 So just a technical note here. I can see Brian and nothing else. Brian can see me and nothing else So anything at all that is happening in a room. We are fully oblivious to you. So I Don't know. I can see I can see I have streamed in the view that I've got. Oh, really. Oh, I definitely can't okay. That's good Yeah, then you'll notice There's a view button that maybe make you see different stuff. Can you hear me? Yes, yes, great. I can see your slides. Ah, yes. Now I can see the room as well Just as you start the screen sharing but I can see your slides You said no, I can't I cannot It says that your screen sharing but all we see is the fact that your screen sharing and not actually see the slides I can see them before All right No, I said Lee Lee, I swear everyone this worked in testing and that was only 10 minutes ago I think they're trying to fix it, but Brian maybe you should stop sharing us But try to start it again Okay, just stopped it and then now I will Start to share again now There we go. No, I can see your slides, too. Right. I Think we can start. So hello everyone. Welcome to the cloud services talk Brian. Do you want to introduce what we're doing? Yeah, yeah To say something that will make maybe make sense. So I'm on Brian Andrew is is here with me on the remote Tommy is there in the room and we'll do a little deeper chose it a little bit, but We're here to talk about co-creating platforms and products how The team that Andrew was Andrew is currently on have previously be on and anybody but taffy Mason be on Cloud service services works works with the technical community build and Maintain in our cloud VPS environment tool forage and each other so So since I said I said this is anybody who doesn't know anything could come I thought we should start with a little bit about what what are we talking about about that services and How the services is It's a cloud hosting Service that the wick of wick of media fashion runs on behalf of the wick of the movement And open-stack Virtua sheen environment and inside that We run we run a lot of a lot of different process projects community. It's a lot of different for projects Kind of an interesting about how how important cloud services has been come to the movement that last month 31% of global edits Have from IP addresses that are inside our cloud. So that's box and tools Those things running inside about services that are going out and out and fixing up the wickies I think that's that's pretty cool Two days ago when I made these slides these numbers might be a little off now But it's going to be slides. We had a hundred seventy seven seven different projects in our open-stack deployment and Inside by those projects there were almost nine hundred separate instance running. So separate virtual machines running and one of those hundred and seventy seven projects is is project that we call tool for and in that project we had Yeah, what do we got there's thirty one hundred sixty men hostools and Almost twenty hundred registered tool maintainers so if you want to learn more about Services and and a bunch of other things about about how you can all tell you can use it you can go to Um cloud and that will redirect you into the red page of wiki tech that will start When we say that that we're building by staff volunteers and we're working together We wanted to find some will show that off a little so I'm looking to get repositories and came up with this slide that has 92 different names on it of People who have us get patches at some point in time that become part of Up an infrastructure structure to use to to manage the virtual machines or other for this deployed There's there's more penis the the true breadth of contributions is much larger than this a get repository search can do And to get repositories search was an exhaustive but I wanted to give Everybody watching just a little bit of idea about about How many people were talking about as we talk some more about how you work together? and You might know notice the view who? Recognize some of these names might notice that there are a number of current former Either Wikimedia foundation or Wikimedia media, which plays on this list And one of the things that I thought what that was interesting about that is most of these people who were employed or Unployed now now or not Without services is teeny Most of did it as as something that was was in general as as a user is Basically just like the rest of the volunteer So we talk about working together talking about you know Trying to collaborate to build better things to help everybody out and we do that collaboration Mostly like any source software project would do and most like y'all y'all do we're working together together Use we use main list we have we have anything this to do to talk to each other as users of platform Or we also enlist to talk to talk to other maintainers of the platform We use IRC channels a lot a lot of our conversations and IRC channels We use fabricator as as one might expect to do a lot of tracking about our software and roadmap planning and Debating the way to do various things We use wiki pages on the Witek wiki. We have a whole whole section Where we make what we what we call an input proposal as well, which are like big ideas about changing things adding really good things We also use witek for for a lot of They're facing announcements One slide too many how do I go back and there we go and We collaborate by the code overview. We we share patches in Garrett and GitLab and sometimes even GitHub for various projects that we And then when we occasionally we get to do even even coolers like have face-to-face sessions That's it at Hackhards and Wikimani. Most of us are remote in this one But but but there are a bunch of us who in in Athens not too long ago and got some discussions this year and then We've been working on some experiments that's including a monthly video call where we're we talk to Talk to each other specifically about that torch So now finally the place where we talk about who we are and I've been been talking for a while. I will keep you for just a brief minute My name is Brian Davis, I work for Comedia Family Function. I'm a principal software engineer Pronouns are closer to him and I'm excited to be here with y'all and maybe Andrew can introduce himself and Delightful partner he has as a keyboard right now. I Can oddly I cannot see my notes and see you at the same time. So I'll be Frantically tabbing back and forth here. I am Andrew Bogot. This is loose the cat Who is not my cat that is visiting and is a very yelly cat So you'll hear him yell some I constantly in the background, but I meant give my best to get him on the floor now Yeah, so I have been Working on the thing that is now called cloud services for about 12 years. I started Not the day that it was created, but you know a few months after that and that was doing the ends at the time but now of course that the project has grown into many other things and Let's see I worked in OSS things before that as well So I think the prompt was how I became involved with the meet Wikimedia movement and the answer that is that that Literally the process was that I noticed that Wikipedia was not the most important thing in my life, but a thing that I Was really relying on 810 12 times a day Every day and so I just wrote to the Wikipedia people and said hey Here are my skills. How can I help and very very gradually after a long time that a job sort of materialized around me? It was very nice. It was a much less formal foundation at the time than that it is now And yeah, so so I do all this operational. I sorry stuff with cloud services mostly the sort of bottom of the stack things and I am an occasional contributor to English Wikipedia to the commons mostly life science things pictures pictures of creatures and Nature photos and such Let's see. I think we're missing if a so over to Tavi. Yes. Hello. My name is I don't work for the one nation at least yet And I got involved in the space that I think sort of 2020 from when Google was the warning their coding event And I've been here ever since I think we're missing you say or Yeah, I think I'm for fortune if they didn't didn't manage to show up to today Which is kind of a Ife was for for me it was top of you or toffee was the new toffee Ife's first around 2000 maybe 2014-2015 and and did a lot of Stuff for text support and wrote things and took over over managed the quarry system and then real the whole bunch bunch of it and he also ran a You know the common common project several other other things and Today he grew up and he's a Google engineer He isn't around us any money more, but every once in a while he showed up and I'm really kind of That he didn't didn't get to joy life go on and we will have a conversation So Now we're at the part that I've been nervous. It's about all week. We're going to have to have a panel to share it I'm supposed to lead this session and participate in discussion. I've got some questions Pre-made and if we run out of kids before before we run out of time we'll have Toffee poll audience there to ask some more stuff I Think what what the first question I wanted to give Andrew an obvious chance to talk about Andrew already kind of did a little bit But this is to say how how you found cloud services, right? So For me I I was a member of media wiki core team back back in the old days when we had he had a media week or a team 2013 2014 time frame and The was then called all the less environment bit Was moving from the data in flora flora to the data center in virginia and It was moving pretty rapidly. There was like a two-week window From one data center to the other and so it jumped in to to help Intvon help ashore start by moving across across the the ci system and Deployment prep projects but the beta cluster and Yeah, that started first first. I hate and then love and then an ongoing pursuit Obvious you can say say how I wondered into the out world Yeah, uh, I was like late 2019 when google was doing their Coding event which was this and they did to pull on High school people to open source like kind of a mini version of the google summer of code that they're still doing today Uh, I got I was like as Andrew said was I am also also like curious how Wikipedia was working on the inner side and Wikipedia was a gci organization and that's Like a lot of things I was at the time was the interest in doing media We could core stuff but there wasn't a lot of media we could core stuff to do in gci So I got involved in some tools and just started from there Andrew you could reiterate your little origin story story. That's yeah I mean, I certainly didn't know that that it existed until I was randomly hired to work on it. I was initially Well, so Ryan it was Ryan Lane's vision to to build build this open stack cloud Built out of Donated but only sort of temporarily donated Cisco hardware, which then sort of haunted us later because we had to somehow refer it to Cisco And Yeah, at the time he wanted a python program or just to gussy up open stack to work on open stack and add Futures that that we needed to make our cloud work as a public cloud rather than as a private cloud So because our use cases are weird and different and remain somewhat weird So so yeah, I learned I learned about it because because suddenly I had a contract to make it do things and It was fun. Yeah, so The abstract for for this is talk um Made a pretty bold claim that that volunteers are co-equal with the foundation staff in planning building and maintaining things within cloud bps And uh I thought it might be interesting for us to talk a little bit about Whether we feel that's that that's actually true Like oh that that volunteers instead are really equal Or if it's it's a bit of an aspirational thing that that that we try to try to keep in mind maybe don't I'll please on a technical level. I would say definitely. Yes. I've had like equivalent access to brian for a couple of years now And as of today's ago, I think I have like Andrew's level of SRE access the entire infrastructure. So People are really willing to give you access if you're doing things to help them Turns out just no they don't have to do it yourself and as Most of the communication is also going out on On public channels. So if you turn up and start to be helpful people start to trust you and give you Let's you do stuff. So I would say definitely yes Yeah, I'm probably the the the person in the worst position to know whether volunteers feel co equal or not because I am the The the have made the most arbitrary decisions probably in history of the project um It's always felt to me like The long term future of cloud services Was kind of inevitable like it's it's always seems sort of clear what the next thing that needs to happen is The next future set and the next stability and the next observability or whatever And so to that extent I can't say that we've ever Consulted with volunteers about what's next, but we barely consult with ourselves about what's next because we're all because You know We're right now. We're racing to replace the grid and that's not because we made a strategic decision to shut down a grid It's because it was clearly inevitable. You know, it was an externalities that meant that meant these things um I can easily imagine that our users and the summit center volunteers feel like they're On a speeding train and that they didn't decide they didn't put down the tracks, right? But I don't know if it feels that way or not um I really hope that in minor but in in incremental ways in terms of what's actually happening today and what Little decisions get made I think that we include volunteers in those decisions mostly Ask this Maybe there are people in the room there with with utabi who want to say that that they don't think that and That that would be great because then we could learn from them Why they don't feel that way I don't no one's No one's here saying anything. It's not taking it out. That's no Nobody nobody joked and yelled and said said we're all liars. That's good. Um I So I quite a bit about this In the lead up to this panel and and I I honestly had not coordinated with kavi before and I was I was glad when when he said that The things that you said that he thought least, you know, you know at a level of access and and the technical decision That that that were pretty were be cool I think I I would add that Ty helps from us to be more equal sometimes There are days when when they'll like like in any collaboration in any even that's got Distruded members, right? They're there days when we accidentally lead somebody out of of a conversation or a decision tommy's been been really good at at both Pointing it out. It happens and being gracious accepting our apologies And trying to help us figure out a better way to forward the next time um But I I think part of it too In in thinking about it and in actually talking with a beer gate about this a little bit as well That at some level, I don't think we'll ever actually be cool and Here's here's the part that I think inequality and and is going to remain an inequality It's accountability I get paid to do the things that I do here through gets paid to do the things that he does is here and and How that getting paid paid part being employed is that we have Commitments to the Wikimedia Foundation, right? Like the Wikimedia Foundation can choose to no longer employ us to take away our money and Tell us to go away and and then that That accountability is something that Here's Can't have right I can't fire a volunteer and I would want to follow a fire volunteer, but I also can't um I can't force a volunteer to do something like I can't I can ask And I can control and I can make But ultimately tommy tommy and it gets to decide every day whether whether tommy wants to show up and continue to help us or not and I I think that's I think that's reasonable. That's right. Like I think I think that's a thing that that shouldn't be considered equal I shouldn't get to do just what the heck I want to do to do and I should be able to force top Yeah, I mean certainly there are There's some aspect of our work that is Toilet that's that's drudgery, right? And we wouldn't ask volunteers for the most part to do that I also wouldn't ask a volunteer to carry a pager to receive middle of the night you know wake up in the middle of the night to deal with the problem because That's I mean, we're paid to do the to do the annoying bits and the hard parts The other thing that I've been thinking about with this question is time horizons, you know, I said that thing about feeling like like everything is inevitable. I mean Brian and I both have been involved in this project for 10 years or 10 plus years and That means that It's easy for me to work on a thing because I know how it'll benefit me two years from now or three years from now and You know A lot of volunteers just want to fix they want to scratch their itch they want to fix their little thing and then go away, right? Or there you know as Tavia's their students and they have other life events coming up and probably aren't doing multi-year commitments and so the other the other way I Don't think that there are a lot of examples of volunteers steering those very long-term multi-year decisions And I don't think that that's because it would be unwelcome so much as it is just that that's It seems like a lot to ask from somebody who's doing it for fun I think that's all I had to say on that topic I have to look at my notes again Oh, yeah, I have the word power law written down in my notes, which I think is just saying that there are You know we're talking about Tavia and Yifei who really are have worked essentially full time for months at a time on on our projects And they're the the tip of a of a pyramid, you know that there there are also volunteers who have worked Full time for a week and then there are also volunteers who appear And shepherd their little thing and then disappear for six months and then come back and then poke at their little thing and disappear and I think rightly we accord different amounts of influence to those volunteers as well based on their their involvement Yeah that That answers Andrew that that that train of thought actually Measuringly well with with one of the that the question I got from from pulling around on social media for things people might want to hear about Right and Sumana who used to be at the foundation. I think it was like about 2011 through 2004 1415 Just Based developer advocate right in community community manager for the volunteer type committee Anyway, she asked uh She don't social social that she she was curious whether As as a group in in cloud services if we experience a thing that she's cadence here here Which is a whole lot like a thing that I call impedance seems mismatch. Um Which is kind of when when parts of the group want to want to do different things at different speeds and that Initially it causes friction and then and then either Dissolve nicely or doesn't get And I think um, you know, a lot of what Ann was saying there plays days into that that For me, I think I think it's sort of of my job as one of the people who get to do this stuff to Find ways to accommodate Whatever can speak to people who want to fall all into your Our Want to do something really fast and I think it's my job to Help get things out of their way that they can do it with them real fast And then I think that the flip that you know if I'm working on something in involuntary capacity things things in life change, right? They got final or They new newer in their household They they move houses or whatever right and they need to take some some time away That we're all responsible for accommodating that right? I need Step stepping fill the gap if it's a thing that that needs to continue to happen on on a faster pace Or just making space for people to put things down for a while and and then try to I'm interested in and Tavi's thoughts about that like Tavi. Do you Intentionally like when you start to work on a thing. Do you think oh, this is this is a three-week project and and so I will do it Or oh, this is a three-year project. And so I definitely will just leave it Leave it alone. I just work on what I find interesting and if there's a bigger project Usually, I think we have like A dollar step testing environmental tools, but that usually is easy to work something on like we can I don't need your involvement during development. Then I have like stack of 10 patches I can push to you and you can review those on your time. So usually I think they're actually Not very often blocked and I can't work on this thing because I haven't had reviews on this thing I was working you know that today So it's easy for me to work on something and push it out for your reviews and come back later when it's reviewed And I imagine that one of the aspects of something being interesting is you being able to watch it Do something right like like you being able to experience the results of your work in sometime soon rather than Rather than being like oh now I've cleared the path to make Andrew's life easier 18 months from now like that That's inherently less interesting, right? Yeah, it's more far interesting if something happens now. I'm not in three years time when we're changing B2C in yeah, and and I try to Prioritize Volunteer patches for that reason like to to be like oh the iron the iron is hot You know that I'm going to review volunteer patches before I review staff patches because I am The volunteers might get bored and leave and it's just less likely to do that And I and I hope that that That's maybe aspirational. I imagine that I do that, but I I hope them I hope it feels that way on your end as well that mostly When you're waiting up for a thing somebody is like oh Tommy's always waiting for this and then we we hopped to it It's a very common for me to when I'm done with one thing I'm Move to something else and come back later when it can't take a while for review But I have something complicitly different, but I'm more interested in I'm nothing more interested in working on this other thing And that's take me a while to get back after you reviewed and to fix stuff and get stuff merged Yeah, I certainly know as a volunteer myself and other projects that like Time to review is number one Future and whether I stay engaged or not like it's very easy to just get bored and forget if a patch that's around for too long If takes a little longer and just move to something completely different and maybe come back months later or when I That's interesting again Um, let's see. We've got Got like 10 minutes left. We got so much time. We could talk about a thousand things intense, right? um Look at look at look at at the lift of questions. I had cute I think I think the next one that might be interesting task is is if People have ideas of this about Changes that we might might make changes in policy or changes in the practices that we do that That feel like they'd be a good good experiment making it easier for For us to collab it together Or maybe even for us to attract more more volunteer to hear about The foundation slack is definitely one thing that causes controversy quite often since they have a I think several cases where Someone comes up to you and slack and hey, how do I do things again? Then you push something through and I'm just what's the context and I don't have any context when everything is somewhere private so When something comes from the community, it's in the public channel the usual I can't see but sometimes very custom foundation is From coming from a private channel But good that maybe we could push those to More forced us to public channel so everyone can get involved Yeah, that's basically what I wrote down to it's not so much a thing that we can change as a change that we can resist right is that as As more more communication moves into different disparate wall gardens That we can we can say no no that's not I mean Brian and I both have said it a thousand times about slack That's not where our team is Our team isn't our team is not all staff Therefore, they don't have access to slack. We cannot move our work there because our team cannot follow us and and so far that's we've been able to To say that and and follow through And that's true about fabricator as well But you're right more and more information vanishes behind behind privacy walls I don't think I would be here if cloud has been on irc. It would be a thing I mean the flip side to that is that I'm concerned that irc is very arcane right like that that that You seem comfortable there and yeah If you know if I were going to answer this later question about how to advise somebody who's interested in getting involved Like lurk on irc a whole lot, but that's a lot. That's a lot to ask of somebody who doesn't Naturally function in that kind of chat environment um Well, I don't really know nobody is clear on what the next open Communication forum is after irc. I mean there are many competing ones that's That's a challenge on the scope that of time that we have here to solve solve for but Thanks for being that out tommy because I I think that's a That's a really good and I think we even on irc we Sometimes catch ourselves hanging out in invite only tools and talking to each day or two Before or somebody goes. Oh, oh wait, shouldn't we be talking? We're not talking about very secret critters that we have to keep keep private to go back back to the the admin or back technically And end user channel one or the other to keep talking about these things And in fact a question that I added to our annual survey is basically Where are you people? Where do you talk to each other? And I keep hoping that it's that that some year the survey will come back and and will say Oh, it turns out that 70 percent of our users are all In this channel on discord and then we will follow like we will cheerfully Go to whatever public channel our users are in it's just that right now The internet is too fractured for it to be at all clear where that somewhere is Um Well, we're getting we're getting down to the end now. I guess we've got about For three or four minutes left. So so maybe we should jump to that that last question you you kind of tease there Andrew Andrew is the what what advice would would any of us give to some who's Inter interested in being involved Down from deep right this infrastructure layer of of the cloud projects And I I think especially interest interest here What My view is to find something that's interesting to know You're not just something that's mark as a good first book because if For example, if it's a book that's been allowing you are Feature that you would find yourself usable then it's much more You're much more motivated to work on it and sells Easier to get started on when you maybe have a clear vision of how this should work or instead of a generic fabricator's task of This would be a good thing for newcomer, but And it's also much less work on us. We don't have to curate that list of good first marks or Answer generic questions on how do I get started on this very large? Oh, oops on this very large space I absolutely agree with that that the volunteers who who stick around are the ones who show up mad about something The volunteers who show up and say what can I do to help? You know we can we can answer that question, but that's it's not that's not nearly as motivating as having having a thing that is Clearly annoying to them and that they want to fix But as you said fabricator it does have I mean it's full of little things that need fixing So certainly people can work in fabricator and I or C until they notice a thing that they want to sink their teeth into So I think what I hear for both of you saying About the same way it's slightly different words is the The classic line of scratch your own itch, right? But find the thing that You're happy to do or Thing that you're happy to make make go away And start there They kind of shout I think uh What are the things that that that makes me most noticeable? and and reach out to them and ask Hey, hey, do you want mates? Do you want to do more things? Do you want to help more is is notice people who are Who are helping others? Use the plop plop right people who are anti-transitions on On wiki tech wiki on our iri our signals on our mailing lists on our fabricator tasks with people who Spontane helping out that way, right? Are often that I first think about When I'm look out and going boy, it'd really be nice if we had some more fingers put on boards right now So If you've been to catch somebody's eye and you haven't yet that's another potential And also this is maybe too little too late, but I want to emphasize how much Doc writing is an important part of volunteer contribution to our projects You know Brian had that list of volunteers that that had contributed to to get things and I have a whole other list that is Similarly long that's people who never showed up and get that who have edited our our volunteer docs and our at our technical docs And sometimes the process of documenting a thing causes you to notice what's wrong with it And then that's that's an entree into doing developer work as well Yeah, starting with support and documentation is a great a great way to to start without having to understand the stack You can just have a user's perspective and still be very useful to the to the projects Nobody's yelling in my ear yet That we're supposed to get off stage My timer is traveling in two minutes, but yeah, I think we're starting from out of time Um Well any any last anything that that that folks want to say Something that they had in their notes to get it out for the question or something that we didn't get to or I think we have one in the room. Do we or you can also come talk to me later if you Could you talk to the microphone? We can't hear you if you're not talking to the microphone Recording stopped like kubernetes or other things. I don't know about what do you all disagree about its future Yes, kubernetes, of course like one of our goals is to make it so you don't have to understand those technologies but yeah kubernetes is on tool for describing and I think probably as well like to stay on open stack for a long time, but We don't also the industry is moving very fast. We don't yet know what's the modern thing in two years but Our goal is so that you don't have to understand what the technologies are as a user Does that answer your question? Sorry Let's talk later. I think we're running out of time. Yeah I mean my last words are just We are interested in talking about this in the abstract and also we're interested in in having who will contribute And so anybody who's following along or listening should Should get up in our in our faces like we we want to hear from you. We want to help. We want to know what's wrong We wouldn't know what's right. We aspire to To be engaged and responsive. So so please Please continue this discussion in any in any venue and in any time and we'll almost certainly be interested in talking to you This is this is why we this is especially brian. Well, maybe not especially but like This is this is our thing. This is why this is the project that we're committed to is because of this Horace porous community nature. It's it's it's what makes it fun Yeah, but I think we're out of time. So thank you everyone for coming here and yeah, please come talk to us later If you have any questions Thank you