forget to abide by our code of conduct and That's all from my side in the end We will also ask for some feedback and suggestion how we can improve it and make it better. Thank you Thank you so much Justin and you know with that. I would like to invite Because the next one is I'll keep the slide on the agenda one I would like to start with the panel Discussion and I would like to invite here very experienced Some of the mentors and mentees from Fedora on stage, please. I would like to invite Adam Williamson Kevin frenzy more Duffy Jess and Suman through so there are two ways to do it Either I introduce all of them or they can introduce themselves So I will give this that opportunity which reminds me I did not introduce myself and that is what happened after game night and The goof up with the slides. So I am Amita Sharma And I'm from Pune, India. It has been 12 years in red hat and for my day job I am a manager Who manages a very diverse team at red hat for roads project, which is data science QE Out of my interest I contribute to Fedora DEI team and also for the mentorship summit now With that I would like to pass it on to Adam Hi, I'm Adam Williamson. I am the Fedora QA team lead at red hat I've been a red hat for 14 years been involved in the open-source community for over 20, I guess So yeah, I work up for Dokiway most of the time And I don't have as much mentoring experience as some of the other people on this panel But I will try and ask useful questions. So yeah Hi, I'm Kevin Finsey I do Fedora infrastructure and release engineering and I've been involved in open-source for a really really long time. I'm really old but you know Don't hold it against me and I will echo the sentiments there. I think there's a lot of experience on this panel Hopefully we can Learn some things from but the open-source community is just always and Fedora specifically has always been very Open and Mentor driven and learning driven and open and I hope we can learn a lot. So Hi, I'm Mo. I'm a UX designer at Red Hat. I first started using Fedora with FC3 Started at Red Hat in May 2004 as an intern. I drove and I said, hey, I'll work for free for the summer So just so you see my level of sanity I have mentored many people over the course of my tenure in the Fedora community and One of them is sitting right next to me. So I'm gonna hand it over to her Jess So hi, I'm Jess and I was interning a red hat for a year and a half as a Fedora Designer and I'm now back volunteering on the Fedora design team. But yeah, my mentor was was Mo and still is a great mentor and Yes, so I I suppose I can say my piece about how the How the mentorship went and stuff. So yeah, I'll hand it over to Samantha. Hi, I'm Schmanthro I work for the Fedora QA team. Adam is my mentor. He started mentoring me for QA for a long time Joint Red Hat in 2016 before that I used to work for rather volunteer for Mozilla and Wikipedia So have my open source days goes back pre Firefox OS days and then once I joined Fedora I was like completely working for the QA team made my way into Council and mindshare and worked with community thereafter. So that's that's mostly about me So I would just like to say that we have very brilliant and experienced Fedora contributors here our goal here is that everybody can be mentor and You see that some of them are mentors here the experienced mentee here We will be with them for next one hour and I don't want it to be just us on stage talking It should be an interactive session so if anybody would like to contribute as well you can raise your hand and talk and ask questions and contribute, okay, so The first topic which we I would like to it's very obvious and Maybe sound cliche though, but what is why do you think the mentorship is? important in any of the open source community not just Fedora I Could take it This is just one specific example and maybe not the most important or the only but I recently had a conversation with somebody who I really look up to Dan Walsh if anybody knows him and He's actually getting close to retirement So for him The mentorship that he gives to the people at Red Hat and in the community is important because he would like to stop at some point So I think the sort of if you think of session is not just you know, we're not all close to retirement, but being able to go on vacation being able to Step away when you need to I think it's important But you can't do that if you don't lift others up around you so that they have an opportunity to step in I Would also like to know Mendy's point of view one of the mentees if you would like to contribute to that Why do you think it is important? Well, I suppose when I Started off in Red Hat last year like contributing to Fedora It was my first time knowing anything about open source So I feel like having a mentor is very important to kind of find your footing on like, you know What is this about like and Yeah, I suppose just Yeah, I said my piece So do you think that This is the relative Continuous question to that discussion. Do you think without a official mentor? It would be easier for you to own board because in open source communities We are a helpful we all are there but Helding somebody accountable for the full-time mentorship Well, has that made any difference any sort of difference? So so I can kind of address this in the infrastructure project we kind of And I think a lot of open source projects. We kind of treat mentoring or Basically as like the group is mentoring every person is coming in so that they know it's safe to ask questions and so forth But that said having a specific person that you can ask questions of and know That that person will answer you or that person has it will set aside time for you is actually really important So I think both sides of it are important. You have to have the community You know if you ask a question, you know, it's safe to ask a question You know that somebody whoever is available will answer you that's great And it's also important to have somebody you can like talk to privately and say I don't know what's going on here Can you help me out? Sure Anybody from the audience would like to contribute to this do you think mentorship is important dedicated mentor in the community when you join that community So I have run mentoring programs in OpenStack and other communities and One of the reasons why it's important to have known mentors Even then if they're not totally active But at least a list is when someone comes and they have a specific question and helps those who are running the programs Know who to put them in touch with Because one of the worst things is is I contacted so-and-so and I never heard back Yeah, and you lose them because you lost that connection that so that's in a really important part of having known mentors We have over the years tried one-on-one mentoring Kind of switch to the Kubernetes model of the cohorts Because that's easier on the mentors we found out we couldn't get the mentees to even introduce themselves So finding out what works best as methodology for your community is also important And that also helps you know how many mentors you need to have Where you need to have them One of the reasons why I think that mentorship is important Well, I have had this personal experience where I used to have this perspective from Well from a very experienced point and then I stopped thinking from the perspective of someone who was really new to a certain Technological stack and I'm like hmm. How would I explain it to them in a way? It's really accessible and Mentoring someone allowed me to do just that. It also got me down to the basics so that I'm not able to Well work on the things that I work on but probably go back to the basics and explore more things because well It's both rewarding to the mentees that you're mentoring as well as to yourself because you're also learning something new with that Very good point. Thank you so much with It's somebody newer to the community. I've been appreciative of somebody who I would consider my mentor Is Justin back there as I have come in very unsure how to do things or how open source works I've spent most my career in corporate and coming into open source It's a different ethos, right and you look into kind of the The the everything of fedora and it's it's intimidating and you don't know who to ask and you don't know like how these processes and you know There's information overload and how do you do something, right? And so I've been appreciative of having you know somebody who's been able to open a door to then help me talk to others and be able to Communicate and I feel like I've been successful because of having a relationship To be able to talk to somebody right somebody I can communicate with so as somebody who is a mentee maybe not officially but More in that sense. I've been appreciative of that kind of ethos that exists here for Well, those were all great inputs. I would just add one thing in there As you said, it doesn't have to be formal always because sometimes Okay, the newcomer comes in they need a allocated full-time mentor But sometimes we also because of the personal life and everything we need a week take a break from the community And even few days of a break you come back Everything which used to be in the community from IRC to Pagod to whatnot all of that has been changed and you are overwhelmed with those changes And then you need somebody To bring you back and on board to all of these new things So with that we will move on to the second Topic which is effective mentorship strategies We know that we provide some tools here that okay, you need to have goals You need to have a time frame. You need to have an agenda where After six months or three months time where the mentee look or stand after having this mentorship and all of that what else as Organizers or as mentors we can do more in our community to make this process more smoother and strategic and fruitful What are your thoughts? I can start with that. So one of those things is we as mentors need to realize that Every mentee among us actually has a different learning curve and it goes With the saying that if we try to fit everybody on the same model that might not work for all the mentees Might work for it has actually worked pretty well for about 75 percent of my mentees But the rest 25 percent are still those people I would want to have extra attention in order to retain them mostly because onboarding a mentee is one of the accountability that we have as mentors But we also have to ensure they kind of keep still They keep being motivated the entire time while they are in the journey So it should not feel to them as if like the mentor is forcing them to do things They should feel motivated and that's one of the reasons why mentorship strategy is very important It becomes very handy. So that's that's something that I keep in mind I want to always have a perspective where I ask my mentees Do you feel what you're doing is right? Do you feel this is? You do you feel comfortable with things? Do you want to change the way we do things? So that's that constant feedback loop helps me understand their perspectives and how they are coming from So I'd like to add when I when I look at mentorships I basically see them falling into two buckets, which I think we've already kind of brought up There's the kind of formalized kind I view outreach he is one of those and I have the privilege of working at red hats So also red hats formal intern program is a way and for me as a mentor The formal programs are helpful in that they have a very defined time scope They have typically not always typically a pretty well-defined project Sometimes that gets thrown to the wind and then you have to come up with something and that's fine, too and the outreach he program has so many amazing Regular or weekly learnings that apply to all interns just about basic career and Stuff like the things you can do And because it's managed not I don't have to do that It's managed for the group of interns and they can ask questions as a group together and they're all having that same experience I think that makes it a better experience for them than me trying to do that one-on-one And the other thing about that outreach he in particular is there is a paycheck because The other type of mentorships that I want to mention is just those informal out of band Sometimes didn't quite plan it but it worked really well and people gel together and those are pretty magical But they also don't have those limits And on both sides like if if the mentee is not getting paid then they're Depending on their life circumstances and whatnot They might not be coming in as regularly spending as many hours, so those internships tend to be more of like a slow burn Whereas the more formalized ones are very intense for a shorter period of time And I think that I have two things and I'll shut up The first thing is I think I wonder if there is a middle ground That we could look at some sort of not quite so intense and maybe not quite so Slow and drawn out something in the middle Maybe that could be a good, but I don't I've never seen that so maybe it wouldn't work The other thing that I think that we could do is think about With the less formal ones is there just some little bit of structure like I don't like signing up for things Because I'm usually too busy to do a good job at it but if there was some sort of Just a little bit more structure like maybe a little bit of self-service type things and then on the mentor side I Don't know I don't know where I was going with that But anyway some thoughts I see I really like that idea because I was going to say something along those same lines All of the mentoring I've been involved with has been very much of the informal type I would say is that fair to say some intro because I've honored that you consider me your mentor But we never sat down and set up a program And I can say Kevin has definitely mentored me in a lot of things but again, we never and As most said it's part of the reason for that is it's on me because whenever these things come up I feel kind of intimidated by the Structure and the scale and okay if I sign up for this is it gonna eat my life for six months aspect of it But at the same time doing the unstructured thing It feels a little like you're feeling your way through a fog at times So I think that's a really good idea and I don't have any better ideas for how it could work But I like the way you're thinking to that do you think there can be Some structure in place to balance that out Where some of them can be best practices and some of them are the important ones to be followed To strike their balance Yeah, possibly it I like the idea of this is this as well, but I Think one other dimension to this is that there's also there's technical mentorships And more of a like social career Mentorship and those are very different buckets that I've had I've had mentees that you know They're just wanting to learn how to do things and Function in the community and and get things done and and so forth. They're contributing But also people who are like on a more personal level, you know, how do I advance my career? Or how you know, I'm having trouble with this manager or your things like that and so Is it's there's so much of this that's tailored to the in particular relationship between the mentor and mentee But I agree that it would be nice for for the open-source community have a little bit more formality Around it and maybe that's something like the joint SIG could be involved in like You know, the joint SIG could check in with somebody a certain amount of time after They're doing some kind of an informal mentorship, but you know, that's making it more formal. So I don't know I don't know what the answer is those were really Great input anybody from the audience Yeah No No, I was just gonna say that I suppose going through my experience going through like a formal and Organization like I know myself a mo when I like during the summer we created like a 12 week plan and It was like formal, but like a relaxed formal so like So like say for example, if I was just wasn't feeling something I put it like to the next week But I suppose like we had that structure, but also I Come to mo about something like hey, I don't know how to do this with this thing I have on on this week. Can you help me and she'd give me resources like and Bush Yeah, like I really like the structure because I suppose myself. I'm not a very organized person So it was nice to have someone give me like Like be organized So I suppose that's yeah Thank you. All right, just based on what the comments were previous to this And this is my first flock but it almost sounds like We could take a half an hour an hour and do speed mentoring Which is basically we set up a couple technical tables career tables community tables and Generally if you have enough numbers of both Then like after like five ten minutes think of it as speed dating the mentor moves to the next table of mentees But if you have more mentors than you know You have multiple mentors at the table and no one changes But it's a great way of getting some really quick mentoring from a lot of people Generally, it's done at like Kubecon open-infra summit, you know the bigger conferences But even so you're bringing people from all over the world here who have different experiences and it could be easily done Thank you so much. Those were really really helpful thoughts. I think So one of the things that I do as well as one of our teammates Aurelian does is he holds a stream every Friday on Twitch Hacking away with some stuff in Fedora infrastructure It's really one-sided in nature, but people can tune right in, you know get to know what he's doing and he explains things in very lucid manner and Yeah, people get to enjoy it I've started doing doing that as well because hacking away on stuff by yourself is boring and For Fedora badges I have started getting James and a bunch of other folks on call And that way I get to get opinions on it, right? And that way it's not just me mentoring people but I get to know about them So it's kind of cross mentoring if you will Thank you So I have one question When you say something slightly more formal slightly more structured than this side and less than that side Are you thinking specific to Fedora or more generally? Because it feels to me that the thing you've sparked in my head I may be talking nonsense here because it's literally just fired off in my brain in the last two minutes There's a lot of people go out and learn programming on the internet and just go and look at YouTube things and so on so that's one thing And then there's a lot of transferable stuff within open source about how you contribute to our community how you navigate things how you get things done and it feels like there ought to be something we can build around a Set of reusable content that is itself open that we can use as a structure for something in that middle ground. I Would agree. Yeah, I think generally Some of especially the stuff that is not like like Kevin was saying there's very much a technical component and the more social career Component and I think in open source generally a lot of the social career component stuff is not specific to the project It might be in that it could be you know Oh this specific person the community is a person to talk to like the referral of specifics But other than that it's general content. So And the thing is here at flock with the Ansible folks and the Fedora folks like I went to Don's talk and he had that He showed the meetup kicks toolkit. I was like, oh my gosh, I could use this for so many communities I'm a part of and it's this kind of sharing it's just happenstance like oh I happen to go to Don's talk and saw this otherwise I might not have known So I think that that is a brilliant idea. Maybe different communities sharing their social career resources Outreachy itself I want to mention does have those sorts of resources to that they send out to mentees and they send out They do regular calls where all the mentees can come in and ask questions and they have a speaker and stuff like that So but we could do more. I think that's a good idea Thank you so much. Oh, that's a lot to consume. I think on this Just just real quick just wanted to mention To take into account how somebody might arrive here so Jess Moe myself and probably many others arrived Via more of an educational route and got a formal internship with Red Hat But a lot of people arrive like on our Thursday IRC Meetings we do a first thing of if there's anybody new here introduce yourself and welcome and they might arrive By becoming interested in open source or their first Linux distribution or something like that So that's maybe something else to take into account of you arrive this way. I have a background in that I might be able to assist you or Maybe not I don't know I have a question for the panel So Obviously the Fedora project is project that's been alarmed for a long time and mentorship as we can see has been a Part of that project for pretty much the entirety of its history in one way or another now I Feel like we could probably all agree that you know open source and people's involvement in it is always a changing landscape and so I'm curious of your thoughts of how the needs for mentorship might have changed over let's say the last five to ten years and Should we you know thinking about the changing way in landscape economically or you know, I work in a university I can tell you Students now face very different situations than they did You know ten years ago when I was an undergraduate myself So Yeah, well what's changed? How do you think that's impacted the needs for mentorship? I can start off with that. So One thing that I see and this is from a very Indian perspective because I come from India So essentially in Indian perspective if I go back five years or even seven years What has actually happened is there used to be a set of people who to contribute to project in the free time as you call it Now these guys who are like contributing from the university standpoint They're more mostly looking out for a job. So they want to be more oriented to a job level skill set So if they want to contribute, let's say, I'm coming from a very technical perspective So someone wants to contribute to Kernel. They would probably start looking at Colonel newbies program first And then if they are comfortable a little bit for shell They probably would test Fedora kernels and go on that route, right? So it has slightly become oriented towards how this can Be career helpful. This is not now any more a hobbyist Kind of thing at least in India. It might be different across But that is one of those things that I have seen second. I have seen the approachability for mentees has actually Drastically increased with the awareness in open source. It's it's directly proportional Previously, there was not much people who were aware about contents inside open source and what people would be able to do with open source, but as Linux became more mainstream and kept being pushed Kubernetes was like swept across the entire landscape for the last good five years People started realizing the potential in open source as a result. They wanted to be contributors and the the joint seg the the channels that we used to have for people to come in and Check in with us about new ways to get in That actually changed. So the generation wise it started off with IRC and today I actually have a telegram chat or a telegram group where a lot of people join in to just get updates So what usually has happened is the format of communication has actually drastically changed and that is also because IRC probably I cannot stay logged in forever just to see whoever has messaged and whatnot and but in telegram That's actually a sink and that's easy to do and it's on everybody's phone. So that's better way to communicate right now so the the communication channel changed and Definitely the job orientation made it easier and easier for people to actually own the skill sets bring it Make make it their own and make it bigger. Yeah I just want to kind of add on to what Sumatra said because I noticed that it was really interesting because what happened on our team is I Started out on the Fedora QA team as the QA community person And my job became more technical over time and Sumatra essentially came in to sort of replace me as the community person and it was so interesting that What I remember from my time as a community person was like IRC and mailing lists and so on and then Sumatra came in and he had this whole new generation attitude and he was Reaching out to the kids on all these fancy new communication methods that I was not on and You know the classic quote the medium is the message and that changes How things work because the styles of communication are completely different on those platforms So I think that's a really interesting change that's happened. It's it shows how important it is to pass the torch I think the big change and I it might be a little outside the 5 to 10 year scope But I think the big change is video chat and the accessibility To video chat made a huge difference because you could connect with people on a more human level This conference is the first time I've met Jess and 3d Honestly, it's very natural meeting her and I think I've had situations where I had a remote intern But it was IRC mailing lists instead of meet them in person was like well I don't know you look like that. So like we didn't even couldn't find each other for like a couple days of a conference, but I Think that that is a big thing and the fact that I can just it over time too. It's become very free I think COVID really opened that up because a lot of companies were like oh the socks for everybody We'll make the account free or whatever, but the fact you can share screen It's actually easier to show somebody how to do something over screen share Then if they're literally over your shoulder Because they can look at it closer, whereas to heads bonking in front of a laptop is not great So I think video chat has also changed how I approach mentorship I'm a very shy person. So for me to initiate a video call is also it's something that I've had to learn like yes It's okay. It's not weird But I was one of those people who grew up afraid of the telephone, too I Have a not sure if it's a question or a comment or whatever, but I I'm confused now When you talk about mentorship some in some some comments say mentorship like in Fedora infrastructure and then they jump into Fedora newcomers and I Now I'm confused because it's very different to Mentor someone that is already a Fedora user and wants to contribute to the project then to mentor a new guy That's it's fierce Linux experience. So I'm not sure if you're referring to both or just to onboarding and helping onboarding in to contribute to the project our aim here is as We have mentioned in the goal that everybody in Fedora is a mentor So whether it is in the infract team in joint seg or wherever they stand in some or other way They are mentoring other people somewhere it are more organized more formal and Somewhere it is not and that's why we are organizing this so that we can take away all the inputs from different pockets of Fedora and We can make and we can work on it and we can make a more formalized and organized and a balanced mentorship experience for people I Think the difference are calling out is the difference between mentoring somebody to become a user and mentoring somebody to be a Contributor in my assumption. I could be wrong. So please correct me. Was this about contributor mentorship? That is all yeah now. I'm not confused Okay With that I would like to shift the topic here to a very important subject We all know how important it is to have the contributors in any open source coming community and having mentors onboarding programs Internship it is the first step how the person will be welcomed in any of these open source community This is their very first experiences and that is how they feel that this community is so What do you think how we can strategize our diversity and inclusion policies? Within the mentorship so that everybody feel welcomed. I always lean on the outreach he program for that So whatever their guidelines are they usually make a ton of sense and I just copy them shamelessly That's also by the way when Jess mentioned the 12-week program that that was totally ripped from outreach So I can add something For me, I have a slightly technique. I mean slightly different definition to diversity and inclusion at least from a mentoring standpoint So QM and mentees They go above and beyond to do certain level of testing right for us There are there's one thing that I always keep in mind as a mentor is if they're coming from academic background and as in their students and they probably are somebody who is Coming from a prop a society where there is not much of internet access Like they probably have one GB of data limit on their cellular networks If I make them download a 2.9 gig image every now and then that's not going to be sustainable So I so when when I say policy when you talked about diversity policies I think one of those things we we should try to do is Maybe use minimal amount of resources That a person has to prerequisite before they start contribution. So that way, you know, we don't force people to have like You know download GB's of data or have a machine, which is let's say i7 plus something right in that way We kind of lower down the way test days are very good in doing that because test days are testing very very specific features and they kind of help out when you basically give it to a Contributor it's a bite bite sized task how do you takes two hours to do it and that way they contribute But they don't have to expend a lot of resources on there and to start doing it So I so that's that's one key differential change in my definition of Diversity in terms of technical contributions here. That's a very nice practical Input in that regard. I would say Yes, please go ahead. I would say it's probably collaborative with the DEI teams and I think the DEI team should be more vocal in some cases to Supporting mentors right and making sure that they understand you know that is fedora as a community They know the different DEI programs that exist within fedora. There's multiple teams. There's the overarching DEI group There is all the initiatives that we're doing, but I think it's it's kind of a collaboration that needs to occur, right? I think mentors who are you know taking on mentees right should be aware and and Reaching out to DEI right and joining kind of the DEI programs at least just kind of as a casual You know kind of casual observer almost right, but also, you know as DEI We need to do a better job of publicizing and saying hey these programs exist They're there to support contributors They're there to make people feel safe right and and I think that's a big thing that we need to maybe Improve upon a little bit is making that a little bit more vocal so Yeah, I think to add on to that It's really important for mentors to know When they can't answer something or can't deal with something and talk to their mentors, you know It isn't just you and the mentee or the mentee and the mentor It's you know the community is around you too So if somebody asks you a hard question or you don't know how to handle it or something like that do reach out to your mentor or DEI or you know the appropriate place and I Hope that most mentors know that they should do that I also think and I'd actually be really curious sorry to call you out Amy But I'd be really curious on what you know about like the open second Kubernetes communities because I recently submitted to a Cubecon side conference this week They're due I think on Sunday And what I was actually really impressed by just submitting to the conference the amount of references to the community's DEI policies How they collected information about the the speakers Self-provided background information and how they take those policies seriously and considering talks Yeah, I'm gonna call Justin out on this a lot of that is because the apply for the chaos badging program Kubernetes is very good. I mean historically they have been Gold gold gold gold gold gold any time we had an issue from the chaos badging program and said hey We can't find this we can't find that they were the most awesome on getting it fixed They also have the most funding One of the reasons why I open in for the first year got silver is Because of liability and other things we don't provide Childcare we can't But yet the second time this past year when we applied we got gold because we explained certain things and We're better about having things on the website So the easiest way to get a gold badging program is to have everything out there easy to find and that's why you had that experience the conferences themselves are run really well on their Code of conducts. They're very good about having Diversity tickets diversity travel They've got funding behind them Especially Linux Foundation, I guess Meeters done a pretty good job of putting together a diverse panel here So if obviously only people feel comfortable sharing do any of us have like experiences from a diversity perspective with Mentoring or being a mentee like positive or negative like how was it? I mean personally I'm Somewhere on the 2SL GBTQ. I I'm forgetting all the letters spectrum But for me it's never been a huge issue, so I don't really have a great perspective on it But I'm curious if it has been The experiences of everyone else on the panel. Yeah, I've been on both sides of that and I think I Think one of the challenges is that if you're not from the same identity Markers, I don't know. What's the right word to say? I'm so I apologize. I was saying something terrible But if you don't have the same identities as the person you are mentoring or if as a mentee You don't have the same identities as the person who is your mentor. There's definitely Like a bit of a trust that has to be established and depending on the the timeline of the mentorship and How how you've built that how where you are in your journey to building that trust? It can be difficult when situations arise to be able to handle them correctly or Perfectly and I feel like perfection is not human so don't strive for perfection But well, maybe you should strive for it, but just don't beat yourself up if you don't meet it Yeah, but I one of the things so so when you were saying how the it would be interesting for the DEI Communities say within Fedora to be a support to mentors I think that's actually a brilliant idea because for me again like I had an issue vaguely recently with a mentee not just Where they were a member of community I was not a member of and I absolutely support that community But I'm not a member so I can't make calls about what is okay And what's not okay and stuff like that and if I had like the DEI group Affiliated with that identity that I could go to and just have an open honest conversation where it's like There's no wrong or bad question to ask like for the next half hour What stays in this meeting stays in this meeting? Can I just ask you these questions so I can understand where the issue is? So then I can kind of and maybe even sit with me as a member of that community and help me work out a strategy for how We can get past this road bump. I think that would have been helpful I ended up just going up my management chain and asking for helping guidance and it got through it I wish I had been resolved better. This is the recent thing. I was thinking through The issues that I had were related to being female And they happened a long time ago and it was a very different community Just generally I I would not recommend what happened to me So I am not going to say anything about that. That's that's exactly I wanted to say that But this is a challenge that if the person is not from maybe same gender same time zone It is difficult to convey that I remember that one of the feedback I got from One of the person from us that when I visited us, they said that you are completely different person and very energetic I thought you always Was very lazy to take meetings. I Said because it is totally opposite time zone I'm finishing my day and you are all excited And starting your day with a cup of coffee and I even remember that when I when Adam was there in QE And I was just joining Fedora a few years back a lot of years back Then it was very hard to connect with him being in Canada and only one famous community Guy in QE and really very hard to you know connect with him So I think it is very very important from the diversity perspective not just gender-wise or you know teams wise or It's the time zone wise to have people all across the globe and all different kind of people So it is very important. Yes, please Yeah, so this is something that well, I also experienced that the difference of cultures So what you want is Conway or what you want to say might not be what would be perceived Let's just say so Do things always help, you know first having empathy in a putting yourself in somebody else's shoe and understand Hmm, would they really understand it how I want them to understand or we take it the other way around because well Cultures differ. So what do you want to say might not get there? You know, it's all UDP. You know what I'm saying The other thing is also being open to making mistakes because well we're human beings and like Kevin said You know that you know if you're a mentor you're mentoring someone else and there are situations that you know That you might not be correct or you don't really know how to address that So well you reach back to your mentors and ask them Maybe they have an idea about how you can address that situation and Well, I can say it for the fact that it did help me Progressing through my mentorship challenges, you know yeah, I Think like so I do quite a bit of mentoring outside of Red Hat on the website that's where you can just volunteer your time as a mentor or mentee and I Think I learned the most By mentoring people that were not from my culture and it's always like I think we forgot like the for me a mentorship relationship is really like by Derek show more like Every time a mentee asked me like oh, but why do you give your time for this? When you have a conversation, I'm going to learn as much as you because you're going to bring like challenging problems You're going to bring different point of view different perspective. I think that's where the diversity aspect is very Very important and very powerful like that's where you have an impact on both people's life If I mentor someone that is exactly like me, we're going to think the same way We're not going to have like this creativity or difference of background culture and an opinion so I think it's yeah, it's very Important to have like that diversity in the mentors mentee and time zones religion sex by like yeah all the That's what that's how you learn and you go I think that's like the goal of the mentorship It's to to grow and to develop yourself and learn from others Yeah, so With this We can maintain the continuity and a similar thought is that we can we have one more question, please? Yes, please go ahead Thanks, and I'll try to make this as succinct as possible and so the on the idea of Trying to make people more welcome in the community, which I think is the general section that we're talking about here and My understanding of the structured programs like outreach II G suck things like that. They're great They'll bring people in that may not have come into the community by themselves then there's as you talked about the informal mentorships that happen and those would be people finding their way and Finding mentorships finding mentors within the community and I come from a slightly different background I'm not currently very active at all in in fedora, but I Mentor a few people, but I work in an office. So it's really easy for me to See where mentees are struggling because I see them every day So my question is sort of around. Do you think there are any gaps between? The structured programs and this is sort of going to where Mo was saying like some sort of a middle ground between the structured programs and then the the informal Mentoring relationships that happen do you think there could be any gaps and Sort of an idea around and maybe this happens already I'm not sure because I know at some of you up up there are very high-profile people in the fedora community and And I wonder if newer people Might find it difficult to approach you because you're seen as so busy and doing so much stuff and involved in so many conversations so coming from the office background where I can just Walk up the corridor and Interrupt people and see how they're doing and stuff and is there any concept of like Office hours where There's like, I don't know ask You can book 15 minutes 30 minutes with Kevin or with Adam or with Mo and in your calendar where you've blocked off time to To for people to approach you rather than Hoping that they will I think to summarize this I I think it's more of a question of approach ability if we we have people not it within the same premises I can take that So redhead long runs this awesome program called redhead link up Essentially they send the pair you up with some somebody Mostly from other part of the world and you get to have a one-hour conversation with them about anything Generally life and stuff every time so I'm a part of link ups since last one year I have met like brilliant people like I I met Simzax If you if you have worked in Kiwi, you know who that is essentially Every time I met people I kind of they were interested in Contributing to test days open source something I would basically be like yeah You know we can set up a cadence of calls where you can probably ask me questions And if if I cannot solve it, I would forward them to Adam or somebody who can answer it on the behalf And it has it actually gives us that exact point. You told me it sets up that bridge between me and somebody That I don't know. I would probably never know To still approach me and then keep a cadence call if if they want to maintain it that way So it has it has all that that kind of program has always helped me do that But that's that's one program So I am part of that program since last one year and I keep doing it every twice every week This year at this time know because of conferences But yeah, and usually twice a week I meet people and I help them out Wherever they are usually people have problems with oh my Fedora Wi-Fi is not working or something is not working So it's fun to debug those as well, right? But then you get some experience and they get some learning. Yeah, I Think I don't have an answer to it, but I think it's a fantastic question. And I think yes, there may well be gaps because you do see a lot of people show up to a community and not necessarily continue and That may well be the case that they needed a mentor, but they didn't get one So I think it's absolutely a great question and the answer may well be that we could do a lot more there and I like the office hours idea, so I may actually do that. So thank you for that. I suppose as well like when I was Starting off like my internship and right out like contributed or I was still in college So like I'd be working six to ten my time, but for Mo it was one to five So it was working hours for most so I felt like you know, I wasn't impeding on like you're like You know your off-off hours time and but I suppose now and are like before Especially in the summer. I'd be going into the office working nine to five hours time So I'd be texting Mo at like 12 o'clock when it's like Seven o'clock hard time hoping not to wake her up and But I feel like you're quite available when it comes to Like asking people so I feel comfortable Messaging Mo at any time. So but I think you need to you need to limit your time. You need to take a break so One I've had that same issue and I work with teams in other regions and the thing that I keep telling myself is People can structure their notifications how they need so I'm not going to worry about waking someone up if they want don't want to be Woken up they can turn off their thing but the the thing that I wanted to say is I think office hours are brilliant and For me and Jass one of our weekly syncoms is basically the Fedora design team meeting We also have weekly CDT which is community design team. So that's because We started out as a Fedora design team, but then we were working with other communities that were not necessarily Fedora Podman would be a main one. Although. Yes, they're very much integrated in the door But you know, so it's like well, it's the fedora design team people don't know they can approach us So we'll come up with a more neutral name so that other communities are affiliated with no they can approach us, but Yeah, I think Having a regular meeting cadence is really good And then people if somebody says oh, I have a friend who would love to work on design stuff Mo How can they meet up? I'll just say I'll come to the regular Fedora design team meetings Now they're at a specific time if you can't make that time What we do is we do a live stream and then the recording is auto uploaded So people could at least watch the recording and get a feel for is this the group for me or not? And then if they want I we always offer you could always book a meeting with us You know a one-on-one in a time that works for you So but I your point is very good And I think for me I I tend to like the structured programs because they forced me to check in Because I'm not like a super social person So I don't always think like I'm used to people like pinging me and I'm not normally the person to arrange the parties or Call someone I'm usually the person answering the phone or going to the party so having something like outreach he has the structured weekly check-ins and Those just having the fact that the structure exists and I have to do it Makes me do it. So that's why I think some some kind of structure like that Some sort of thing where even if it's an informal mentorship, but you know the timelines I think of an informal mentorship are longer. So maybe not a weekly check-in. Maybe a monthly roundup. Yeah, that kind of thing Yeah, so totally totally agree, but one thing I want to point out is like an infrastructure Monday through Thursday, we do a stand-up twice a day every day And we just go over stuff and that we have like a period where we say anybody have any questions, you know Ask whatever you want. That's fine But how many people know about that? We're very bad about you know directing the people who might need those resources to that kind of stuff and Every once in a while, I keep thinking that that maybe we need a fedora directory Assistance or something, you know somebody to yeah, exactly. Where do I go for this? Oh, you go talk to that team over there? And yeah, but definitely we could do more in that in that gap to answer your question I just want to cross the streams and say in discourse if anybody was in that Maybe because I don't know the discourse experts have told me there's events integration So I'm just wondering if we could have these Open calls where people can ask questions listed as events in discourse and we can make that the central hub No, I think you had something to say Do you have something regarding this topic or do you want to ask another question? Yeah So the only thing I wanted to add was that I love office hours as well And we try and do some of them and so all AWX is doing office hours But I do feel that it still puts the onus on the person coming right? So Mo made the point that you're not the one who's going to start the call right But does that mean if you were a mentee in another community, would you? Feel comfortable jumping into an office hours any more than you would say asking for help on get hub or wherever It's still the same problem. How do we get people to come? Isn't solved by office hours. It's another medium. It's good. We should do it Yes, but we still have to figure out how to get people if as Adam said people drift away because they didn't get the help They need would they have had the initiative to come to the open office hours as well? I don't know that it solves that problem I don't have a good answer to that right getting people to come to things is always the problem So one of the things that I've done personally when I've been reaching out to Kevin who lives the world apart from me Time zones can be a pain say We use a synchronous mediums of communication right say a bunch of times you can't make it to office hours because well time zones You can drop a ping instead and you can trust them that they have the notifications off because guess what the time that you might Be pinging them is probably just asleep at that time, right? But you can pretty sure that they're not nice enough that they're going to respond you back when they'll be a week And that's that's a good start. I guess I have the problem. They're you're talking about I was just trying to help a friend that I work with to package to just to put a patch in a package and He's an old guy. Well, we're in our 40s. So we're old guys in In computer years And and he was overwhelmed by all the he called it. I'm not I'm not it's not my I'm quoting all the bureaucracy Around being a packageer and I was trying to mentor him and and given some guidance Pasting stuff, but I didn't do the office hours thing So I'm gonna do that when I go back to Mexico. I'm just gonna let's sit and well It's remote. Let's make a call and let's go through the process and this Was very good advice. Thanks And I would like to add to that to set the expectations right in advance before jumping directly to the To that video call or office are maybe To kick off with you can start with informal one But going forward when you are devoting your time the other person is devoting their time set the expectations and Agenda in advance so that you are prepared and the other guy is also Well prepared with that I would like to take the next question will come to you as well Because I have some set of questions, which I really would like to be in within the time So we have seen and this is the question came in Yesterday as well on one of the social media channel that some of the Fedora groups are doing really well in mentorship and Some of them are not yet there. So how do you think the learnings and Motivation the force the support how we can give that to those Groups which are not there yet. I know that design team team team all of you are doing fantastic to Support our new contributors and bringing them in the community How we can You know build that culture across other Fedora sex and teams and groups I think each team needs a flywheel It's sort of quote Ben cotton And I think where I see teams within Fedora struggle is they don't have like an identified flywheel So it could be either there really is nobody with the time or motivation to do it or it could be Nobody feels they have permission That's one of the things that I think is the early mentee Thing that you have to get over. It's like you don't have to ask permission You know we've been saying at Red Hat. It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission And some people are afraid like should I do this thing? Yes, if you want to do it, please do it But I think that is the one thing that like it's not going to happen I can give people all the advice in the world But if they don't feel empowered to actually do it or if there isn't anybody who has the time or commitment to be able to Be that team's flywheel It's just not going to happen like you need the people but if you do have the people I think again when I said this before Looking at how outreach he does it is a really good way Like everything that they do is just such top-notch from just the inclusive language that they use in all their Documentation know how they have it laid out to all of the things that they recommend So I think for any team within fedora any team within any open-source project Definitely looked at them and from some of the stuff Amy's saying I think I want to look at the Kubernetes community too and Kind of steal from them What's a flywheel? I Think you could do it better, but that was something that Ben Cotton our former program manager sadly laid off Which we're all still salty about Used to say he did you need a person on a team who will be there who can be relied upon to be there and make things happen and You don't want people to sort of fall into a gap where they they want to help out And no one is there to help them and that person generally needs to be paid by somebody So it's their responsibility to do this thing So I mean for our team so Andrew is the flywheel you can rely on him to be there if Community stuff is happening. He is going to be there organizing it and people can reach out to him So that's the idea of the flywheel And that's why I like to say that outreach is a program is really good because they pay the interns because you can't Expect somebody to work that intensively and not have a paycheck. I See that you keep mentioning this. I really want to know that what is the best way because It takes a different kind of effort and determination to go and read each and every outreach a mentorship page But how best we can get that lesson learned and bring it to our community and implement it Maybe the mentor summit Maybe no, but no like I would envision maybe a training like it could be a talk here And it could be it doesn't have to be very long of like a half-hour thing If these are best practices learned from Outreachy, okay And it could go through and say, you know the 12-week plan I think is a great one Because 12 is a wonderful number You can do you can do three weeks for four projects like three weeks each Or you could do three projects four weeks each or you could do six and two either way It's just a nice number and depending on how complex the technical project is you're looking at or just You know what what skill set the the intern would like to learn like if they just want to learn one thing Maybe you do six by two if they want to learn four different things You do a four by three breakdown of the schedule and the fact that you're doing these weekly schedule These weekly check-ins And you're going through the schedule and making sure like updating it to match the work that was actually completed because you know The thing the thing about our Ruchi too when I've done many outreachy internship Mentorships, it's It's intimidating to you have to come up with the schedule as part of the application process But then it never works out the way you planned it and there's no shame in that It's good if you did it exactly the way that you put it out when you sent in your application You're doing something wrong because you learn in week one. Oh, I can't do that thing in week four So that continual checking in on the plan and honestly, I think that's something Florida could do generally is Have this strategy. Let's check in and see how we're doing And a regular cadence. So I mean that's that's one specific thing is that 12 week plan thing I think is brilliant. Um, there's other things too like they have topics every week that they talk about Like when I remember I attended with an intern was the the resume building one and how to talk to recruiters That kind of stuff it's jobs focused, but having like a list of these general topics That maybe you know, if we have a community within fedora, like it could be the join-sig I don't know some community that would maybe have these sort of trainings too and I think the other thing is that we do talk about this stuff a lot And it's everything is video chat recorded since covet We have this rich library material on our youtube channel And like I remember specific talks. I saw that I found informative but Like just might not know that that talk that marie gave about, you know, making badges exists But I do so could we have some sort of library and again, I will Cross the streams and say maybe discourse could have a video library thing to point to the videos So we could build a training Center That kind of goes through these general topics. So then people have something to reference But you always want to keep the material fresh So and I don't know the cadence of fedora mentor summit But it could be something that we're reevaluating every summit and then we're posting those fresh videos and making sure they're listed I really like these ideas and it's like Logistic and providing the right material maintaining the repository and all of that But the real challenge which I also Observe and and seen across the board is that The same faces the same teams coming and stepping in into the mentorship and being the mentor The main thing is here how like we talked about how important it is to have the diverse pool of people mentoring each other How can we motivate and encourage More people to be mentor Um, so one of those things we used to do back in the day is called triple t train the trainer um, essentially a a series of a two-day program for our trainer would basically take up multiple other trainers and be like Here's how I mentored my people and I found these few things that did not work for me Do you have a suggestion of how I can curate them and that has been actually a very nice way of Correcting flaws in the mentorship program. So you don't have to entirely change your strategy towards mentorship You just have to fix The small problems and they can come from experience of other mentors, right? So that's one thing that we have actually nailed down as a part of The mentorship summit We tried to ensure that there are more mentors and they kind of give feedback to other mentors saying Hey, we have been trying to do this. This is failing We don't think this is working at 100 percent. Can we have some suggestions around certain topics? Yeah I just want to call back on this to maybe some earlier points Like moe's idea of some kind of middle ground and i'm sorry. I don't know your name But your idea of contributors who are getting lost. Sorry darin Sorry. Yep. Jared your idea about contributors getting lost because I think If we had some kind of very light fedora how to be a mentor Program that would really help with this a lot because you know As a qa team, we don't have our own mentorship program exactly if we had something project wide where people coming in We could say oh, we've got new people coming in. Does anyone want to be a mentor? It's not this intensive Six month program. It's just go and read these three docs pages about this is how you do our very In middle ground form of mentoring. It's not scary Now you can go and help out the new people. I feel like that might really help with you know, a few of the different things here I mean, I think your point too about oh well There's only certain teams and they keep showing up and the other teams don't show up I think the thing to keep in mind is we are very upstream focused And I think for example like I don't need to call teams out But you might not necessarily see like the fedora kernel team in these programs But that's because this program's like some mantra mentioned the kernel newbies program So in some cases I think teams rely on their upstream and I think where you see like fedora design team showing up a lot It's because we're our own upstream like nobody's really upstream of us So obviously we need to do the mentorship and I I think it's okay like I think it's okay But I think what we do need to do is identify Where if you want to get involved in a specific fedora team, but the mentorship program is upstream We need to say hey, you're interested in working on the fedora kernel Look at the kernel newbies program or if you're interested in working on the desktop and fedora workstation Look at genomes mentorship programs So it's one of those things where maybe we need to have the references upstream that we don't have That's a really good point. Please go ahead Sorry All right, so it's it's a bit of a meandering question, but I think I can condense it but I want to Say a couple things first all right first thing is research has shown that labor unrelated to the actual production of software is Pretty much universally devalued in open source regardless of people's intentions people feel bad about doing this sort of work So this is one thing that we we know for sure right the the second thing is that you know Generally with mentorship in open source because everything's on a goodwill basis The the people within the community the mentors Have more power than the mentees right they have existing responsibilities So naturally without any other sort of interventions Mentees regardless of the goodwill or the intentions of the mentors are expected to engage with on the terms of the mentor Right and I think a good example of this is thinking about like time zones Right and why it was always having to engage with mentors in the community that are based in america on their time zones, right Uh, and then the third thing I wanted to not to like I don't want to stir the pot or cause drama But I went to justin's talk yesterday about how to spend fedora's money and it was all about events Right, which I thought was interesting because I'm like, oh, yeah, we all of us here. There are part of this community Yeah, we like going to events and seeing each other and yeah, I enjoy being here too Uh, but everything else is okay. Not everything else We're talking about five flywheels and there are like red hat paid staff positions that You haven't been laid off yet but And I don't want to stir that pot either but I think it's you know We're talking about ben cotton and many other people that you know, uh, Who's whose layoff was arbitrary at best and discriminatory at worst um and so I want to My question is about a devotion of resources that this community has access to And not just like the people in this room, but also like you know the the budget that we have And historically a lot of this budget has been around like you know celebrations and flock and events and stuff like that Do we feel like that needs to change and to grow this community? We need to devote monetary resources to you know, as you said flywheels or you know devoted staff positions around mentorship and these sort of roles And if so, what what do you envision those things to be? um before We start I just want to pitch in there that de i team in fedora has been contributing the budget for the mentorship as well, so so I Matthew Miller started this conference uh keynote with one point which was uh state of fedora and one of those point was If anyone in this room who has a budget for diversity advisor role can actually come and help fedora to get somebody full time there That was one of the point which was made by the project leader That can give us The last point that you asked for mostly the the budget part The second stuff, which is actually there right now. Um, I was While we were doing this diversity weeks fedora diversity weeks for a week of diversity fwd ftw something Uh, essentially you could actually reimburse the certification that you were doing on diversity And that was a good way to actually help and get more community members or rather more flywheels to understand what diversity and inclusion means right that uh, I I have Not a great idea on specifics of from where do you get these courses and whatnot? But I know there's a budget allocated which you can use and justin may have exact informations on The amounts at this point We also sponsor In the past we sponsored the outreach intern as well with the fedora dei budget Um, I know because I was there. So justin has the exact numbers, of course Well, I don't want to step in if anyone else does want to comment on how resources are allocated in fedora for these kind of things But I do want to just acknowledge the point too that In fedora since at least since I've been involved in 2015 We've always had a diversity allocation in the public fedora budget for things like we were doing with sponsoring outreach interns in the fedora community um But also things that we've done across the year like the appreciation weeks the uh formerly fedora women's day now fedora week of diversity Where we were doing before kovat like in-person events and we we had them in five different continents of people Organizing these community spaces in their local communities But I think the challenge that we have now is especially as we're coming out of kovat You know, there are resources that we have in the community and those are things that I think a lot of people may not realize are available or um Are are not exposed very well. So, you know on one hand, you know It is a team like this is also how the dei team has been able to do some of our very specific focus projects but at the same time I think wider input on how to best prioritize and uh Make sure that we're creating opportunities for people to share how we can more equitably use our resources for mentoring for Supporting greater diversity in the community, you know, I think that's probably the the challenges We do need to have a larger conversation about that and finding the right balance of Getting wider feedback and input and making sure that we're not trying to do Too many things at one time We think that's also been the challenge is we've had resources And then it's a smaller group of people who no it's not just that part, but it's just it's harder to To scale. So I think there's there's multiple pieces there, but I just wanted to comment that about The budget piece and you know There are resources, but probably the conversation is how can we be more Open about and transparent about those resources and use them in a more well continue to use them in a equitable way and making sure that we're still Uh improving proving that in the community Thank you. Just input I think when we look at the allocation of resources, there's like two dimensions to think about and that's Is it a one-shot deal? From the funding perspective or is it an ongoing thing from the funding perspective? And then on the other side think about the outcomes. Is the outcome a one-shot deal or is the outcome ongoing? I think events tend to be A one-shot deal in one sense at the individual level. Oh, I got to go to flock this year I won't necessarily come next year, but I don't say that because I wouldn't want to go and just thank because the funding but Because I went I was able to make the social connections and build the intimacy with others that when I go back to my Remote contribution. It will be super powered at least for a while So you have sort of an ongoing outcome And it was sort of a one-shot deal from a funding perspective for me as an individual I think as a community an event like flock I mean, we don't have to do flock every year. We do we have not always done flock We used to do flood cons. It was multiple smaller events But that ends up at a high level budget level not at the individual level an ongoing Cost and I think sometimes when we have these conversations, we think of the individual I had a one-shot deal and not the fact that this is an ongoing regular cost But then also I think for flywheels at the individual level it has to be ongoing Otherwise, it's not sustainable You and I think it's easy to fund programs like Outreachy because they have that 12 13 week I think it's 13 weeks now But they have that specific Timeline and it's a one-shot and you fund it and you know what your budget looks like and you can do that And it is for the for the individual receiving it It is an ongoing benefit But it's not enough to keep a flywheel a flywheel has to be able to make a living So and that's the level of budget. I Just didn't get speak to this maybe I don't think we have that level of budget to hire multiple people in if we did Yeah, Matthew would be We would have that diversity coordinator if we did have that budget right and Yes, please go ahead So I had a question for the design mentors Uh, this came up during my Outreachy internship as well and recently when I was trying to volunteer for flock as well So one of the regions I struggled while contributing to fedora was Using the open source design tools and I think I've been vocal about it for a very long time I have been trying to discuss this and I've gone to different open source communities Discussing the same issues and how they are dealing it so Like for better or worse it matters to me what design tool I use and I've been using proprietary design tools for a longer time So when I came to fedora, I saw that you all were using open source design tools and I'm nothing against it It's just that I know I'm more efficient while using the tools of my choice So I just wanted to know like what matters more to a mentor like the contributions that are being made or the tools That are being chosen to make the contributions And is there any way that we can find a middle ground between New contributors who just want to use their tool of choice so that they can start contributing first and then maybe switching or I mean, it's just that if I use a tool of my choice, I know I'll be more efficient I can contribute more and if I am like push to Like push to use like different open source design tools I just know that I'll be frustrated and my will to contribute goes down. That's all Thanks for the question I can take that So I would be the czar of making people use open source tools in the design team I I have a lot of reasons for that and I understand as an individual You invest a lot of time into your tools and it is a huge ask and I could say this You're in the discourse session Asking me to use discourse is a huge ask because I have the tools I already have that I like but I'm being open-minded I have tried to discourse a number of times Matthew says he's going to sit down with me and fix it for me So but the the bit about that too Like I would be fighting that way more tooth and nail and the fire alarm would have gone off multiple times in that session If it was proprietary because fedora is really I see us as an open source first community And it's not just because of the dogma of open source and software freedom It's the the reason I am so passionate about using open source design tools is that when I was a student I was a freshman and actually I had started working with this tool called macromedia director as a high schooler at an engineering summer camp So I was the director girl So anytime there was like a video project or what I would use director by the time I was a senior So this is within four years I don't know if adobe had already bought macromedia at that point But director they you couldn't even buy it like you couldn't get a copy of it And I had all these projects in my portfolio that I couldn't play them and I couldn't open the files to edit them Because I didn't have a copy of the dvd. It came preloaded on my laptop. Um, so For me to apply to jobs and have a portfolio like I had all this work I couldn't use it was locked up in a proprietary format requiring a proprietary tool and that really sucked So that's why I'm passionate about the open source tools. I think it's a practical consideration when you think about bit rot I think it's a practical consideration when you think about accessibility A lot of these tools cost money a lot of them cost money on a subscription model now Where it's hey, you know what pay us ransom and you can access your files. Otherwise, no And it's like yes I you know, I understand that maybe the way the open source design tools work is different Like I'm not when I go into the discourse session. I'm like, this is so uncomfortable I don't like it. I have to learn all this stuff I understand that it works perfectly well for other people who are used to that system So I don't think it's an issue of the tool having a problem It's the having to retrain yourself and the investment Of having to do that with a tool that you're already familiar with that It's like your right hands or your third hand or something that it's so natural I understand that's a big ask But I think for us as a team it's really important from Volunteers coming into the team Contributing something if they give us assets and yet they could be beautiful It could be the most perfect design ever if it's in a format that I can't open With tools that I can access it might as well not have existed because say it's something for flock And we have to update it with the with the dates for next year If I can't open the file, I'm going to have to remake it from scratch So it's really important. I think to think about the format of the files that it outputs You have to think about can other people access the tool that was used to make it You also have to think about the point of fedora is to be an open source project So My question is kind of a little bit more, you know, obviously most of us here are folks who hack away at things, right? I mean, I've heard today a lot of things about, um, you know, we need to understand who our mentors are We need to understand. I mean, it's almost kind of a data question I think I've also heard about the funding the resources and making sure that those things are there I think as a community we have a lot of tooling around things like badges and rewards and recognition I mean, is there any opportunity to leverage fedora to do this, right? Can we leverage, you know Show who's a mentor show who's you know, who is being mentored by someone else Can we recognize that and then start to understand who is becoming a mentor because of this, right? I mean, I mean heck could we put that in fast, right? Literally show who's who's mentoring, right? Like I don't know about you know for most folks But you know being able to award a badge or some kind of recognition would be an amazing thing to do So I just throwing it out there folks have ideas or what your thoughts are. Yeah. Yeah That's totally something we could do And that's sort of a project-wide thing, right? And a lot of the mentoring stuff is per team So we would have to get some sort of buy in at you know, some sort of mentor summit of some kind about that But yeah, we could totally do badges or some kind of relationship But one of the problems there is that A lot of the relationships are ephemeral, right? So you're a mentor for A month and then the person goes somewhere else or whatever Or you're mentoring like five people and you know, some of them are You're seeing every week and some of them you're seeing every month and So there's that kind of complexity to it also But I think you're right that some sort of recognition or some kind of How to find the mentors or you know, where to go Again, we get back to the flywheel You know who who in this in this team or project can direct me to the resources that that I need Yeah, I was just going to say it's kind of an interesting comparison with say package sponsors or something like that We could that's the permanent part people who are willing to be mentors like The the individual relationships are fleeting and the mentees may be fleeting But if we can have something kind of tool-wise, which says these are the mentors on this team That might be really useful, I guess Oh, no, I was I was gonna say something on Anushka's point about the preparatory software um, I suppose when When I first joined the fedora design team like I had knowledge of Excuse my language illustrator before and Then I Sorry But that kind of I suppose it helped me get into inkscape because there was a lot of stuff That were similar and I know inkscape has like a feature where you can like Use like the illustrator buttons in inkscape So like I suppose that kind of got me into it, but Then going back into college and learning illustrator. I was like I don't like this piece of software. I'm used to I'm used to inkscape now So I think it's like I know people learn like in different ways, but I suppose that was that was my experience of it and You know and and as Mo was saying like the freedom of having um, you know, like like dot svg can be opened by anything Dot psd which is for photoshop can only be opened by photoshop So it's nice to have the That freedom. Um, but I do understand where we're coming from with was a figma you were using so yeah So, uh, like as you pointed out that dot svg can be opened anywhere. So recently I just saw that Inkscape svgs are not supported on figma or other modern design tools So that's I mean the problem is the open source design tools that The community has been using sometimes a lot of files from those Tools are not supported on modern design tools and modern software. Like, uh, it's not just figma. There's uh, like sketch And framer which do not support these files and the like my point is not using just one tool I'm just asking if there could be ways that people could use the tool of their choice not changing The entire community's tool of choice Like if you want to work with open source design tools, you have the Free will to do that and if I do not want to do that I have the free will to do that The problem is is we don't work in a silo. We work together as a team So we need to agree on the tools we use that's why for example I'm willing to give discourse a third go Because we all have to be there in order for it to work And I think that when you're saying inkscape svg doesn't open up in figma Number one, you can do save as plain svg on inkscape and then it probably should but if it doesn't that's figma's problem It's not inkscape's problem because svg is a standard And I know that there are members of the inkscape team who follow closely and participate in the w3c svg standard If proprietary vendors don't want to adhere to that standard that is their problem. It's not the standards problem I also want to say that Modern tools I think inkscape is a very much a modern tool And I don't like the proprietary stuff being said that it's better And the stuff that's free not because I don't think just because it's free software means it's less than It's a different model. It works differently But for us using inkscape is really a partnership for us because We are pretty close with the upstream inkscape community We just spent me and madeline spent a lot of time with martin owens who is the lead ux developer for inkscape at pennpot fest a couple Was it a couple months ago? It was in june no it was in july Anyway, and pennpot is another tool where it is an upstream open source project. We it is a modern tool very much There's a lot of large companies that use it And that's the tool we go because we know the upstream we have a great relationship with them There are features in inkscape right now that were implemented within the past release or two that was fedora I'm sure Are we out of time? I would like to conclude this this discussion just with one sentence that In my career one thing I learned is change is the only constant Be open-minded and that is how you will build your resume with different skills with different tools Okay, with that I would like to thank you this lovely audience who has been very very enthusiastic for the participation Last night I was thinking after this long game night and beers and drinks Who would be there just maybe five people or panelists? But no there are people who are very active and I am so thankful and glad that we had you here I noticed uh note down a very good the Conversation the summary with different learning curves join sake how de I can contribute Red Hat link up fedora office hours fedora directory outreachy lessons train the training flywheels Very easy three pager how to be a mentor the best practices Exposing the resources that we have wisely So i'm not going to promise that we're going to implement each one of them But we will definitely try And focus Step by step that how we can implement that in fedora and make it a better place for mentors and mentors Thank you very much An outside is happening the group photo so we need to run Yeah, so this talk is why you should join a community And I've never used this on keynote before but it's really cool because I can do it from my phone So my name is Amy marriage for those of you who don't know me I am technically a principal technical marketing manager at red hat specializing in open stack um My self proclaim title and I was allowed to do it by my boss is I am an open source evangelist Because I work more upstream than I do downstream I do work with pm and pm but Anyone who knows me knows i'm upstream all the time So these are the ways you can reach me. I am irc On as spots i'm also in the matrix and that spots with the z because we also have spot in the community We're two totally different people With different heights and I don't have blue hair so the agenda rolls in communities A walk through history, which I think y'all enjoy giving back in communities And time for q&a so we can have Plenty of discussion and I talk kind of fast so we will have plenty of time So first off is the roles in communities And there's roles that are in every community The first is developers which I think everyone can guess on that So a primary role of the developers are coding and bug fixes They may be bug fixes that they did bug fixes that were reported that someone else did And then reviewing and testing code and this is really important A lot of people don't test their own code before they get it merged A lot of the gating systems are not as controlling as maybe they should be So as long as everyone's happy they hit a button and it gets merged I work a lot with zool So what zool does when we put a patch in for open stack is it tests it against that project And it can give it a verified plus one But then after it gets enough reviews from the cores and the community It goes back through the gates and actually gets tested against the whole entire project We call that workflow and it gets a plus two from the system and then it can get merged But someone's going to write those tests Otherwise you can still get merged, but it's not being tested against anything Collaboration and community engagement Developers need to get out there and talk to the community Collaboration one project works with another project smaller Open source communities and may just be they're working on one thing But fedora sentos opens stack kubernetes There's lots of different projects and they all have to get work together In order for a change to happen And it could just be we're making a networking change. This is what's going to happen Are you going to be okay with that really enjoying this phone thing? And documentation and tutorials even if there is a document team It really helps if the developer documents what they did and what it should do at the very least Because otherwise no one knows what it did they have to go through the code and they're you're starting from scratch And tutorials, especially if it has an operational Point of you configure it like this and this is why it does it And then operators and users I can I personally consider them part of the community It's where I started as an operator So they utilize and they test the software They're the ones who are actually going to use it And they report issues and provide feedback I found a bug This is what happened. This is the way to replicate it But providing feedback can also be that is the greatest UI I have ever used. I love where you place that button Part to participating in discussion. How do you know what they need if they don't participate in the discussions? You may think they need feature x and b and you're spending 20 hours a week on feature x Nobody needs feature x they would like feature y And when they explain it to you you realize why they want feature y and then again creating documentation and tutorials because Their use case may be different than what the developer thought of So they're going to write something a little different about why you should use it And if you connect this piece with this piece and you do this configuration You can make all these great things happen And leadership whether it's something separate or not They facilitate the collaboration. Let's have a discussion Even at FinCEN IRC We're having our weekly meeting. Let me start the meatbot These are our topics setting And communicating vision I can't even read my own stuff So this could be this is the goal of our project This is why we're doing it This is why you should use our project Nurturing community growth if your leaders aren't positive inclusive Understanding have empathy for the users and the developers. You're not going to grow You're just going to have a two-person project And coordination and organization And I kind of mentioned that when I discussed meetings and having topics and an agenda and the meatbot and stuff But it could also be for instance Totally different, but Shawn Working with Justin to have this event You know, how can we get our communities to work together? And conflict resolution and mediation Let's be real. There's a lot of conflict When open source started there wasn't a need for code of conducts Now there is and your leadership are the ones who are going to get it reported Need to discuss it And correct the problems And it may even be that Hey, we realized we just did this in open stack We realized that our code of conduct was outdated So we all got together we worked on it And we got a new code of conduct past the board and legal Because we felt that things were missing from it So even if you have your governance in place it may need updating And guiding the technical direction In some projects and for door is a good example. There is a steering committee in place Their job is to decide where things should go technically They may not be the overall leaders of the project But they are the ones who give the vision and make the decisions for the technical aspects of it Open stack is another one. We have a technical committee The board of directors do not make any technical decisions and we'll tell you go talk to the tc So as I mentioned some Roles are in every community So once you get out of those Small teeny tiny two-person committees communities You get more people in and there's more roles and it's not necessarily the same people doing everything Even though even in a larger community that documentation should still be done by the developers And the users But for technical riders you actually have someone who can help you fix your documentation So the document project features and functionality and they're going to clean up what should hopefully already exist from the developers and make it more usable Managing and maintaining project documentation. So this may not be necessarily the documentation on how to Contribute or to use it, but the overall documentation for the project. This is our mission. This is what we want to do Creating developer resources. So again, they take the basics that they say they need And then help to improve them and make them better and they might come up with totally different things And supporting community engagement Again, you're gonna get there's going to be a theme here of supporting the community So this could be that They redid the onboarding documentation so that it's good a technical writers could be involved in the social media Infrastructure so now that you're no longer just doing your thing with your merge requests on GitHub you might actually have infrastructure behind it So system administration and maintenance You're running your own gates. You have to create users on those systems for the developers to do stuff Development and configuration management. So again, they're going to want to make their life easier. So they're going to want to use ansible What else do we use in these days? Um back in the day we use shift Um puppet puppets still pretty popular, but mainly they're going to use either ansible or Hey, it's an open stack. We can't get rid of it Because we have a lot of stuff in it works. We don't have anyone to contribute again infrastructure Um continuous cincd um For us in open infra we use zool Which is actually another project under open infra and that's the one where I was telling that it'll test your code Your initial code to make sure it passes your project and then that it'll work on the whole entire project So, um, I know github will do some tests for you if you write it But to be honest with you, I don't know of another system I think hopper is doing something similar where you can test against your whole project Scalability and performance optimization our gates are timing. Why are our gates timing? Well, this provider only gave us five systems this week nodes this week to test against We're going to have to add some more nodes on to another system so that we have the capacity we need in order to do our testing So the largest communities graphic artists. Thank you mo Sometimes you also just need friends who can help you with your graphic artist problems. Um So some of the things they do the logos and the branding materials Creating user interface and user experience because they have a visual eye You might think that button goes down there and then they take a look at and go Oh, no, you don't want it down there. You want to put it here and put it on the left Not the right because everyone's used to it being on the left Have you ever clicked on the wrong button when a pop-up comes up because you're so used to it being in one place? user experience designing promotional materials It can be something as simple as the stickers. We've all been handed out outside It can be something more detailed One pagers that you put on the counter at fosdom for people to pick up so they know what you're doing And provides it providing visual assets for documentation. That could be graphics or even this lovely fedora presentation template translators were global Larger projects often have translation teams So they translate the documentation The localize the user interface translating project communication I don't know if I have it on there reviewing reviewing and editing translations Part of localizing and not even the user interface And I guess I don't have it separate is what pops up as warnings That's one of my first open stack contributions. I actually have python code in open stack putting in localization tags So that all the so that if you come up with a warning it is in your language and the explanation of that Warning is in your language Something you might not think about but is very important for a global community community advocates I've been saying every it's kind of everybody's role, but there are often people who just advocate for their communities So community community engagement and support these might be the people who are on your help You know you've got to help forum and they're the ones who are going to answer Because they're always there and they're always trying to be helpful Also a great way to get involved in a community outreach and promotion your ambassadors They're going to reach out and say Hey, you've got a meet-up coming up Would you like us to speak at it or they're just a point of contact that someone can say We're having a meet-up. I'm looking for someone who can come talk and we'll go. Oh, here's all the ambassadors in your area Community building Hold an event Attend a conference have a social feedback collection and communication User surveys are great for your communities Because that's where you get your feedback a lot of the times from your users and your participants Or it can also be someone just attending an event. Oh, I see you're wearing a so-and-so t-shirt Oh, yeah, I I do so-and-so on the committee. Well, I really really like what you're doing. I like this aspect I like that aspect. It's like all right now. I'm gonna take it back to the team And providing diversity and inclusion promoting and diversity inclusion A lot of times the advocates Are the ones who are going to go out, you know, they see someone who's struggling in the community And they want to be the one who is inclusive. It's just how we are That um, we were kind of joking at the table earlier today I might have a reservation for 10 people at a restaurant. I'm what we're walking to the Restaurant I see someone kind of just walking by themselves in a strange town because they're at the conference And they don't know anybody it's their first time like hey You want to come eat with us? You know, it's it's just that simple of getting someone involved in a community is just Seeing that they're alone. They're confused and inviting them along Okay, this is kind of fun for me in the beginning if you build it They will come so we we we're talking about diversity inclusion today and um When open source kind of started it was all the same people In this case I got my three cavemen and they will come Well our operators were kind of the same people too But then there were communities so it wasn't just two people in a room On the internet with github We started putting people together So it wasn't just for developers anymore and we have different people So we have a developer a tech writer maybe a user Um So we started to look different We weren't just those two guys in a room who like have been best runs for five years Or all their entire life and this is important Now if you also notice we still don't have cultural diversity here But at least now we've got some gender diversity going on and where we are today Communities are for everyone And I tried to get as diverse as I could on the people I think that's all our people so you still have You know everyone's working together and this is actually I really like this one also because they're all behind a computer So the are out there working from their houses the are out there working from the office as some of these may be employed Some of them may be volunteering I volunteer in a whole lot more communities than I'm actually paid to participate in Um But there's people of interest and they all bring something different to that community So I'm not going near as fast as I thought it was So ways of giving back to communities. Hey, I can talk really fast Performing reviews everyone should be performing reviews and it's a great way to get started in a community Um going back to open stack. We have the ability to plus one anybody can plus one anything anyone can minus one anything It's only when you get to more of a leadership role, which we call your cores where you can plus two or minus two people Help grow the community You love your community you invite people to join the community Promote diversity inclusion Now anyone who was at the meeting yesterday For the panel noticed it was all white males Um on cento s's behalf that was a conscious decision. I chose to make I could have taken that chair. I felt up David. It was the best person to represent us in that case Benny could have been here for almost she is not here in attendance But it's important to note that those two projects have female leadership Mentoring because this is the mentoring summit So you can have internal project mentoring, which is kind of what we've been talking about this morning One or more mentoring I kind of mentioned the cohorts this morning Sometimes they work sometimes they don't it depends on the group and how active they're willing to be But even with one on one mentoring Um sometimes, you know, you're you're paired up with someone you never hear from your mentor Or you never hear from your mentee And there's the cohort mentoring Now external mentoring programs Outreachy outreachy is like the most popular Um project out there. I think it's one of the best run But it's also nice that they get paid they get paid to be there as a mentee And that gives them the ability to maybe not get that job at the fast food restaurant and while they're in college and working on things Google summer of code and docs. I don't know if docs is still going on it ran for like a year or two and then I haven't really seen it Um, but that was a google sponsored internship And again open source projects. You didn't have to be a google project for it and questions and answers Yes So I just wanted to point something out Google summer of code is very code centric. They will not accept ux I guess they have a special program for docs Um, but outreachy what you can do community advocacy You can do ux all the roles that you went through are eligible for outreach. So I just wanted to point that out. Yes. Yeah um I'm shaza. I'm a student at ucc university coach And my question would be like i'm not sure if this mentioned throughout the last two days or not Um, but would there be any direct connection between fedora and universities? Either in america or in india or in europe Middle east any of this? I can answer. Um, so in bruno red hat has a long-term relationship with the bruno university of technology where A lot of interns come as students And many of them work Not on the internal red hat stuff. They do work on upstream projects Contribute to the projects or contribute these projects to fedora. So it's kind of covering there So at least in bruno, and I think it's also boston university. That's been involved In the same or similar program Yeah, that's that's how we already have in place for Fedora contributions And but these programs these programs they unfortunately Tied to specific universities And that's usually how it's run around the world because it's collaboration with specific faculties or professors in the particular areas Now outreach. She is not tied to any particular college I do not think the google summer of projects are tied necessarily even to you have to be a university student Open infra is tied to a few different universities in the united states But we are open to other Colleges who want to contact the open infra foundation To do they're going to be more open staff kata containers, you know our projects versus fedora But I think if you contacted foundations or Maybe linux foundation as well. So at more more of a foundational level or Board level type of you know, hey, I'm from this university. This is my professor. We're kind of interested You know, you might be able to make it more More informal formal So it may not be paid But they might be able to work with the university in order to have an internship project Yeah, I'm actually an internet red hat and I could say that this is you know, the relations between universities and companies does exist You know during these providing these internships and things um, but I would say like From the university I'm in right now considered one of the largest universities in ireland and It was unfortunate that I didn't know anything about open source projects before I start my internship in red hat And I can see how amazing it is, you know throughout my internship and throughout this event But you know the idea that we we're not You know Open to any of this in the university either from the academic perspective or from the event perspective And so like my career is more is like would there be any in the future? You know more like fedora events that holds in universities to introduce students to these Projects and you know contribution to open source that these students who's looking for experiences Can't contribute these because me as a student I'm looking for experience And I always try to fill my time in the summertime, you know christmas time to do, you know any any Some sort of things that I can fill my time with that will benefit me on my cv and experience So I think lots of students would be interested Not just technical courses, but also non-technical courses would be interested in contribution to fedora So if this can be made in the future, it would be amazing. I'm a little worried that in your coursework You never heard of open source And I was going to point to you anyways mic So there are developer advocates that work at the foundation open intro foundation that I know reaches out And I will talk with her after this event when I get back on us oil Goodbye. Yeah Maybe just in response. So I work for the Rochester Institute of Technology. So university We're very lucky to have a long history of open source. So we have an academic minor in open source where students can take a series of five undergraduate courses And they're multidisciplinary too. So it's not just focus on development You know, you can be a business student talking about open source businesses and stuff like that You know graciously a lot of our history actually stems with our original partnership with red hat that You know for many many years Donated funding to our university and allowed us to have this very rich and vibrant student group That you know, I was a part of when I was young. Justin flurry was a part of and you know, I think was was a great way of us interacting with Open source projects. So with regards to your question I've noticed being in working in academia for the last three years. There is a large disparity between universities where some have you know for Probably mostly through like just chance and luck have been able to get funding and resources To build these programs and they've been really successful and students have loved them And then others simply haven't had the resources wherewithal or you know, there hasn't been this like academic shift Towards open source just yet In ireland if you're interested in the irish ecosystem Certainly trinity college doublin has a technology transfer office. That's very open source forward So if you're interested I could introduce you to the people over there We've worked with them and they're excellent And there there has been a couple other universities I'll have to dig through my contact list by be happy to connect you with people if you at least want like the irish Connection I'd be happy and maybe through that there could be a larger sort of Yeah, I can think of the university of aloha, nebraska Which runs the chaos project out of there. That's where it started. So there are universities that are doing things I'm a little disappointed to hear that it wasn't part of yours. Okay, and let me clarify that I was an animal science major I was pre vet so I did not take computer science classes So what your degree in also doesn't determine what you can do in developing open source You know so Most of the developers yes, they come out of computer science programs But there's so many different things you can major in and become involved in open source So I had a question on another topic. Um, you mentioned in this talk and earlier this morning about mentor cohorts And it's actually a concept. I'm not quite familiar with so I was hoping you could talk about it So because open believe it or not open stack in kubernetes communities. We're very close We talk to each other all the time And one thing these started was like one mentor with three to five mentees And it seemed to work really well for them when they were in their height of development Just for clarity open stack Is no longer in a type we're actually have more cores Out there than we've ever had before we're growing like crazy from users, but we don't have the hype Um kubernetes still has the hype though. They have a lot of the same issues that we do so it's always interesting to talk with them But the idea being that if you could put One or two mentors with a cohort there was less pull on the mentor itself So, you know, if they had a meeting or went on pto your mentees weren't just sitting there twirling their thumbs So there are those advantages Um, but one thing I felt that we had the issue with where remember I mentioned That they wouldn't even introduce themselves So they might be too shy and we didn't get to imposter syndrome earlier today But imposter syndrome can actually prevent you from just replying to the email with hi My name is amy and I came from the university of florida and i'm just getting and started and i'm interested in x y and z You wouldn't think imposter syndrome can keep you from doing that a little bit, but it can So you don't have that necessarily that one-on-one relationship on as a one-on-one mentoring you have to be a little more out there So there are definitely advantages and disadvantages of it So it really depends on your community and the mentors and mentees you have you have to figure out what works for yourself You mentioned that it was something that was done in these communities when they're in their hype Like now that the hype is maybe died off a little bit. Is this a less effective technique? Like is what are the requirements that would make this a successful approach? I wouldn't say it's a less successful technique, but they had more people coming in So they had more demand on the mentors Then they had mentors So it allowed them to share the work And help more people So that's where the advantage is because you're not taxing a mentor as much because they have a buddy or two And you can mentor Three five ten people So you can cover more ground It's kind of like private tutoring versus a classroom. You just balance it out Please ask a question on another topic if i'm digging into this too much I'm curious Would the two mentors be sort of of similar like if if i'll just throw out a random example like if In open stack if it was like networking Would both mentors be expected to be networking experts or could it be one is more a general open stack? Maybe they work on something else, but they're there to support the other mentor Like are there different models there that might work better than others? So we had Different tracks that you could say you wanted to be mentored in and that you wanted to mentee So unless someone Said you know all five of us want to be Neutron which is our networking. We wouldn't necessarily be that specific The idea also is we've run liaisons So that in each of the individual open stack project We had a name of someone we could put people in touch with So kind of like a mini mentor You know so that I've got my getting Garrett set up. You know, I've done some docs. I've you know, I've done this and I'm really interested in networking Oh, well, why don't you talk to alfredo? Why don't you talk to alvira? They're on the team. They're great people. Let me put you in touch with them because sometimes also You know that community advocacy isn't necessarily that you know all the answers, but you know who to send someone to I'm so proud of myself for talking slow Thank you, everyone. Do you have something else in this room now or I think it's another Oh, okay I see because we didn't capture it earlier Or talks will be a different speaker coming in For For the game Which we are getting off now and she gonna explain it which game it is. I hope you all will enjoy it Okay, I will Yeah A different room which room is it? So due to uh The state of fedora keynote was not live streamed fully on wednesday So at two I guess probably sometime in the next 15 minutes We'll be a read a retake of the state of fedora keynote in this room If you're in for the story stitch activity We're going to move to the room upstairs where we had the candy swap and where lunch is And we'll just take the tables up there to do the story stitch activity It's a it's a conversational card game I definitely would encourage you if you've never seen it before it's uh famous on on tiktok and instagram But it's also just really fun and you get to learn meet people and uh, or get to know people in a very different way so Yona amita anything else to add on Hi, everybody. I am matthew miller. I am the fedora project leader and this is my Uh Going into my 10th year of being the project leader and this is my 11th time I'm presenting a keynote at flock or nest conference because this is a redo because The stream cut off at the beginning of the other time. So I thought Yeah, there's some important stuff at the beginning We need to make sure that goes and if i'm going to do the beginning I might as well do the whole thing We'll see how it goes the second time around and you can decide if it's better or worse I uh, I make up a lot of it as I go along. So we'll see how it comes out Um, yeah, so over those 10 years there's been a lot of a lot of ups and downs and Some of a lot more ups than downs I think I think it's been generally a good time in fedora right now There's this saying Given somebody's as an ancient curse, but it's not actually ancient It's something that some british guy made up in the I don't know 19th century or so and I thought I'd I thought I'd give terry pratchett another another British guy the credit for it here but yeah, uh, sometimes Having a lot of stuff going on can be very stressful and uh, this is kind of how it feels to me in the world overall right now We've got war disease Famine basically all of the horsemen of the apocalypse And if heat waves weren't in the original set I think that they have kind of ridden up very quickly and taken over whichever the other fourth horseman was To be right in the forefront of the charge So that's kind of a lot and then of course closer closer to us Uh, red hat has been going through, you know corporate things. We had big cuts in our travel budget I was afraid we would not be able to get anyone here to this conference at all It actually turned out a very good turnout. Um, it's kind of weird to be giving this at the end of the Rather than the beginning so I can look back over the conference. Um, there were When I checked at the beginning, I should have gotten the number just for this But there were like 130 registrations, which isn't the biggest Yeah, okay Moe's looking it up for me here. Yeah, so we had we had good turnout much better than I was worried It's not the biggest we've ever had but it was great and we had people here together and that was that was nice I was worried about that but We had earlier scheduled this to be plan this to be in Detroit in the United States But visa problems there looked like it wasn't we're going to get people there if that happened and then We moved it to ireland, um for hopefully better visa times But then it turned out a bunch of people at the last minute couldn't come here because of that so that was Again worries and then uh, there were the layoffs at red hat, which That sucked for all of us at red hat. Um It affected company morale and it had a direct impact on fedora and you know that not just Red Hat nurse morale, but everybody in the community have really felt hurt by that so that Added to this Really just uh, interesting times and not the good way, I guess And then this last month all the things going on sento us So and a lot of worry coming out of that from people, you know in the community and a lot of Fedora users and people on the internet are kind of casually looking into like what's what's the pattern here is fedora next And not fedora next or earlier strategy fedora next and you know bad something bad happening to us Um, yeah, so all that's going on and that's all Kind of in the background here, and I hope that we can kind of Let that fade into being background noise And don't mean to diminish the importance of all of those, you know world crisis things or you know how How that things at red hat have affected all of us Um, but there are none of these are things that we in fedora can do anything Directly about there's this kind of you know hiss in the background And I hope that we can we can focus on the things that we can deal with um and Kind of fade into this peaceful universe at least this is a background that mo drew here during the covid Covid lockdown times through the fedora wallpaper desktop wallpaper, and I really liked it especially for that time. It's kind of a Place where we can kind of relax and remember, you know fedora is bigger than red hat I love that they pay me full time to work on things and I love that they provide all the resources for fedora a lot of resources um But really like all of us coming together to be fedora ends to be fedora friends For our family No matter who we work for like that's that's what fedora is about That's it's bigger than all of that and hopefully even in that chaotic world We can find this peaceful place And then though even more than just finding this piece and or respite from it all a fedora should be a place where we can Do this thing we want to do in a build this world a world where everyone benefits from free and open source software That's built by inclusive welcoming and open-minded communities That's that's the fedora project vision and I really hope that We can we can get to that utopia and I have a lot of optimism for how things are going This is a picture from A nasa 1970s like how is the future going to look what our space station is going to be like that? I loved as a child and still love there on the internet today. They publish these and it's that's to me that symbolizes That utopian future To other people you may have your own picture of it, but that's that that's what I mean by this here Yeah, but yeah, how are we doing towards that? One of the things we've been doing the last few years is a survey of fedora users and fedora contributors That we could put out there in general and tried to make as Scientific as possible. It's an anonymous survey where people can give feedback on different questions. We've designed and This just finished up on the end of july So it's hot off the presses in fact when I was working on this talk I actually didn't know what these numbers were going to be until the last minute And so I actually stayed up late and kind of redid things because there were different ways things were going to go So, um, oh, hey, what have I pressed? Wrong button on the remote There we go. Okay, perfect solved problems. Computers are great. Um Yeah, so this is this is the first time we did it. Um satisfaction survey and this came back really very high An average of 4.2 of you know out of five of how satisfied people are so things in the bottom are good there um And that year there was about 400 respondents in every category 800 total so pretty good response rate two that we thought um The next year we got about 20 more contributor responses and about three times a number of user responses so almost 2 000 responses overall um, and Basically the average went to 4.3. So things were getting better looking up now, um with all of that backdrop of the apocalyptic things and Everything else and you know, especially all of the online negativity that was coming from every direction. It felt like uh Over the last month. I thought okay. This is going to be this might be rough But one of the things I didn't even mention there that we had a change proposal So I'm going to talk about a little bit which was very contentious And I really was worried that there would be a lot of people who came in to just you know trash us on this and you know um So I thought was it going to be you know is the average of two now or I don't know but um, it turns out They love us. They really love us. I guess that's the thing No, um, we that we actually got a really good response on here. This is up again about 70% overall So almost 3 000 responses this time um And the average score went down a tiny bit it drops to 4.2 back to where it was two years ago But that's just kind of you know, I would love to see it all going up and up and up But uh, I think it's fair room some room for improvement there We're in the fours and we can grow and I got optimism for that And it was really nice to see these positive growing numbers here Continuing so I think we actually really are in a good place And I do have that room to improve and we uh, that that's what we want to work on here Uh, who to look specifically at the year-over-year change here in each thing That's something I thought was kind of fun. We actually had uh, Zero contributors who rated us at the lowest number one this year and by contributor in this case It is people who only identified as a user when they were asked to the different ways they participate in the project So a lot of the people who are contributors are users as well, but that's the the split here But so there's no one who said that they were involved at more than a user level who said they had You know satisfaction And it could be that we just you know lost those people there The six people last year who said that But I noticed that last year there had been eight people who said that we were score two And this year it's up by six 14 So I hope that we converted all of those six people to just a little bit a little bit more optimism And we'll see how that continues as we go on Another indicator here just this is uh from the introduce yourself threads that Community members have started on the fedora discussion forum and this is basically you know show up say hello and Maybe somebody says hello back and just go a little bit about yourself And it's kind of neat to see this just sort of organically grow year over year with more people participating and more Messages if you are watching this and haven't said hello, please join Just if you've been around fedora for a long time or if you're brand new it's a great place to just drop in and Start talking to people and I really see this as kind of a sign of health when a community is Just has that sort of natural engagement there and that that's growing The place to go is in the water cooler section of our forum, which is sort of the the metaphorical Thing where back when people used to go into offices all the time When you want a little break you just go and get some water and there'd be somebody else standing around where the water Bubbler is and you you know chit chat a little bit. So this is kind of our chit chat section of the forum there Up go there There's also an introduction section in our fedora space on matrix who've chat dot fedora project dot org I've actually seen you know increased activity there as well It actually been so quiet for a while I just was thinking about starting a conversation about shutting that down because An empty introductions room is kind of embarrassing, but it actually started picking up So thank you for everybody engaging there as well. That's another place to do this kind of thing I don't have a chart for that one, but yeah, it's a Okay, so this is A section where I'm going to show some other metrics which are about our the therus Stats on the the metrics we have on the number of systems running out there in the world And I show a dinosaur here because we do not do any sort of invasive tracking This is all kind of an observation level thing So it's sort of like doing an archaeological dig is something that you is millions of years of reserve hundreds of millions of years And you can't really reconstruct exactly you can have a theory about how you're putting things back together So Steven smoojin who's one of the people who's worked on this and done a lot of work on making that system work over the years I've Joke about this dinosaur thing and this is the dinosaur represents uncertainty is basically what I'm saying here So here is the latest things from dnf count me release release release and I was like wait a minute I've been that that looks bad. This should be going up into the right something is wrong here So actually something is wrong here and It's one of I don't have as many graphs about this as I often do it might talk because I found some bugs Here there's definitely a bug in the way dnf count me is recording systems Their system age and there seems to be something else as well because I was digging into this I actually noticed this is another view of the same data sliced by By variant and each of the releases at their peak The latest one here actually hasn't reached its peak yet because it isn't that usually is right before the next release So that will still grow but you can still see it's not really the great trend But I noticed that This is only desktop systems that are going down. So all the rpmos tree base things are going up including the desktops and server cloud Those are also going up if they break them out, but the desktops ones are going down, which is weird So I think there's some kind of bug there And so I started looking into the older method of tracking where you just count the number of ip addresses that show up in the mirror every day Sorry, and I shouldn't say tracking because there is no system tracking here. This is just kind of counts overall So the other older counting method And it happens that there is almost a two to one correlation here If you just double the height of the old line It hits the new one and that it's so close to a factor of two that I thought are we double counting and I had people check this like double check this so many times We're pretty confident that that's just actually what the the correlation factor is and there's there's reasons for that That we can talk about that it might be reasonable basically Between behind every network between everybody's home home router or whatever on average There's two systems or there may be some big places where there are A lot of systems behind one network address translation address or so what we'll see what that is But you can see that like there's a pretty good correlation there for those releases Pretty magical. I'm I'm not really actually can like it still might be a Double counting error and I don't really like the the actual numbers aren't really important to me Even if it's double counting, it's kind of that the trend that matters So the trend matches in both cases here, which makes sense But if I look now at the more recent releases, you can see it at the very beginning It works and then all of a sudden the dnf count me and kind of flops off which is Really strange. Um, and I think it might have something to do with some bug in the way that is working in dnf So I didn't dig much further into this but I am um, you know, I don't want to just be like Oh, I'm looking picking the numbers that I want to see But I think there's pretty good reason to believe that the more optimistic numbers here are actually More reflective of reality. Well, we'll see next time around. I may be like well that turn out. There's something terrible That's part of the the fun of doing archaeology and you do more research and you find out more things But that's that's where that is there Uh, yeah, sorry uncertain results. Um, if I didn't traditionally do this in my state of fedora I might have just skipped the whole thing, but that would have been weird. So here's here's the transparent. That's what I've got Um, I think it's I think it's mostly okay This is a pause for water segue here. So, um In other news, um, exciting things that have happened recently in fedora Um If you follow it all this data fedora talks I've done you've heard me say for years that Having most of our activity on mailing lists and on irc hides our activity It buries it under something where most people who are you know using the internet today on their phones or however Are not really seeing or even able to participate in everything that's going on and there is a lot going on in the project So part of this moving our chat from irc to matrix, which has a much Lower barrier to entry and kind of more like what people are used to in modern chat apps That's been that's been one big improvement And I'm also hoping we can move a lot of our mailing list discussions to Discussion depth fedora project at org, which is a discourse based forum Um, I think in doing that It'll be more obvious that we're alive as a project and in fact it will help us be more alive We are selecting out a lot of possible participants for bad reasons It We want to make sure we can bring people who are been engaged in the project are used to those Along as well. We actually had a big long session here again. This is the benefit of doing my my keynote at the end of the Conference we had a big long session talking to people about how that will work Um, one of the things is we've got to make sure we bring the content to the new platform It's uh mo pointed out to me mo is right here in the front earth line. That's why I'm talking about her all the time Uh, but she pointed out to me that it's you know, it is about the content and and having reasons for people to be there It's a social problem more than a technical problem can't be solved with technology And so one of the things I wanted to do to do that is bring our change proposals there where we talk about You know, what's going to be different in the next release of fedora? We traditionally talked about those on the fedora develop mailing list I wanted more visibility. I wanted more participation. I wanted more feedback more engagement. So Uh, we had the first change proposal for fedora Linux 40. We decided to do that on the discussion forum And how did that go? Well, um, there's another ancient curse. Be careful what you wish for uh, we had um 1378 posts in less than a month on this topic and most of those during the first week and over the weekend I you can see the numbers in orange there on the slides I probably should have put little fire graphics on them or something to make the show how dramatic it was But it was it really kind of felt on fire or felt, you know, kind of like this another another view People got really upset And a lot of people were coming in Uh, you know, we got a lot of accusations that this was decided in the back room and that IBM had made us, you know, was making these decisions and forcing it on the users who didn't want any of this stuff And I realized that a lot of the people coming in here We're not necessarily new to fedora as a user But we're new to this process. So a lot of people actually said, you know, I've been using fedora for 20 years And this is the first time I've spoken up in one of these changes So they really felt upset about it And I I realized that this is kind of a thing that we had the same problem with our release process where people You see every time we are like, oh, we've got to we've got to slip the release date from what we'd planned To a later date. Oh, no is fedora, you know, they don't have their act together Really, like that's a normal part of software development like Every every schedule was optimistic, right? And so Usually what people do is they just don't tell you what the release date is and surprise. It's done when it's done and you know, so even like The red head interpersonal schedule that's you know, they they they tell you when it's ready Not when not what's going on behind the scenes and in fedora we show what's going on behind the scenes And it's the same thing with changes. We don't have that back room All of these things are done in the open in public and So this is this is not a done deal kind of thing. This was people bringing it This is a proposal they're working on it happened You know, I I'd seen it before if they're working on it But most people uh and fesco the fedora engineering steering committee that makes the decisions This is the first time they're seeing it. So, uh It wasn't that back room deal But that's what people expected when they came in because you know, they're used to big companies when making making these decisions in and then it's it is a done deal and Basically as a user all you can do is go to their forum and just light that up and Put all the complaints you can in place and get all your friends to talk about how bad it is and respond to everything with anger And you're not expecting the people who are making the decision to even listen Maybe some for a manager person will collect things up and that it ends up being a like This is the weight and the heat and the anger and that's how like you can get your feedback Which like that's not our process at all and A lot of people commented actually that they were upset that this fedora would even consider such a thing that this could even be proposed so that that upset me but in a different way because fedora is a big collaborative project and I hope most of the people in the room help most of the people listening know and understand this already But I want to talk about it because it is such an important thing Fedora tries new things. That's part of who we are We've got we've got Freedom as our core value and I think a lot of people you know identify privacy and Digital privacy as part of the free software source software You know, it's one it's part of that value and I think that's true in fedora We also have values for features and first so we want to try new things. That's really important And most crucially we are friends all working together It doesn't mean we think the same but it has to be safe to propose things that other people might disagree with like people have strong opinions on things but That's okay. We don't always have to agree But we're always working together towards this common goal to make this world that utopian world like Where everyone benefits from free and open source software and it's built by inclusive welcoming and open-minded communities and that's what we have to be in order to do this so Yeah That that's that's what we need and so I don't know if people recognize the painting here This is the school of Athens Socrates And so this is how that turned out So we need it to be safe Even when people think a proposal is annoying or something is terrible or even dangerous If something might corrupt the youth like we've got to make room for those proposals Because we got to be able to talk about them So we're going to continue Trying to do this in the open We could instead bring this into some sort of back room We could put it back to the mailing lists or we could use features to make it so that you know only People who have been active in the project for to a certain level or certain meet certain other thresholds can participate Or even see the discussion at a certain point We could do those things, but I really don't want to I think that transparency I think it's great that we had more people involved in this We're going to going to try some new rules this next time around Particularly we're going to have zero tolerance for personal attacks, which is generally what we do in fedora anyways But this time because we hadn't really Strongly level set the expectations We were kind of lenient on a lot of posts that Where we could see someone was really angry and they wanted to express themselves and they also happened to you know say that the person was Something bad about the person proposing it Including that The people proposing it, you know aren't Don't have fedora's best interests in mind that they are acting in bad faith and some of those are those are a Former personal attack that kind of undermines undermines how we collaborate in fedora. So This next time around we're going to hide those as a moderation thing that which gives you a chance to edit it We would like to have your opinion, but you've got to be part of the process part of fedora and and work in a collaborative way it doesn't mean There should be dissent we want to hear all of the sides But you can you can make your point without making personal attacks and conspiracy theories and all of those things We're also having in addition to the rules. We're we have a Video introducing the process and kind of a some more background presented to people and we'll see how that goes the next time So We'll refine from that and hopefully things will get better and better and you know No one will have to drink the hemlock in the end and we'll be able to Continue doing fedora in an open and transparent way and make that grow and grow Okay, uh, so That was maybe a little bit Yeah, I got excited. I've got excited the first time. I did this got excited about the second time I'm passionate about that. It's really important to fedora um other thing I mentioned a red hats layoffs before and Red hats well layoffs really sucked. I won't go into it in detail because Uh, there's not really a lot. I can say it's what it really is those things out of our control um And yeah, this is not like the none don't take anything. I'm saying as like official red hat or those observations it It seems that the cuts really targeted Program manager roles at the company. There are a lot of people Who had that title in various ways and actually even are the people in open source the open source program office who are Not doing what we think it was program management in any way Actually had their Roles coded as program manager, which I don't know. There might be some like metadata is important everybody. Let's get our labels right but Yeah, so it kind of did feel like oh like wow fedora is in the crosshairs here. This really like hit hit but I don't think that was actually the case so it really um It it was miserable, but we weren't fedora wasn't particularly targeted other actually important Actually important other important projects and things that in red hat also have to deal with the same kind of thing So it sucks all around Fedora has a kind of unique problem because we actually have The assumption that we have a funded program manager role like codified into the fedora council charter And this really is a role that we depend on so and Ben cotton who was the program manager has a really good explanation of why this kind of thing needs to be a paid position There's a lot of things in fedora that you know amazing volunteers do wonderful things but There are some things which we need to make sure happen And you can never make volunteers do things. That's one of the beauty of being a volunteer If you don't want to do something, you know, you don't have to you can just go off and do something fun instead Of that difficult thing or just you're keeping to a routine and so on So this is kind of a role which is a lot about routine And so that's important and in general kind of keeping the momentum this idea of flywheel theory You should find ben's book and and look this up. It's it's really good But yeah, so a paid role is helpful Doesn't necessarily need to be red hat paying for that role theoretically, but it's not like anybody else has stepped up but luckily Mike McGrath, who's my management chain got a new position created which was moving heaven and earth under the circumstances in the company I think it's unfortunate that he had to do that But like I said layoffs suck. So i'm really glad that he did uh because You can't hire back for a role you just cut in layoffs for you know legal reasons on this can't be the same But it's also kind of a chance to actually reinvent what exactly we want the role to be in The role to be it doesn't have to be like a program manager at red hat in general It can be something really really fedora specific. So we actually have an opening coming in this soon There'll be more details coming up that soon So I am I'm glad that to get that support Um also speaking of paid roles one that red hat doesn't fund that I've been trying to get funded for 10 years They we have a diversity advisor position on the council And I really think that should also be a full-time paid role for similar reasons and it is it is hard work Um, so if anybody else out there like I said, this doesn't have to be a red hat role Someone else can be paid to work on fedora full time I would love to see another company step up and help fund this for us I think that would be really important because that is Fundamental to who we are as thorough as well And I think it's an area where we could always use help and growth. So yeah, you know challenge everybody Yeah, um, and so finally because this is the state of fedora kind of have the past the present and and the future here Where is fedora going? So our last big strategic plan for the project was called fedora next and that was almost a decade ago So it's time for a new map And to have a map and a plan first. We need to know what we're aiming for Famously it is difficult to make predictions especially about the future And anybody who says that they know where technology will be in five years, like they're flat out wrong They need to go back and talk to socrates and you learn a little bit about the nature of knowledge but you just think about if How technology five years ago and like look at what's in the tech news today and you know all the stuff with large language models I think you know some people might have predicted Generally, but like knowing where to invest and what's important like that would be very hard Fingers in the future. So what do we want to invest in for five years? There's going to be some specific things But in general we want to double the number of fedora contributors who are active every week So that means we have more people who are engaged and we have a really healthy project That is able to grow and change and so whatever comes at us from a technical point of view We'll be able to adapt and have You know people who are interested and who will bring fedora into what's needed at the time And so that's that's the overall guiding star to double the number of contributors who are active every week I joked about this last time when I did this so I'm gonna do it again When I say it out loud you can have that it is not ambiguous But in writing it's very hard to get double the number of contributors active every week written in a way That doesn't sound like we mean to every week double the number until we have infinite number of contributors, which would be awesome, but is probably not an achievable goal Sorry till I'm going to keep phrasing it that way because I don't have another good way to put it But that's the basic goal growth if we could if we could do that exponential growth great But I'll be happy for doubling in you know that by the end of five years have Twice the number we have now So what is a contribution exactly? This is the definition we came up came up with You have to actually be doing something. It's not you know It's not just signing up having a username like that's not a contribution I like that to be a plural thing not to be contributions And not just a drive through like you're making contributions before you're a contributor It doesn't have to be a lot. It can be very little. It'll be a lot of different areas But you have something where where you're there And it has to be something that actually kind of advances this in the direction of our project It kind of fits fits the mission and vision, which is very broad But that makes it a contribution and it's not something that's just played an incidentally a benefit Where it is Something that happens to happens to be there, but you're not you're not really intentionally putting yourself into it and Um, that's yeah, so this is the definition I came up with And nobody has come up with a better one if you want to help improve this again everything in fedora We are all about the incremental improvement. So if you have ideas for improving this I've opened to it, but this is basically our working definition here Um, and this is another thing I've talked about before I will not go into detail on this But this is kind of the framework for strategic planning and execution we use in fedora It is called a logic model and the basic idea is that over here on the Left side the right side We have kind of that the abstract high level things the guiding star and you know your mission vision Any kind of things the things you want to see happen? But that are not things you can actually directly affect and then over on the left It kind of scales down to the more concrete and I like this model a lot because it really tries to Make you connect what you're what you're saying your high level thing is into how you're actually going to do it And also connect what you're doing back into how it does that thing So we've been working in fedora council and fedora at large on you some of the Themes that are kind of on the very high abstract side of things Um, these are kind of the focus areas there and I'm actually not going to go into big detail on the specific ones here Um a lot because you know, we're going through this process and we kind of hit against This very rough patch and kind of the momentum died out of the work. We are doing this I was hoping to present like here's our logic model for what we're going to be doing at flock this year We were way behind on that target, but you know Given the state of the world given the state of everything. I think that's okay I think it's very more important to make sure we have The community working on this and that we're you know working towards this overall goal Then to have some sort of you know, perfect thing on paper But we do want to work on it. So Yeah, this is kind of where we lost momentum here Maybe a little little time on this one here like there's I'll go through the actual themes So fedora is for everyone Work on accessibility that's making sure that people no matter You know what accommodations they need can use our software and participate in our project And we want to make sure that you The fedora linux is available in more people in more places on in more in more systems and that we invest more in our local communities We want to work on mentorship. This is we want to both lead in how we do the distribution and what's in the distribution technically That's basically this things here and then Kind of how we structure the project and and how how we are already kind of make the things that we're working on now Kind of grow into better stronger things kind of the one we really haven't actually talked about yet in detail is the ecosystem connections, which is kind of about how we relate to other other linux distributions and our downstreams so given Brought changes in that the last recent times Maybe it's okay that we didn't really get to talking about that in depth yet And we actually kind of had some of that conversation here At flock at one of the panels. So that's that's continuing. We'll have to figure out where that will go Next down the road here, we do need to get this restarted. It's This is an important thing to have we want to have have a plan that makes sense and goes where we're going and I think over the next six months and maybe we'll come i'm going to come up with some specific dates for that I don't really have that right now But I my target overall is to have something that we really are feel good about as a community with overall input you know work from the council and from Community at large into having something we all feel good about that will present at the beginning of next year and at fosdem at the next year So in order to do that we really need all of your help We need feedback on these things We need people who are you know running for the foot of our council and helping to work through the process And you think about areas that Community has come up with where you would like to contribute to those or where you could be a leader because for each of these themes We really want to have somebody who is the point person for that who is Kind of helping to keep that organized and making sure that that thing is moving forward And we're going to need a lot of different people with a lot of different skills for all of that And I also need to file a ticket with the design team to update the logo Oh, it's already updated. I just didn't find it. Oh Oh, that's terrible. I should have should have checked with you. Okay. Well, this is a lovely sticker sheet And there's a better version with the right logo on it there somewhere So yeah, the hope is with all that. Um, I think We've had this rough patch. We've had rough patches before Things are interesting, but I think that interesting, you know can be good. We can use that Use that to advance the project and we can use that You know that the times have changed to move forward to where we want to be towards, you know, this utopian vision or The utopian picture that you have in mind when you think of you know, the fedora ideals Thank you everyone Uh, do we want to do questions in the room? There's like 10 people in this room this time There was a lot more the first time this is kind of like a fake audience, but go you can applaud. Yes allows applause Excellent. Thank you. Uh, does anybody have any questions? Yes Okay, we're getting a mic run hour This is kind of like a stupid question, but you know, you know the saying about it actually are stupid questions But I'll take even those that's the will we ever have a fedora masca a fedora mascot. So we have We've got a we actually have a number of fedora mascots that are um Kind of under content. Yeah under I don't know what content is the wrong word, but um Hold on let me see if I can find them just a second. Am I the fedora mascot? I hope not I was thinking of like a cat Who gives like advice? Have a little like comic strip like garfield except with like computer problems to find things here A revamp of our beloved fedora characters here. So these are some of the Animals that have been in fedora and these are actually the uh, so there's a panda here that is you see appearing things at different places and uh different So these are the current cartoon versions of these. I'm not sure I I don't know. I kind of feel like classic beefy still is is is the beefy miracle version, but You know there's the new one's fine. We've got a badger a badger So we've got we've got we've got these here. They're kind of the mascots We don't have any any one single mascot and I I don't I feel like in some ways that's kind of appropriate for fedora because I feel like getting everybody in fedora to rally around one favorite animal would just be um We've got a diversity of opinions about favorite animals in fedora and I think that's okay Yeah, do you want to run the microphone? Thank you. I have one and it maybe also pretty stupid one. Yeah, seriously But uh, this is something that I've been having some some thoughts By definition a project is finite. It has a start and it it must Have an end you should buy ben's book where he points out that fedora is not actually a project but a program SAC yeah, um, are we planning to continue being named project? Yeah, so I actually had a discussion on Mastodon I'm trying to do mastodon. It doesn't come naturally to me but Yeah, but about that naming problem because project Project has a meaning in open source that people understand that um is It's hard to think of something that is better if you have a suggestion. I'm I'm open to it I think fedora program doesn't really sound right even though it may be technically right in the project management sense Um, there's also a thing that is very red hat That is kind of important to how this got named project in the first place which is red hat works with open source projects and makes enterprise Products and this project product distinction inside some of the red hat business unit and marketing is like a foundational myth that if you try and poke at you will get um You know mythological level response sometimes to to what are you doing threatening things and in fact at one point When we are kind of working on the fedora next strategy and we wanted to use kind of product thinking Or it's kind of about how to put polish on our outputs the things you Look at like what do users want to need and put those into the things we're giving them We kind of started wanted to talk about you know fedora workstation fedora server as products and that was the one time at red hat that I got a friendly talking to about you know Whether whether this was a thing fedora should really do or should reconsider and so um I We decided you know, we don't really need to fight over that and backed away from product I think that we really would have fought we probably could but I don't think it would have been a Useful outcome. Actually the other one is about hats. This is another thing because especially at the very beginning of Fedora, they were really Worried at red hat that it would be seen as you know a red hat endorsed Product and so they didn't want us to use hats at all in our marketing And that actually is still a request today and that is why even though we are named fedora You don't see fedora hats in any of the fedora official things Again a plight request that is not a fedora hat. That is a red socks hat You can wear that that's fine But that's why we don't do hats on our marketing again a plight request from our sponsor that seemed not worth antagonizing To stick with the name fedora project. There's an easy way out. The end is defined by world domination Was that the end is defined by world domination by world domination? Yes, we will be done when every Just like that paper clips game when everything in the universe is turned into fedora, then we'll be satisfied. Yes, the project is done That might not meet some of the what? Yeah, I just Of course I think there's the smart was the Measurable wait, I forget what the s stands for that's been a long conference Measurable attainable something Specific right that's world domination specific the entire universe. Yeah, that's all right, but measurable is the entire universe if it are it Yes, attain maybe we may fail on the attainable on that one though. So I we can Aspirational though we could call that All right, does anybody else have any questions or silly comments? I think we're at the silly comments phase of the conference Ten years ago. I think I've seen blue fedora. You may have seen some more fashionable than me former project leader wearing a wonderful blue fedora But not officially in marketing just as a fashion choice. Oh, it just happens to be a blue. It happens. Okay. I've seen them. Yeah Thank you everyone. You're welcome Oh, there we go. All right Soon Justin's going to be talking and saying things that have some sort of meaning I just wanted to thank everybody for making this so awesome every year For our conference whether online or in person is such an amazing invigorating thing that Helps me be recharged for the whole rest of the year and I hope that's the same for you I hope everybody is feeling excited and optimistic about where we're going If you're not come talk to me and we'll try and change that but Yeah, I'm you know tired but happy which I think is a sign of a good flock And again, thank you everybody and Justin will be more specific I mean first like let's give it up first flock in four years. Thank you And I also want to make a call out. Thanks to all of our our virtual folks who have also been engaging I said it in the opening remarks, which ironically we're not Streamed or recorded But you know, this was a first attempt at this year of trying to reimagine what the flock experience can be So although we were careful not to call it a hybrid event We were putting our toes in the water and trying to make it more accessible for people who are Weren't able to make it here or unable to travel for whatever reason So I'm really glad that in addition to bringing all these folks back together in person We're making small steps to still make sure we're including folks who could not be here in the room because flock really is an important part of our community space and the nest events I think really showcased that The the virtual spaces are really important for fedora and that those are also should be continued to be first class Experiences for our events as much as flock is But we're going to do that we don't need the traditional kind of close out here I know uh, some of you might have gotten the tip that you know if you've been to a flock before in the before times Usually what we do Usually it's on the fourth day and we have a morning We were we were one day or half day shorter this year is at the end session We have an opportunity for all of our speakers But we can also do anyone else that wants to uh share a flock story or experience because we've got a whole Whole hour block up here, but I'm going to ask for any speakers or or attendees or workshop organizers for uh to share three things Uh a low light A highlight and something that you're taking away from flock this year Whether that's something you want to continue doing or something you learned Um, can we have our our speakers and or workshop organizers can you raise your hands? Perfect, so there's a lot of you uh that are here and also just want to Thank you for bringing your coming to flock and sharing your content here I know it was maybe a little uh Last minute at times But I think it all worked out and we had a really great Arrangement of speakers and sessions So I want to thank all of you for your contributions here this year But we'll go ahead. We have uh robert and jen here So low light highlight it's something it was maybe challenging or difficult Highlight is something that went really well or made a positive impression and then One change or something that you're leaving flock with so we'll go amita and then we'll go back over there um First of all, I'm very grateful to be back here again at the flock in person The low for me is not able to see um The familiar faces anymore Including marina And few others like ben marie So that was a little low for me because they I worked with them a lot For many many years the highlight of Of the flock was the keynotes I'm again putting this In because It made me realize that community is still the community. It is still the same. It has not changed Even after so many changes Happened around us It is still the same. It's open. It's transparent It's inclusive So that's the biggest highlight for me The takeaway for me is that There are many new people in here the fresh and young people And they are trying to make their way in fedora and they are facing it is Amazing to see see and realize that they are facing the similar challenges, which I may have faced during my time So my biggest takeaway is to help them navigate those challenges Not the hard way which I might have faced but By sharing my learnings and experiences and motivating others the experienced people To share their learnings with these newcomers. So they don't have to learn it the hard way So these are Yeah, I think that would be good for our virtual folks We want to actually Trying to figure out this format a little bit as we go, but maybe yeah, let's do that because Trying to make sure you want to meet it to come up then just to say Yeah, come on come on up so we can just have You you don't need to repeat because I think it was on the mic Like this is Come up on the stage And Actually as people are moving up here that made me think I actually wanted to do this on the first day But by a show of hands, how many Peoples this was their first flock that they've ever been to Well, we'll do both. So this is your first flock in person That's almost I think almost half or over half of the room, which is that's really exciting Raise your keep your hand up or raise your hand if this was your second flock It's a large larger other portion or still a large portion third flock fourth Six I think there were seven flocks on three nests. I think that's the count we're going for and now raise your hand if you have been to one fedora nest That's almost everyone two nests three A good chunk of the room. So it's really refreshing to me to also see all the new folks that have been here And to see that in addition to you know, we have a lot of sorry to interrupt you I was the person who was speaking before this statistics and metrics has been taken. So hello, everybody So also give your name and where you traveled from with your so Isaac i'm from cork, but i'm traveling from boston usa I'm part of the risk five international foundation group part of the linux foundation And for me the highlight was the low light. I'll be honest was I had too much. That was a low light And the highlight was I got to meet. I was surprised that I got to be able to meet other distributions as well. So rocky alma linux and in addition to just fedora, which was cool And the takeaway was there's lots of risk five follow-up on opportunity and coordination and triangulation I'll be doing with the people that I've met here this week So thank you justin for the invitation for accepting my proposal and I'm really happy and glad I was able to be part of this It would have been rude not to have you here. We're in your hometown Name and where you came from and then low light highlight one takeaway. Okay, uh, david cantrell I'm from boston usa as well um So i'm not going to do them in that order because I forgot I had one One highlight, but I want to add in two That I went one short So I really liked that we had The enterprise linux communities represented here as well at flock that to me was a A strong highlight because effectively we are one large community and we all You know collaborate together. So it's nice to have that, you know in one place and I think we should continue that effort The other short one is i'm a huge fan of the 30 minute session Like that made managing the days so much better. So I think we should really stick with that low light I already told you don't put windows laptops in for presenters and don't make me use powerpoint And then the takeaway I think One of the best things at any conference always is what we call the hallway track the networking the socialization I thought that was fantastic here, especially After how much time it's been since the last flock I had a lot of really good conversations with people on how to improve Communication and collaboration within the projects um that i'm involved with And got just a lot of good feedback. In fact, you might call it. I you know a lot of good discourse that I had so Ah, no, come on. Come on But no seriously, I I really appreciate the feedback that I got from everyone and it was You know I after one of these I get recharged and I go back and there's just so much work To get going on and leading up to the next one. So thank you Hello, uh, I'm going to start with low life I name and where you came from name where I came from Troy Dawson from Spokane, Washington, USA Low life, which was really wasn't that low. Uh, it's all been high Nobody showed up for my kitty. I know there was a couple of you there But uh, that was my favorite talk and uh, nobody showed up But it wasn't that bad Everybody showed up for my alternative images talk, which I was baffled by and surprised And I appreciated that Uh, this year for the state of fedora or state of apple. Sorry, matt I I actually tracked down all The the distributions that used apple and I was surprised at how many people was like, yeah, I use that little That's me that one and that's So I was excited that people appreciated that that is only happening once because now that If people expect that there's going to be some weird names in there And the final thing that I was excited for thank you all for your positive feedbacks on my shirts. Um, I appreciate that so If you put a weird name in there in order to minimize tracking of things actually filter out Um, the outliers so you will not be counted in my official overall stats So keep that in mind your the amount you would like to be You know counted as you know towards the overall Growth of everything versus the amount you want to appear in a funny name in a talk Both of them had their advantages. Just keep that in mind Name's akash deep third I came from poona india. Um, if my voice sounds familiar Thank you so much for attending the websites and apps talk as well as the state of the community infrastructure one as well So talking about the low light, I do think we could have done a better job at you know, the remote You know being a hybrid event the folks are joining us remotely. I guess it's the one sided event for you folks Well, there's always a scope for improvement. So let's hope that we can have a better hybrid event for the next time onwards For the highlight. Yeah, I was able to know that a bunch of fast usernames are actual human beings They're not some ai writing code making design and then trying to kidnap me No, you're actually human beings very lovely human beings might I add It was a very lovely meeting you folks and it's my first time in flock over here And what's my takeaway? Yeah a bunch of action items, you know, like uh, david said hallway track You know, you meet bunch of folks you understand this bunch of things that you could do To make things better. So I guess that's what I'll do. I've made a bunch of friends I think robert as well. We have the statistics thing that we need to take care of now. So bunch of collaborative opportunities That's about it. Thanks I'm amy marisha. I came from texas I'm going to start with a low point too. There were some talks that I had to miss because I went to other talks But that always happens at least We weren't any speakers weren't actually scheduled on top of each other, which has happened to me before so, um High point was really meeting everyone and I've been more Sent to us than fedora and I was really happy to see our communities come together for this Because we are side by side And having the enterprise linux folks here from alma and rocky also helped us to bring those communities together So that was a really big thing loved cork Loved the weather it's a hundred and something at my house right now. So sorry not sorry Thank you. Amy. Um, uh, I am Ivan from chihuahua, mexico Latam or please latam My low is jet lag. I'm still jet lag and if I tend to mumble it's because of that My high is seeing a lot of nerds that love fedora Uh, you are lovely guys in person and in eirc and everywhere And my takeaway is watching This guy is doing multi medium packages migration From rp and fusion to fedora, and I'm very hyped and motivated to help you guys So I'm gonna start doing that when I wake up Thanks. Thanks guys for putting out this event My name is sandro in the community known as penguin pee. I traveled from the netherlands. I live in the hake The low was last night's activity for personal reasons. I won't get into that The highlight was that we are able within the community to have heated discussions That set off fire alarms without burning down the building And my takeaway is that we have a great variety in the community and One thing to add is for the conference Even though we don't call it the hybrid event yet It should get one and it should stay it makes it more accessible for everyone So, hey, I'm nekita and I traveled from deli india to here and I'll tell you about my low lights highlights and learnings So, uh, there was no low light for me really, but I guess it was sort of a cultural shock to have the vegan food over here It's a it's there's a less variety over here. Maybe so yeah, that was a slight low light for me The highlights were many I would say so this was my first trip out of india for the first time that I got this opportunity to come out because of fedora and I got to map Faces to the handle names I used to see in the chat on the matrix channel so and I never expected such events to be This fun So I was I had an expectation that I'll be sitting there and I'll be taking notes It will be very technical but The the fun parts and the way the sessions were interactive They they were they were beyond my expectations. So it it was a very very fun event for me and The takeaways So through the sessions I learned more about redhat. So whenever I work for some organization, I try to Search them up try to read about them try to learn about them But more than the online reading and researching I learned more about it through these sessions and Yeah, I felt very much included over here. The community is very very nice. I didn't feel excluded I felt appreciated and I felt motivated to contribute even more because I I have heard people who start contributions to open source through programs like gsoc and outreachy and they discontinue the contributions thinking that they are not paid anymore For the contribution. So why should they contribute? But I feel that contributions give us a platform to learn more about The working of the organization and they also give us a plane to develop our skills So that was that was a take away from me That's one of my favorite flock things for the first flocks is just putting the the fast IDs to faces That's like I feel like the the most important one of the most important first things at flock It's mr. Maureen Duffy. I guess this has boston may My So um, yes, my low light is that I had this plan that I was going to do that at my talk And I forgot Because I had some laptop issues the first day and my talk was the first day So instead of getting to fully engage that morning I was desperately trying to pick up the broken pieces of my demo Which was not as cool as it could have been but at least I had something that worked Um, the I'm glad you like that. Yeah Gourmah agit Gourmah agit Um, the highlight would be getting to meet Jess and amma and paul who are members of the community design team The fedora design team that I had been working with for quite some time and never met in 3d So and we actually have a really cool group photo that we took I tweeted it out on the conference hashtag And we're holding out all of the mascots and just has kalour who's the flock mascot up on the screen there And she's holding him. So um, what was the other thing a learning or take away a take away? Um I don't know you all there's a great group of people and I really missed you. So I'm glad to be here I'm justin forbs. I'm from, uh, texas Came over here from there Lowlight would probably be the number of people who are frequently at flock who could not attend For various reasons. There's a lot of missing faces that I would have liked to see But that didn't stop it from being a fantastic conference and the highlights The hallway talk was great. There's a whole lot of work. I've got to do We've got to do a lot of things to improve the the manageability of the kernel and a few other things. Um I learned something about discourse that I didn't know before so that was kind of cool and Yeah, it was pretty good Other take away is I apparently I need to update my profile picture because You used to have a long hair to no beard and I have introduced myself to several people who I've known for years Hello, hello, I'm Isabella Whelan. I'm from Dublin It was a hard time to get up here So that's my first Like lowly was actually getting up here if you've ever seen someone sleeping outside. That was me I've missed so many talks because of that But my highlight was getting to see all you amazing people and also And learning a lot So what I take away from this is There's a free version of red hat And also, um, I may have accidentally Gone him into trouble for recommending me boards Thanks for that Name where you came from low light highlight take away. My name is Robert right. Um, I'm from Portland, Oregon in the U. S Um, uh, low light was uh team fedorables didn't win Uh, yeah, um, uh highlight I I really was surprised by the amount of community that was really focused on community Um, you know, a lot of what we do is technical You know, a lot of it is you know, open source development means writing code But there's so many people who are really interested in community matters, right? You know, what we do to be able to grow the distribution and you know focus on the people aspect There's so many people here who really really care and you you can see even the focus online and it's it's It's amazing You know a takeaway for me is uh, probably Uh, making sure we continue the momentum, right? How do we take this back? And you know when we're not here bringing this into our spaces and in our community You know through either discussion or matrix or other areas to ensure our community continues to grow So it's not too late if you still want to sneak up here Now is the time Um, hey, my name is adam. I'm originally from chic republic, but I came from the netherlands when I live Um low light. Um, not everyone could make it. Unfortunately. I miss some faces. Um highlights we've had many nice conversations and The difference between online conversations and impressing they're just like on an entire different level and there's more Space to focus on the community and maybe the way we talk normally and improving things in that way It's not just the technology. So that was nice. Um What was the highlight? Um, it was just a great time and I think that's it. Thank you Good to it some sense of fun So the discourse discourse was not the low light for me. I that was that was great I'm a little disappointed. We didn't get to the thing I wanted to do there, but the thing we did was important. Um, no, I think the Low light probably did not being able to be in enough rooms at once Although also not having as many people here. I like to get here That was also that but um, yeah highlight was just all the amazing things people have said is their highlights here It's so nice to hear them and just hear uh, yeah how It it's Amazing how much this can mean to so many people and I love you all Um, and you know that even includes that the panel which I was very stressed out about with the different distributions And it was just so nice to hear like fedora is the best for everybody Thank you all the downstreams. We're trying our best Um, and I guess the takeaway is test the av stream before the keynote so that you do not have to do your keynote twice I guess I should also uh So i'm justin i'm originally from uh, Atlanta in the in the georgia in the us My low light was um In previous flocks there were a lot of uh with the dei team We had made a lot of changes to the format of flock Towards greater accessibility and we had things like colored lanyards or people who didn't want to have a photograph taken or the communication preference stickers You know, there's there's always things that could be better, but I was I was Disappointed there are things that I I remembered from past flocks I I wish I we could have I could have uh covered a little bit more on that front Because I think there were really great things that we did before and I hope that next time we can Continue to bring some of those things back uh my highlight was Was was this uh, you know, I think for me it was a lot of you know, it was such a weird thing This is my sixth flock I started in 2015 and I was just you know attendee speaker sometimes But then after four years and then trying to bring Suddenly I'm in these shoes trying to do all of this and it was like I felt so much pressure because I was like I know what flock is supposed to be like I know what people are going to be expecting or What I felt like the event is all these things the highlights that people were talking about the community feeling the the friends part of our four foundations and I was really anxious because it had been so long and I That's that's what's always kept me in fedora Is that community feeling and I just really wanted to Make sure that we still had that and I feel like we did and This was uh, there was a lot of stress and challenges and it was my I never done You know, I kept trying to remind myself. It's like right. I studied networking and systems administration not event organization and management, but I I was really happy with all of it how it came out the great Amazing team that we have helping drive the organization would not have been possible Jen Natalie Amy Sean Matthew so And so my takeaway will be uh, you know, I think what's great about flock is that it can really help you Focus, you know when you have conversations on what are the important things? You know, it's easy to walk away with a lot of action items But it's also helpful to realize like what are people like what's the pulse on things? what are what do people care about and or what are people caring about right now and It helped me. I think kind of a Think more about how I want to prioritize that flywheel energy with my time that I do in fedora So that was really helpful to help illuminate some things for me Well, I think with that we can go ahead It wouldn't be the closing if we didn't have the thank yous. We have some special Acknowledgements and thanks that we want to do First I just want to give a huge shout out to the fedora design team For all of their work they put together for all of these amazing badges the t-shirts the swag the room signs The calor logo is on all the all the website We got a new logo for flock this year. Emma kidney helped create that one. So specifically I want to call out Uh, well people who some of them have already left but Emma kidney who is here on Wednesday and Thursday Moe Raise your hands when I call your names. We have moe. We have just cheetahs Paul power still here Paul is left We have madeline peck who was not able to travel here and marine ordin as well with the badges all the uh acclaimed badges Which by the way we have a special limited edition badge for you to get in tonight's social So don't forget about the ghost tour badge I think this will be the first time that we also make the flock attendee badge available to some of our our virtual folks as well So there will be there will be badges to be had whether you were here in person or you were tuned in on the live stream Uh, also as a nuisica. Can she raise her hand? Designed our logo on the front of the came with a concept and that designed their concept for the fedora logo On the front of the t-shirts the fedora is for everyone fedora can be everyone Uh, it was her her concept. I also want to thank of course our sponsors We had red hat and rocky linux at the platinum level sentos at gold Alma linux open suce meta and lenovo who were at the silver tier And you know, I I think there was a common theme. There was definitely some anxiety coming into flock But I was telling people yesterday last night and this morning is that I'm really glad that we did this and that we had these connections that happened here And honestly our sponsors made so much so much of what flock is is also the travel sponsorship bringing people from The five continents that we had in the room is I think that's a huge part even with some of the accessibility and Inclusion challenges that were there. I'm still amazed by how diverse our our community is and how the all these different journeys of Where people came from and our sponsors are a big part of that because that's where We really invest most of our spending on the conference is Helping people get here so that they're they can have their voice be in the room So I just want to give a huge thanks to all of our sponsors for Both for the travel support but helping do all the other logistics to help pull this event together So I really want to give it up for us I've got a list A huge shout out for the fedora marketing team and joseph gaoso who could not be here because he is uh currently with a Uh taking care of a newborn child with his wife when we say the marketing team. Thank you joseph It's joseph the marketing team So this is an area where like really could use some he is doing an awesome job But like we could use some more support because the awesome job needs to be backed up with a bunch of other awesome people Who can help um so that he doesn't you know get burned out on this and that we can continue to have like the Amazing like social media presence and all the things he's been doing. So just a little call for help. Sorry. I had to insert that in there And I want to call out too because he did some really thought all the social media posts if you were watching linkedin twitter twitter x mastodon All those content he was thinking that he came up with you know for the sponsor Thank you's you know He actually did digging and was looking at like how are all these how are all these Distros and companies actually engaging in fedora and he came up with all these very thoughtful posts and pointing to work that people are doing upstream and Uh, I that was a huge thing that he did. I wanted to acknowledge that I did thank our events team But I'm going to thank them again because they were so amazing and fantastic especially with all the crazy last-minute logistics of the last three weeks and Everything else has been going on and still trying to balance flock on top of that So I want to give a huge. Thank you to jen natalie amy shon and matthew for Bringing this together I do not get much credit, but also jen and natalie particularly should get some credit for never once saying look you amateurs During all of this putting this together They're very patient. Yeah In addition, I also want to give a thank you to all of our volunteers So we have volunteers throughout the conference who are running our registration desk We're operating our cameras and we're moderating rooms helping run microphones all over this way in that way So a huge. Thank you to all of our volunteers for helping manage our all of our rooms in the registration Another huge thanks, you know one of the things that I learned with flock is you know, even though we we you know If you remember from the long ago times We used to have those community bid processes where there were local folks who you know did the whole bid like Hey, we're going to come to rochester or poland and the community organized that whole process and Uh, which was a lot of things for you know, someone who's volunteering to do So we've kind of moved away from that a little having it be all on the volunteers to figure stuff out, right? But one of the things I think is still so important is having a local community where we go for flock So I want to give a huge shout out to all of our local irish Friends who helped make it super easy to come here and we're running things from waterford printing out the room signs And laminating things at last minute going out and buying door prizes and Helping us find restaurants that could take these crazy group of people who are all here So a huge thanks, especially I want to call out Uh, ifa maloney who unfortunately was not able to stay till the very end um Emma kidney as well who helped with a lot of the design And there's one more person I'm os link uh fion fion fio Fion who is also a huge help with a lot He was from here in cork and has also helped a lot of the on the ground logistics So huge thanks to our irish friends for helping host us this week And also one more time for all of our speakers and presenters raise their hands in the air A huge thank you for all of you for bringing your content to flock Thank you for uh putting together all the last minute slides cramming in uh workshop prep and doing all of Bringing your content here. Thank you for uh continue to engage with the flock With the flock cfp and bringing your and your work here. So a huge thank you to our speakers as well and then finally Uh an acknowledgement I just want to give to and I think it was justin the other justin who uh mentioned You know a lot of faces that weren't here this year You know, this is definitely the smallest flock that we've done in a while I think that was to be expected because that's also kind of what the across the board It looks like with the in-person events, but it's definitely different There were also faces that I Was definitely missing this week people who when I think of flock are also Faces that come to mind for me So I want to acknowledge both that even though this was our first time bringing people together Having those hallway track and getting to engage in that way We're definitely missing some people who could not be here and I just wanted to Acknowledge them and I hope that we can bring them back into the flock in a future year Also, we need to thank justin who really put a lot into this and have made this Be in another amazing flock event. So thank you very much justin So I I think that covers everything, but there's one more thing that uh want to share So if you might remember, uh, we were going to do a Detroit flock in 2020 And uh, something happened that year So we didn't take it that year and then we're like, okay, we're working in the hotel We're like, all right, we're going to come back next year. This is all going to be figured out in 2021 You know, we'll come back to Detroit. So, you know, they held the bid for us And uh, 2021 comes and it's like, ooh Back to the nest Which was great. Thank you, Marie Uh, and we tried again for this year. We looked back at Detroit a third time and uh Then we realized that the us visa thing was really hard that you know people and For fourth time. Oh, I'm just All right, that's COVID time for you. All right, we tried again. I didn't realize there was a third Something about Detroit, huh? Well, we were looking again this year in the challenge here for we were we're going to go with Detroit We're going to be doing this in the us But uh, the challenge at that time was that us visa's were this really long wait people in Mexico and brazil had like a Two-year wait just to get an appointment people in india had three years just to get that first appointment for the visa So we went with ireland Which was I think a great choice because we had all of our great lovely folks who were here to yeah our local friends but With that in mind, it's been seven years since we've been back to north america Some of you might remember the massachusetts cape cod flock of Longo Yes, there's no cheers because of the black mold That said it's been a while since we've been back on that other side of the ocean And while I do want us to continue thinking as a as a community how we can continue to support our friends and latam And apac and places where we don't have that central event Bringing people together. I want to still think around how we can include those folks and make sure that we're not just Limiting ourselves to two places Uh, that said it's it's time to come back to north america So I'm happy to announce next year. We will be back in north america for 2024 Dates and location coming soon, but for now we will be back in north america 2024 with flock And with that I think we're at the end of Where did the three days ago? I thought I just got here. There's a little jet lagged misplaced my passport Got stuck in the emergency room a couple days before flock, but you know it worked out And uh, I think from here, I just want to again Thank you all for being here being a part of the experience All the new faces that could be a part of the event in the community You'll probably tired of me saying thank you all the time. You start playing the music But more logistics before we all break out from here We have some evening socials with a badge a limited edition badge for you to claim We'll be doing the ghost tour tonight. So with a plan. Yeah ghost tour So at 5 30 we will have shuttles coming just like last night shuttles that will be coming from the Front of the hotel that will take us down into cork city. Some of you are doing the group at 6 So I believe we will be meeting the guide there when we get there if you're in that first group Some of you are doing the 8 15 tour So if you're in that late group go and have dinner have a night out on the town And the bus is coming back from the city to this hotel will be at 10 p.m So we could probably end a little bit early get some time to refresh and recharge And I hope to see you all for the evening social tonight in cork Thank you all for an amazing flock and we have a last Yes question was if you're taking uh, uh, you want to come into town but not do the ghost tour You're welcome on the shuttle All right everyone, thank you for an amazing three days And I hope to see you both online in our next release party in november October and hopefully the next flock. Thank you all