 Everyone, welcome to theCUBE coverage of AnsibleFest 2021 Virtual Hybrid. All online now, it's been a hell of a year. It's been going great with all the interactions. AnsibleFest 2021, Carol Chen is here. She's the Principal Community Architect for Ansible Communities with Red Hat. Carol, thanks for coming on the AnsibleFest 2021 Virtual Coverage. Thanks for having me here, John. You know, one of the things about the pandemic I was mentioning, there's the online communities have really that have been online have thrived. Developers know how to do virtual and virtual first now is becoming a norm for developers. So the pandemic, although it's been in really big inconvenience for many, developers actually haven't been truly impacted other than the face-to-face interactions around hallway conversations and events. You're seeing a lot more community open conversations happening more than ever before. Just the trend itself was hot. Now you have more people collaborating. What's the state of the Ansible community right now? Because online content in all time, I'm seeing videos hit. I'm seeing a lot of content flowing all around the internet. It seems to be more action. What's the state of the Ansible community? Yeah, definitely. And actually from the very start, Ansible community is a very much online community because of the diverse nature in terms of geographical distribution and just people from all of the world coming together. So initially, I mean, of course, we do have like in-person meetups which were a popular thing before the pandemic. That kind of took a little backseat and it turned virtual. Initially people were like wondering what to do, but we are used to video conferences and online chats. So virtual meetups became quite a popular thing in the first half of the pandemic. So pretty much most of last year, we actually saw a slight rise in the number of, the median number of attendees at these meetups because it's more accessible. You can attend from home. You don't have to go to a physical place to attend these meetups. However, this year we are starting to see some virtual fatigue and the numbers are dropping a little bit, but hopefully with some parts of the world are opening up and we are seeing some meetups coming in-person again, depending on the region, of course, because it's not the same around the world. But I think that the need for people to connect socially is always there, whether it's online or in-person. And the Ansible community is pretty strong in that. And I want to stress that a lot of these meetups are organized by the community members, not necessarily by Red Hat or the Ansible team. So the desire to connect with other people in the community has always been there and it's going on strong. Yeah, that's a good call out on the community side. I think that the affinity groups around the communities self-forming these meetups, people want to meet in-person. That's going to come back. You're starting to see that hybrid, but it's also you're starting to see, again, a fatigue for being like attending these virtual events, but at the same time, you're seeing the asynchronous consumption still go high too. You're seeing, okay, I can do a fly by the event or if it's in-person, I'd prefer that. But there's still a lot more asynchronous going on and a lot more opportunities to contribute. And you guys have done this contributor summits virtually. Can you talk about that trend? What, tell me about the virtual contributor summits. Sure. So of course we have our regular community meetings, weekly in fact, but the contributor summit is a place where we can actually gather, previously it was face-to-face, usually part of Ansible Fest like the day before or after depending. And to really hash out different discussions and more in-depth technical analysis of different parts of the project that we're working on. Even though virtually we are still able to do that and we are actually able to increase the frequency of these events. So usually it used to be once or twice a year depending on whether or not we have, when we have the Ansible Fest. But last year we had three contributor summits and this year the third one will happen along with Ansible Fest in September, end of September, so this week. So yeah, that's definitely the advantage of making things easier for participants. Yeah, Carol, talk about the vibe of the summit. I mean, these contributor summits, what's it like what are people experiencing? Are they just contributing code? They're working on projects? Is it hackathons? Is it more, what's the format? What are people preferring? What's the best practice? So what we want to encourage is not just one person giving presentations and like a one-way thing, but actually a dialogue. So a lot of these discussions are kind of interactive. So we use tools that allow people not just like streaming one direction but people can also appear on video and talk and express their opinions and join the discussions or in chat if they prefer not to show their face. But in any case, a lot of times it's not a full presentation but perhaps an introduction for five, 10 minutes. And then we go to discussion of a certain topic in depth. So it's a very, I would say discussion-based and also we are introducing hackathon at this contributor summit because I think it's quite a popular thing for people to get hands-on experience or work on something right away with people to support them then and there. So you can get results in real time. So in actual fact, even before the pandemic our contributor summits have had like a virtual online component. So we were doing hybrid events before they were called popular hybrid events. Before they were, that's a set, they're cool. I mean, that's not really cool. Right, right, exactly. So because like I said, our contributors are from around the world. So we always make sure that they had a way of participating in the contributor summit as well. Yeah, I think that's really important to point out. I mean, I won't say it's cool to do hybrid as necessary now because of the pandemic. But that format actually is interesting because you've got a linear event that's physical face to face. Certainly that's super valuable when that comes back. But now that the online side has kind of been tied together with the simulated live asynchronous capability you have this new format. Talk about how you guys are taking that to the next level around trust because one of the things about being face to face and then being online and knowing people is working together and getting a feeling of trusting each other, right? So this is a huge part of community. How are you guys, now that we're more dispersed than ever how are you guys facilitating and nurturing that trust equation? Right, so as an open source project one of the key things is we would do a lot of the things in the open. We know that the pull request that the development of the code is all done in the open that's in a very kind of implicit trust that you can have through that. And also the community meetings are open up to the public. Anybody can join if they're interested in. And even if you're not able to join the meetings because time zones or whatever that we share the meeting minutes after the meetings to everyone which brings me to, we actually started a newsletter for the community called the Bullhorn since last April I think because again, we are trying to explore more channels to be able to reach two different people who may not be able to attend in person or even during the same time as the community meetings. So they can have this bi-weekly newsletter every two weeks that shares the meeting minutes what has been discussed, the new developments in the community, the new collections updates, new tools and so on. So definitely we see like we want to improve the communication to the community and ways to they can provide feedback to us as well. And that's called the Bullhorn. That's just getting the word out. Yeah, Bullhorn. Yes. Thank you. It's like the updates. It's like a quick executive summary of kind of what's happening. Is that kind of the prime? Right. Okay, well, I want to ask you specifically I heard about this new community steering committee. What's the purpose of this? What's this evolving into? Can you give us some background on the purpose and the objective of the community? Yeah, sure. Yeah, we established the Ansible Community Steering Committee earlier this year. And as we were saying that the Ansible project is growing. So of course the user community and also they're very happy to say that the contributor community is growing. So we want to provide a better structure for the upstream Ansible project. And a lot of changes are taking place. So we want to have some group of people to be able to facilitate that. For example, people want to create new collections, Ansible collections for automating technologies that they're working on or even contribute to existing collections that they have a vested interest in. So what are some of the procedures and policies that are needed, right? So the steering committee defines these procedures and make sure that the new content coming in are in compliant to the policies and so on. I mean, this kind of decision making and stuff has been happening in the community in an ad hoc manner to a large extent. Even before this, but having the steering committee will provide to add more structure, like I said, and also guidance and accountability for the Ansible community. That's awesome. You know, I love, first of all, love your title, Principal Community Architect. And you know, one of the things I've always been a big fan of with Ansible and now it's quite a red hat is one red hat didn't screw up Ansible. They let it become what it was and became really big with the combination. But the community has always been content driven. And now you got recipes. You've got collections. You've got content. But the community piece is key. And right now more than ever with the pandemic, community is more important than ever before. Open source is more important than ever before. How do you look at the architecture of how to sustain and evolve communities to be more inclusive and to grow and to survive and thrive post pandemic? What's your learnings? What's your vision on architecting community for the future? I think the key thing is to really find channels and ways to listen to the community. We talk about how to reach our news newsletter, whatever meetings to the community, but it's also what's coming from them. If we don't listen to what they have to say, we don't know what they want and how we can make the community better, the process better for them. I mean, I've been managing different open source communities before Ansible, but every community is different. I cannot say what worked for the previous community works for this. I always try to reach out to the current members in the Ansible community and hear what they have to say, that they are complaints, criticisms, good and bad, because without those feedback, we cannot grow and we cannot improve. And myself, I've lived in three different continents. So I know the struggle of whether it's language barriers or time zone restrictions. So we keep all these in mind as we build our relationships with the community. Yeah, and I think there's a real opportunity with this new virtual standards that not yet emerge. I mean, you mentioned you've been doing hybrid, which has always been part of in a physical event, which is going to become normal, but I think there's an opportunity that we're learning in this past year and a half where there are new things and it's good, bad and ugly. I mean, there's been some really ugly conferences, urge will be painful, but there's also been some really nice moments where people are seeing interaction. So is there any learnings that you've taken away from this past year and a half that you can point to that might want to share with folks watching around how to tap into the magical moments that could be enabled by the virtual and or bringing people together? You know, I myself, I'm a lover of technology, anything new I like to try. So definitely in this pandemic, there's been a lot of opportunities to try different technologies, what works, what doesn't work. I think, you know, just trying things out helps. I know sometimes people are resistant to change. I myself sometimes find it hard to change my ways in certain, you know, I'm used to this tool. I want to use it most of the time, but anyway, you know, give things a chance, but most, I think most importantly is focused on the people because technology aside, it is the people you are reaching out to, right? So again, listen what they have to say, you know, if this doesn't work for them, find out what they prefer or, you know, how we can make things better to improve things for them. So always keep the focus on the people, on the community and, you know, give new technology a chance. You know, sometimes it works out sometimes it doesn't, but you don't know till you try. And yeah, just for the best. I'm paying the water's warm. Come on in, the water's fine. So the meetups are happening. Right. People are getting together where there's a geography opportunity where there's not a lot of scaring, too much scare going on with the meetups. So that's cool. What is the current AnsibleFest 2021 key thing that you'd like people to walk away with, Carol? Because honestly, the momentum's continuing, the world needs to go on, we are seeing hybrid and then we're going to end up coming out of this soon. What's the key message this year from the AnsibleFest 2021 from the community? That Ansible is open. Ansible is, you know, open to contributions from anyone and especially the Ansible community team is working very hard to make things easy and accessible. So please feel free to visit ansible.com slash community for ways of reaching us. And, you know, use Ansible to automate your stuff and then use the free time that you have from that to spend more time with your family and friends. That's great. Be open. Listen, now you got a steering committee to steer that ship in the right direction. Congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and the update. Really appreciate it. Again, props to the community at Ansible, part of Red Hat. You guys do a great job. And again, we'll see you on the other side of the pandemic and thanks for coming in remotely all the way in Finland. We're here. Thank you so much for having me. It's been my pleasure. Thank you, Carol. I'm John Furrier for AnsibleFest 2021 coverage. This is theCUBE. Thanks for watching.