 I appreciate you all coming. Thank you so much. If you're here to talk about JavaScript, you are in the right place. So one thing I've heard many times today so far is, like, just a refrain, open source is eating the world. And if that is true, if open source has truly eaten the world, then in my humble opinion, JavaScript is responsible for multiple helpings of said world. I think a lot about that. Kids' poem, Hungry Mungry by Shel Silverstein. Hungry Mungry ate the whole world. And I think that actually may be about JavaScript. Come to think of it. So I don't know if anybody else showed my opinion about that. But so click. There we go. So this talk is about how the next, I was just going to say, if it's really eaten the whole world, then space is its next meal. Because we've sent JavaScript to space now. If you want to find out more about that and how it's being leveraged off-planet, or whether node modules really are the most heavy thing in the entire universe, you can check out this great talk that we had from Christina Koch at our 2020 conference. And yeah, something I wanted to share. So I want to thank everybody for taking time to come. My name is Joy Berson. I'm really lucky to be, and I'm proud to be, the community director for the OpenJS Foundation, where I get to work with an amazing team of people, including Robin Yin, our executive director. And Brian Warner, our program manager. Also Liz, a community leader who's joined us here today. But a lot of community leaders from some of the largest and most highly consumed open source JavaScript projects in the world, including Node and Webpack, NativeScript, jQuery, which is still used by 70 plus percent of the web AMP. So it's a pretty big gamut of projects that we have. And in December of last year, we wanted to create a program that would help drive community and participation and general support and other benefits and things for the foundation. And it's very many and very different projects. JavaScriptlandia is that program, and that's we're going to talk about today. We'll discuss some of the benefits that we found and as well how we got it off the ground and that kind of thing. And maybe it's something that will be applicable to you and your communities. But first, I'd love to tell you a little bit more about some of our projects for context and also a little bit more about the foundation. There we go. So we have over 35 open source JavaScript projects. And they touch just about every layer in the software development stack. So we have core utilities like NVM and AJVJS and Lodash, which, again, another project that's still quite highly consumed. We have packages that handle streaming and parsing. HTTP requests, native code integration. We have development tools like ESLint and Appium and QUnit and WebDriver that do testing and code linting and code quality. We have build tools like Webpack and Grunt. We have tools for accessibility and internationalization like WebHint, Moment, Globalize, Message Format. We have some of the most highly deployed front end and back end frameworks in the ecosystem, Express, Fastify, jQuery. And we have tools that are functionally platforms of their own. So Node.js, Electron, AMP, Node.Red. These are projects that have spawned their own ecosystems of plugins and open source libraries around them. So they work across solution domains. So we do deployment, IoT, serverless, low and no code. We serve hobbyists. We serve Fortune 100 companies alike. And we even have one of our projects is an award-winning project, Hospital Run. It serves medical facilities in low or no latency environments in Africa. So quite the gamut of projects here. And in my view, maybe I'm biased, but in my view, they're all pretty critical to the web platform. They're also all independently managed, which is quite unique, I think. And the truth is, your organizations are probably using one or more of these, whether you realize it or not. So hopefully, I'm not being too hyperbolic to say, I think they're quite important. They are also very different. As you can see from the previous slide, not just are they different technically, but they're different in terms of size. So how many people are consuming them, how popular they are, how big their code bases are. Some of them are run by sole maintainers. So just one or two people driving the book of the project. Others have really large multi-organizational governance structures, thousands of contributors. So we've got the difference in governance models. We've got difference in the geography. So some of them are more popular in different parts of the world, or they're maintained for multiple parts of the world. Differences in their community and the culture around those projects. I think that's actually one of the things that is a big strength. It's a reflection of, I think, the broader JavaScript ecosystem. There is no one JavaScript community that rules it all. It's decentralized, but it's also highly codependent. And I think this is one of the things that makes us a robust and resilient ecosystem. So very different, very, very different groups. This begs the question, though, if we're wanting to create community, how do we define community? So this is a tough question, and it's one as a community director I want to ask in myself a lot. It's about kind of understanding the scope of the, and trying to understand the scope of the communities that we're trying to connect with. So that resonates with me. The question of how we're fostering a community across all of these projects, when, in fact, the projects themselves are very different. And on the surface, they maybe just look like the only thing they have in common is JavaScript. That's like saying, let's create a community of English speakers. It's quite hard to do. So it's so challenging that a lot of people don't really think about this question, or they don't really consider some of the distinct differences between audiences and communities that they, until it may become an issue for them. So there was a book published in 2019 called Working in Public, and the author there kind of broke down a couple of different communities that she saw that kind of require a different touch. And so they have maintainers and core contributors on the way down to people who are end-users. The folks just consuming or using the project in some way. Or do you consider your definition of community to be all of the above? At the foundation, I think we take a really big approach. We want to be as inclusive as we possibly can, and to take care to ensure that we have programs and offerings and stories and support for each level, because we've got the core maintainers of these important tools. But we also have the end-users, and the casual contributors, and the commenters, and the people who are supporting the project in some way through tutorials that we want to support. So that is kind of, like I said, our big 10 approach is to try and tackle stuff that will help all of the above. So come on, I think here we go. There we go. So why is it important is another question. Why is it important to define this community? Well, as we mentioned, the ubiquity and the scope of JavaScript makes defining the JavaScript community really, really difficult. It almost defies definition in and of itself. That is, I think, kind of problematic, because it can make it hard for people to learn the language. It can make it hard for people to getting into JavaScript to really understand, what's the right way to build a modern web application? How can I get involved with projects or make connections across projects? How do I start to understand the differing perspectives or the differing techniques and strategies and approaches that may exist across JavaScript text stacks? At the very least, how can I start to feel welcome in a community or at least successful in achieving my goals in JavaScript without that community? So I think beyond learning and mentorship and that understanding of different perspectives, you also get the benefit of opportunity and inspiration when you create an effective community space. That's some of the challenges in not doing a community. I loved this quote from Carl Sagan, which is originally, if you wish to make Apple Pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. But I think it kind of applies to the JavaScript ecosystem as well. And that sense of overwhelming, sort of like, how do I in this space can be quite difficult to overcome if you don't have a community space to connect with. So that brings us to why the OpenJS Foundation. So our foundation exists to serve this JavaScript ecosystem and to help build that community, to help take care of sort of our JavaScript water cooler spaces, if you will, by building connections across the projects and sharing information to support. Oh, did that just skip all the way to the end? That's cool. Why did that do that? Well, this is fun. Boop, boop, boop. There we go. OK. So sorry about that. So we believe it's really important to provide this neutral home for our critical projects with the common principles of technical governance and accountability. And to do that in doing that, we're providing more long-term sustainability, both for the specific projects that we serve, but also for the ecosystem as a whole. So this idea that we can create a space, even despite our differences in projects, we can create a space where all those projects can come together and share this information and be a node is very core to us. Oh, there we go. Now we go. OK. So it takes a lot of resources to do that. And we're providing both the community space, but also infrastructure and core services for legal and financial support and that sort of thing. And it takes those resources to serve these communities in a long-term and sustainable and consistent way. So we're talking about probably tens of thousands of dollars each year and also cross-industry collaboration, which is a lot more than you can provide just through crowdfunding. You really need your organizational sponsors and supporters to be with you and be behind you. So many thanks to our member companies and our awesome board of directors for all that they're doing to help our project succeed and get them the support that the projects need when they need it. But that brings us back to community. We've got the system of support that comes through our members, which we're super grateful to. But we wanted to start looking for a way to elevate the hundreds and hundreds of people who were letting us know that they also wanted to meaningfully contribute and support programs for projects and community. So through some kind of membership system, individual memberships and foundations aren't super-duper common, and we didn't have one. So we started to examine what could we do that would be meaningful, that would be helpful. So we were also exploring ways to create more safe and productive spaces for JavaScripters to work on issues and get expert access to information from resources and from our community leaders to potentially align themselves with our experts in the foundation, even if these were people who couldn't or weren't ready to contribute publicly or contribute technically, because there's obviously a lot of people using our projects who aren't necessarily ready to go file an issue and raise their hand on GitHub to get involved there. So to achieve those goals, we started to work on JavaScriptlandia. And we launched it in December 2020. Again, it's an individual supporter program that we have a list of benefits and only charge about $25 a year. And this complements our organizational membership by, again, providing paths for those folks to deepen involvement. So the perks include digital badges for their favorite projects. They can put them on their social profiles or their personal websites and share those that's powered by a system called Credly. We also provide discounts and exclusive offers on training, certifications, conference, and that kind of thing for folks who want to attend and meet up or get involved more online that way. We also provide an insider newsletter, which helps drive awareness of things that are happening in the foundation. It helps to also keep those communities involved, not just in what might be happening technically with the project, but what might be happening socially behind the scenes. So those were some of these initial benefits that we brainstormed to provide something meaningful. We also, let's forget, we have some exclusive promo items that we're going to be experimenting with, one of which is this awesome badge that, if you are a JS Landia member, Robin and I have badges for you. So come see us at this event or at any event in the next couple of calendar years. We'll be handing out cool badges for that. We also have some stickers that I will hand out to anybody who wants one. You can see it on my laptop here. It's cute. Yeah, but just little things that are meaningful and allow people to wear their support in some way for open JS's projects and to help signal that they're here to help us drive alignment through these programs. So looking a little bit closer at the site, we set out with this initial list of benefits. And we've been really, really thrilled with the response so far, so if this is something that you're kind of considering for a program for your open source project, I'll share that the response has been overwhelming. We've had over 400 people who've signed up to date. And they're listed on our site. So we provide this website for them to kind of display their badges and display opting in, of course, display information about themselves if they want to share it. So you can see all of our parties there. And then each member has their own page. So this displays all the badges that they earned or an optionally other information that they may want to share with their developer community. So again, this is about helping encourage them to fly the flags of their favorite tools while also strengthening their connection to the bigger picture of JavaScript. So we'll be doing for our upcoming events, custom badges. We did for OpenJS World. We have badges for the training and certification program. And we'll be rolling out other badges very soon. So yeah, coming soon, actually, speaking of which. Our long-term goal is to use this program to turn the participants into ambassadors for the projects and for the foundation by giving them, hopefully, a lot more leadership opportunities and a lot more opportunities to wear the tech in a way socially and otherwise that they can be proud of. Because they don't have to just identify as only a JavaScript or only a TypeScript developer, only a Node developer. So you can be an intersectional JavaScriptist, I think. So we'll be adding more badges just for our project. So for leadership and mentorship roles that you may be helping with in a specific project like Node. Also for badges, optionally, for JavaScript projects that would like it, like TypeScript, for example, or React, these are not part of the foundation but are certainly projects that lots of people love and want to support in some way. They'll be able to do that as those projects opt in. We're also looking to develop more programs to, and this is so timely because of everything, more programs for the local community support. We have, obviously, JavaScript communities all over the world and there's more that I think we can do to support fostering the individual's leaders in those communities. So using the program to help foster that and also adding more features to the website like social sharing and embeddable pages and that kind of thing. So really helping to create stronger bonds and hopefully a richer picture of all of the many, many activities that are happening across the world of JavaScript. Right, so what are we doing with these funds? What are we gonna, what are the members helping to drive with this? We've got a lot of different community programs that we run at OpenJS Foundation, which are open to all but obviously, especially JavaScript landing participants. We do a community book club, which I think is really fun because I'm a book nerd and we've talked about, we're doing them quarterly. We've done, working in public by Nadia Eggball and we've done, we did two for one the last time, which was how to do nothing by Jenny O'Dell, which is not really about how to do nothing and braiding sweet grass and they were really great. So you can come join us and nerd out about open source books if you want. We have a collab space program, which is a great opportunity for again, fostering leadership. We have one collab space rolling right now. It's the package vulnerability collab space. So if you're interested in having conversations with peers about, you know, but in this case, we're specifically protecting packages and vulnerability disclosure and reporting and that kind of thing. That's a great little community to get involved with, but there are others on the way. We have our community fund, which is something that our members are able, our community members are able to participate in and this includes things like the travel fund, which is something we've done for quite some time, where we support people who otherwise would not be able to attend our events or maybe they want to go to a specific projects summit or something like that. We can support them through the travel fund or if you want to host a meetup about one of our projects supporting you that way. Scholarships, we just launched the Lift Scholarship Program, which is open through October 15th for people who are interested in, you know, getting, taking the node certification or training. And then a thank you program, which is one that is near and dear to me, where we will be helping project maintainers and community members thank those who are making meaningful contributions. Other programs that we drive at the foundation include the training and certification and a web standards working group where we have a big cross group of people coming together to talk about issues and web standardization and how to get involved and information share. And there's gonna be a project launching from that group, hopefully a little later this fall. So lots of cool, lots of cool things going on. So in closing, you know, we had an opportunity last fall to kind of figure out how we could get more of our community together and get people who weren't ready maybe at that time to, you know, get involved and learn more about the project and learn more about OpenJS. And we tried that through this program so far it's going really well. And we hope that you will consider adopting similar programs for your projects, but also we hope that you'll consider joining JavaScriptlandia and getting more involved with the OpenJS Foundation because we have a lot of cool stuff going on. Yeah, let me see if there are any questions about JavaScriptlandia or any of the foundation's programs because we've got a lot of stuff and stickers are one of the things that we have a lot of also, cool. Well, and thank you all for your time.