 Hello, my name is Vadim Rokovsky, I work for Red Hat and one of the major things which Red Hat works on, it's not just open software which is not sufficient these days, it's always about communities where we try to build a group of people interested in our products or rather we want to turn interesting things which people do, basing their community and we're sustain this community so that later on we can sell this as a Red Hat product. But the core of this is always the community, a group of people who are interested. This is why we're having a panel discussion between various members of communities. They are usually fairly small by our standards of course but nevertheless they're incredibly important because A, they're local, B, small communities become large communities in the blink of an eye, it's not really a problem. So today I think I would leave introductions to yourself because you know you're better than I am and that would be more convenient. So who wants to start with introductions? Let's start. Alphabetodor doesn't work, you're all A's, so. Okay, let's start from me. Hello everybody, I am Alexander, I am a founder of a company which is named Victoria Metrix. Have everybody heard about this company before? Okay, probably you heard about Prometheus, monitoring system. And Victoria Metrix is like Prometheus, but better. And this is also open source. And next one? Hello everyone, my name is Andrei, I work at Flant. And we are developing open source software and help other companies to deploy, prepare and monitor their applications. We have various open source products and we are communicating with the community quite a lot and with the different communities and that's it. Hey, I'm Aneshka and I'm here as a representative of two different communities for this Chesco Digital, which is like only check based community focused on digital technologies and helping NGOs with using digital technologies to its full potential. And the second one is PyLadies, which is a worldwide community focusing on bringing more ladies to open source and to Python language. And I'm a member of a local chapter here in Brno. With that, I think we can move on to more specific topics because the topic of community is very large, but I think we want to focus on a particular time set, which is the last two years where quite large changes have occurred to the whole world and we are interested how much did they affect the communities. So I think I wonder if each of you could look back into what changed two or three years ago and what's how the community looks now, both in terms of success or failures or any kind of changes in how you approach them, the ways of work, remote is a huge thing. How did that affect your particular communities? I understand if you don't have a great look back into this, so it's totally fine to say I'm not sure, I don't know, it's okay, there's no pressure. Who wants to go first? Let's start from me again. Andrei will be next anyway. Okay. As for Victoria Matrix, we see a huge increase in the number of people of our community during the last two years. This is because Victoria Matrix is quite a young company, it is four years, it has been founded four years ago and we are still at startup mode and our community and our user base grows multiple times per year and during the last year I believe that our community has grown almost probably 10 times and this is great and we see that the coronavirus crisis which held during the last two years increased the users' involvement in our project and I believe not on our project but in all open source projects because people have more time working from home and more time for exploring different available projects in open source and have more time to spend the time on these projects and that's great. Andrei, would you like to go next or we can ask some more questions? Yes, sure. I can say from perspective of land because I'm working just half a year in this company but I was working with other open source software previously and we were developing some services which is consuming these projects and I can say that yeah I see that there is more and more people getting involved in these open source projects and I like this because it makes new communities and makes people happy communicating with each other and this is a really beautiful thing and I like, I think in the future most of the projects will turn to be open sourced and all of them will have the community because it's different business model but it's more likely, I would say, people like that and people like open source more than proprietary software and it makes some sense. Or we can pass to Anishka and do another circle. Okay, so I have experienced actually both sides of this coin. I mean with Chesko de Gital, the COVID was kind of a boost for the community because at the time of the first lockdown the community was approximately half a year old, it was really young and at the time we had like 1,000 members of the community and over the first month of the first lockdown it doubled its size to 2,000 and a year later in February 2021 it was 4,000 people so it was really huge growth for us and Chesko de Gital was from the beginning meant as an online community so we're basically living on slack. So by COVID we were affected only in a positive way, not only with the growth but also with the activities in the community because Chesko de Gital is a community of expert volunteers and when they saw the crisis coming there was kind of immediate response for that and people came with a lot of ideas supporting the urgent needs in Czechia at the time. So for example the COVID portal which most of you may be know as the one source of truth for COVID information, it was originally built with Chesko de Gital and Nucket together so these kind of projects and it was really great to saw all the people coming and really wanted to help. Of course it has its downside I mean when the restrictions lifted summer is coming and so we saw the decrease in activity and then in the spring of 2021 again the people came because there was another lockdown so it was kind of like seen the side but overall for Chesko de Gital COVID years were years of growth. It's kind of different story for Pi ladies in Brno because we didn't know before COVID actually how important it's for us to be together face-to-face on site to meet other people because the main purpose of Pi ladies is to create a secure safe space for ladies who want to become involved in IT and it's really really hard to build this online. We tried, we tried with the first lockdown we really tried to switch our courses and workshops online but it didn't work it was just we weren't able to replicate the same safe space the same environment to build the relationships in the community so well as it is when we meet on site so during COVID and it's specific for Pi ladies in Brno I can't speak of another chapter in Czech Republic but in Brno we suspended most of our activities and now we believe the future is bright we're restarting we're pulling a lot of activities for summer and also for autumn stop by on our booth I can tell you more but over the two years of COVID it was really really painful for Pi ladies Brno. I keep hearing the recurring theme that the community is growing when the lockdown started but the question is what I would like to know is do you foresee retaining those numbers as in the lockdowns most of them are lifted in most countries, bonches people go back to walking in the woods and having fun with their kids and so on do they stay in the community how do you help them to stay and keep on working on the fun thing they did during lockdowns Andre now goes first because now is his turn. Okay I think it is really important to show the people that they work if they're making some contributions to show that it is really important and it's really important to show them to give them feeling that they're working on something that you can you know it's always cool when you can say hey my code is working somewhere in Google or somewhere on Facebook yeah just if it's changing few few lines of code that it's like makes me happy and I think it is important to give people the same feeling. Who wants to go next? I think that of course when the lockdown is finished then people tend to do other activities than contributing to open source or involving in open source but we can help people remain in the communities of open source projects by encouraging them and by encouraging them not not only to contribute the code but the most important part of every open source project is documentation and the documentation is easier to contribute and to improve compared to code and this means that wider audience of our community can help us and we should encourage them and we actually encourage them to send us pull requests which fix just typos in our documentation or improve our documentation in a few words on a few sentences and this is a great I think this is a great way to encourage community and to grow it and another important part is Slack chats or Telegram chats where the most active community members can take active part and they like that and we should help answer their questions in this chat and should encourage to ask their questions even if these questions feel not so professional it's okay well for us it's a bit different I mean both of you guys your communities are tied to like specific open source product with just going to tell it's different I mean we are built over the open source principles but we don't have one specific tool or one specific product we are tied to but I agree with Andre with the importance of like this sense of belonging to work on something which is important something which can help or so we experienced actually the the similar boost we experienced with the covid we experienced now with the situation in Ukraine because again it was built on the immediate response to some crisis and the community came together and started working on helping projects and I mean this is a really important thing this sense of belonging the urge to help it's really common for the open source communities while we're talking about the successes over the last couple of years we also must also mention the shortcomings of what happened could have been done better or more importantly even the threats which are critical for the communities to not to be entirely destroyed because it's very easy thing to destroy a community so you're all coming from all different backgrounds so I would like to share what are the threats you're seeing in in how your community functions or even just sustains itself I think yeah our project okay our project contains consists of two parts one is open source which is named open core which contains the most features of the project victoria matrix and also we have enterprise version of victoria matrix and these features are available only for people who pay us money for contracts and I see that the main treat for projects like ours which is named open core is that open source community usually want enterprise features to be pushed to be backported to open source version and they always push us they say why you put this to enterprise version put this to open source version and this is the most challenging part of such project as ours to explain because the community why we did this and in the way so people don't angry on us and continue being our fans I don't know maybe I didn't get the question what's the problems actually we're developing yes the threats and problems and shortcomings of what you did last for the last two years what is the most threatening thing is probably the most interesting question where do you see the threat coming to your community I can say much because again I work in just half a year developing open source software but yeah that's I agree with Alex say Alexander sorry yeah that's it's always problem to understand how to split your software how to sell it actually but there is some options how you can do that and that's interesting like you can develop your open source software and you can try to sell it and we did we do that the different way we actually we prepare the tool which is solving our problems and solving our cases and we just put it into the open source so the main principle how we get the money it's still our clients but we developing our tool which can be used by anyone else and I think this is win-win so when it comes to differences between open core and the full support module we have two different opinions as in you're assuming that the problems you're hitting would be the problems of your customers as well meaning if you put this open source you can support them better this is pretty much similar to red heads model right depends to this correctly while alexander's model is more classical open core where you have to find a very careful balance between paid customers and community okay but that makes perfect sense Anisco of course any yeah I mean for us it's again a bit different but I think we have some similarity to what alexander says which is a motivation motivation of the community which is of course a bit different than when you're working on some big project but to keep keep the volunteers motivated it's the same for all the communities and you can find the the similarities all over for us we have an interest kodigital we have a small core team which actually its function is to keep the community happy to provide all the tools needed to provide support to step in if there is a need or so and to nurture the community which is which can be applied to all open source communities I believe to all communities actually to have those who feel the responsibility of keeping the community alive okay I think that the most important thing which we can do to in order to increase our community and make our community happy is to follow their suggestions on how our project should evolve and this is great and as for victorimetics we always try to follow to listen to our community and to implement features which they mostly want and we see that this is much better than somebody than one person for instance me can decide which features should be implemented and don't listen for community and so we follow the path by listening to the community and implementing features which the community demand not the features which somebody like me want to implement because they like and this this works well because people like when their feature requests are implemented and if these features are needed by a big number of people why the audience then this audience become more supportive for for your project and become even glist of the project and this is great I would also append that it is important to be polite with your community and it's always cool when you're making some bug reports and to get fast reply on that and that's the thing where people what expecting from you and if you see and if you're communicating with the community very well they will like you even more I think we have three minutes left so let's do one last question and then we probably could have the audience ask you a few things so we can always slowly move to the hallway track it's the benefit of the DEF CON of course let's let's make it short I want you to name one thing you are very very proud of which is related to community for the last two years what's biggest thing which immediately comes into your mind when we mentioned success in the community or something like that I have a short one that we survived and and we're going on I know the feeling any other survivors I don't know I just want to say that I like how Google can organize the community they know how to do they actually with the organization terms all these special interest groups working groups and I like the organization I think that organization is important thing to have in communities I have no input we will country as a survivor then good anybody from the audience wants to give a couple of questions so we just slowly move to the hallway track I see that yeah hello everyone so thank you for great discussion like you probably using at least for Alexander you're using GitHub to get an input what is needed but if we're talking about communities we have different channels like Slack forums whatever how you can measure the engagement and how can you actually understand what your community is growing community is dying or it's like a stagnation thanks for the question very interesting question and there are many metrics which we can use to measure the our community for instance the number of issues the given period of time and if we see that the number of issues created and feature requests to which our users create during some period of time during the months increases then this means that our community grows also we have metrics such as the number of downloads of our binaries and the number of visits to our GitHub to our website to our documentation and we can also measure the growth of the community by these numbers and also the number of people in our Slack chats and telegram chats also shows whether the community grows over the time and the one thing we see the the big increase in the number of pull requests from community members for our projects during the last two years especially because if we will see at our project two years ago then the majority of commits and pull requests were from the members of Victoria Matrix team especially from me and if we look at these commits for the last months for instance then we can see that almost half of these commits go from community members not from Victoria Matrix team and this great this shows that the community grows totally I agree with everything said before I can also append that this is might be really cool when not only you talking about your product but when people starting talking about that some discussions and you can find the discussions in some different places in some unrelated forums and sites like that we need to wrap it up but no it's okay I mean it's we have the same metrics as Alexander said so basically the externals and the progress of how many external people are communicating yeah that makes sense okay I think that's all the time we have left even more so feel free to ask additional questions to the people in the hallway track that's why we have it and thank you very much for all of your attention and then the round of applause for our perfect panelists please