 Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE, covering Open Source Summit North America 2017, brought to you by the Linux Foundation and RedHash. Okay, welcome back everyone, live in Los Angeles, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of the Open Source Summit in North America. I'm John Furrier, my co-host. Stu Miniman, our next guest is Jono Bacon, who is the founder of Jono Bacon Consulting in the community. Great talk here at Open Source Summit. Great to see you. Thank you for having me on. Congratulations on all your recent success and the personal and business side. Congratulations, great to see you. So, bottom line, Open Source Summit is kind of powered by the Linux Foundation, but pretty significant accomplishment and state of the union, if you will, calling it Open Source Summit, big tent event. What's your view on this? How do you explain to folks watching, is this a new event? Is it a combination of multiple events? Certainly a great, great big tent, cross-pollination, whatever you want to call it, but what is this event about? Share with your opinion. I think it's interesting, and I don't work for the Linux Foundation, but I've worked very closely with them for a number of years, and I think what we've been seeing is that in the earlier days of Open Source, there was, you know, the Linux Foundation have played a fairly key role in certain specific areas, and in recent years, they've become a real center of gravity around Open Source in a variety of different areas, from automotive to cloud and beyond. And obviously there's a ton of events that are happening in all over the world, and the Open Source Summit I think is interesting because it's really an umbrella event that's got four other events that are part of it. So the event that I was running, which we launched this time around, was the Open Community Conference, which is kind of like one thread of this broader event. So one of the things I like about it is, is different events from my experience draw different types of audiences. The Linux Foundation events have traditionally brought a lot of professionals who work in the industry, in a similar way that happens at OSCON as well. But I like that the events kind of become a little bit more organized and diversified into those four areas. And I think what happens then is you get a greater bandwidth of content and discussions in the whole world. I think it's an interesting point of these other streams, if you will, kind of running into the Big Ten event. It's got an ecosystem vibe to it because you don't want to lose the specialty of the topics and interests at the events that matter for the audiences on content faces and face-to-face communications. But it's interesting that they're taking this approach because if you look at it, the scale that's coming in open source generally categorically, if you put all the code together, it's exponentially growing. So there's a flood coming. There's a big open source flood of code coming. So I think it's time to stick architecturally about the dams and the rivers and the flows. To your point, this is a super important point in history. Oh, it's without question. And one of the things that's interesting to me is, in my work as a consultant, when I help companies to build communities, it's broken into a few different layers, for example. So one is a technology layer, like which of the Lego bricks that you're going to choose to put together and how do you click them together in different ways. And again, that's why I think the LF has become a real center of gravity around what those projects are and how they integrate. But the other thing that we're starting to see more and more of is, I think, is the formalization of the software development life cycle, which is, it's not merely just writing code anymore. It's about automated testing and continuous delivery and deployment in all these different pieces. So I think we're seeing a formalization of the Lego bricks, but also the instruction of how you click them together. And that's really important if we're going to broaden out this bubble, because this is a bubble that we're in right now. This is full of invariably tech companies talking about technology, but when we get into bigger enterprises, when we get into non-tech, into the non-tech world. And the realities are there. And there is so much nuance wrapped up in open source that is alien to people outside of this world, that we need to build that better interface for that. And that's just putting some hardening around either software or process. That there's some comfort and reliability to the users. I'll give you one example. Like one company that I was working with who a large hardware company, fairly unfamiliar with open source. And one of the first questions they asked me was, like, what does success look like? We don't know, like, we know what all these options are. We see all of the things that people are talking about, but we don't know how to determine what success is. And I think even just that, it seems like an obvious thing to the people in this room, but it's not obvious to a lot of people who are new to consuming technology in this way. They want to see a finished line or some KPI that says, we're done. Exactly. And also, you know, because this is technology that's built by a broad diverse community of people, you then, a lot of these organizations then say, so what is my expected social responsibility here? It's like, how do I participate in this world that I'm broadly unfamiliar with? You know, to me it's like a hip hop art. It's trying to join a metal band, you know what I'm saying? It works differently. It's completely different genres of developers and also environments. What's your advice to customers? Because, you know, they have to navigate because the mainstream adoption of Linux, obviously, and now new projects as they graduate or come to fruition will be deployed. So there is an ops, the dev ops certainly is a movement we're seeing that we're going to agree on. But now I got to put it into production. Right. Yeah, I'm a bank or I'm an enterprise. Hey, I got some guys that are monitoring. We're not that active, but we're happy to use it. Be a user. How do you talk to that customer? Right. The way in which I try to approach it is, is to break it into a few different areas. The first thing is, is to first of all make sure that everybody's got the same sense of what the problem is that you want to solve. One of the things that was transformative to me when I started consulting was, it's amazing how many people think they're solving the same problem, but they're actually on a completely different grade of the same problem. So to me what I like to do is I like to define what I call a set of key themes, which are these are the big rocks that we want to target in a timeframe, six months or a year or whatever it might be. Particularly with when you're either doing community strategy or development or you're doing a level of open source, it's fundamentally cross-functional. It involves marketing, engineering, product. There are executive stakeholder requirements and then there's the people on the ground who are delivering those. So getting those themes in place I think is critical. But then to me what's important next then is to break a broader strategy down into smaller consumable pieces. I think one of the things where a lot of companies get stuck is they're aware of these different Lego bricks that are available to them. They're aware of some optimizations in terms of workflow, but it's such a huge thing to bring in to an organization that invariably has already got a very, very stodgy or very specific culture that they've got to somewhat unseat. So to me you need that combination of a permissive top-down approach, which is invariably your exec saying, we see value in this, but then you need to break the strategy and the execution down into smaller, manageable pieces that a team can wrap their head around. We were talking to the Cisco guy Ed and he was talking about DevNet, a huge developer community for Cisco. DevNet Create was kind of their cloud native group that they put together. Great little skunkworks worked out great, but those are two languages, there's two worlds there. The semantics of what they're saying is the same thing, but the translation is needed. This seems to be a common thread within the dev house community now that the rubber hits the road and people see the obvious benefits of whether it's true private cloud or cloud native. So how do you go ahead? You provide like a dictionary, it says, hey, here's the translation. Okay, he really means that. I mean, are you being more hurting the cats, being a translator or as a client some further along than that in your mind? It varies, it does vary from company to company and a chunk of this, at least from my experience, is there is a significant translation layer. One of the things I talked about in my keynote on Monday was I see collaboration, like I do community strategy, but fundamentally it really is organizational design. It's just outside of a company in some cases and sometimes inside of a company. And in an organization, you'll have a set of stakeholders who are making decisions and then the people who've got to execute in those decisions and there is often a massive translation layer between them. I run a conference called the community leadership summit each year at Oscars and every year a couple hundred community managers come along and I hear the same story from a lot of them which is, I joined this company, I started building out, I started doing my work and my manager wasn't happy. To me it's because the execs are defining value that they want to see but it's not getting translated into tactics and very rarely all of the folks who are coming in to do this. Where their ROI calculations are, they're not seeing the real answer. They don't know what success looks like. And they come in and they don't necessarily have the strategic background to internalize that requirement into a place that they can move it forward. So you get this impedance mismatch. So a big chunk of what I tend to do is to really try to understand what those requirements are and to work across the organization to try and- You're doing architecture? Right. Like organizational behavior architecture in the wild but also an arbiter to the managers. It's looking good. It's like you're trying to score the game. You're like keeping- And some of it as well, as I'm sure anyone who's watching this will have seen this with the companies they work with. This isn't rocket science is, you know what someone says they want. This is going to sound incredibly patronized and it's not meant to. But when someone is what they want, invariably what they actually want is not that thing. So for example, you know, I was working with a company a couple of months ago and they were saying like we just want growth. Like we absolutely want to grow as quickly as we can. And when I dug into it with their CEO, what they were really, what they really wanted was brand recognition and acceptance. And those are two very different, two very different challenges that you're going to approach there. Still get a word in. I'm sorry. John's passionate about community if you can't tell. Question I have for you is, building community takes time and things are changing faster than ever. How do you help people manage that, that pace of change versus I want results and it seems strategy is something that is for today and we're changing often. So how do you manage that kind of give and take of growing yet breaking? It's a great question. And again, I think it varies. To me, there's some fundamental pieces that are involved in the way that I, and I take one approach and other people will take different approaches. I'm certainly not the only person who's doing this. The approach that I like to take is, is we first of all need to treat communities as a journey. It's not, I think a lot of people think, we have a product for a service. Let's get people interested. And it's seen as a series of individual interactions with individual people. Whereas the way I look to look at it is when that person discovers your product, your service, your framework, whatever it might be, there's a journey from how they learn about it, how they go up and on ramp to get something done, how you get people making their first contribution of how they derive their first piece of value and then how you incentivize and reward them to keep them moving along the journey. So to me, I look at it as this zoomed out bird's eye view of this journey that I want to craft and then I like to break that down into small bite-sized pieces that form the strategy. But the other thing is, and this varies depending on the companies, is to what level of transparency and openness you need to communicate with different people. So for example, one of the first things I do with InnoSource when people bring in open source principles inside a company is to make sure that we have weekly reports going out and we're updating the stakeholders more specifically on a regular cadence. Because I think in that kind of environment where an existing enterprise, we all see these like digital transformation consultants come in. A lot of people like. It's a total gravy train. They make them the bookings and the billings. It reminds me of the old ERP deployments. Write a big fat check and it'll be like, all this consultants come in, make all the cash. And I think a lot of people are looking at them thinking, all right, lunchbox, you'll be here for a year, you'll be gone then, all right. And we'll be on to the next thing that our CEO cares about. So to me like. Well, the consulting business is being disrupted. It's interesting, you're a contrarian in your world because you have a consulting firm, but the old model used to be the next gig is to get that next consulting gig. So you worked not to actually put yourself out of a job, which is what the client wants to get. And that's where agile and cloud has come in. It's interesting is this is where the work product is, you know what success is in that model, right? You can come in and say, look, we did our work. Everything's got a community that's vibrant. You got operationalized, your value. Yeah. You don't need me anymore unless you want me. So, you know, it's one of those kinds of conversations. Your thoughts. I agree and it's interesting to mention agile. One of the things that I've noticed as well, and I'm sure lots of, not just consultants, but people notice this as well is, is there are, I think there are, there are broadly two types of people in the world. I think there's people who take a very kind of organic and somewhat animated approach to how they do things. And then there's some people who really need a roadmap. They need, they need to follow a plan. And on the, I think a lot of people who are building organizational design or building communities default to we need to create a process and a workflow. So people can follow that and we can have a sense of order. I don't think most people naturally want to work like that. I think there's a reason why people don't stick with to-do lists is because people like to have a more organic way of working. And a good example of this in my mind is agile. Like some people will take agile to the end of the degree with story points and epics and a lot of that kind of stuff. And in my mind. You serve the process, the process doesn't serve the objective. I mean, it's the classic effectiveness model, but I mean, that's the whole point. I mean, you could score close opportunities if you're too structured, but yeah, you got to have some boundaries for the ball bounce around. So you got to want both. What is the ideal in your mind? In my mind, the approach that I'm a big fan of is an approach called Muntzing, which was the story of, I forget his name, there's a guy back in the 50s and he basically owned a TV factory. And what he'd do is he'd go up to an engineer who's building one of these big, bulky old TVs and he'd basically pull out components until it stopped working and then he'd put that last component in. So it'd be the minimum level of components for it to work. Ended up saving the company a ton of money. I like to take the same approach and process. What's the minimum level that you need that gives people the creativity to be successful in a predictable way? So like with Agile, these epics and storyboards and things like that, I think a lot of that stuff is just there to deal with crappy product managers. Like people who aren't very good at managing a project, no process is going to deal with the, is going to deal with someone who's not good at organizing. You need to bring to me like the right level of the human ingredient and the process is what just keeps people ticking over. The other thing too that I find in that area is people kind of redefine or they maybe mischaracterize what outcome is. Everyone's like, oh, outcome driven. Love that word. It's all about the outcome. In this case, the TV's got to work at a less amount of moving parts. That's the outcome. And so outcomeists can be bastardized, if you will. Could be really mangled in its definition. How do you work with clients on trying to really kind of temper and set the expectations on what the outcome is? Because the manager still wants to know what the outcome is going to be. So do you reverse engineer from there or how do you tackle that? It's interesting. A big chunk of it for me is just, is being realistic, you know, like is, there is no minimum amount of work, I think, that needs to be put in to achieve any kind of community. I think you can build a tiny community with one person. However, depending on the requirements and the goals, there's just certain things you have to do and there's certain time and resources that are required. And also just expectations. Like one of the expectations that some people wrestle with, I think, is that I always try to set is, if you're building a community that are inside your organization or outside, it's only going to succeed if a broader set of people participate. You know, we see this trend where you hire a community manager and that person lives in a forum or a Slack channel to build out the community. It doesn't work. Because the people in that community want access to other people. This value creation mindset in communities, value has to be a group dynamic. There's individual contributions, I get that, but the group dynamic is critical. Not just a message board moderator. Right, I mean, that's basically what you're saying. He slacks a message board. You know, nobody wants to deal with, nobody wants to deal with, you know, the interface of the thing you care about and that's the community manager. So, a chunk of this, then, is a different mindset in how people operate. One of my clients is a company called Hacker One. I wrapped up working with him a little while ago and their CEO is this guy called Martin Mikos. Yeah, Martin, he's a great CUBE alumni. Phenomenal, and he's, for me, is like one of the people I most respect in our industry. He's a great strategic thinker, understands community, knows tech. Right. He's an amazing, and one of the things that he said when he joined Hacker One was, I want everybody in this company to know a hacker. Everybody's got to know our audience. Everybody's got to understand the needs, the desires, the insecurities, the worries, the dynamics. Otherwise, we can't build a community. It's not just hiring a person to interface to that. That's one of the trickiest things because, again, it takes time. It's alignment to the audience. Right. This is classic, right? I mean, ingratiating in and actually being cool, aligning with them. Right. And if it's done well, it's really rewarding because I think people who ordinarily wouldn't see the fruits of their labor. Well, John, I want to get your thoughts as we wrap up the segment here on what's exciting you about potential new things that are coming around the corner. Obviously, we see the promise of blockchain, which could have a great big application for communities. We're doing some things with it now that we're testing in our community around trying to create these new value networks. Certainly, there's new tooling coming out, things like theCUBE and content and communities. New things are coming. The growth is going to be here, which is going to create new opportunities. What are you excited about as you want to navigate the community landscape because the thesis is more people are coming in, more rivers of distinct audiences are going to want, specialty, but at the broad market, what are you excited about the community opportunity from compensation to interaction to culture? Right. What's your thoughts? There's a few things I'll subdivide into things that relate to my bread and butter, which is communities, and things that's more broadly in technology. The one thing I'm really excited about communities is I feel like the value proposition has become well understood. Is not just in open source, but outside with Procter and Gamble, H&R Block, Harley Davidson, all these examples where people see the value in doing this work and doing it well. And that's great because I think we're improving the state of the art of how we do this. One of the reasons why I got into this was I want my career to leave a fingerprint on a structured, predictable way in which we can do this. As opposed to this seeming magic science that a lot of people seem to think community is. For a series of one-offs that are unknown, not understood or can't be operationalized, are leveraged in a way. Yeah, exactly. From a technology perspective, there's a bunch of things. I'm really excited about crowdsource security, things like Hacker One, Bug Crowd, Synac, things like that. I think there's a lot of excitement in my mind around bringing open sourcing to financial services. There's an industry that's ripe to be disrupted, which is a sentence I would never thought I'd ever say, ripe to be disrupted. And then I'm also really excited about the work that's going on, obviously in AI, but the intersection of AI with kind of like voice control. Things, obviously things such as Google Home and Alexa, but also things like Minecraft. I think blockchain is interesting. It's kind of less interesting to me. I've just, it's not really something I've really been following very closely, but I think it is. I think it's pretty neat. But then also just the formalization of the end-to-end software development life cycle, and how we're seeing GitHub was transformative in technology for a lot of companies, and now we're seeing GitHub as one piece, and you've got continuous delivery, and continuous deployment, and also how you manage ideas, and project management, all that kind of stuff. I think there's a lot of transformative ideas coming, and I think it's super exciting. Congratulations on all the great work you're doing. Thank you, appreciate it. And I just think that the self-governing community model that's now becoming mainstream, people starting to figure out how to balance that with the command and control, top-down, and hierarchy, job definition specifics, and balancing that, I think the self-governing open-source model certainly proved that, and communities is a working example of what you can operationalize. It's exciting. And crowdsourcing just takes it to the consumer level. Right. No, hey, okay, it's working there too. Right. Okay, great job, thanks for coming on. Thank you. I know Bacon, Bacon Consulting, it's theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, I'll see you in a minute with more live coverage after this short break.