 All right, thank you all for coming. It's actually great to see other people involved and interested in what we're doing with mentoring in the open source community and the OpenStack community as a whole. I am very lucky today to be joined by this panel and even luckier that quite a few of the people on this panel have actually been mentors for me since I started out in OpenStack. So I'm gonna introduce myself and then let them introduce themselves. My name is El Marquez. I'm a technical evangelist for Linux Academy. I always say that this gives me the opportunity to be a professional noob because my job is literally to get to play with new technologies, break them, and then go find the people who are willing to help and teach. So it's an exciting and intimidating position and with that, I've gotten to meet these wonderful people and I'm gonna let Amy kick things off by introducing herself. Oh, they're not in order. All right, well fine. We're gonna be difficult here. All right, well Jill doesn't wanna start, so we'll start with Amy. There we go. So my name is Amy Marish. I'm an OpenStack training architect at Linux Academy. So basically, I develop and do all the training that we have for OpenStack. I am on the OpenStack user committee and I am the chair of the OpenStack diversity and inclusion working group. All right, Jill. I'm Jill Rulow. I'm a software engineer at Red Hat working on the Triple O project and with Elle, run the OpenStack cohort mentoring program. Nicole? Thanks for being here. I'm Nicole Huseman. I work at Intel as a community and developer advocate for things like OpenStack and Kubernetes. I've also been working with Danielle at Bitergia on some of the OpenStack gender diversity research. I've worked with Amy on the speed mentoring activities for the OpenStack community and I also am involved in the chaos project, specifically the diversity and inclusion work group. Hello, Rikwan. So my name is Danielle. I'm one of the founders of Bitergia. We are a software analytics company. Well, I had the opportunity to work with Nicole together in the OpenStack gender diversity report for the last couple of years indeed. I'm working with her as well in the chaos which is the community health analytics for open source software. It's a linear foundation project. In this case, specifically focused on the diversity and inclusion working group. Well, I'm part of the inner source column so you can find me there. Thank you for your time. So I guess we're not gonna waste too much time. We're gonna get right into the questions because it's kind of where we're here to get to actually have an opportunity to discuss mentorship as a whole. And so we're gonna start out with just questions about mentoring in general. And the first question that I had was actually a conversation that I had with Amy and Jill the other day. And we always hear about how important mentorship is in the community and how everybody needs a mentor and how great the programs can be and they can further your career. But one of the questions that's never really addressed is what really is mentorship? How does that differ from what some people see as somebody who's sponsoring you who's actively helping you pursue your career or an individual who's coaching you? Nami, I know that you had quite a few thoughts on this one. Yeah, I mean, to me, a mentor is someone who's going to ask you the questions that you need to answer to decide where you're going to go. So it's not so much that they're going to tell you how to get there, but they're gonna help you figure out how to get there. So what we also refer to as coaching, to me, is someone who's going to give you the steps you need to meet the goal. They're not necessarily gonna question you and help you figure out how to get there, but they're going to help get you there. And then we're having a bit of a discussion on what a role model is. And Al thought a role model was someone who you didn't necessarily know, but you looked up to. And to me, a role model can actually be your mentor or somebody who coaches you or whatever, but it's someone you look up to and inspire to be. And it can be all, all those three steps can be one person or they can be multiple people. And the idea of being that as you grow your career, your mentor may be one person and then you've reached your goal in the end of where that relationship goes and you'd have another mentor for another area of your life. So mentoring isn't just work related. It can be personal. It can be anything that you feel you need help with. Nicole, I know that you've had a lot of experience with different types of mentoring programs throughout the open source community. And I was wondering if you see these roles, if you see these separations inside of actual mentoring programs. Yeah, I mean, so there are different roles to play. I guess I would back up and say that one of the things that I find in terms of where mentoring plays a role is in welcoming new folks into the community. Mentoring can take many different forms. Some of them very organic. In my case, and you mentioned my experience, right? In my case, it was organic. There were a few folks in the open source technology center at Intel who really encouraged me to play or participate more in open source communities. OpenStack community being the first community that I dove into. But yeah, I mean, there were certainly structured programs as well. The OpenStack community I have found offers so many ways to get involved. The cohort program, I know that we wanna focus on today and then the speed mentoring activities as well. One of the things that we found, and I know in our introductions, we mentioned the OpenStack diversity research that we've worked on. There's some data points there, Al, that I think are really exciting in terms of how mentorship programs play a role in welcoming newcomers into the community and in making sure that they have a place there and encouraging their contributions such that those contributors, that we retain those contributors and they feel like they have a belonging within the community. Before I ask Daniel to kind of present some of that information so you guys can see all the data that's gathered, Jillma put you on the spot here. And we are co-leading the OpenStack mentorship program and I could paint this as all roses for you guys but honestly, it's been a hard struggle. It's been something that we've really been trying to get off the ground and I was hoping that you might speak to some of the issues that we're facing with starting a mentorship program over, rebooting it. Yeah, so back around the Vancouver Summit, kind of the community that was running the what used to be called the long-term mentoring program realized that it had kind of tapered off, it wasn't really having participation, it had had some struggles. That was a one-to-one long-term, you got paired off with one person and you would go for many, many months having that mentoring relationship and there were some challenges that they were running into with people were not being responsive, they'd get busy, things were falling through. So there was an idea to reboot it and try and reorganize it to have more kind of fault tolerance to those types of things that can happen in one-on-one relationships. So L.U. and I had stepped up and said, hey, we'll give it a go, we'll try it. And the idea we came up with was the idea of having mentoring cohorts, having groups of people in the community come together and say, as a group, let's mentor newcomers in these ideas so that we can bounce different ideas around, people can cover for each other, have different time zones or availability. So we put together all these ideas, kind of announced it, went out, we had a lot of interest people that were like, yeah, I wanna do this, let's do it. And then not as much follow-through. So we know with the one-on-one mentoring, there's certainly more accountability. There's one person you can chase after and say, hey, you agreed to do this, you need to come do this. With doing the group-based approach more of the kind of community approach, we've lost that accountability to be able to chase after one person and say, hey, you signed up for this, you need to do this one thing. We're trying to figure out how do we hold people to following through, to participating, to getting involved and just getting that going so that there's traction. Can you try to see if the mic's on? Can we get the question mic on? Thank you. I was there at Vancouver and I signed up to be on the thing with the cohort I've got on the, oh, no problem. I mean, it really actually was no problem in that it was no work because I've been on that IRC channel since Vancouver and it's been dead air. I've been on the mailing list and it's been 99% dead air. I'm not sure that we have as much of a problem with getting mentors to sign up as we do with getting mentees to know that it's there and to use it. You know, to kind of take issue with a premise, it was one of the first things that y'all said. Everybody needs a mentor. I mean, that's clearly not the case because there are lots of people and not all of them are participating in mentorship and various kinds. I've certainly been forced by my employers in the past to participate in mentor mentee activities. Do you have to have a mentor? Not my style. Don't, you know, leave me alone. But I think part of the problem here is then having people understand that this is available to them. People who do want mentorship, people who do need it. That's just kind of my... And I apologize if it came off that only mentors had signed up. We also had, we've had 20, 25 mentees sign up. Yeah. And that's kind of, I'm sorry, that was kind of why we decided to do this panel discussion is, you know, we were told, you know, hey, mentorship is really important. OpenStack is interested. People want mentors. No, not everyone, obviously. But, you know, in general, the community is wanting mentorship programs. We're like, okay, we're going to present this. And we kind of want to know what's the next step? What are we doing wrong? What are we doing right? How do we get the news out there? We wrote super user articles. We're on the mailing list. We sent it to every OpenStack list. And so we're kind of, want to hate community. You said you wanted this, like give us feedback on what we can do to make it better. You know, is that fair to say? Anybody have, Amy? And the accountability isn't just your mentor and you didn't respond to your mentee. It's also the other way around. You know, a mentor would go, I emailed my mentee five times and never got a response. You know, I'd go great lengths without getting a response from a mentee. So you have, both parties have to be involved and real life does come into effect, which is why we thought the cohorts would be better because even if the mentors got busy at work, the hope was that the mentees would also be helping each other, therefore making bonds within the community, therefore being retained in the community. Yeah, I think it's a really hard thing to set up. And I understand like sending it to mailing lists and stuff, but I guess everybody in this room is the same. We are all members of God knows how many mailing lists. And a lot of the time you don't have time to read them. You just like, oh, yeah, okay. Ben, or I'm gonna put it in a folder to read later. No one ever reads that folder, ever. I mean, that is where things go to die. And I think maybe what you should try and do is to contact the big company sponsors and say to them, okay, we want to get this thing off the ground. Do you have human resources that can help us? Or do you have an internal communications team perhaps that can help us get this thing off the ground? Once it's established, you would find that it's a lot easier. So I'm interested in being a mentee and I had no idea that this existed at all. Probably because I put that mailing list in the folder to go and die. So yeah, maybe the big sponsor companies could help you you know, get off the ground, I don't know. What's that? I think it's kind of becoming a community input and I'm really enjoying this. No, we're good if you guys have input. Yes. That's awesome. So I think that's one category. You're on the mailing list, but this one got lost in the noise. I think we have a huge contingent of people who haven't yet kind of folded into the mailing list. People who come in fresh and want to get started from absolutely raw. I was in a session earlier today about the contributor portal. And one of the things that I had meant to bring up that I think I forgot about in the discussion as it does kind of went off on a tangent, but that when people, brand new people land on that page there isn't something that says I'm completely lost, get me a mentor, right? And so that, because these people don't have get, they don't have, they may not even have their mail client. They're not subscribed to the list at all. They're not gonna see that stuff. If they did, if I went in and subscribed today how long until I see a post that says by the way, there's a mentorship program available. I'm certainly not gonna go back to Piper Mail and read all the archives. So unless that was happening on a regular basis. So that initial touch point I think is a place that we can really focus on. Yeah, that's all right. So we have some links that will be on the last slide which will include where to go to sign up for the mentoring program. When you fill that out, that notifies us and we send you a direct personal email. It's another email. But you will get a direct email for us with instructions of how the program works, where to go to do next things. I would be interested if you sign up to give us feedback that on what that experience looks like. Is that a good first user experience or not and what we could do to improve it if that's not? And I think to go with what you said, I think. So Amy's, it's quite funny. So Jill is mentoring me to be part of joining OpenStack and getting this mentorship program growing. And then Amy and Kendall are mentoring us. So we're kind of practicing what we preach. So it's a little bit of a cohort there too. But to reach out to the foundation and see what we can do to be kind of like more of an active project so that we're recognized right up front as people are joining. So before I guess we go too far into that, I know Daniel has done a lot of research on the subject and I was hoping you might present some of your findings so that we have a little bit more of a foundation to continue our conversation on what we can do to improve OpenStack mentorship. Yeah, so this is part of work done together with Nicole and in this case with Iterian Intel. And we were trying to understand what it means mentorship program from a more quantitative point of view to basically having numbers in terms of contributions and having specific questions such as for how long these interns are retaining the community. And then we can compare with the rest of the community to check if from a quantitative point of view being mentored means something else, right? That if you are over the average in retention rate or under the average. So this is an example of what we were in life in. This is a map of the world with the Tennedician's team till May-August 2017. So we had in OpenStack around 40 people from 13 different countries. Most of them or a big portion of them coming from India in this case. But well, you can see the representation here. I'm from 17 different projects. It's interesting that I mean in OpenStack there are 60 or 80 different projects. But in terms of the outreach and this specific mentorship program, let's say a few of them were doing mentorship. So then going to the question of there are do we need more mentors or mentees? So it's something that is going there. And there are some projects that had up to, I remember five interns, it was Keystone, right? And Horizon. Horizon. So those were the two projects with the highest number of mentees in this case. So the next step would be probably going directly to those projects and say, hey, what's going on here? What can we learn from you? You had the highest numbers, right? And then we had 31 different mentors. So if you have the numbers we have something like up to two, well, one to one in terms of mentors and interns. So up to you, my friend. Thank you. Then the question we had was, OK, so if the goal of the foundation is basically to bring people from underrepresented minorities in technology to work on OpenStack, adopt OpenStack, use OpenStack, and develop OpenStack and work in the community, it means that the foundation wants to retain them for a while, right? We all want to be community here. So we had this question on top of this. And then we realized having the numbers that basically five out of the 38 interns are still contributing nowadays. And this is around 13%. So that's a number. And then if we compare the usual trend for the community, this is the retention rate is under 10%. Of course, I cannot say or we cannot say that this is because of the mentorship, but it's something we should explore definitely. So we have a higher retention rate when mentoring or at least in outreach than in the usual trend of the community. So that's something. Of course, we are comparing like 40 people with 7,000 commuters. So there is a big gap here. But these are some initial numbers. And the retention in media is around 18 months. So outreach is, as far as I remember, three months, right? Period. And we are talking that this is taking six times that. So people start working a bit before, people start working for a while after this. So that's something. Then we had this number of contributions in terms of, okay, so what's the whole picture here in terms of what all of these people have been contributing to the community and the foundation? Well, these are net numbers. So they simply say nothing. But this is kind of a way to illustrate the kind of things that mentees basically are producing in each of the projects that we have here. So we have 1,000 in general with commit or changes in image. We do not have information about code reviews in terms of plus one or plus two. And I received another interesting question by Sage Sharps asking for where are those current contributors working for? So basically the companies that are part of this. I don't have those numbers, but these are a couple of really interesting questions. And yeah, so in terms of the open stack, what we are doing is, well, first, we go to the publicly available data sources. So mailing list, our public, carrot, and kit. So we retrieve everything. And then for outreach, at least when we were analyzing this, the list of developers were public. So it was kind of a manual effort. So we were there. We retrieved all of the information from open stack. And then I was basically one by one like, okay, let's see this developer who has been participating and looking for their activity. Then, yeah. I'm not sure if you're aware of this. Yeah, yeah, I'm aware of this. But I mean, I was using Stakelytics for another thing that was first, I have two data sources, two inputs for my analysis. So just to compare. And then the second one is that in some cases, Stakelytics didn't have some of the developers. I don't know why. So I was perhaps because identities and so on. The problem with Stakelytics in that specific case is that you need to specify some name, but we did have all of the identities of our developer in the database. So that was easier in this case. But that was basically the main difference. So this is the definition of the bonus stack foundation in terms of what they want to achieve without reaching. So the question now is, are we achieving this? So then I guess that, or I think I believe that with data we can have at least some part of the answer here, which is the data. So I'm gonna leave, or do you wanna say anything about the resources? I was gonna leave them up in the background so people could have them for a bit while we discussed, but I didn't know if you wanted to mention anything specific about any of these or anyone on the panel? Is anyone not familiar with any of these? That's good. So the contributor portal is kind of a, choose your own adventure, I'm an operator, I'm a user, I'm a developer, I'm this or that. And the idea being that you'll drill down to get more important information. The first context, CIC currently is developer focused, but it's a, their goal is that if you need to ask a question, they're gonna be there waiting whether you're on ask.openstack.org, a mailing list or whatever, and they're gonna jump on it and get you a response. There's also a move to make an operator's version and possibly even a user's version. Now the OpenStack Upstream Institute is one and a half days before the summit starts, so we've been here since Sunday. Technically we've been part of summits since Sunday, but the OpenStack Upstream Institute also goes out to some of the OpenStack days with Ildico and Kendall, and they do it locally. D&I, we meet every other week, we have working on a diversity survey, we are now where the cohort mentoring program is under as we move the women of OpenStack underneath diversity and inclusion, so we do all those type of activities. We had some unofficial activities and some official activities this week. Mentoring programs, our focus of course being the cohort mentoring, but we also have outreach-y and in the past have been part of Google Summer of Code, and as Nicole mentioned earlier, we have speed mentoring at the summit. So Google Summer of Code is a program put on by Google and you apply, and if you get in, the help you get an intern, and I believe it's more one-on-one type mentoring similar to outreach-y, this year we did not get accepted because there are so many people applying to be part of the program, so hopefully they'll expand it next year and we can get back into it, but as a, so this year we just have cohorts and outreach-y. So you guys can see there's a lot of mentorship programs out there, there's a lot of things that OpenStack is trying to be a part of, and on top of this you have OpenStack having individual projects. You know, you've got, you've caught a container, has caught a container, sorry, has kind of their own program in the way they're onboarding people. We have dozens of onboarding sessions that happen today. So I guess what the question is here and it's gonna go to the panel as well to you guys is what can we as the OpenStack mentorship program do help to really solidify your efforts and help bring in and onboard those people who are wanting to join your programs? I was hoping that Amy and Jill will tell you guys we came up with four different cohorts that we were going to focus on to try to kind of attract that new blood. Do you guys wanna talk about what the cohorts were and their goals? Yeah, so the four cohorts that we initially came up with to start the cohort mentoring program with were FirstCloud, FirstPatch, FirstPhoneCall, FirstCloud, FirstPatch, FirstTalk, And FirstCoA, Well, CoA. CoA, so the CoA is the Certified OpenStack Administrator certification. So that would be helping people pass that exam, learn the things they need to do to deploy and operate Cloud and get certified. FirstCloud is deploying and operating a Cloud for the first time. FirstPatch is just getting a patch accepted to a project and FirstTalk would be getting coached on submitting to a CFP, whether it's for summit, for an OpenStack days or some other event where you wanna talk about OpenStack and then hopefully getting a talk accepted for something. So we thought those were kind of good things that covered a broad section of what people might wanna do in the community and might be good jumping off points for the program. So let me hit a couple of things that you said there. First of all, the question of different projects operate in different ways and how do you navigate that craziness and do you need somebody that's in the specific project? This kind of ties into, like again, what we were talking about earlier today at the contributor portal discussion forum, which is that a lot of people come at the contributor portal, there's one section of it where you undo a twisty and it's got a list of all of the project groups on it, which is great. If you know where the hell you wanna start in the first place, which a lot of people don't, and they need sort of an initial sort of switch mentor to give them even that initial guidance and that person doesn't need to be project specific at all, right? I think attempting to go into projects and trying to make them all more similar in the way they operate is a non-starter, right? I think we agree on that. I mean, it'd be a nice ideal, but that'd be a tough sell, I think. No, I don't disagree. I think that for us, I would at least personally see that as falling under first patch. Someone could come to us to say, hey, I wanna contribute, I've never contributed for it. Can you give me guidance for what projects to get into, who are good resources, how do I even go about picking a project? Would absolutely be something that I would say. So one of the things that came out this morning was that actually I think it's gonna get implemented is when you get into that page, it's, I called it the IKEA guide to first patch, which is there's gonna be a spot in there where you can say, I'm a developer and I just want to know how the process goes, and it would actually walk you through a tutorial, go clone the sandbox repository, go edit this file, go put it in a thing, go get review, we'll have a bot that's sitting there watching for those reviews that'll, to be realistic, it'll wait three weeks and then minus one your patch, right? And then it goes back and goes through the process basically and you get to go through the full workflow and then eventually you go fix it and then it submits it, it'll actually merge your patch for you, right? And that doesn't have, that flow at a high level should be at least common enough to all the projects that it would be applicable no matter where you want it to go, and that would kind of give you some amount of confidence to kind of go on from there. Now, it doesn't really involve mentors necessarily, it's an automated mentor in a sense, but as I mentioned earlier, getting a spot on the contributor portal that says I'm the kind of person who doesn't want to do a tutorial on my own, I'd like a little hand-holding, I'd like a little bit more personal attention, get me a mentor, right? Like it helped me with a person kind of a flag and you were talking about, you guys obviously communicate with Kendall on a regular basis, while that talk is still fresh in her head because she was the one running it. Yeah, plug her with that, and I think that's probably good. And I know there's some discussion and effort being made to put the Stackup Stream Institute online. The way I see combining kind of what you were talking about with the first patch is the mentor may not actually do so much mentoring as kind of serving as almost a first contact SIG member, oh, what are your interests? Oh, you know, you may really like Nova. Let me introduce you to some people in Nova, and Nova might take over from there, or you might go ahead and help mentor them getting set up and everything else. So it's, even in the cohorts, it's supposed to be kind of free flow as to what the person needs. Yeah, for sure. So I know, oh, go ahead. So we're just slightly connected to this. I'm also one of the Offstream Institute trainers, and this was exactly my problem back then when I wanted to learn how to contribute to Open Stack, and I ended up rather just taking over being an Offstream Institute trainer because I was also missing this tutorial. And actually, I also heard this as what Amy said, that we probably should somehow make the Offstream Institute more official, like in an online form or something, because I also kind of have the feeling that now the mentoring part is actually not that bad at all. So what Amy said again, that the first contact is gonna be made, and that person would just direct the newcomer to the developer who actually can help them. But right now, the problem is, and this is what I also heard during the weekend, that we are talking a lot about the mentoring program. We are so happy that we are doing this mentoring program. We do this and this, that we are so great that we are doing the mentoring program, but we do not really have any output of this. And this is inherently the problem because the mentoring program is actually something where you connect to or more people. So it doesn't necessarily have a written evidence that this happened. But on the other hand, I think we still should keep it on our to-do list that we gather a couple of project team leads and at least, so the problem is that we cannot really make a tutorial that this is how we contribute to OpenStack because it's like 30 something different microservices, a lot of differences between them. But at least as this kind of user group here, what we could do is, and this would be an output to create a template which could serve as a tutorial for all the projects where we can show the steps, what to do, how to jump on one of the microservice development. And then on top of that would be the actual like face-to-face or person-to-person mentoring. So to go on what Marcus said and what you said earlier, y'all are going to hate me in a minute because I'll put you guys on the hot seat now. I'm new to OpenStack, I've said that quite a few times here. Is there an inherent risk in what we allow for open source projects and every project kind of does their own thing and we allow that autonomy, I believe would be the correct word for it? But is there an inherent risk in that that we are losing people because we don't have that uniformity when it comes to the onboarding to the mentorship? I told you guys it's gonna be a hard question, but yeah. Sometimes it can just be that introduction to that particular project. Hi, this is my name is and they wanna work on Swift, so I introduce them to not my name. And I just get them talking. Well, not my name is actually a person. But that introduction can be all they need to get started. There are documentations that go over this how you set up your environment and if you wanna contribute to here and we do have everything from this is how you get to, even before that we have, this is how you get your logins and everything else. We have all the steps, but I think what happens is you log into a channel and you say, hi, I'd like to contribute and if no one is there or you just don't have that warm handoff, you get discouraged. It's the human component that you can't put in a wiki. Nicole and Daniel, you guys have had experience with mentorship programs outside of just OpenStack. I mean, can you tell us a little bit about what you've seen there that maybe worked or ideas? Not to put you on the spot there. Well, two things come to mind for me. And it goes back to what I said earlier in terms of organic mentoring versus structured programs. For me, the way that I made my way into the OpenStack community was through mentors that I had at Intel in their open source technology center where they encouraged me to get involved. And so I had that, I guess you could call hand-holding or less hand-holding and more encouragement to get involved. And then I could see that I was being invited to the table and what did I have as a strength to offer a value in terms of how to participate in the community? From a structured programs standpoint, one of the things that we've done with the speed mentoring workshops is to take, and I think I was talking to Lisa Marie earlier this week about how we've been able to move some of the really great things that are happening in the OpenStack community in terms of welcoming diverse folks into the community, how to take some of those programs like the speed mentoring workshops and move them into some of the other communities. And one of the proof points has been or one of the successes, one of the things that I'm proud of is that at the last open source summit in Edinburgh, they actually held two speed mentoring workshops because it was such a popular program there. So there's obviously a need for that. So I think that's one of the things that I've seen work really well is there are so many different ways to get involved, but it's what matches your time that you have to give. Your resources, I know resources, folks are bandwidth limited. So it's what matches how you feel comfortable in terms of paying it forward or giving back. And it often, yes, absolutely. I think one of the key factors, as you said, is the cultural thing. So first you need to have some cultural approach either in the community or in the company or wherever you are. Coming back to your comments, my personal experience is not in open source communities, but when I was doing the PhD and back there, I would say that one of the key factors is to have someone that is mentoring you, but it's giving opportunities to do something, either sharing, starting the chair session that teach you how this works, that help you with the problems or the failures that you have. So someone that gives you opportunities and then you try those, right? You try to do your best there. I think that idea of giving opportunities is quite interesting. So something just hit my ear. So I'm gonna be now a little bit aggressive, okay? Don't take it wrong. So once one of the big cities mayor in Eastern Europe said that, look, in our metro system, we do not need elevators for the disabled people because look at the statistics, disabled people are not using the metro system. Of course not because there weren't any elevators yet. Now you said that everyone was looking for the speed mentoring session. Of course they were looking for the speed mentoring session because they have no idea how to start because usually open source projects just don't have the proper documentation. And unfortunately OpenStack has this problem too. So I'm still a very big advocate of having better documentation, having the output, not just talking about stuff and setting up this, let's say, tutorial template. I firmly believe that that would help. Another story from this weekend again at the upstream institute, we met a very talented young guy. He was just a student and now he looks for a job. And what you said that you like this organic way of getting into the OpenStack project and I think it's a very nice story and we can romanticize it. But the problem is that not everyone has this opportunity, not, for example, this guy, what he does not have is a company around him but what he has is a ton of time. And if there were proper resources from which he as a self learner could start and actually send in a batch, the most probably next time he could come here without paying for the $600, $1200 ticket. And might find a job. So right now what he does, he just wishes that during the next couple of months while he's sitting at home without the job, will be able to learn alone how to contribute to OpenStack and get some patches. I actually had the same problem. My company wasn't necessarily supporting myself. So the problem is that since we are diverse, let's really try to think with those people who are in this troubled situation where they have the time, they have the energy, they most probably have the knowledge, they just don't have the familiarity with the processes and the source code and so on and so forth. So based on what Mark said and your experience, both in Ansible and Triple-O and just in the OpenStack community as a whole, where does mentoring sit with the onboarding process? It sounds like so far they've been completely separated. So do you guys, yeah really where does it sit compared to the onboarding process for projects and OpenStack as a whole? Anyway. I think it goes back to the individual project because at least my project, OpenStack Ansible, is very welcoming. If someone puts in a first patch, we'll help them get it through. Same with operators, you're having trouble getting up and running, we're gonna help you. So on that side, I'm really lucky because if you're gonna talk about an inclusive welcoming project, I'm on it. So I don't get to see sometimes the stories people say and I'm like, really? And I get logged in on that channel and I just watch it and there's no interaction or someone will ask a question. But again, you have time zones and other things that are factors. So if you do have a welcoming project, it's easier to get started and get involved and grow very quickly. If you have a company behind you, it's very easy to start and contribute and everything else, which is kind of similar to Nicole's experience. As far as what Mark is saying, I think if we're getting back to how do we get it out there that we exist? How do we get people involved and how can we get them moving along? Because if that student from this weekend who I guess I didn't meet because I was running around all over the place, you know, if we had that information for them to find the mentoring program, we could get them involved, we could get them contributing, they could get that job. So we have that missing link, which is actually the focus of the Birds of a Feather we had earlier in the week. And this panel is to get the feedback, to get this thing up and running so it can be what it should be. Yes. Well, you know, so Jill comes from a company and she's involved in the Opposite community and the project because that's part of her job. So it's a different aspect of, you know, I came in to work on this project and I'm involved because of this project. So she didn't have that initial step of what projects do I choose. And I'm like the first one to say, I go where my friends are. You know, I've got patches all over the place but it tends to be I hang out and stay where my friends are. So it looks like we are coming close to the end of time. I wanted to share these links or we probably went a little bit over time. I thought we were till four 10, sorry. So these are the links that we have available for you guys. I would really deeply appreciate it, even if you are not looking for a mentor or mentoring that you reach out to us and give us feedback. The big thing that I've gotten out of this panel discussion is that we need to work more closely with the OpenStack Foundation. There needs to be more of a tie-in between onboarding of projects and mentoring, whether that be that we go into the projects or that we just let them know that we are available. So if you have any other feedback, feel free to reach out to us on Twitter, email. All of us work closely together. So thank you guys very much for coming and thank you for sitting on this panel.