 So thanks so much Marie, really appreciate the invite to the Women's Fedora Weekend and to talk at us. It's an absolute privilege to do it, whether I have much insight now with another thing. So I just kind of chatted about my experiences and so far. Things I've learned, challenges that I faced and a few accomplishments that we've made as well. So a little bit about myself. My name is Sarah Finn and I'm an agile coach with the CPE team. So the Community Platform Engine at Nearing Team, which looked after a lot of the infrastructure within Fedora and also sent us. I joined in November 2019, came in shortly after EFA, our product owner who gave a great talk yesterday. Both myself and EFA are the only women at the moment on the team and the guys that we work with are amazing. They're really champion us and really support us in all the different things that we do and the new things that we're jumping into as well. So that's really, really positive. It's a great team to work with. I'm also part of the agile practice team within Red Hat as well. So it's a group of agile practitioners and it's growing nearly every month or so. There's so many there. So it's great to have that community as well within Red Hat to be able to bounce off a few ideas and that. I'm a mother of two great girls. Addison is 10 and Isabel is 4, coming up to 5 in the next month. So definitely the job of balancing the career with family life can be quite challenging sometimes. I'm from Waterford in Ireland as well, down to sunny south east. And I'm very much an advocate for a team and an agile coach. I think there's enough said about that. But genuinely, I'm all about the team and trying to ensure that when people are working together that they're happy with how that's going. They're feeling quite content and feeling valued and getting a chance to celebrate their accomplishments. So how I became involved in Fedora. So I joined the site Red Hat in November 2019 and I joined the CPE team. So the community platform engineering team as their agile coach. So open source was definitely something I was familiar with in other organizations. And it's always that kind of conversation where we were discussing technology and different platforms and tools to use. And architecture and solutions, did we want to go down the open source route and go that route. But I never really got a chance to deep dive into it. So when I joined Red Hat and CPE, it was a huge learning curve for me and it opened up so many conversations. And just it was mind blowing, to be honest, to seeing all of this great work being done by such a large community. The vast amount of different technologies and things like that. It was just amazing to see. And also I became accustomed to IRC. So we've done that pretty quickly and got used to collaborating with the team and reaching out to them on that as well. Also I got to meet my helmet. So you can see in the chat there, Ifa and myself because that's Helma Louise. We haven't drove off that clip yet, thank God. But we're great, we're a great team I have to say. And we bounce up each other and we have that great bond and great support. So as I said, joining Red Hat, joining CPE, joining, I suppose, this door of open source and communities in regards to Fedora and CentOS, it was absolutely mind blowing to delve into this area. Because my background and my experience would have very much been an organisation of business-based, that this was just mind blowing to see lots of different people contributing together. Just because they liked doing it and they valued gaining ideas from other people and sharing their insights. It was just amazing to see and something I definitely wanted to explore a lot more. So why is it so mind blowing? And I thought about this over the last couple of days and I thought, okay, it's going back over my experience. What experience did I have in the last few steps and decades? Not too many decades, but one or two. So my background, I actually started out, I did a Bachelor's of Business Studies in Marketing. And I went straight into the marketing field. Even around, God, probably about 13, 12 years ago, it was not longer. So I loved marketing. I loved, I think, the kids watching advertising ads on TV used to play game called ads. They used to have to guess which ad it was, which product they were trying to sell, which brand. So I kind of gravitated towards that. But really, for me, when I thought about it, it was very much around the psychology of marketing. So why would somebody buy Nike over Adidas? Why would someone buy a Samsung over an iPhone? I really was intrigued by the decisions people were making. And I got a chance then to study a lot into emotion and rationality of marketing and that mindset. And what was really important to me as well was the ethics. And that has always been important since I've grown up. My family would definitely instilled a kind of an ethical mindset in everything that I did. I was always there to, I suppose, support people and to ensure that people were getting the right information. And if they were deciding to buy a product or a service, that they were buying it for the right reasons. So ethics was a big part for me. It has been in my life, but definitely in my career as well. However, the experience was a lot much different than what I thought it might be. This is a picture of a pressure cooker if people don't know what this is. And when I got more and more into the kind of corporate and business world, all I sensed all the time was pressure. Like constant keeping things going, keeping on that, that hamster wheel all the time. Very little time for actually collaborating, for reaching out to help people. The general kind of human aspect of it was really, was not existent. You were really reaching out to people to ask them to do something for you or to gain something. There was very little of the kind of kindness and human element to the corporate world that I experienced. A lot of people felt to get ahead. Maybe they had to take credit for everything. There was very much an I, I, I mentality more so than we. So it's not coming from my background. I was very much wanting to come together and to kind of build on things together. Not to single myself out of, you know, I'm going to achieve this and I'm going to do this. I was very much, you know, it takes a community, a team to build anything of value or to progress as humans and as goals for the organization for it. So then I discovered agile. And that was another moment where my mind was absolutely blown because it was a kind of a project management platform or approach that really was centered around people. So within when I came across agile, I was moving more from the marketing side of things and more so into the project management side of things. So the marketing, as we know, became huge online and digital marketing and all of that. It was very little traditional. So my role has started to be coming into more web development apps and that kind of thing, very much front end solutions. And I really felt my feet in project management, but I never liked the traditional project management. Data we picked from the sky and when we need a certain solution over the line by or we need, you know, this amount of hits on the website for to ensure that this is a valuable opportunity that we've gone down that route. This was agile to me was something that just made sense, you know, would allow people to check in with each other. It created opportunities for collaboration. It shared accountability across an organization for the delivery of value and for the delivery of the value to our users. So it just made complete sense and it creates a safe environment for people that they could speak up and share their thoughts and views. And if they felt something wasn't worth doing, there's an opportunity to say that if they felt they wanted to work on something in particular that they'd like to work on, there was an opportunity to do that as well. So really, I found that I was more comfortable being in the background and supporting others to take those leaps and to move forward and push outside of the comfort zones. So then when I came across Red Hat and open source of Fedora in 2019 when I joined last year, again, as I said, my mind was just blown because it all came together. Like the four foundations of Fedora just really sat with me so well. So freedom, you know, freedom to chat, to share ideas, to be innovative, to elaborate and to just be really open and honest. And I was just music 20 years ago. It was great friends. So like first, you know, first with foremost that it's a group of people that are friends. So not just people that are working together on bills and packages and upgrades and all of that, but that they're actually friends working together. I thought really, I really loved seeing that features as well. And first, so it was just all this innovation and this lovely warm environment that I just felt everything came together. So that's why my mind was blown when I became involved with Fedora because I finally found a career in a company and a community that shared my values where people were at its core. So like there was times where I felt, God, was I more, should I went down maybe the teacher route or the nurse route? What I wanted to do was kind of care for people and ensure I find my best is supposed to have people have a nice day. You know, they say kind of smile at somebody and might bite in their day. But the more I thought about it was like with that, I, you know, I love the world of innovation and technology and organizations and business and how much we can do together when we come together. But definitely I think this is, I've kind of come to terms, this is my calling in regards to bringing a bit of humanity and into the organizations and ensuring that it kept in communities as well. So how do I contribute to Fedora so far? So as I said, I'm very much behind the scenes, but always in the wings supporting CPE and its stakeholders as well. So as an agile coach, as you can see, there's a wide remit on what we do and how we do it. So there's a lot of coaching, there's a lot of time spent on just observing and seeing how things are going. Is there anything that's frustrating or challenging people or a team and just giving them the opportunity then to come together to discuss how they might try and resolve that. Is there another new approach they could take? Is there something they want to try out? So it's just that extra support for a team to maybe come up for air a little bit ever so often and to have a chat around where they'd like to go and what is I suppose there? Where do they feel comfortable, you know, where are they content? If they're feeling quite under, if they're feeling under pressure, if they feel like there's no downtime, how could we and what changes can we make to try and improve that? So what I'm doing is coaching, mentoring, again with any transformation or any new way of dealing with things. It takes a lot of change and takes a lot of time sometimes for people to kind of build the mindset of behaviours and build them a resilience. So they're open to new things and new approaches as well. So at the heart of everything I do, as I've said, is my motivation is always around helping people. So from the skills that I use on a day to day basis, I'm there to try and reduce stress and to create more compassion for ourselves. More so, that's first and foremost, that we feel that we are good enough and that we give every day is good enough. And then once we have that, then we'll definitely start feeling compassion for others and help each other when we're going through difficult times. Become more open and real. So creating a safe space and opportunities to be open to flag difficulties that are happening and actually giving people a reality check, you know, in what is possible and what's not possible. And just going back to the draw on board around it as well. As I said, people to feel good enough that every day, you know, what they're contributing to the community or what they're contributing in all of their life is good enough. Everyone is doing their absolute best. So to feel valued and heard. So everything that you're doing each day is valued and that you feel heard that you can have a conversation or flag any concerns that you might have. And also that you feel a sense of accomplishment. So I think if we were to really reflect on things, we want to feel that we're accomplishing things within ourselves, you know, that we're moving forward. So to do that, sometimes we just have to stop a little bit and reflect and go, you know what, God, you know, I got that over the line today that was really, really challenging. Or I reached out to Ali or our contributor. We worked really well on that. It was really nervous to do it, but I still did it. And we got that over the line. And so that's what I'm trying to encourage is just people to break down those barriers a little bit to be really compassionate with each other and to bring the more human side to it as well. There's a quote here that I think I came across a couple of months ago that for me, it sums up what success is for me. And the last three lines is it's what sticks with me. So to know even one life is really easier because you have lived that is to have succeeded. So my motivation is that it's people, it's not around going up a corporate ladder or anything like that. If I put a smile on someone's face or if people feel less stressed after having a chat with me, happy days. I'm happy. I succeed that day. So what challenges did I face when I joined CPE and Fedora and the world of Red Hat as well? So honestly, I was a newbie, newbie to open source, newbie as well to the world of software. As I said, a lot of my experience would have been front end solutions more so than the back end. So this was hugely new for me. It was quite nervous around it. But I knew I suppose that with the experience that I would have had in lots of different industries that I had to tweak and change that at the end of the day, the philosophy was still the same. It's around trying to encourage more collaboration and address challenges and frustrations. So yeah, it was like a fire hose. It really was. And I think Lee Griffin, who's the CPE manager, has said that to me. How's that fire hose going? And I think the fire hose was on a steady flow there for a good three to four months of information. So what I couldn't get over was just the vastness of Fedora and how far it spread. The amount of packages and tools and everything that was just there. It was just, it was in awe to be honest of all the talent that's out there and how people were coming together. And I really got to see that through IRC and how people were collaborating and also on GitHub and places like that as well. So what I learned as well is definitely the relationships and the passion that was instilled within Fedora. And for me, I suppose I never really understood that to that extent of what it is in Fedora. Because a lot of the time, as I said, my experience would have been in organizations. There was passion there, but it was from, you know, it was at the end of the day, it was a job, you know, that kind of way. But here, what I see is just this, I don't think there's hard sums at office, just this fire of passion for, you know, the values that you have there. And it was really good to see that. But it took me a while to grasp, you know, how people were very passionate about it and to ensure that I was giving enough time and really taking that on board when I was chatting with various stakeholders and team members as well. Also wearing multiple hats. And so I came in into this role as an agile coach, but my experiences would have been very much product owner, scrum master, Kanban coach. And so this was my first role whereby I had to kind of step up a little bit and help out other people that were going to be in those roles. And so I was trying to juggle, how is I going to do that? Where do I step in? Where do I step out? Also navigating the different people that we needed to reach out to within CPE, within the Fedora community. So how was our relationships at that time? How can we improve them? What are the challenges there? And there were some challenges at that time as well. And how best to approach them? How best to go about it? And also there was obviously skepticism with this agile coach that came in, you know, what is their agenda? You know, what is the end agenda? Where does she want to get to? And it takes time, you know, to build that trust. But I think I have done that with the team, think it's cost that I really am, you know, just around supporting people to get things done and to do that in the most compassionate way possible. Also, I was a mom, obviously, I'm still a mom, that didn't drop. But as you all know, if you've experienced it before, starting a new role, you're talking at least six months. But for me, anyway, anything more that I started, six months it takes for you to feel, okay, I get it, I know where we're going, I know what's happening. And it's all consuming. When you go into a new role, it's all consuming. And especially with this agile coach role, because I wanted for the team and for people that I was interacting with and being very mindful that when I interacted with the team that anything that we might have discussed and things like that might have impacted things in the community as well. So I wanted to ensure that everything that they experienced was a positive experience. So that was a lot of pressure that I put on myself at that time. And the reason I wanted it to be as positive as possible was because of that skepticism and sometimes with agile and with other experiences, some team members with my event or some community members may have had the experience with agile coaches or squad masters and things like that. I wanted to ensure that I was instilling that the team were the captain's, you know, the partnership of the changes that they were making. I was just creating opportunities and suggesting different ways we might do that. So obviously as we were kind of looking at everything, I wanted things to be quite positive. So that took a toll on family life, which was quite hard. And I feel the MAMI guilt and all that that happens with it. But I have a great partner. I have a great family as well. And the colleagues that said with NCP have been amazing. But I just, you know, I'm now at a point where I can step back a little bit more and allow the team to move forward. But I think it's great for the girls. And when I was doing this today, I was saying to Addison, I'm going to do a bit of Fedora thing today. She said, I'm really proud of you, MAM, to do that. So, like, I won't get emotional now. But, you know, as I have daughters, they want them to pursue things and not feel, you know, that guilt sometimes and to move forward with their dreams of what they want to do as well. So what victories did we achieve? So we had lots of victories within CPE and I suppose within the Fedora community as well. So there seems to be a lot more opportunity to collaborate. Like within Fedora, anyway, there's huge collaboration there. There's huge transparency there. That's never, never, ever, ever been an issue. And again, that was a learning curve for me as well because I come from an organization whereby there was a lot of meetings, closed meetings where, you know, a set of people were invited into a meeting and everything was, you know, maybe top secret until we could go out with something kind of more formal, you know, what that announcement might be. So to see, you know, an environment that was so transparent and open with what they were doing, as I said, it was just music to my ears. It was great to see that. So really what this illustrates is it's just a little bit more within the CPE environment there. Just having a chat when we see these requests coming in, when we have maybe bigger pieces of work that we'd like to work on, you know, that we're having a chat around, okay, who do we need to work on this? What's going to be the outcome of it? You know, do we block off six weeks to get this worked on or do we do little pieces of it over time? Or is it, you know, a year long thing? So it's just happened that conversation to see what skills we need and what resources and what support needed to ensure that we're delivering value to the community that they can use at the end of that period. It's all about balance and we're always going to be there. And I think within the team now, what I can definitely say, you know, within the team, that they've gone into a mode of reflection and reviewing things that we're doing. So for example, if we're having a meeting every week and we feel, you know what, I think we could change this up and gain more from it. Team members are now speaking up and suggesting new ways of dealing with that, which is great to see. Yeah, with IRC as well. I sort of definitely on that, love it. And I've also done a few, what are they called? Upgrades. So BIPL has taught me to do a few package upgrades for my Google Chrome and all that. So I'm delighted and thrilled to get that done. We asked for a lot of feedback. So you might see the community engagement or community happiness survey that goes out. So we set up a community happiness initiative. We're about members of CPE and also representatives from the Fedora community join a bi-weekly call and we look at ways on how things are going and how we can improve within the community as well. The team are starting to look at the both different paths. So it's not just one path that we want to go down. There could be lots of different approaches to things. And again, just having that opportunity to discuss that. So it's brilliant to see that. So that's definitely something that's become a more and more the norm within the team. Also the man here, I don't know what he is. Is he a Viking or something? I'm not too sure, but with the shield as well. So it's around trying to protect yourself a little bit more as well. And I'm glad to see the team doing that. So being comfortable to say, no, we can't do that or there's no value in us doing that. Or yes, we can do that, but we can't do this. So it just reduces this ever-growing backlog of to-do list whereby we log off at the end of the day and think, oh my God, there's still another load there for me to do the next day. That we look at what makes sense for us to do and what ensures that it's ever creating that value to our community each day, each month and each quarter. And we're taking time out to celebrate. So celebration is a big part and should be a big part of what you're doing on a daily basis, but definitely quite regularly. Because at the end of the day, we do have a lot on our to-do list. And if we just keep going, we never take any opportunity to celebrate how great we are and what we're doing and how we're improving people's lives. So we definitely have done a lot of that in CPE as well. And you can definitely see the team becoming a lot more self-organized whereby they may not no longer need to have a coach in the next couple of months because they're creating these opportunities themselves now organically, which is amazing to see. And I feel very proud to see that as well. So as I said, really, my role was just to ensure that they're creating these opportunities for themselves to address challenges, frustrations and try and include people into decision-making and being very open with what's happening and what's not. So my final thoughts is really for women, more women to come into tech. If that's something that they love to do, it's around women and men championing each other and just coming together and to support each other in doing that. And I can definitely say that a shout-out from my experiences of Elizabeth Fedora on the development list within CPE, the men and the women have just been beyond supportive, very open to answering all my questions that they might think are very silly questions, but I don't care. And it's just brilliant to see. So I think the more and more we break down these barriers and create space for more questions to be asked and for women to really champion themselves and just go for it. And we'll be here to support you along the way. So that's it for me. Thanks so much for your time. Not sure if there's any way valuable, but again, I really appreciate it. Thank you. Hi. Hi. You do not need to question if that was valuable. That was so awesome. And I have like too many questions. Thinking of more and more questions. Okay. So my first question is when did you first get involved? Like when did you first get hired in tech? When did you first get? Okay. So hired into tech was probably 10 years ago with a consultancy firm in the college called Waterford Institute of Technology. And they were very much around website bills, apps bills, working with companies to really get into the mindset of their users and what value would bring to the users and things like that. So that was in around 10 years ago. Now, God, I'm getting old. I'm just like you're very, very early 20s. Already 20s, very early, very early. Okay, cool. Yeah. And school for tech or did you go to school at all? Like did you go to university for, you said you were from marketing, right? So yeah, so I did a BBS in marketing and then I'd say about six months or so after that and I could really see like the marketing was becoming online again, very much digital marketing. So I did a web development course then. And then after that I did little kind of other courses, very small kind of tech side things, but I very much stayed on the front end. So more of the marketing, the user experience more so than diving into software and things like that. Cool. So now that you're in more of the tech world and the agile coaching and the project managing and all of these things, do you miss the marketing stuff? Sometimes I do, I'll be honest. More so around this with the visuals. So everything in marketing is UI. You know what I mean? It's like jazzy, you know, it's a lovely clean design and color, all that kind of thing. So it took a long time for me when I was in IRC, you know, kind of all of this text and all of that, even on the terminals and things was quite different to me. But I think I do like this upper end side of things. I do like seeing how things work, you know, and just a little bit of code and so much up here as I was delighted to upgrade my own Google Chrome to the date. But I do miss it, but I do see, I am bringing a little bit of that experience into CPE as well. I know Stefan, he's the manager, a new manager who's just joined CPE and he kind of comes from a little bit of that background as well with a lot of visuals and UI and things. But again, we need to look at our audience and ensure what people are comfortable with them and all of that too. So I have thoughts about this. I have a design and finer background. That's what I went to school for. So yeah, that was honestly something that took some effort to overcome was the format and the presentation, like you weren't around in these days, but we used to use something called track. And it was honestly, as someone who was used to it, like I was in college and at the university we used Apple. We used, you know, it's going from that to something that is not wrapped nearly as shiny or pretty, and it's the UI and that. So I think that there's, I kind of had this goal to improve design and open source, but it's a hard one. There are some open source design groups, but I've always been so involved with Fedora. It's kind of hard to bring it out past that. But the reason they ask if you were missing marketing is because we have marketing opportunities in Fedora. Right, but it's very good. And I was just, I was looking at your presentation and which slide it was, it was the one we were talking about, you know, the things that you attempt to do for others in a very concrete way. It just made me think of my mentorship experience. It made me think of the kind of things I think about and do when I'm mentoring other people in the community or now more officially through Outreachy. I think you would be such an ideal mentor for Fedora and actually just to shout out Sarah, which she is co-mentoring an intern for this upcoming Outreachy session with a couple members from CPE. So I don't know what your role is in that, but I see you're involved and I'm really excited about that now because I hope you can talk about it. Yeah, interact with applicants and share this kind of energy with them. That's awesome. I can't really say that it was productive. It really supported me in it and go on the Outreachy program. He's the coordinator for the interns stuff for Fedora, so we definitely thank him for all of that support. He definitely gives me reminders about things I have to do. That's great. What do you feel like since you've been on the CPE team? What do you feel like the biggest impact that you've had? What categories do you think you've fallen with that? When I joined CPE they were an amazing group. Anyway, you know what I mean? Their hearts are 100% in the community. I felt for them sometimes definitely at the start. When I was introduced and people were probably unsure of what my role was. They had a heart in the community and a heart in Red Hat. It's quite challenging there. I think I hope what I've left them with or what I'm bringing is I value all of that. I just think it's excellent to see them contributing so much to the community. I definitely want to encourage them to do things they enjoy doing within the community and create space to do that. I hope that I have instilled that in them so they know that it's not one of the other. It can absolutely be all of it. Hopefully that's it. Awesome. For people who are familiar with Fedora Space there's this thing called the Develop List or for people who are unfamiliar. We have the Develop List and Sarah mentioned it in her talk. I can kind of tell why. She was like about a year ago when we had a lot of passionate people on there. That was a really nice way of saying it's kind of like a dumpster fire. I guess I want to ask how did you try to do their job and maybe they have more understanding of why they're doing what they're doing with the average Fedora etc. How did you coach the team through that? It definitely seemed intense. I'll just say it was a really good forage. It was an intense couple of weeks that we had all together and it was pretty emotional. I'm curious how did you support the team through that? Yeah, so absolutely. I think the word passionate is a great word because it's only when people do get upset or are angry about certain things that are done it comes from a good place. It comes from a passionate place. It's obviously reasons why and it's to protect things or whatever that might be. I always see any feedback whatsoever as a positive actually I find the more that we're open with that and the more that we become more content with just listening and just hearing then I suppose to come together and try and see what we can do together. So what is our common goal and what is our common purpose but not to what would you say, take those feelings and make them personal. They're not. They're somebody else's experiences that they're having. So to try and I suppose detract yourself from the emotions that somebody is feeling and try and see through where that anger is where that's stemming from or where that disappointment is around it. So it would have coached the teams individually and also management and stakeholders as well on how we were communicating around it. I'm using it very much as a lesson, a lesson learned. So we're not perfect we're not going to get everything right there's going to be things that we're going to not do right or people feel we haven't done right you're not going to leave everybody. But I think if we learn from things and then as we go forward to try and improve it and I think having the community happiness initiative we're coming together and seeing how we can improve things and having that survey there as well that can help us not come up against that in as much in the future. Very cool. Thank you for answering all my questions. So I don't see any questions in the chat right now of course people are welcome to drop some in but as you were here I'm sure you know what's coming next I was hoping Oh no I'm so proud of this. I was hoping you would read this little script for us we're putting together some content after this with our footage one of the really cool things about working online this way for events for events as we get all this content recorded so here it is I need to try to figure this out a little bit yesterday maybe you remember and then we added in one more piece at the bottom we are Fedora so when I'm ready go ahead and unmute myself I'm going to say this in Irish first so you say the first part in Irish the part about yourself okay and the part in English okay so what is the what's the second part we are from different countries we speak different languages okay the only thing I'm not sure about is I am a woman and I speak English let me see because you know that the translation for I am a woman and I speak Irish there Google and standby okay let's go over this the translation I it's a bit embarrassing that we don't know I think it said just oh there you go do I have it on there okay perfect thanks so much for that so do you quit it's not on film it's not on film it's not on film it's not on film it's not on film it's not made we are from different countries we speak different languages we are of different cultures but Fedora unites us with open source we are Fedora awesome thank you for doing that and thank you again for coming here I hope you get to hang out and chat and see a couple more stories from other folks and guess what I'll see you at work on Monday absolutely thank you thank you