 Hi, and thanks for coming. My name is Rich Bowen, and I am the community manager for the CentOS project. I've been at Red Hat for almost nine years, and I've been doing the CentOS project for a little over three years. I'm going to be talking about what happens when you make your community angry as a community manager, because eventually you're going to. So I'm going to start with story time. I mentioned I'm the CentOS community manager, but I'm going to tell you a different story. In 2013, I was the SourceForge community manager, and if you are of a certain age, you know what SourceForge was, and I was, I was there in 2013 when my manager, Roberto Gallipini, sent out this blog post announcing a new program for projects that were hosted at SourceForge as a way to share the profit that SourceForge was making on the back of their communities, and this was not received as well as it was expected by management, and as the community manager, it was my job to appease the community when it became angry that SourceForge was making money off of them, as though somehow they didn't know that already, but more importantly as part of this profit sharing, one of the things that SourceForge did was package third-party software in with your software release when you sent it out, not necessarily with your consent, and this was received very very badly and led to some some terrible press with SourceForge. The community was very angry and it was my job to sort of appease them a little bit, but appease is definitely the wrong word here, as you'll see as we go forward. So that's probably not the story you were expecting me to tell, so I'll tell a different story. On December 8th of last year, my project, the Sentos Project, announced that we would be discontinuing Sentos Linux and instead focusing our efforts on Sentos Stream, and Sentos Stream is similar to Sentos Linux, but it's different in important ways that made the community very angry. I am not here to talk about that announcement. I'm not here to talk about that decision or justify it or explain it or tell you it was the right thing, but I'm talking more about what you do when your community gets angry because they're going to, occasionally, no matter what project you're working on, your project is going to make a decision that's going to make the user community, the developer community angry, and as the community manager, it may not have been your decision, but it's your responsibility. So I have a lot of things that I want to say in a very short time to say them, but there's two points that I want you to remember throughout all of this, and I'll be reiterating them as we go through, because they're really the central points of all of this. And the first one is to remember which hat you're wearing. Now, there's not necessarily a right answer to this. Some community managers are entirely representing the community, whereas others are entirely representing their employer, and those are both valid models. It depends what your community looks like. The tricky thing is that you're doing both if you're doing your job well, and so you do want to remember which hat you're wearing, and if you are confused about which hat you're wearing, you need to take a step back and answer that question first, because that needs to be in the forefront of your mind throughout all of the other things that you're going to do as part of being a community manager. So I have to decide daily to be the voice of the community to Red Hat, even when I disagree with what the community is saying, even when maybe it feels like a personal attack against me, even when it's going to make my co-workers angry, I have to remember that that's my job, and not take things personally when I am perceived as part of the enemy. Another way to say this, so this is really the same point, said a different way, you got to remember whose side you're on, and ideally you're not confused about this. Very frequently when you are dealing with an angry community, you are asked to take sides, and the conversation can start to sound like us, the company against them, the community, the people that are using our stuff for free, particularly if you're free in a company that relies on open source software. The people that use the software for free may be seen as the enemy, maybe they're undercutting our profits in some way. If the community is ever seen as the enemy, then you have a much bigger problem, you have an education problem where the company needs to be educated to understand that the community is really what's keeping them afloat. So those are two points that I'll continually come back to as we go through the rest of these. So I mentioned December 8th, we made this announcement, and then I took a few weeks off for Christmas. And when I came back, I had the opportunity to read through three weeks worth of email in two days. And it was fascinating to watch, very obviously the community going through these sort of canonical stages of grief. But when you are working in a community that is largely distributed as open source communities are, somebody's always finding out the news today for the first time. So we announced the end of life of a product, and that end of life is December 31st this year. And there are people that are going to discover that the first week of January next year. And they're going to be angry all over again. And they're going to question why we made a decision, and they're going to try to talk us out of it. They're going to do the bargaining and the depression, the being furious at me personally for doing that. And it's just not as simple as saying, well, we got through that, so everything's peachy now. And so I've been going back through this again and again and again all year. And it's been a difficult year, but it's also been a difficult year for our community. And so I need to make sure that I don't make this about me because it's just not. You have to be willing to be patient and listen and understand that you may not get to that acceptance. A large number of our community members are going to switch to Debian, and that's fine. That's their call, and that's not a failing on my part or on theirs. And so it's really important to be compassionate and to not get defensive. So one of the obvious reactions that I've had all the way through this is when people get angry, I get defensive and I start saying, well, you're just wrong and we're right and we did the right thing and you just don't understand it. I just haven't explained it well enough yet. And that is often a sign that you've forgotten whose side you're on. And then I have to remind myself that I'm the community advocate. I'm on their side and they have good points. And so you got to listen, got to understand where the community is coming from. You have to understand their grievances and acknowledge that they're probably right. That can be difficult when it feels personal, but it also helps you do your job better. It helps you advocate better for the community's needs within the business, which is making decisions for the shareholders and not for the free software users, which is also legitimate. So you're writing that line trying to remember which hat you're wearing. As a community manager, your most important asset, your only asset, is the trust of the community. And if you cannot maintain that, then you need to turn the job over to somebody else who can have that trust of the community. Now one of the things that I had to do very early on was acknowledge that the community was right to be angry. We made a change to their world and they were angry about that and that was right and legitimate and correct. The business, on the other hand, made a decision and they were right and correct. And those two things have to be held in tension. This is one of the weird things about working in open source. There's this constant tension between everything can and should be free and we like our paychecks. And that tension when you're in an open source program office, when you're in a community manager position, that tension is the definition of your job and that can be very stressful. And the tendency is to just say, well, I just haven't explained it well enough. You just don't understand yet. I need to explain it again. And it's a lot more listening and understanding the reasons for the grievances. And I'll get back to grievances in a moment because you can't always fix them. Another thing is to remember that it's not personal. It can feel exquisitely personal. It feels exceptionally personal when you get threats in email and it wasn't my decision. It wasn't my, but it's my job. It's my job to be the face of that decision. And if you're in a situation like this where the community is angry and you don't feel that it's at all personal, then maybe you don't have enough compassion and maybe you're in the wrong job because compassion is such an important part of being a community manager. So, yeah. Move on to the next major topic here, which is talking to the press. And I recommend that you don't. I recommend that if you're contacted by the press, that you clearly understand your company's policy about talking to the press and that you talk to your press and public relations and whatever department and make sure that you're doing it right. Now, if you're in a position like this where you are the face of a project, hopefully you've had some sort of press training. And if you have not, then you should seek it out. The people that do the press for your company will appreciate it enormously if you seek them out and ask for this training because they don't want to clean up after you when you say stupid things. And it's really easy to say stupid things, particularly if you are a compassionate, empathic person and you trust the reporter who's talking to you. Now, I should say most of the reporters that I've dealt with, practically all of them are ethical and they're committed to truth and they're trying to do their job and tell a story, but also I've encountered a few who are looking for a catchy headline. And if you twist the story just a little bit, you can get a great headline. And so this sounds incredibly cynical, but when you are talking to the press, assuming that you ever do talk to the press, you got to filter these questions through the cynical side of yourself and think how your answer can be misconstrued. And I've said stupid things to reporters and they are perfectly happy to print those stupid things because I said it, wearing my company hat. The other side of talking to the press is that when you are speaking on social media, you're talking to the press and it can be really easy to say the snarky thing on Twitter because it's just a joke and then you find yourself in an article the next day with Red Hat Spokesperson said and your personal Twitter account and your project Twitter account, you may imagine somewhere in your mind that they are two separate things and you can say the one thing, the one place and the other, the other place and that's also not true. Your joke tweets are official statements of the company. Now of course they're not, but that's beside the point. So it can feel unjust when you say, well I was just saying that as a private citizen but you don't get that privilege when you're in a public facing position. As the great philosopher Socrates said, there is honor in the tweet not sent. So you're, wait, did I? Yeah, we all wear all of these hats, right? But the dirty secret is that the question which hat am I wearing is a lie. You're always wearing all of your hats and the other dirty part of this secret is that you don't get to pick which hat you're wearing. I can say I'm up here wearing my Red Hat but someone in the audience can say well I was acting as the official Spokesperson of the Centus Project and it's more about how the listener hears your words than your intent and so you have to decide which hat you're wearing, you have to be clear on which hat you're wearing but as my friend Theo Schloss-Nagel said, if there is a fundamental conflict between the different hats you think you're wearing then that's a problem. If you are playing different parts and those parts are in conflict and you have different values with your different hats then that's not honest. You're not being honest with yourself and you're not being honest with your listeners. I worked for Theo for a while and I always appreciate his insight into things. Anyway, the next major point that I want to make is that you should always tell the truth and this came up during the early weeks of this... Yes sir? During the early weeks after we made the Centus Change announcement people would ask me questions that were leading or argumentative and it was my job to tell the truth even in times when it made us look terrible and one of the reasons for this I mean obviously one of the reasons is that you should tell the truth because it's the truth but the other reason is that your lies will surely find you out. Your users, your customers, your audience are way smarter than you are. There's more of them. They have done more research. They know the deep corners that you haven't learned yet and if you try to gloss over the truth they'll come back the next day with well I have this evidence here that shows that you were lying and now you've doubled your problem. Not only have you violated their trust yesterday now you've done it again today and so telling the truth it's critical because you can't get away with it. In an open source project in particular you can't get away with trying to make yourself look better. The other part of this is if you don't know the answer don't make something up say I don't know and then go find out. You don't get to keep saying I don't know that's not an answer because they're going to ask you again tomorrow. So you have an obligation to find out that answer and give that answer honestly to the community. Now the other side of this is sometimes you're not allowed to give the answer and that's okay too and you have to say that. Now to those of you who are not North Americans we have this phrase throwing someone under the bus which means to criticize or blame or punish someone else in order to make myself look better and for me to throw my employer under the bus and say well they just did this to make money or they just did this because they hate you or because they hate our competitor or whatever. It also will come back to visit you. It's important to be honest when you're told you cannot speak about something. You can say well I'm not authorized to answer that question. That should often be accompanied with you need to talk to this other person which can feel like passing the buck but it's doing your job as well. Because once again trust is the core of your job. Now at Red Hat trust is our only asset because we don't sell software we sell support and so if people don't trust us then we no longer have a business model and so in our case in particular and for those of you who work for companies that rely heavily on open source this is also the case for you. Trust is what you sell. Now during the bargaining phase I was often asked can't you just go talk to so and so and get them to change this and this was one of the places in which I had to be brutally honest. This is the decision that we've made I'm not going to change it. It's not going to change. I wish all you want but we're not reversing this decision. In other situations in that source forage story I told before some of you were here that was a decision that I had some influence on and I could go argue for that and get that decision changed and you need to be honest about that with the people that are asking the questions. Don't make people think oh I'm going to go that for you and get this changed if that's not true because then once again you have undermined that trust that you have and that can feel and people said this to me in those early weeks that can feel very callous for me to say well this is just the way it is and you're going to have to deal with it so hopefully you can be more tactful than that but the fact is that if you can't change it don't pretend that you can. And then one other thing don't get fired remembering which hat you wear but also remembering that this is your job and you're getting paid for it and you're working for a company don't get fired for this now there are cases where it's worth getting fired for if your company does something unethical and you are the face of that then maybe this is something you should get fired for maybe it's something you should stand up for and get fired for I am certainly not the person to suggest that to you I hope that none of you get fired over such a situation but you know before before you click send on that email think through what hat you're wearing think how that will be perceived to the fourth person down the line that it's been forwarded to who's in HR or whatever and don't get fired in order to make a joke or to in order to pass the blame to someone else so don't burn any of your bridges in your advocacy for either the customer or the company so that is what I have time for I know this was really short but we have like one minute for questions I think we have three minutes for questions yes well in this particular case the community did exactly that the community said well screw you and they forked and they went off and did something else and that's always a viable option in an open source project and so there are four or five prominent well there's like two prominent ones but four or five other ones that have sprung up out of this decision and are going right along and doing their thing and that's one of the great things about open source that may not be the case if you're not in an open source company but it certainly happened here yes well I think that the answer to that is communicate more sooner however in this particular case the day after the decision was made we announced it and so which is why the announcement felt so unpolished because it was and you know it's a double-edged sword because if we had waited until it was more polished we would be accused of holding on to it because we announced it the first day we were accused of having known long before I mean the thing is when you rely on trust as your currency that can always be questioned and that was one of the reasons for a lot of the anger was feeling misled and that's hard to get around because the people who cannot see inside the machinery can make all sorts of assumptions about it so yeah that's a hard question I have many answers that don't really fit with the theme of this talk but yeah it's a good question yes so that's another presentation but what we have done is take as many steps as possible to open up our governance at all levels so the board of directors for the project was always kind of meeting in private phone calls now that's public and streamed on YouTube the Centos project is tightly tied to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux project and REL moved all of its processes upstream now and so that's all done in public and so you know my answer is similar to my answer here is communicate more earlier and be as transparent as you possibly can and when you can't be honest about that we are out of time thank you so much for your attention