 I know we have a couple minutes left, but like you know I just thought since you guys are here I have your attention maybe we can make it a little bit interactive. So just I wanted to understand what brought you here I am assuming this title spoke to you and that is why you are here because there are multiple tracks in this conference right and you chose this one. So I am assuming there is some kind of problem that you are trying to solve or something that you want to get out of this session I want to understand what that is. So I would try to make sure I cover that in my session right now. So just shout out whoever can volunteer what they are here for or what would be something that they would want to take away. Yes. As Chad mentioned earlier it's pretty hard to do that first contribution without having shaky hands all the time and I was hoping to get some better understanding on how to do a proper contribution that will actually contribute something instead of just annoy someone. So it's contributing from the developer perspective. Anybody else wants to go? Yes. The vast majority of them all who worked on pretty important projects now don't. And so you know this was kind of a more positive so best practices building community like kind of so I was just kind of curious to see you know like what kind of open source communities that are thriving right now what they're doing and kind of see if that can apply to I don't know ameliorate the things that among the developers I know who really loved open source and then now you know like 95% of them don't do it anymore just kind of you know like seeing if there's anything to be learned there. Okay. I'm looking for ideas on how to link a local community with a larger global community. How to link isolated subgroups together into a larger community of similar interests. How to link smaller groups into a larger community okay. Anybody else wants to volunteer something? Thank you so much for giving me these pointers. Going one, going two, going three. Okay. So thank you so much everyone for your time today. I will try to cover these points. So I am little bit about me. I am Sujata Tibriwala. I work for By Dance now but I'm like maybe less than six months and into By Dance open source program office but before this I was working at Intel but I'm saying working at Intel but I was really working in the open source and my job was to build developer communities and grow those communities and somebody mentioned linking those developer communities and grow worldwide. I have experience in that. You see some names over there. I don't know if any of you have heard of any of those projects. A show of hand if any of you have heard of DPDK, Acreno, OneAPI, etc. I see one person who's heard of it. So well the next bullet probably explains I come from networking software background and when I started it was basically building communities, open source communities in networking. I worked a lot with Linux foundation networking at that time. So these projects that you see they were like you know very much rooted in networking. That's why they were there and when I started so for example DPDK was one of the flagship projects that Intel started and the keyword Intel started didn't go away. Everybody thought of DPDK as Intel you know synonymously. It was my job to de-brand DPDK from Intel and I'll talk a little bit more about like you know how I did that, how I like you know worked with the communities worldwide got more contributions into the community and then rinse and repeat with other communities and that's why I'm here. Fun facts about me. I am a seven-time marathon runner. Maybe I don't look like one. Talk about diversity and image. Yes, I do. I am a yogi and I also paint that is how I de-stress. Somebody was talking about burning out. That is one of the ways I avoid burning out. So one thing if it's like you know consistent if you're working with worldwide communities is you are ready to sleep and there's somebody else in the world who's ready to wake up. Right so you're always like you know on the go but like you know there's times when I just take off take those couple of hours on my weekend to just run or at the end of the night before I sleep. I just take out my notepad and my colors and I start painting. That's how I de-stress and if you follow me on social media I share all of that. So I have a certain road map today for the presentation but please feel free to ask me questions and interrupt me at any point of time. So I know we are at Ospoke on. You all know what open source is. So probably this slide is redundant about defining open source but I just wanted to show you here that just so that we all are level set on the definitions here. Defining open source at the very basic at the very core is of course the code is open source. It's open. It's free to use like you know the cookie recipe that you know one of the presenters before shared like you know you bake the cookie you put the recipe of the cookie on the cookie box and you share it with everybody right. Yes that's what it is. That's a basic documentation but that doesn't make a good open source project right. A good open source project is something that also has community around it and that's where you have those the two bigger circles around it. And this is a very loose definition like you know like a stages of open source so sandbox is something you know a developer dream dreamt of something and just created a project out of the dream and put it out on GitHub hoping that somebody will pick it up and start contributing. And the other end of the spectrum is a mature open source project like KubeCon sorry see Kubernetes or like you know DPDK like I was mentioning or Cata today or you know some of the other things. Where everything is happening in open there are contributors from different organizations there. There are public meetings held there are you know developer days held where there's like you know the diverse community decisions are in open and well now I don't want to use the term merit based because of my previous presenter here maybe do over like you know do our based community. Where like you know people really raise their hands and do things and they feel empowered and safe to do things and incubation is something in between. You want to be a mature project but you are not there you want to be right. So there were some questions from developer's perspective when I was thinking about this talk or was writing about this talk this was more from the perspective of somebody like a open source community manager not from the developer perspective but I will try to cover that. So as a project where are you today. So I am assuming all of us here are associated with one open source project or the other right. So with this definition can I have a show of hands of how many are there in the sandbox stage for example. A couple how many are in the incubation stage and rest of you are in the mature project range can I assume that okay one well this is a mystery a test can everybody raise their hands please not everybody is capable of raising hands okay the test failed again how many belong to a sandbox project okay still a couple how many incubation a couple mature okay. So anyway I am assuming or I am basing this talk on that everybody wants to grow up and become a mature project is that a good assumption okay I see okay so then we agree on that. So if you if your destination is to become a mature project what is your path the path seems to be very easy you want to go from sandbox to incubation what do you need you know need more community right more than the developer who dreamt of this project you need openness what do you mean by openness here in the context of open source any volunteers yes transparency okay any other so basically yes yes yes how decisions are made yes you have the code out there you have the documentation out there but if you are not sharing some things you are being selective maybe on the project road map and things like that you do not want to do that and meritocracy or duocracy however we define it right so if a developers feature is good you either the community is open to accept it or if they do not accept it they are transparent about the decision of why not to accept it because the fastest way to lose somebody is to feel like their voice is not heard and that is why we had this previous talk right like people drop out or people feel burnt out in my opinion is when they feel that they are not recognized or not heard so this is what like you know we want to and these are the like you know and these are easy words to say but very difficult to implement so yeah so from going from sandbox to incubation yes you need more community openness and meritocracy and you know from incubation to maturity but how do you build community when I was at Intel we my manager had lot of community developers under him and he used to always say something one thing that he always was amazed on how different each community manager was and how they handled their community and probably you saw that in the speakers before me how they talked the way I approach that problem to build community or to get those first contributions in is to build a funnel funnel is anybody here from marketing okay there are a couple people right so funnel is a very typical term used in marketing yes so and this is how like you know brands work they just pump out the ads in hope like you know they bombard the ads on everything all possible channels hoping some conversions like maybe one percent or point one percent and then like you know finally they become their buyers so this is pretty much this is pretty much how I approached go out in the community talk about your project project make them aware of it you know like how we are talking at is this at this conference and then when you are talking to a developer you are actually making a negotiation for their time why I am saying negotiation you are asking them of the most precious entity they have which is their time yes you are giving them the information for free but they are giving you a precious commodity time right so their time commitment increases from the acquisitions phase here to the engagement phase so at the broad end you are just talking developer is just passively listening to you and then you conduct hands-on workshops hackathons you have them onto asynchronous communication channel so this third part is important to build a inclusive community inclusive community where worldwide was one question right if you are not in the same time zone the developer cannot attend your meeting if that is the only way you are communicating you are excluding them so do hands-on workshops hackathons it it asks more time of the developers once they get inspired so some of the developers who you talk to at meetups conferences they get inspired they are more curious to learn they come to hands-on workshop make it easy for them to play with your code once they get their hands dirty they get more inspired they build something with it proof of concepts now you are increasingly asking for more and more of their time right at each stage build recognition programs so that like you know if the developers are coming they are being recognized for that if they are doing a poc you are being they are being recognized for that like you know the person from red hat was talking about like you know point system something like that and then once they're at the broad end of the funnel they actually become contributors give them the title of external advocates they are experts they are your ambassadors into the community any questions at this point yes yes yeah so actually I have a slide on that wait if you want to wait to get to it when yes no that's fine so conflict in the event of conflict first we have to understand first you have to listen what the conflict is about okay and then most of the times conflicts are like you know maybe there is some kind of when their people are passionate when people are passionate there is like some kind of ego involved right so I am right he's wrong or she's wrong or she's right I'm wrong so make that argument not about person make it impersonal so I how am I doing on time oh the voice is working so this is a clip from 12 angry men have you heard of this movie I did a leadership course at stanford and this is a textbook case of how to resolve conflict so this clip oh okay I think yeah we'll have to work so basically what the 12 angry men is like it starts with everybody in the jury saying that this person is guilty and then there's just one person who says we need to hear we need to argue because we are sending this person to the chair he's not saying I'm right you guys are wrong he's saying we are sending one person to the chair so we owe it to the person who we are sending to the chair that we at least give him a fair chance so he makes the argument about and a goal which is larger than you and me which everybody can get behind does that make sense yeah largely I mean do you think it's ever just kind of inevitable that you just have to cut people out of the community proactively to kind of save the community sorry I'll say that one more time do you think it's ever necessary to proactively just kind of remove people from the community to avoid yeah if they're being very disruptive if they do not like you are trying to bring objectivity into the argument if they are not doing that then of course you may have to remove them fair enough but give them a fair chance before right see my slides are you guys able to see my slides disappeared from the screen so there was a question about the first contribution is very hard right getting that first contribution is hard from the developer's perspective and also from the perspective of the project getting that first contribution into the project is hard do we agree on that yes so actually so this is a hard problem not just for an open source project this is also a hard problem for a minority opinion there are 10 people in a meeting you have an opinion and the other nine have the other opinion again i'll go back to the 12 angry man example when you are the minority opinion it is very easy to sideline you and trivialize you but the moment you are able to win another person to your side then you are two people you're not minority anymore in my culture there is a saying one plus one is equal to eleven in Hindi it says a correct gyara has anybody heard of that yeah so basically you've just won your first stakeholder you're not that odd person you're not that oddity so it is similar in open source project so before even you start talking about your open source project ask yourself why why does this open source project matter what problem does it solve once you can answer that question it will be easy for you to talk to others in the community and once it is solving a real world problem it will be easy for others to get behind so like I was mentioning the other example right the why this person is arguing in the 12 angry man is we are send sending one person to the chair and we want to give this person a fair chance before we make him die right it's easy for everybody to get behind that so if you have a clear why for your open source project it's easy to talk to others so here I'm showing some stakeholders or example stakeholders that you can get into the community and coming back to the burnout questions or why people don't work in open source you know people are usually more motivated or feel less burnt out if they know why they are doing things if they don't understand why they are doing things then it's easier for them to burn out does that make sense like frequently people do startups and they work 24 by 7 but you ask them are you burnt out probably but they're happy they don't feel burnt out because they know why they're working so maybe I'm trivializing the problem but like that is one of the ways that you can do so you know give them the why give them the recognition hear them out that is one of the ways that you can avoid burnout so what so community is one thing but openness is meritocracy meritocracy right so this is like nothing new I think we all know the basics right you have to have a basic documentation you have to have the website somebody was talking about mail English so things are out in the open things are discussed out in the open if you want to invite others you have a clear contribution guidelines so people know what actually you know how they can get contributed contributions into the community and if they are rejected why they they would be rejected and like you know what are the bugs and you know what are the enhancements be open you know have a clear code of conduct so like you mentioned if somebody is being disruptive that's bad code of conduct and respect others you know open source projects and like you know trademark logos etc okay now you with hopefully with all these practices you got your first contributors and now you want to increase your contributions and go to mature how do you do that there is only one formula I can give you whoever were your first contributors if you have one you have two you have four recognize them make give them the floor give them the limelight peaks more than you know somebody else talking about your project so I talked about dpdk right so when I built dpdk summit in the dpdk summit I had 90% non-intel content that was my formula to get you know community in in the beginning in the first year it was very difficult because we didn't have as many contributors I worked whole year tirelessly with them I gave them the gift of my time like you know working with them understanding what their problems was were how I could enable them some needed hardware some needed engineering support some needed like you know maybe stipend some only needed my guidance on how to talk to their you know boss or like you know their guide in the university on letting them contribute so you know I did all that and first year I didn't need a lot because you know I only had a one-day summit and I just needed eight or ten speakers so one year 40 developers I talked to 40 developers got eight of them like you know they finished a POC to a level that we were confident the review committee was confident that they when they come on stage and talk there'll be enough meat behind their talk and that is what will inspire the next set of developers and why is that social currency right anybody heard of salting tip jar this is another term in marketing being used you know you go to a coffee shop there is a tip jar there's always some money left in that tip jar if you put coins there people are going to throw coins if you put bills people are going to throw bills so you want your tip jar to be salted you want to showcase your contributors and you want to give them a good experience so that they will go and inspire other developers so then like you know going from incubation to maturity you have to up your level of openness and the way you you know reward meritocracy now you have real POCs hopefully so find different ways of sharing it like you know people learn in different modalities sites sound words so have blogs have videos have podcasts have conferences have hands-on training showcase your contributors and then like you know have them commit and merge in like you know in the community have your decisions out there in the open make them part of your technical oversight committee or like you know technical steering committee whatever you want to call them make all those decisions out there in the open have a meeting time which is public anybody can join the meeting maybe decisions are made by the technical steering committee but the meeting is free to join anybody can voice their opinions and always always have a asynchronous communication channel maybe somebody is in a different time zone maybe somebody is doing it of their free time they have like you know four hours of domestic duties to do after their work and they still want to do open source they can't join another meeting but they can join a asynchronous channel so be inclusive and hopefully that will lead you to being a mature open source project now I will talk about some roadblocks to all this happening I mean it all seems very romantic that you know everybody believes in open source and you will build the community in no time but there is always non-believers and detractors and sometimes you know business comes in the way how do you win them over so that you can follow that path how many of you have actually encountered open source detractors or people who don't believe in open source there are few right so I'll again come back to it that people who don't believe in open source they usually have a reason do you agree do they give you a reason I have put some reasons like you know they are afraid probably to give up control they say this is a project that we own we have developed we have invested in why should we open source it and give an edge to our competitor right or they say you know this project we totally control it we know what to do what are the processes how do we like you know if we make it open source maybe the quality will reduce so here are some arguments these days nobody wants to be logged in I think I'm how am I doing one time okay great so I'll give you a story for giving up control and staying competitive I'll again go back to the DPDK project because that was one of the earliest project that I worked on so there was a particular customer that our marketing team was trying to convert DPDK onto like you know they were trying to sell DPDK to this particular customer and this customer was actually our competitor was buying from our competitor not from us right so what our marketing team that was they invited them to one of the DPDK conferences and like I earlier told you I had 90% non-intel content over there in that conference so when speakers are talking audience are asking questions guess who's replying to those questions not people from Intel not developers wearing Intel badges developers from our competitors developers who are partners like you know but not people from Intel this happened till lunch time and in lunch time I heard this marketing person's VP tell one of his engineers I think DPDK is really an open source project now there's no reason for us now not to move to DPDK and yeah rest is history they did move to DPDK and so we won that business just because we followed open source practices and why did we use open source or why were we doing open source same reason why like you know what the speaker from red hat mentioned sometime earlier right it saves company costs we get free testers you know I can't like you know every time I I heard from somebody that oh this is not supported in this open source project and I would just go and say hey this is an open source project if it's not supported please develop that feature and contribute contribute back to it it's an open source community and many times it worked they did you know develop that feature and contributed back to the community right so you get so many different users use your software in ways you don't even you wouldn't even dream of existed I'll give you another example I mentioned another project one API the reason we went into one API was because we were a GPU market but our GPU was not ready yet so yes we are putting this open source project into the hands of developers but GPU is not ready yet so developers can't test it on GPU but it was all it also used to work on FPGAs FPGAs were ready in the market and it gave developers a huge advantage that like you know anybody has programmed over FPGA before no okay programming on FPGA is a completely different stack like you know you need to know the tools you need to know different operating system different language blah blah blah it's a huge learning curve but with one API developers could program with just C so that was a huge advantage when we put out that project we never thought we will get traction so much traction on one API with FPGA but that's what happened but so my point is we don't understand when we are when an open source project is put out there the community uses it in so many different ways that the original developers would have never have imagined and that actually makes that software better and because and when you are proactive and you work on that feedback it actually is going to make your software better so it is going to improve your quality and it's going to improve your reputation how many of you think of Google as a reputable company okay maybe but I mean a lot of people want to work for that company right because everybody knows that they work in open source and they contribute to open source so you know you will attract best talent and 99 percent of the talent is outside your company so I'll come back to my earlier point on how to win conflict so when you talk to open source detractors listen to them really listen to them what are their concerns and then come back with you know good counter arguments well there will there may be times when it doesn't make sense and that's okay you know some things will never be open source and that would be okay so you know just listen so anyway these are some examples we heard from Linus in the morning and then chat GPT is another example of this paper if you have not read this paper if you're interested in generative AI please go and read it attention is all you need just because it was out there in the open community took it up and like you know now we know where we are so anyway this is my roundup of building community from scratch listen to the community learn by come you're contributing there's more ways to contribute than just code treat your community as a team be inclusive and share spotlights thank you and sorry I forgot about this if you want to work with us I do work for by dance right so we are having a innovator program and if you want to join us would love to work with you we have 50 plus open source projects and if you're interested to learn about those projects you can take my contacts you know would love to connect with you and you know this the QR code is the discord server again my link and my LinkedIn and my colleagues LinkedIn are there okay thank you and I don't know if we have a time for a question any questions okay thank you