 Hello and welcome to tackling new challenges in a virtual focus community and exploration of virtual community management. I'm Allison. I'm a developer advocate at Weaveworks and I'm a co-chair of Kubernetes SIG Contributor Experience. My name is Bob Killen. Mr. Robbie tables across all the things. I'm a program manager at Google. I'm a member of the Community Steering Committee and also a co-chair of SIG Contributor Experience. Now, before we kick this off, I do sort of want to go into why this is important. Well, everyone is virtual now. We are forced to have more asynchronous communication. But open source has been, you know, mainly remote forever. So we as open source contributors and maintainers should be positioned quite well to deal with this sort of thing. How come we're running into problems now? We should, you know, we should really be experts at working, working virtually now, right? Many people and companies are honestly grappling with becoming remote all at once. There's greater isolation, meetings, and it all adds up. And it leads to sort of like many negative experiences. So we've adopted some strategies to help like mitigate and combat the combat these issues, reduce the zoom fatigue, strengthen our community bonds. And in many cases, we've made participating way more accessible. So you're probably wondering, how are we going to share our experiences with you today? Well, fortunately, Kubernetes has become so popular that it has its own spinoff located entirely within this slide deck. This spinoff includes a book and a television series that follows two fictional maintainers in a large open source project called Notonetes. Today, we will be reading a story from the book and watching an episode from the television series. And then following up with some of our own commentary and things that were missed out by the writers. So let us begin the Notonetes storybook. Notonetes is one of the largest open source projects out there with over 56,000 unique contributors and a whopping 300 plus repos. With that larger project, it is busy and they have over 200 meetings a month. And honestly, people are tired. But with all that sort of out of the way, let's actually kick it off and meet our two fictional maintainers. I'm Fiona. And I'm Frank. Okay. Today, there is a meeting for the Notonetes project. Let's join in on the call. Good evening, everyone. It's just us again. It's just us again. The participants list empty, confirming the length of attendees. Fiona and Frank, the only people to be seen. How do we solve this problem? What tools do we have? How else do we communicate? We can use Slack. So pausing here for just a moment to sort of go over the like Slack meetings and some tips for us that have been a bit more helpful. Slack or chat-based meetings can be quite effective even for more than just regular touch points. This is first like by providing a multi-day period for people to respond. It lets them tune in when they can between their other responsibilities. Now, discussion still occurs and it may just be like a few hours between responses, but that's okay. This is also a huge win for international contributors that can be actively involved without having to be up at all hours of the day. Something else that has honestly really helped us is Slack threads. Having a thread per agenda item keeps things very focused and people can watch the specific things they're interested in. Now, with many more things vying for people's attention, giving people more ways to sort of like manage their focus has proven to be very effective. Now, after the Slack meeting concludes, the threads also make it like easier for us to summarize the discussion for the notes. And we then take those notes and send them out to the main list so that anyone that did miss it can stay informed. Honestly, one thing we found is like very few people do wind up going and read the notes directly. But if you can send them notes, they'll actually read them. Now, this last tidbit is important and it is hard. No decisions should be made in something that is ephemeral. That goes for either chat or video meetings. Those should really go to your list as an independent item with a lazy consensus period. Lazy consensus is essentially giving a decision a common period if there are concerns that can't be resolved, then the decision itself is postponed. And this gives everyone an opportunity to review and get their word in. Now with that, let's return to the story. What a great idea. Let's try it and see how things go. The next meeting is a Slack meeting. Will it be a success? Our maintainers create the meeting threads. Over the next few hours, contributors worldwide chime in at different times when it suits them. A day and a half later, the meeting ends. The next big part of Fiona and Frank's work then begins. They comb through the meeting threads summarizing points made. In an email to the main list, the information is relayed. Now, a week after the Slack meeting, our contributors gather again. Slack, call. Where will we find them? As the meeting types alternate and last week we used Slack, this week should be a call. Let's join in on that. At first glance, you can see a big change. The number of participants is greater than two. Our chairs are filled with excitement about the discussions that will ensue. The Slack meetings had a lot of engagement from contributors far and wide. A big improvement from the live meetings with only a small number of people inside. What are the contributors' thoughts about using Slack meetings? Do they think it's a good idea? Let's look at the responses. That should make things clear. Thank you for this. I haven't been able to attend due to a work conflict. I don't have to stay up past midnight anymore. The regular list updates have really helped me stay up to date with what's happening. I'm busy getting my kids ready for school regularly. The Slack meetings have been great. And with meetings improved and Zoom fatigue at bay, the Notonetees project continues yet another day. So chat-based meetings can improve your contributor accessibility. Open Source communities are a globally distributed teams and asynchronous by nature. But there are a few interesting things that really sort of happen as they grow. Now, in the beginning, they all rely on like main list forms and issues. But once they reach a certain size, they tend to adopt chat, which is a little bit more synchronous and a much more social, but can generally still be treated as async. The next step up sort of like on the rung is, well, they tend to have meetings and they're high bandwidth and they do serve a purpose. They're honestly like great to knock out and discuss important topics. Also, this is a little bit of a point in contention and what is true or not is who knows, but having regular meetings is often associated with project maturity. The other thing is like these meetings can actually be great for growing your community. They provide a way for people to get to know each other, putting a face with a name and talking to people helps strengthen your community bonds. But as an unintended consequence, they often become exclusionary. Decisions are made in meetings, full up items are not communicated broadly. And with a global team, no matter what, you're excluding someone unless they really like to stay up late. Now, even if people are in the same time zone, they may have to like pick up their kids from school and can't make a meeting regularly. The other thing is like it can also be incredibly intimidating to chime in on a call, especially for those from underrepresented groups or if they're new contributors. The meetings are, you know, also recorded and published for transparency purposes, but some people are really uncomfortable with having their face recorded and posted on the Internet. So you don't know people's experience in history. And you can sort of like start to see why having like regular video meetings could potentially be a problem. With those points in mind, here are some tips for your open source meetings. So you can still have video meetings, but make sure you can accommodate those contributors that might not be able to join in regularly and use what tools you have to available to find a happy path. So for example, we're quite creative with the communications mediums we had and we use Slack to do the meetings. So also many projects create additional meetings for different regions, Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, to give them a space at a time that is convenient to them and to make them feel included. The intent is often well met, but the intent is often like good, but can actually backfire. So more often than not, both groups wind up being siloed, not knowing what the other is doing, wherever the majority is can often steamroll the other groups and fall into the pattern of making decisions without engaging with everyone. You can do it, but be sure that there is enough frequent communication between the groups so that they're aware of what each other is doing. You can also mitigate some of these problems by scheduling ad hoc meetings for specific topics with the right people. If it means a person or two staying up super late for a one-off or a regular discussion, it's way better than having a recurring meeting that involves folks staying up till 2am. Keep meetings for discussions, not decisions. Decisions should go to the mailing list where people can respond asynchronously. Everyone may have the bandwidth to attend meetings, even if they are on Slack. By using the mailing list for decisions, it goes straight to their email. The mailing list also serves as a decision register too. Always follow up with an email to the mailing list with the meeting notes. Keeps people informed and makes the content searchable for people subscribed to it. Make it a task of the note taker or the meeting host. Just make sure that they exist in the place that people will see it. If there's any big action items or follow-up items, putting them at the top of the email will also help visibility. Also, keeping everyone informed is key and can drastically help reduce the need for extra meetings. Also, most open-source projects are on the free tier of Slack, which deletes message history. So by sending the notes to the mailing list, you're creating a searchable archive for other contributors. Welcome back to the Not In Eddie Show. Episode 2, Virtual Events. Hey, can you send off this week's meeting threads? Sure thing. All done. Later that day. Hmm, I wonder how the meeting threads are going. You know, it'd be awesome if we could have a virtual contributor summit like we do at NotCon. There's a lot of chatter about this idea. I miss everybody. I'm sick of recording talks. I only want to do an event if it's all social. No more screens. Just make it informal so there's no commitment. Do you think of this idea, Frank? We do a celebration instead of a summit. We celebrate our contributors rather than doing one of those virtual conference things. Yeah. No talks, just fun. That sounds awesome. Can you toss it in the Slack thread? Celebrations over summits. Virtual events can be great. They can be accessible. But people truly miss the hallway track. They miss the social aspects of meeting in person. Don't make it hard for people to participate. For these type of events where the social is focused, let people invite their friends and family or give them some way to interact with each other. You can still have technical or educational content, but don't neglect the social side of things. Instead of summiting, we should get together and celebrate our wonderful contributors. Look at the time. It's time to close all those meeting threads. Can you gather all the notes please and then fire them off to the mailing list, Frank? Sure thing. What game should we play today? I have an idea for the contributors celebration. We can have a game night in the Notre-Denis Discord. That would be a perfect idea. That sounds awesome. But how do we involve the people who don't play games? We could stream our games, but it still might not be that fun for them to watch. Well, if streaming games is like TV to gamers, what would be like TV to contributors? What's something everyone can relate to? Something everyone does. They eat. Next week rolls around and Fiona and Frank are sharing their idea on the weekly contributor call. So last week in the Slack meeting, we mentioned a contributor celebration. We'll use Discord as a space for folks to hang out and have fun activities such as a bake-off. So what's Discord? Discord is a chat service similar to Slack, but it's designed honestly with communities in mind first. Those originally targeted towards gamers, but has now grown to support many other groups. Discord itself, they have really gone other way to make it an accessible platform as well as a very safe space with strong moderation capabilities. You can do things to like require people to, you know, agree to your server rules or abide by your code of conduct before joining your server. The other thing in Discord, voice and video aren't second-class citizens. It has strong support for both. And they've also added some newer features that sort of like make it closer to like something like Zoom or WebEx with a presentation mode that can make it easier to host these sort of events in there. Discord sounds like a great place to host this event. Montage time, epic montage time, people working together, getting things done. Let's launch this. Today's the day we've been waiting for a fault. So tweets are fired and people are turning up and the team is helping folks who get stuck get unstuck. Please help. Let me see what I can do. People really enjoyed sharing pictures of their pets in the pets channel. And these are all the pets. So small. Have different ways for people to participate. Having multiple mediums of communication gives people more ways to engage with each other. It also gives them the opportunity to enjoy the event on their own terms. For instance, some folks might be exhausted with social interactions, but still want to engage with the main event. By providing a stream on YouTube, they can watch along without having to worry about joining a call or registering for yet another service. Also, by having topic focus channels, it gives folks an easy way to break the ice. Instead of awkward silences, people had a topic to talk about. All these different topics can create many different water coolers for people to gather around. All right. In 30 minutes, our first planned event will begin. It's trivia time. Are we ready, folks? Everyone's turning up to watch the main events across Discord, YouTube and Twitch. So this is trivia. This is trivia with a very low production budget. So use your imagination to see the other squares. I can share my appreciation with others. I'm on the show too. And with that comes a close to the contributor celebration. If you could fill out the survey, that would be awesome. So you are probably wondering about some of the things that the writers of the show happen to leave out. Like most television shows based on real life events, it's not quite the whole story. Well, fortunately, both of us are here to present all the things that actually happened in the project. In fact, we worked with the writers of the show, not Allison and not Bob. To totally not fictional writers. So anyway, earlier you saw the contributors in the show suggest events that they wanted in the celebration. But we didn't cover all the thoughts and ideas when it came to selecting the events. So like I said earlier, there should be a similar to a point I made earlier. There should be a non sign up way to access main events. Doing this improves engagement. For example, the great cloud native bake off is one of the top videos on our YouTube video. Also, despite the event occurring on Discord, we had 2,600 people tune into the event streams over the weekend of the contributor celebration. Social should be a priority, but having engaging technical content can also work very effectively. At the summit, one of our contributors, Lori Apple, ran a tea and time management workshop that wound up going a full hour over it's a lot of time due to a large amount of participants. Even though that was more technical or skill focused, it was very engaging. So awards and raffles. So if you can backing up your virtual event with some physical items such as awards can help people feel connected. And you can also use that to incentivize greater communication. We had a reward bot that would send people a code to the CNCS store so they could get a shirt or a hoodie. The reward bot would also reward those that participated more. And we turned up the frequency in which it would give out prizes during our main events. One caveat though, international shipping can be a huge pain. Even if it's outsourced, some countries it's just very difficult to ship items to. In these scenarios, if you can try and find something in their own country. Or as a worst case scenario, you can even do a gift card. So when we gathered feedback from the event, people really like it. We received pretty much nonstop positive feedback. And 85% of our survey respondents actually really wanted us to do another event. And only 15% or the remaining 15% was actually split between maybe's and depends on the pandemic. There was not a single no virtual events like this are more broadly accessible. And we actually had a few like long time contributors who have never been able to attend a KubeCon or contributor summit show up. This was actually because of like financial or geopolitical reasons, but the event gave them an opportunity to actually get to know their fellow contributors and sort of like really brought the community closer together. The water cooler aspect of the like off topic channels also allowed like a few new contributors to break out of their shell. It was like a very neutral icebreaker. We had one that actually popped into play like destiny to with a bunch of us. And that was their first real experience with the community itself. Others like fired up games of like among us and brought their kids along to play it was great. There were just little things that keep people engaged and especially now like bringing people together. So to recap on some of the points that we've made chat meetings can improve contributor accessibility. The people who are in different time zone, people who might have bad internet conditions, people who might be uncomfortable with calls. They now have more ways to participate in the community. The communication mediums you have leverage slack zoom and mailing lists to provide a way for everyone to be able to participate in a meeting. So give people multiple pathways to engage similar to what I said just before about the communication platforms, leverage text, video and streams for your virtual events. This will make your event more accessible and inclusive. And last but not least, do not neglect the social side of your community. Better social bonds means people are more comfortable around each other. And when people are more comfortable around each other, they work together better, they're more likely to reach out for help. Also all work and no play can be quite a drain. Thank you very much for watching our presentation. If you're watching this live, we will now be doing a short Q&A. Thanks everyone. Thanks everyone. Bye.