 All right. Thank you. Welcome, everybody. Congratulations for toughing it out towards the end of day three to discuss this good topic that we're very passionate about. This talk came out of the Q&A that from our talk that we gave in Amsterdam and lots of people joined us in the hallway to ask about a particular question that my friend Christian had asked, and we decided, you know, there's a whole talk there. And so the three of us stood in that hallway and made this talk. If you want to come closer, feel free. I know it's kind of a weird viewing from back there, but it's also you want to see the screens. So your choice, but feel free to come forward if you like. We're going to let Jordana introduce herself first. If this works. Hey, folks. I'm Jordana Fan. My pronouns are she, her, and I'm a technical community manager looking for my next role. I'm the current chair of the community working group of the Drupal Open Source Project, who are tasked with fostering safe, inclusive, and healthy community, and to uphold the Drupal Code of Conduct. I'm passionate about fostering community health, sharing knowledge, and empowering others, which is why I'm leading open source community health sessions for a few folks from different open source communities come together to share knowledge, collaborate, and support each other. Unfortunately, I was unable to make it there in person, but I am thankful to be able to participate in this amazing community digitally. I'm a lecturer from the University in Cologne. I'm also a freelance IT consultant. I use the pronouns he, him, and if I'm not doing, presenting many folks who's a rancher, I'm not teaching a university, then I'm a climate activist, and I run a couple of social groups amongst, one which is the Rancher User Group in Cologne, and I also support the AWS User Group. And my name is Lisa Marie Namphee. Most people call me Lisa. I'm a CNCF ambassador. I am developer relations community architect. I have been an ambassador for over three years now, but before that, architecting large user groups in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 10 years, running open source communities there, started with the first OpenStack community, ran the first ever Istio Meetup, the first ever Azul Codd containers meetup. Last week, we ran the first ever NUMAflow project meetup. So I love to showcase the new, new technology, open source in particular. And for the three years previous to that, until very recently, I was the head of developer relations at Cockroach Labs, which was supporting the database Cockroach DB. So, we started off looking at conflicts that came out of our last, our last session together. Oh, you, it's not on? Better? Thank you. User error. Yeah. Okay. Well, after our last session of the last panel that we had together, we start looking at conflicts and we came up with what we wanted to do in today's panel, basically run through a, what is a conflict, then come up with some tools and end up with a communication method, methodology that we wanted to introduce to you. So what, what are conflicts? I mean, there is a sociological definition of what a conflict is, but mainly it is about miscommunication. It's about disagreements between, in the group. And mainly if we look at open source community groups, it is about inappropriate behavior. And that could be especially when we burst out in, in hybrid times, that could be offensive pictures. I've seen that a number of times happening. It could be unwanted physical contact. It could be misogyny, which is fairly prevalent in our, our kind of field of work. There is mansplaining, which is also something that you might or might not want. And anything else that is tied to usually a white male behavior. To prevent this, the first thing will be to actually agree on a code of conduct. And that is something that needs a kind of a group effort, a group brainstorming to agree on what is acceptable behavior in your community, whether you do support diversity, equity, inclusion. And then from that point onwards, you can create a code of conduct. There are very good, and Jolana will show the resources towards the end of the talk. There are some very good examples. I personally like the Berlin code of conduct, but hey, that's me coming from Germany. And what does a code of conduct do? First of all, once you've defined and you agreed, okay, this is how we want our group to be. Then you define the expected behavior and saying, dang, this is what we want our members to behave. Next step is you define what's unacceptable. And then you spell out the consequences of what happens if you do not adhere to it. Does that mean you will be exposed? Do you have to leave the conference or whatever this? So, and then final step is how do you address grievances, which is usually, which is actually more important in a, like in America where you litigate all the time. So, it's true. It's very true. So, but the point is, agree on what's good in the community. Then write it down and write down what's unacceptable and write down what happens if you go against it. One more? Chris just spoke about conflict and preventing it by implementing a code of conduct from your community. This is a great start in fostering inclusion and safe spaces. Participation in your community or event is a privilege, not a right. We must abide by the rules and conduct ourselves to the values and principles of the community. Text should be open to anyone and everyone. We are all different and this diversity brings new perspectives, which is important. But think of the paradox of tolerance, which discusses the need to be intolerant of intolerant. So, every person is welcome, but every behavior is not. Which is, which is why it's so important to have a code of conduct that makes it clear. So, when working on or reworking the code of conduct, remember to not reinvent the wheel and to try and learn from the experiences of others. It's important to know that we can and we should iterate on it and remember to get key community stakeholders involved. There are code of conduct templates available and we can look into communities we appreciate and see how they are doing things. But please remember, and I cannot stress this enough, the code of conduct is only as good as the enforcement of it. We need practice and planning to be effective and help maintain safe spaces, which is why I recommend looking into resources on enforcement and response. Chris will now talk about what to be aware of in creating and maintaining safe spaces. And I'm sorry, I think I messed something up. We were supposed to have closed captions on that, but we'll sort that out for the next video. Sorry, Joanna. She's online watching. We'll get there. Good. So, now that we have defined the group, we have defined our code of conduct. We've defined the consequences. Now, what do we do? And in most social groups and political spaces, that has become a practice called awareness, which is obviously based on the English word of awareness, but also means a practice in a group of people who take care of taking care of the group. Basically, it is care work and that gives us a tool and an ongoing process to actually deal with the inner workings of the group. Awareness by itself in English word means you want to be in the situation. You want to be attentive to the situation and you want to be aware and respectful of the boundaries of the others. I think that's the key point in awareness is to know and respect the boundaries of your fellow group members. And everybody is different. Some things that might be offensive to one person are completely okay to the others, but it's always the person who defines the boundaries. And that kind of turns the thing on its head, basically meaning I, as a person, I define my, I set my boundaries and I expect the other to adhere to the boundaries. I might need to explain them like we did with the buttons on the, which I don't wear right now. So the handshake stays six feet away button. So the key thing, if you deal with the key concept of awareness is everybody boundaries are different and it's the person who defines when the boundaries getting violated. So how do you do that? I mean, it sounds really nice and yes, we can all agree on it, but how do you practice in a group setting? First is you write an awareness concept, which sounds, again, we wrote a code of conduct. Now we need to write something again. So we write an awareness concept. Sometimes, and I've seen this in large festivals, you might want to include a safe word saying it's like, okay, if I, if I say to a person in the room, Panama, then that person will know, oh, there is a violation. Let me take the person out of the situation and clear it. Panama is a, is a safe word that a concert, big concert have company have introduced. So I'm just borrowing it, but having a safe word that you can use in a situation where you feel uncomfortable means that you do not have to explain yourself, which is very, very helpful. If you have a large enough group, like maybe like something like an AWS user group, you could establish a subgroup that does awareness full time. And then for every meeting, especially for hybrid meetings, assign an awareness person who can be there and take care of the people online and offline. And last but not least, like Jodana said earlier, a code of conduct is only as good as the enforcement is. So you need to empower your awareness team and say it's like, okay, you, you have the ability to actually step in and resolve a conflict. And yeah, that's, that's probably it's a well, well known concept in, in political groups. And I think it has a good place in open source communities. Okay, apparently there's a closed caption button, which I don't know. Sorry. Okay, well, if you're the trans, it will be transcribed if you go online. I'm so sorry, I really don't see where that is without actually going to YouTube. So here's Jodana. I'll continue by adding a few things to great points. Chris just made about awareness. We should be aware of our role when we're in situations. When we're acting as a facilitator or moderator, it's important for us not to project onto others. Not about us or centering our feelings or bringing it into in our own issues. It's about understanding the situation first and foremost. Our role is important in fostering safe spaces in order to foster effective communication. So we should aim to be neutral and gather information. We should also be mindful of the effects of things like the roles of the people involved, if there are power dynamics at play, language barriers, and that everyone can have different, sometimes conflicting perceptions and assumptions. The focus is on listening to learn with an open heart and open mind. But we are inherently flawed. We all have biases and our perceptions colored by our emotions, our situation, and our experiences. Take, for example, the actor-observer bias. We tend to explain our own behavior differently than how an observer would explain the exact same behavior. This changes how we form judgments and assumptions about why people behave in certain ways. So mistakes happen. We're going to get it wrong. It's what we do after that matters. We should take responsibility for the impact our words or actions have, because even if we had the best of intentions, it does not erase the negative impact we cause. So we should practice, and it's in the word practice, practice, practice, practice. We should practice patience, empathy, compassion, and grace for ourselves and for others. Remembering and being aware of these things greatly aids us in communicating more effectively. Nisa will be going over one communication process that explains how awareness and intent can affect communication. Okay. So nonviolent communication, this is the question that came up at the last KubeCon that we decided to take a whole presentation pretty much to address. It's one of the tools that we're offering here that you can follow up on. There's links and lots of URLs, and we have a resource slide in the back, and we have QR codes. So there's lots of places because the stock is about practical tools that you can use, and there's a lot of takeaways. So this will be very much an overview. But just for those of us, particularly in the U.S., nonviolent communication is commonly referred to also as compassionate communication, because violence or violent has connotations here that can trigger, that can make you think of something else, you know, just incredibly negative. So we want to be clear that this practice is something that we're, it's a very established practice, and it's practiced all over the world. And violent communication isn't necessarily malvalent. Most of the time it's just, it's automatic, it's habitual. But today we're going to talk about the process through which we can learn to express ourselves clearly, honestly, and while listening to our needs, and the needs of others. And these are all very specific parts of the practice. So I'm not changing the language because it's incredibly deliberate. So nonviolent communication is a process of communication that was established by psychologist Marshall Rosenberg. I brought a little eye candy. I'm a book person. Also, I like to scribble. You should see this is my copy of this. It's dog-eared and scribbled all over. But it's a really, it's an amazing practice. It's a compilation of ideas about compassionate human behavior packaged to meet modern needs. Dr. Rosenberg, I'm going to quote him here, because I want to get this right. Dr. Rosenberg refers to nonviolent communication as the language of compassion. He declares it to be an ongoing reminder to keep our attention focused on a place where we are more likely to get what we are seeking. This is the important part for communities because we have to focus on the end game. There's a way to get there that works, and there's a way to get there that absolutely doesn't work, that just blocks communication. So the main point, it's focused on a place where we are most likely to get what we are seeking. And it's actually proven to have amazing results. You'll also find that on many levels, this can be game-changing, whether it's work, home, community. So it's not something that you would just do in one place and not do in another place. It's most effective if it's practiced consistently. It's also not easy. Like I said, most of our responses are habitual. They come out of an emotional place. It's not easy. It takes a deliberate attempt to break patterns of communication and establish new patterns. So I just would like to encourage folks that want to go down this road to really commit to it and try to put it in practice in every place in your life that you can. And that will, I guarantee you, help you when emotions are high and we're resolving conflicts in our communities, you'll have a better grasp of the tool if you've been using it. So the nonviolent communication process is based on four components. It's observations, feelings, needs, requests. And again, I'll go into that a little bit because those words might not be exactly how we're thinking of them. The concrete actions that we observe inherently tend to create emotions and feelings. And the trick here is to be able to articulate observations without any judgment or evaluation. So observations without judgment. They use the word stimulus here that's taken straight from the book and there's a reason for that. When you articulate observations, try and just say what happened. Present the simple facts. Judgments trigger emotions in other people. Simply stating observations opens the door for communications. For instance, I might say things in a couple of different ways. I might say, you weren't listening to me at all. You were on your phone that entire presentation. Or I might say, let's see, how could you say that? You could say something like, I noticed that you were on your phone through most of that presentation. And then you open the door for someone to say, yeah, I was live tweeting you. Yeah, what you were saying was so important, I was taking notes. Yeah, your co-presenter was telling you to turn the closed caption slides on on your presentation. So yes, apologies for being on the phone, but there's sometimes there's a reason to do it. And then you see, there was no reason for me to get upset. There was no reason for me to judge that other person or accuse them of something. So this is where the practice is. When you can put that type of language in practice, it just inherently opens the door for communication right away. And then you can say how that made you feel. So in nonviolent communication, what others say and do is considered the stimulus, but it's never the cause of the feeling. And this is important to kind of try and get our heads around. Um, only then, if you state things simply, you can get to your feelings, which then can help you identify the needs that you're that you're actually seeking that are connecting to those feelings. And maybe, maybe that's the other hardest part, because we know we're hurt, but we don't always tie that into what it is that we actually need. I mean, there's something that we need, which is causing the pain. And there's a way to get to what that is. Same with the other person, by the way. And so, you know, once you kind of acknowledge that step, then you can establish a concrete action that you can use to request whatever it is that you want. And so just put that in the form also of what you would like to have happen. Again, don't turn it around and say, well, you know, don't say what you don't want to do. You know, don't, what you don't want to have happen. Like I hate it when you, you know, stay out so late at the office or whatever. It's like, well, you know, I'd really love you to come home for dinner. I mean, whatever your example is, put it in the, you know, how they say to kids, don't tell them, you know, don't run, tell them walk. I mean, I think it's the same, it's the same purpose. So the formula for this, when A, I feel B, because I'm needing C, and therefore now I would like D. So that's kind of your, your sentence structure. And this is all, there's so much documented on this. But comparisons, really, really good, important, important point. Comparisons and judgments, please avoid at all costs. This is, this is so toxic. There was, there's this book by Dan Greenberg called How to Make Yourself Miserable. And he actually demonstrates in very humorous ways, the negative power of comparison, comparative thinking, and thinking that, you know, the, the negativity that can have on us. It immediately negates any opportunity for nonviolent communication, compassionate communication, and further healing. And a lot of it is because you're hurting yourself, right? You have to be compassionate to yourself. And then that opens the door also for compassion for other people. So please, I'm like, this comes out at conferences like this all the time, right? We talk about imposter syndrome, but then we go and we're seeing these presentations of people standing on stage who have done extraordinary things, of course they have, because they're on stage at KubeCon. And then they're talking about how they also had imposter syndrome. And you're looking at everything they've done, speaks all these languages, and learned, you know, the code from scratch after they got law degrees. And I'm totally picking on my dear friend and fellow CSF ambassador, Julia. You know, the things that people have done are extraordinary. That doesn't mean that what you have done is not extraordinary. We all have something to give, but if we start comparing ourselves to others, it's the first way to just dive off that cliff into depression. So please, don't do that. Don't judge others. Don't judge yourself, but definitely don't compare yourself to others. So we can all contribute. We can all get involved in the community. We can all join the community. I think if we have one more minute, okay. You have time. Because we put an extra, so those were the four main ones. But Chris and I talked about this, and he really liked this fifth bullet, which I can barely see, talking about taking personal responsibility for our actions. I do think this is a really, really important thing, especially in community, but in any type of conversations, if you have a denial of responsibility, and this generally happens when you're attributing the cause to factors that are outside of yourself. So I did this because I was told to. I did this because they made me do it. I did this because it violated a policy. Your child was expelled from school because he did this thing that violated this policy. This person was expelled from this community because they violated this policy. I'm not saying that you can't have really hard, fast rules about this, but if you're going to leave the doors open for compassionate communication and for learning experiences, regardless of what the outcome is going to be at the end, there's always a chance to keep the community together, all of the community, not just the person that did the thing, but all of the community. I'm sure there was a lot of other children at that school that were missing that kid who got expelled for the day. I'm sure there's people in this community that have felt that something's unfair. So if we have a denial of responsibility, then we completely take ourselves out of the action, and we hide behind these rules, these guidelines, I guess. But they're guidelines. They're things to be discussed. They're things to take into account, and they're things to start conversations and then decide what the correct action is in a way that you don't lose your community members, including the person that did the thing. That is one thing that they go through a lot, this offering to take personal responsibility for your actions and really owning what it is, and then leave the door open for compassionate communications. So the point is replace language that implies lack of choice with language that acknowledges choice. So nothing's ever yes and no or black and white, or you have to choose this or choose that, or you have to vote for this or for that, or if you put that on someone, it removes the chance for somebody to have a conversation, to maybe support both positions. That's what you should probably really try to avoid. Replace that language that gets rid of choice. And the last point, humans are very dangerous when we're not conscious of our responsibility for how we think, behave, and feel. That's a very dangerous position that human beings get in and causes or results in a lot of very destructive behavior. So that's just something to think about. Be conscious of our responsibility, take ownership, because we're going to only control ourselves. Really own it. And I think you'll find it opens the door to communication. I'd like to go over some techniques and tips on how to implement some of what we've discussed so far. Our roles are generally going to be to moderate, facilitate, and de-escalate. So it's important for us to set and maintain the tone and set clear expectation. Set the goals, boundaries, and clear expected and accepted behavior. Everyone, and yes that means us too, should adhere to. We should strive to be non-judgmental, calm, and neutral. This can start with don't assume malice or malintent, which I prefer over assuming good intent, which can sometimes be problematic. Because a lot of the times people are unaware of the negative impact of their words and actions. So remember the goal. It's about bringing that awareness to them in a way that they are open and willing to listen, understand, and learn. This is why it's so important for us to create a space for people to be honest and vulnerable. We can also do this by putting the focus on the words and actions, not on the person themselves. Behavior versus personality. You said, you use these words versus you are. We should also ask questions about experiences and behavior without adding judgments, conclusions, or assumptions to our statements. So an example would be, you're very quiet right now. Are you listening? Do you care? Judgments, conclusions, and assumptions. Versus, you're very quiet right now. Can you let me know what you're thinking? Much more neutral. So everyone involved should try to listen to understand and listen to learn. Dr. Stephen Cubby said, most people do not listen with the intent to understand. They listen with the intent to reply. One of the most important things I personally always try to keep in my mind and in life is seek first to understand, then be understood. So to recap, I'll go over a few tips and reminders when dealing with difficult conversations or conflicts. I'd like us to remember the motivations. What are the goals and preferred outcomes? Make sure the expectations and agreements are clear to everyone. Intent does not equal or erase impact. And we should be mindful of our own biases and perception. This is why I recommend to try to have at least two preferably diverse people as moderators are on your photocon of the portion. Remember, we are all fallible. We need to be aware of this so that we are open for feedback and open to learn. Mistakes are human. It's what happens after that matters. Take responsibility, learn and grow, and pass on that knowledge if you're able. We're never going to get things perfect every time, but we can correct, teach and learn. This is why we should strive for connection over perfection. Renee Brown defined connection as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard and valued. When they can give and receive without judgment and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship. We should meet people where they are. We should make accommodations for people so that they can feel comfortable and effective communication can take place. This can mean making accommodations for things like language, cultural, culture, neurodiversity and disability. Should we have a translator? Do they prefer to discuss things asynchronously or without video? Is there captioning available? We can sometimes miss important information if we don't have the language or cultural context. So we all have our own lived experiences and perceptions which give us each our unique and different operating systems. Remembering this helps us be more patient and pathetic and more compassionate towards ourselves and each other. So remember to find support and take care of ourselves and others. Do this before it becomes a necessity, before burnout. If we don't take care of ourselves, we won't be able to do this work properly and without burning out. We cannot pour from an empty cup. We've added a few resources. Please note that this is not an exhaustive list and if you have links you would like to share, please reach out and we'll update the slides. We would love to hear from you. Our last slide shows how to connect with us if you'd like to discuss, have questions or feedback. I'm also on the CNTF Slack, so feel free to reach out. Again, I am so gutted to not be there in person, but hopefully we'll have parrot. I appreciate you and sending you love. Thank you. The amazing Jordana Phong. Thank you so much, Jordana. I'm trying to work through all these hoops to get these things rolling. Yes, we have these resources. Like I said, all the slides are available. This is a way to get in touch with us. Did you have another slide? Nope. Nope. Oh yeah, make sure you do this. We can take a couple questions too because our time is up. Happy to take questions and Jordana will hear your questions if they're for her. She can text me the answer, or we can get her really quickly on a what's app. Take a picture of this. This takes you directly to the feedback for our talk. I think there's a bug in the system. And if you don't click the happy face on this talk, it doesn't actually work. So make sure you click choose wisely. I'm just kidding. We love your feedback. I don't know if we get feedback, but if you type things in, but if you really want to make sure we have feedback, I'm at Lisa on CSF Slack. Yeah, I don't think you're on CSF Slack, but there's lots of ways. Okay, everybody get that. We'll put our other slide back up. And in the meantime, we will take some questions. Did someone have one? There's a microphone here to be recorded for all the world and the people on the live stream. Yes, sir. Awesome, awesome. Do you know of any training that's available for awareness monitoring? Training for awareness monitoring. Like, can you expand on that question a little bit? Awareness of what? Like we were talking about in the slides, awareness, you know, for meetings and community spaces and that sort of thing. Okay. Like there's some trainings and stuff that are available for code of conduct, et cetera. But I haven't seen anything for that. Oh, for awareness. Oh, you have a link on your, that was your slide, right? Yeah. I could put you in contact with good trainers where I live, which would probably not be that helpful. But we do have, if you look for nonviolent communication, there are very good courses out there. They're usually... The bottom one here, where are you based? Okay. Just in general, yeah, that bottom one actually has a physical location in San Francisco. So they do some classes, but I think most of these things are generally online. Yes. Like in Europe, I will be able to point you because there is some very good training around and relatively good workshops, but I don't have anything here. Sorry. Well, maybe they, they, he can write to somebody in Europe and say, who's your counterpart in the US? Okay. Any other questions? Yes. Thanks for the talk. That's really good. I'm glad we're having these conversations in tech because they're super important. My question for you guys would be like, do you find it helpful in communities? Because you're talking about like, practice, practice, practice is the name of the game. And I didn't think that was what the last question was about. Is it, have you found it like people practice on their own to kind of be like in an open source community, kind of leave it to other people to do self-paced learning? Or like, do you think it would be helpful to have, you know, someone be like, okay, like today, you know, like the last Friday of every month, we're going to get together and do some practice together, you know, about like communication or we're going to practice like awareness and things like that. Yeah. Back in the days, we both came out of the OpenStack community many years ago and we actually had something like that within each project because there were so many different projects and we really incurred, we had a working group that kind of like resided over all of it that a few of us were in, but we also had for each individual project we wanted to get ahead of it because we had, you know, losing some community members because of stuff that had happened and people didn't feel comfortable or just, you know, burnout or for whatever the reasons were. So we were encouraging each project to implement something like that so you meet every week, maybe one of those times a month or once a quarter, you're doing a small version of it and then encouraging people to go out and do more on their own. I do think you need to get ahead of it. It's kind of one of those things just like with diversity and so many other things. If you're not proactive about solving the problem, it doesn't solve itself. You know, all of these kind of difficult behaviors that we're talking about tend to unfortunately be the norm and that is a really, really hard thing because you don't get a lot of validation. So unless you're constantly practicing this, it's being negative reinforcement all the time. I mean, just like turn on your TV, don't even bother with Twitter, like we all know that, but you know, it's just there's too much, there's too much negativity out there. So yes, Maya, I think, I mean, what do you think? Fully agree, especially if you're practicing nonviolent communication actually does take practice and nothing beats trying it in a group. Just do the four stanzas, try and go on. Nothing beats practice at that point. And if you're in a group and if you're absolutely new, invite someone to kind of seed someone who has done it before, invite him or her, and then go on from there. Yeah, absolutely. Unresolved problems do not resolve themselves as much as we'd like them to. Those of us procrastinators. Thank you. Thank you. Sir, did you have a question you stood up for? Do you still have a question? Okay. Oh, okay. Sure. Anyone else? All right. Well, thank you for coming. Give yourselves a hand. It's a tough topic. Thank you for being here. Great to meet all of you.