 Welcome to Beyond Code, the importance of elevating non-code contributions. My name is Fatima. I'm Abu Bakr and we are from GitLab. We're on the developer evangelism team that sits under the developer relations team, where we work on DevSec, AI, ops, and building community. So today we wanted to talk a little bit about non-code contributions, what examples of those might look like. We'll share a little bit background on our experiences working in open source communities and at GitLab. And then at the end we want to have this open forum discussion. So if you have reflections as we're talking or if you have questions, please write them down. And then we'll have 15 minutes or more at the end. We want this to be like a very open format. We want to learn from you as much as we tell you what we've experienced. Okay, we'll start with me, my story in the community. My career has involved community, right from all the way back to 2004-2005, when I was still in the high institution at Federal Technical Biology. Here are some pictures of some of the sessions that I had then. The main goal of the community then was to... I wanted to have an environment whereby I can learn from my friends, hang out with my friends definitely, and also share knowledge. It evolved from just being a group of friends, learning with one another, to members of the institution joining and coming together, and also members from the city, even sometimes members from out of town, joining to come and be a part of the community. And the main goal is to learn, share, and grow with one another. Even when we started partnering with organizations like the Google Developer Groups, Digital Ocean, and a couple of organizations like they do today, they defined their KPIs and other things for engagement, the goal still remains the same, to learn, share, and grow as a community. Fatima? So my background in open source came because of a job. I had gotten a job that they wanted me to learn Drupal, and they said, you need to go to this conference, you need to figure out what this project is, get involved, figure it out. So I went to DrupalCon, and in that community they say, come for the code, stay for the community, and it really rings true because you go there in order to better understand the project or contribute a component or module, but you end up meeting all of these contributors from all over the world and feel really connected and like part of something bigger. And so over the years I got involved with community contribution, I became a core contribution mentor. The first photo there is like the mentoring group in DrupalCon Vienna, which was really cool. It was my first time like walking somebody through the process, like a new contributor walking them through the process of contributing something, and when you see someone's face light up because they've made a contribution, it's very rewarding for yourself as a mentor as well. So like GitLab, Drupal is also a very complex project, so it's not always easy for people to just show up and contribute. You need to have a lot of background, you might need to have specific technical skills, you might need to know a specific language, and so there are other types of contributions that are also very valuable, like writing documentation or testing or writing an onboarding guide or helping somebody translate something for another community. And so those are the kinds of things that we want to share. We're going to talk about a few of the different non-code contributions that we've worked with, and then some examples of programs or initiatives that you can do to support those types of contributions. We're going to start with events. Yeah, we are here, Open Source Summit, an event. So events are a huge part of non-code contribution. It brings the community together to come and learn from one another, share experiences, share learnings, and even create more opportunities for the future. Well, all these events involve a lot. For example, these events took months of planning, months of logistics, working with partners, ensuring security. You are going to be dealing with humans, and humans are complex. Ensuring safety and coordination, inclusion of everyone is a huge task that every community member has to do, not to talk of venue management. And this is at a large scale. Now, if you come down to Meetups, some of these organizations already have partners to work with. Oh, they can tap Google, Google, give money, and so on. But you in your local community, you have to go convince some sponsor or some organization and show them this is the value of this event. This is why you should support this event and so on. And this event at the end of the day brings opportunities for the community to grow. That is where new contributors are initiated. That is where new members have ideas on how to contribute or how to influence other parts of the community. And even non-code contributions, that is where people have ideas on how, oh, this is how we can grow the community. This is how we can make it inclusive. And this is how as a community, through events, we can grow better. Fatima. So with Open Source Projects, there's a number of different things that go into that. We've listed out a couple here, like documentation, planning your roadmaps, your community, your customers, your users. They all want to know what you're building next. So if you're organizing an Open Source Project, likely you are also planning a roadmap, planning future features and releases. You also want to onboard new contributors. You want to mentor them, have training, so that you can continue to retain them as they have experienced contributions to your project. Then there's the hands-on programming part of it, like triage and feature discussions. And what we find, even with contributors to GitLab, is there's one person who writes the patch. But there are so many people that go into the process of getting that patch committed to the product. There's people who provide suggestions. There's somebody who jumps in and says, hey, I tested this, but it's not working. Here's the screenshots. Here's why it's not working. And so all of those people don't tend to get contribution. It's usually the person who committed the line of code that fixes the thing or adds a new feature. And so I think it's important to take a look at that whole process from onboarding that new contributor to mentoring them, to them filling out an issue or reporting a bug or helping somebody review an issue that they've created for. And so there's like a number of valuable contributions along that kind of life cycle of a contributor that I feel that we don't recognize yet and that I would like us to start recognizing in the scope of open source projects. Yeah, next thing is community management. Yeah, how do you keep all these communities together? Okay, you organize events. They attend. So people come to learn. Some people come for swag. I for one, that's part of one of the reasons why I come to events. Then others contribute, but at the end of the day, how do you keep everything together? How do you bring in new contributors, maintain them, enable them to grow through the communities? So you don't keep dealing with one of the issues I had while I was managing events back home in Nigeria is every day people, you are dealing with newcomers, new people, you have to maintain new content. How do you get those newcomers through the stages to become contributors, to become future speakers, to become non-code contributors in the future? So creating those pipelines, defining a goal as a community. Why are you having the community? What is your end goal at the end of the day? And what are the KPIs? Are you just worried about numbers? Are you worried about monetary aspect? Are you influenced by an organization that has objectives to find? All those have to be in place. Remember retention. How do you want to keep your members? So you don't have a system whereby if you just come one day, second day, they don't feel like coming. Or they feel this is too basic for my experience. Or the community has played to, there is no much growth that members of the community can achieve. Then content management. As a community we generate a ton of content. How do you coordinate the articles, the videos? This session is currently being recorded. How does it become valuable for members of the community? How do they find it? How do they benefit from it? And also code of conduct. We are complex human beings. And from modes to cultures. What is right? They call it moral relativism. What is right? One side might be wrong in another side. What is offensive is on one side. They are generally general things that are offensive. But then cultures differ. And how do we ensure that as a community we all become inclusive. We all coordinate and work with one another in a safe and secure environment? Yeah, Fatima. So now that we've covered some types of non-code contributions we have some ideas of how to recognize them. And then we're really looking to hear some of your ideas on how to recognize them. So one of the ways to celebrate your community members is giving them achievement. So you could do this through badges. We're implementing a badging system on GitLab. So when somebody reviews an MR or closes an MR or gives a hackathon contribution we give them a little gamification icon on their profile that they can feel excited about. But there's a lot of platforms that allow you to do that as well. There's like Creadly where you can set up badges and share them with community members. If you're already on certain community platforms like Discourse or Reddit or Stack Overflow they tend to have their own systems for gamification and awarding contributors or recognizing them. A lot of companies like ourselves we have a GitLab Heroes Program. Advocates is a great place to give recognition and see what they're working on. Some of our heroes are very technical. Some of them post for us with code snippets and all of that. Some of our heroes are not so technical but they can provide feedback on initiatives. They can test new features that are in experimental stages. They can come to events and talk about their experiences and inspire other people. And so really figuring out who your advocates are and how you can reward the different types of work that they are good at. And finally like people like Avamagra who loves swag you can always give swag in exchange for participation. But I think something more powerful than sending somebody a mug or a backpack or a pen like these things are great is actually giving them opportunities. So maybe you have a learning internship at your company. Maybe your project does a shadow program. We have those at GitLab as well where we have shadow programs. You can shadow the CEO. We have a development director program where external contributors can actually shadow one of our development directors and see what the day-to-day of working at GitLab is. And so I think some of those opportunities are actually very valuable. So if someone is contributing to your project this might be a way to give them value back. And so it's a good relationship. And then finally. Yeah. As contributors we all hear it online. A very good and hard-working contributor suddenly says he's taking a break. Or for some reason he's going out of the community. Not because of anything but because we are all humans and life happens. Sometimes it's mental health. Sometimes it's just burnout. People have been working years and years and we all went through the pandemic. Everyone had their experiences from the pandemic and wanting other communities. How do we ensure members of our community are held in the stay safe and an environment is created for them to feel safe and also be able to share and learn from their experiences. Not just the code part but how some of us are parents. Some of us are passing through some challenges in life. Some of us are caregivers. Some of us are in environments that have complex situations, political situations. So being able to create an environment where we share, we learn before comfortable and where possible we feel vulnerable to it because sometimes it's not about fixing it. It's just about being able to let out, share with someone and learn from someone. And as a multicultural community almost all of our communities are multicultural. Learning from a different culture, a different environment. Create a system whereby we're able to become more inclusive. Be able to become more welcome into others because you only be able to understand and welcome someone let's say from South Asia or Africa or understand their situation if you know what they are going through. If they've been able to be vulnerable with you and be able to share. You even know where to support better when they are comfortable sharing with you or sharing their experiences of how they are, whatever they go through. So creating a healthy, safe environment where we can be vulnerable as a community is very crucial in how we maintain communities. That's why communities need to have groups or communities that ensure safety, mental health and a more conducive environment for contributors within the community. So we've covered the importance of non-code conversations some examples that we've seen from event planning to parts of the open source project cycle to community management as well as having non-code conversations as well as contributions. So we wanted to have an open forum discussion with all of you today. We've prepared a slido with two very general questions so that you could submit questions if you feel uncomfortable speaking on the mic or on the recording. So you can submit questions to the slido using this URL slido.com and then the hashtag number which is one nine seven nine six four five. And then we'd also love for this to be interactive. So you can submit questions there but you can also submit reflections, things you're thinking about. And if you feel comfortable we have a audience mic as well so you can come up and share a reflection or question with us. Share something that maybe your company is doing to recognize non-code contributions that would be great. Abu Bakr is going to get the mic. Thank you. Two participants are typing. So Abu Bakr what's the non-code contribution that you've made recently? I spoke yesterday. I spoke about understanding the sake in DevSecOps. Security is the major part of the major issue in our industry. So I spoke about people who are not familiar with security. How do they apply? What are the different attack vectors? How do they mitigate them? And how do they automate their software development lifecycle to be able to do that? Oh we have a couple. Oh podcast. Almost everyone who's seen podcasts these days. Yeah, I know they're great. Yeah. Because you can listen to a podcast while you're walking somewhere and it's a great way to feel connected to somebody that you may not get to see in person. Yeah. And we are getting to learn more about people from different parts of the world just by listening to them on podcasts. Yeah. Develop training. Yeah. That's interesting. At least so that others can be able to learn more. Yeah, it's always great when so if we have a community member who has put together a training, they'll share it with us or they'll share it on their social media and then I put together our community newsletter so I don't actually write most of the content. You know, like I just start collecting all the content. So if I see someone's done a podcast, I will just grab that and put that in the newsletter. So that's my non-code contribution. There's no code involved. It's a drag and drop newsletter editing process. Attending this session. That's a great one. Yeah, it is. Because at least you've come here, you've learned something. You be able to, even if it is you attend another meeting somewhere and share some of the things you've learned somewhere. You've contributed to a project. You've contributed to Open Source. Does anyone want to? Yeah. At least I get to exercise. Great. Thank you so much. And I'm Petia from Humanitarian Open Street Map team and that's a big passion of mine on non-contributions. I'm not a software developer myself but I focus on tech engagement. And yeah, a few examples. I think we had an outreach mentee for instance and our project was exactly about technical documentation. And I'm really big advocate. I always say like other examples that we do is I run a working group where people can join. Maybe one thing I don't see here is also testing. So involving a lot of our users in testing the software before we deploy like on staging. And there's been really interesting feedback because normally people say I'm not technical. But actually there are contributions. So yeah, just wanted to say thank you for having it really important and great to hear all the examples. Thank you. User testing is a really important one. Like I worked out the city of Boston and you don't know if people are able to load the website or use it or if it's accessible until you put it through that test. Thank you. Hey, so I lead communities at the Green Software Foundation and we are about half of our work is technical and the other half is really building communities. So I think I put Meetup Group on here. Podcasts. But a lot of our work isn't just building the tools for people to have greener software. It's also helping them learn about it, helping discover in the first place, spreading that awareness and building standards. So actually while code is a big thing, it's probably only 50% of what we do. Wow. That's really great. Yeah, it's awesome. I think the Linux Foundation houses almost everything around Linux, cloud native and everything. And the platform, for example, I am aware of the LFX platform. Yeah, so almost in the infamous or famous CNCM landscape with all the logos of projects and everything. So it's very good to have a platform. It's part of enablement. We're able to enable the project to grow because at the end of the day when project people have contributed, suddenly you see a project dying or you see the project ripple and it's only been updated nine years ago. So it's a very great work that foundations like the Linux Foundation are doing to keep our projects healthy. Thank you. One story I yesterday was one of the speakers that attended this session. He was able to attend the open source summit because he attended an event back home in the open source community Africa. And Chris was there and he gave a voucher that, oh, if you want to go to the open source summit, you can come. And he was here yesterday speaking about observability. So it's one of the success stories you hear from this event, this community. You don't know where opportunities can take people and how they benefit the community further. Okay, awesome. Open tofu. I just read it this morning. Open TF became open tofu, right? Yeah. I was reading about it this morning. Awesome. She accepted our open tofu. Nice. Okay. Next question. This may or may not be a controversial question, but when you're talking about non-code contributions and a lot of projects they measure contributions. So they might give you points for specific things that you do. If you're a contributor on stock overflow, for example, answering a question is a certain number of points. Upvoting a question is a different number of points. If you get the solution, you might get plus 30 points. There are different ways to recognize and weigh non-code contributions. This is something we're still figuring out as well. So I thought this would be a good open discussion. How do you recognize them? How do you weigh them? Are you rewarding them? Are you sharing them? Yep. We'd love to hear from you. Or you can take the mic. We'd love if you would take the mic. Badging. Awesome. Yeah, badging. Yeah, that's a nice one. Director of Champions and Experts. I am a part of the Google Developer Experts. I think there's distant JetBrains that can give you one-year license to their software if you are listed in the directory of the GDEs publicly available online. So I think that's why directory is important. And it's also a recognition for you to say, okay, to recruiters or employers. It's recognizable. It's not just by a word. Yeah, and that brings you to other opportunities as well. If we invite our heroes to speak at InVent, it's very good for them as well as it makes us look good. But it also makes the hero have the opportunity to network at the event to share their expertise. And then demonstrate the impact of the contribution. I love that because sometimes, like you were saying, people will say, I'm not technical, but they'll write a really great explanation or documentation for something that someone who may be technical but may have never touched this part of the code or learned about this function will be able to read that and understand. And so sometimes I think we make contributions and they kind of go into this void and you never get to see the impact that your contributions are having. Yeah, swag. Yeah, definitely swag. I'm tired of swag. I have a funny story. When I was hosting the digitalization community back home in Andrea Balchi, so the first time they wanted to send us swags. So we were just expecting probably a few hoodies or socks. But they ended up sending like cartons of different swags, t-shirts, different sizes. So at a point we didn't know what to do, so we organized a very huge event to do and so on. To the extent, anywhere in the whole town if I see a digitalization t-shirt, I know it's from that event. That's amazing. Like you're all connected by this giant box of swag. And contributor contributions. I think one mechanism by which we can do that is through our newsletter. But the newsletter is also limited because the community that's reading it is also the community that we're sharing back to. And so I personally would love to hear other examples of ways that we can share that impact to... The people I want to reach are not the people who are already reading the newsletter. I want to reach the people who think that they don't belong in that highlight, contributor highlight section in the newsletter. I'm nervous about it or like, oh, I don't have anything to contribute. Where can I meet those people and how can I encourage them and know that their contributions are valued? I don't know. That's why this is a bop. Maybe you can put it on social media, so like just like one person a week or someone who has contributed a lot recently. You can even do it monthly. It depends on how many contributors you have. So maybe something like that in a social media post which will also be good for the newsletter but also recognize who is contributing. So maybe something like that. Have you done that before? No pressure. Yeah, so we did consider it. I was a community manager at another organization. So yes, we have... So whenever someone got any kind of a title even if it's like becoming a community manager or recently becoming what was the name? Like a contributor but someone who has contributed frequently a member maybe. So yeah, we used to do that. So yeah, like tagging them giving them that recognition because at the end of the day the organization will have a lot of followers. So that usually matters and it makes them feel good. Awesome, thank you. Thank you. I was also reading this about the impact of contribution. I just share and use a few. I think that is a very great point because if people are able to see that oh, this company or this organization actually took our feedback and change was made or an impact was achieved it was for more people to share feedback and be able to... I think that's a very great point. Anyone else? Yeah, I think... a question I've always wanted to have I don't do live streaming here. Oh, okay. I've always wanted to know how I'm always fascinated about doing live streams but I end up not doing it. So you see how it actually impacts not just good contributors but non-codes to be able to contribute back to the community. Because most of the videos or live streams you see online are just someone live coding or creating some examples somewhere. Any PJ Mads who used to live stream quite a bit and so this is something that he related to me is that it really lowers the barrier to feeling technical because your live streaming while he did a lot of Python bots so he would be... I'm trying to figure out how to do this but I don't even know how to start this function and part of this live stream is him just googling it and figuring it out and going and we're sitting in the chat and we're like no PJ that's not the right function but I think people in the chat being like well thanks for doing this because now I don't feel like I'm really lost and so it gives people a moment to feel like relatability where it's like oh you're struggling too I struggle the same way or I always forget where the documentation is as well and so from what I've heard I think live streaming helps lower that barrier but I think it also depends on what the project is and who's watching if anyone. Also mentoring how do you think mentoring because I see mentoring as one of the things that actually spurs a lot of comments because a lot of people feel uncomfortable don't know where to start and mentoring seems to be one way to be able to boost more of non-good contribution. How have you seen the impact of mentoring? In my experience I have mentored more contributions than I have done contributions so like if you track open source contributions it's always like a comment where sugar overflow helped me so I get no credit for that you know like the credit goes to the person who wrote the patch or they reviewed a translation or they uploaded like some testing information but I'm sitting there like hmm if I were you I would you know and so it was a really good experience for me because I used to feel not technical enough and my way of like overcompensating for that was I'll just mentor and then that person will do the hard stuff and I will help guide them but I learned that like it's very hard to be the mentor because you kind of have to like sit on your hands and you want the person to learn the process so that when you're not there they can do it as well so it was a very good learning opportunity for me to like listen and like observe and like not say anything until they're ready to receive like the next step or a hint or something so yeah I definitely learned a lot. Yeah awesome and I think it's also valuable to managing a community because definitely some older folks from the community would live ok life will happen people will move on to some other things so being able to when mentees will then grow to be the new managers of the community that will grow to the community in the early days of communities we all know oh Kelsey Hightower Brian Lowell, Joe Bedan and so on but now you hardly even hear about them in the community dude they are still a part of the past when new people are now maintaining the community and growing the community as as we go. And it's important to have experts in different areas if I'm good at back end engineering I'm probably not going to be good at design right and so you need to have people in your community that can be able to share their area of expertise and make space for sharing that. Yeah awesome. Anyone wants to share anything? Or we can stop the session and have a little conversation without the recording. Maybe first an answer that's somehow not really there in my opinion but it's really easy just the next time you see the guy on the hallway in the canteens I'm coming for corporate just tell him in person thank you so much and it's really an in person thank you is so much worth you see the smile in the face he sees your smile in the face it's really nice. Yeah I definitely agree because I think there was a time I met someone somewhere and he was kind of sharing how he got into tech by attending one of my sessions and I was in at very low states at a particular period in time but the person sharing our experience about something I did I didn't even know impacted anyone and he was not how that's for him to take and how he's able to achieve this get his job in this place and so on it really boosted me and gave me that morale to Bokeh. I think this is working and doing more will definitely benefit more members of the community. And second thing I have a general question about non-code contributions maybe you got a good answer so if you go to a project it's always you go to REPL and you see issues. About non-code contributions is a little harder because the work is usually going on in the background deep inside I don't know some forum maybe so what's a good way to list or show open tasks where people can get into is there some pattern just do you create issues like it was code or The way that I've seen this done in two different communities is planning as an example create an issue for the event add tasks for the planning even if the planning is happening sometimes it's in meetings on Slack or it's a Zoom call just post a little summary of these people were in attendance this is what we did and usually at the end of the event you can say all of these volunteers were involved in the contribution of this event so before you close that issue just give them all credit in order to just recognize the work I kind of put the responsibility to do that with an event with the organizer list out all of your volunteers and give them contribution in a public space and not just at the event on a slide or in a meeting that they're in but in the space that everyone looks at maybe with projects we can use specific tags I know a lot of open search projects have an open for contributions tag but maybe there's also a documentation tag or a testing tag that needs user experience testing tag and that's a way of highlighting if you filter by these two tags you'll find opportunities for you to contribute that may not necessarily be review this issue, write me some code and I think one of the things to that is if you want to get people who are not familiar with the project is to use times they are familiar with instead of we have an RFP or something we need designers we need this so that I know how to do design I don't know anything about Kubernetes we need technical writers we need this to contribute so that people will be able to see things they can do and also detailing in the rhythmies of the project this is how you can come in this is how you can onboard this is how you can contribute to a system where there are certain people we have a couple of anonymous here there are certain people who just want to do they don't want their names to be out there so creating an environment for them where they can actually perform some work or do some things or just give without necessarily creating paper trees probably maybe due to policies in their work or due to some personal reasons also creating an environment where someone can just oh I'm passing by this yeah fix move on they don't necessarily want to be part of community or part of anything but they just want to do a move on so creating that environment where information is public information is transparency and also showing oh this is this thing that was done for example like I think the Kubernetes project they list all the contributors that contributed to the project at the end of the video and what parts they played in it so it's which is part of appreciation also so being able to show and document how people can help where they can help specific things they can do and the resources they can use it's very valuable in ensuring that you have more non-code contributors to participate and one of the things we saw success with last year was doing a documentation themed hackathon like we're only going to work on the docs issues and I think that was a it was a good positioning for us to be like you normally don't come to our hackathons because you feel like you don't have you don't know Ruby or Rails you can't you can't contribute to the code base this is a docs hackathon all you have to do is read the docs edit some docs update some docs that are out of date and so that was one way that I think we saw some success I think it still needs there's more steps ahead of that I think we can improve on that but when you ask the question that's what I was thinking of awesome thank you only five minutes yeah any other questions they need the time to walk going once going twice well if you want to talk one on one we'll be at the GitLab booth for the rest of the conference yeah thank you very much for listening thank you so much