 Welcome back everyone. I'm here with Rob Strecce. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Day two, Open Source Summit. Live coverage, three days, wall to wall. Kind of getting down towards the end of day two. A lot of great content, action packed. It's not pulling the big numbers like KubeCon, but it's the right numbers. It's the elite. It's the premier show that sets the agenda for Open Source software by the Linux Foundation. General Bacon's here, community leadership core. Great to see you. Great to see you. Great to see you. Yeah. I mean, you're an expert in community. You've written a great book. You're well known in the community circles. Open Source has won. Okay. It's no longer the shoulders of giants. It's all giants. It's now the industry standards. It's all shoulders. It's all shoulders. It's all shoulders. It's now the, it's the software industry. So, and so much more is happening. So we see another inflection point coming and community is the lifeblood. There's a recent post that was written this past week around Google's leaked memo. Yep. Around open AI. And they talked about community as a moat. Yep. So you start to see words like moat, which implies competitive advantage. Okay, it complies proprietary. The old moat was proprietary software. That's dead. Yeah. Now we have community being called a moat. Not a bad thing, but it's going to impact open source as these projects become so large and these communities are developing. You have a series of ecosystems developing. What's your view on this? What's your reaction to all this? I think it's great. I mean, you know, when you think about whether it's a project or whether it's a company, the most important asset that you have is your audience. Your products, your services, your projects are a means of adding value to that audience. But fundamentally, if you can, if you can make your audiences life better, then you win. And communities are a tremendously effective way of doing that. And I think we're just, we're starting to see this really direct correlation between success and the role of a community in that success. And I think AI is going to make everything change in a multitude of different ways, in the way we build communities, in the way we generate content for communities. It's all going to be impacted by it. It's interesting. I want to get your thoughts on AI because if you look at open source, we've been there from the beginning. Gabriel said, what's your, how are you going to be open source? Well, I used to steal software in college and deal it. So that's technically before it was free. Right. Okay, we made it free. So like, now we're there. It's so successful, but it was built to be distributed. It was built to be not corporate, very light at the top. The Linux foundation, I think is the poster child of structure. It's very thin at the top and all the value goes down into the projects, the community. So not a lot of top down, but there's a top, a lot of bottom up. So now you get a world where that could be that foundation, a tornado like AI comes around, does it topple, does it change it? It's a question. We think it's not. But the point is, it's going to be a change to the structure, the people equation, how projects are managed. What has to happen to, as the velocity of this new rocket ship? Yeah. There's a structure change. What's your view if you had to riff on, like, what's the adaptation look like? Well, I think it's in the beginning, we're going to start seeing, we're seeing it right now. We're going to start seeing AI being used as a tool to support the success of building communities. So I'll give you an example. One of the issues that I see with a significant number of companies who are building communities or projects that are building communities is they just do not offer enough value for their members. So how many times have people been into a Discord channel or into a forum? It's just a bunch of Q and A. And you're like, well, why would anyone come back to that? It's a utilitarian function. I go ask my question, I get my question, I get out, right? So the analogy there is it's like Netflix. If you opened up Netflix, it's the same three TV shows over and over again. You'd never open it up again. The reason why you opened up Netflix is because it adds value. The problem is that generating value, which is often generating content and events and things like that is time consuming and it's expensive. AI is really helping this significantly, right? Especially everybody talks about ChatGBT as a means to like generate content. To me, the real value of ChatGBT is summarizing content. Like for example, taking a transcript of a video and then running it through ChatGBT to generate material that you can then post them to your community that you can use as a means of adding value to your targeted audience. So I think we'll start out with this content approach, but then we're going to get to a point where I think AI is going to be saying, okay, I'm sucking in all of this information. All of this data about patterns in how the community's operating and we're able to identify trends. Like to me, I want to see velocity going up, velocity going down so I can react to it and AI is going to help with that. In the keynote today, Rob was covering the keynote and there was a slide up there by the Lutheran, whatever it was called, AI company. They use the word synthetic media. Right. Which I, you know, okay, that speaks to some of the auto-generated media. A lot of content is going to be, heavy lifting content is going to, vanilla content is going to come out. Could be good. Content is a lot like, is data. Okay, code is data. So communities thrive on information. So if misinformation becomes a dynamic, you're going to have to have some sort of countermeasure around the group dynamic. Yeah. As you know, you're an expert in this. I'm just trying to frame it. How does the content market develop? I mentioned forums. Because you got sub-stack, which is subscription. You got sites that are, news sites are going away. Stack overflow shut down, which actually BTX us. They don't want to get up their jewels. So you have a content market that's changing. Yeah. People just take matters on their own hands. How do you see that evolving? How do you advise your clients? How do you see like content? Is content glues people together? Yeah, I mean, to me, like, I think we're, right now, we're kind of getting distracted with the wrong thing, with this topic around content, because, you know, there's a big argument going on about, you know, AI-generated content versus human-generated content. I don't think it matters. Like, if I, just me as a human being, if I've got a problem in my head, and I want to solve that problem, I don't really care whether you tell me how to solve that problem, or whether AI tells me how to solve that problem, as long as I can solve that problem. And I think we're going to see this, like, T1000 fusion of, like, humans and machines kind of coming together. The key thing I think is going to be voice and tone and doing that. What makes communities really tick is it's information, but it's that sense of connectivity. It's that sense that you build relationships. The Linux Foundation, I mean, this event is a great example of this. I'm walking around here and I'm bumping into so many people I've known for many years and I meet new people. And it's those relationships that make this valuable. Sure, the exhibition area is cool and the talks are cool, but what really makes these events tick are the people. It's the people equation. So content, I think, it's a function. What I like about AI is I don't want someone spending four hours creating an article. I want them spending 45 seconds creating an article. I want them spending four hours reaching out to people, engaging with them, building relationships, connecting people together to see how they can support each other. And that network aspect is huge. The network effect is ultimately the key value you're talking about. The thing I've learned in my 22 years of doing this is you've got to be intentional about it if you, the amount of people who just say, there's our Discord channel, there's our forum, and they say, go check out our community and they just leave it at that. It's not good enough. Yeah, I think that's- That's our Discord. Well, I set it up, so it has no intention. I just wanted to set it up. But I also think it goes back to when people are active, you want to be responsive as well. And I think it's really hard with just, especially with the people trying to build a community to be as intentional in that community. Maybe they have their engineers who are involved in things of that nature, but a lot of times they're busy doing other things as well. Yeah, they've got other stuff to do. So do you see that as an advantage to the AI being involved in this as well? I think so. I mean, I think AI is going to make all of these things more efficient. But I think also the mental model, when I started out consulting with companies, I didn't think I was making this mistake, but I was totally making this mistake of trading in big chunks of really clear and I think valuable strategy, but it was fundamentally anchored on you've got to discipline yourself to do these things. If you do these things, if you eat your vegetables, you'll get good results. And what I've learned about human beings is what's more important is that we do lots of little things that have a outsized impact. So to me, instead of sitting down building out a big strategy on the rest of it, what I'd rather people do is just do one new thing a week and try that thing and experiment. And I think when you get into that cycle, I mean, every founder I meet does this, right? You start a company, you've kind of an idea for a project, you build it, you start iterating, you get feedback, and it's this cycle. And I think that to me is what really gets the results with communities. It's not sitting down saying, we're going to have this big strategy. It's, you know, let's, oh, we're going to deliver a bunch of conversation starters. We're going to try these different community events. We're going to have around a feedback from our community. We're going to try these types of gamification and really over-indexing on making people feel validated and feel like they're participating. That's the most important thing. We actually had a conversation with Angel Diaz who was in here earlier, we have a platform engineering kind of same concept. He said, the people who design it up front tend to fail. He says, that's what you don't do. Do it and then find out what can be reused and rebuilt on. That becomes the core platform. Don't try to overthink it. You're kind of saying the same thing. Get out there, find out what's authentic, what connects, what makes people feel part of the community. Totally, yeah, fall in love with your blind spots, you know? Like fall in love with your blind spots, get out there and say, like, one of the things- What do you mean by that? Explain. So what I mean by that is like, like when you launch something, you don't know what you don't know, right? So your blind spots are out there. And I think a lot of people, they are insecure, they're self-conscious of, you know, they come to a place like this and like, if I'm going to start this, put this new product or project out there, I don't want to look like unprofessional. I don't want to look like a failure. And I think what everybody learns as they get older is, just get out there, get it out there. No one's really sitting there and judging you and then have your audience fill you in on the blind spots. Like one of the things I like to do with communities, I recommend everybody does this, is there's this power imbalance where you've got like a devrel person or a community manager and the expectation is, oh, they're the people who are running the community. The community members are there to consume whatever they put out. And what I always say to them is, no, you say to your community, look, there's a hundred of us here, for example, right? We can make this the greatest place to be if we do this together. And I'm going to facilitate this, but I need you to help. And even if you just tell me your thoughts, your perspective, if you tell me my blind spots, you make them a responsible part of it, then they feel like they're shaping something. And that's when you get better. And I think that is so important. I think one thing I'd like to get your thoughts on is this idea that Facebook kind of patented, which nobody likes, uses the product. And I think the value contribution model of giving to the group, collective more value than you take and having some sort of social contract contextually based on what the community is. Is that like a formula that you see? A hundred percent, like to me, it's all about value in everything in life. Like if you can't add value, then you don't impact anyone because I think we live in a world where there's just so many distractions. So to me, what I always recommend to people is, think about who your audience is, write their pain points down because there's this kind of like slightly cheesy analogy of like, if I'm a dentist and you want to get your teeth quiet and you've got toothache, you're going to demand me as a dentist much more urgently. So if you zone in on those pain points and if every interaction you have for the first 10 interactions is helping them to solve one of their pain points, you can't not fall in love with that person. John, I have a question for you on the big way that's coming. A lot, you mentioned the technical founders get kind of caught up and they don't go to their blind spots or people don't. One of the things about AI and Open Source is this code's getting better and the mechanisms that people think about the mechanism that it takes to do something. This is how I do PR, this is how I do community, this is how I do marketing. We're kind of based on old school techniques. So what new things do you see that are going to be abstracted away by value? I mean, public relations examples, we do a lot of PR firms. They just want to get the message out. But they don't have to do those steps anymore. We chat GPT, it's gone away. Marketing might have to change. So a lot of people get caught up in the mechanism versus what do I want to do? What are you seeing out there that's new ways to do something else like community or organic marketing where the community is? I mean, the paid stuff seems to be kind of like going through the side, seeing advertising dry up on the big publications. But community is all about the new way. What new ways are being replaced? What new things are replacing old things? What would you say to that? So I think one thing that's happening is just the dynamic is changing. You know, like if you think people who are, like if you're a team today, you grew up in an era, not just with the internet, but with social media. The relationship that you have with brands, with celebrities, with people is different. You expect to be able to engage. That's the first thing. So I think we're already getting, we already have a dynamic where people expect this kind of engagement. So that's the first thing. I think the second thing is it's building a personal relationship at scale is what it's all about. Like, I think if you think about, you know, back in the days when email marketing was all the rage, it's all broadcast. You're sending messages out to somebody else. Whereas I think what we're figuring out right now, and we faced this when I was at Canonical with Ubuntu, like we had a community of, you know, 50 million users and hundreds of thousands of active contributors was how do you build a personal relationship where everybody feels like we have a connection? The tricky thing is you've got to build like the most profoundly sophisticated workflow to do that in the current model. Whereas what I'm excited about with AI is if I've got a bot that can, that I just let loose almost like a, like the Google search engine bot. And it can identify, hey, there's this person who lives on the other side of the world. You've never interacted with them, but they've been doing all these really interesting things. And I dropped them an email as a community leader and say, I just want to say, I really appreciate what you're doing there. That's the personal interaction. Without that bot, I would never have seen that. And to me that level of visibility is going to be profound. Right now it's all like AI insights. That's an insight. Yeah, exactly. And it's the pattern matching because to me it's all about driving data, you know? Yeah, totally. I think that just building off of that, I think it kind of struck me when we were at CloudNativeCon, KubeCon a couple of weeks ago and then being here and seeing, I guess you could say, the dichotomy about the people who are really, really involved, they're here. And the people who were kind of, you know, tourists, the, you know, 59%, 58%, that were there for the first timers, you know, they're trying to figure things out. And there's a big dichotomy in that community. Oh my God. It's how do we bring these people along? Yeah. The one thing that, and we've been very good about it on theCUBE for the last two events has been asking them, okay, what does that mean? What does that project mean? Because I think there's a lot of people who still don't understand. We talk about code pollution with AI pushing code into open source and the potential for that. Is there community pollution also potentially happening where you have so many different projects and so many different foundations, all going after the same people and the same watering holes. Right. And how do you get through the signal through the noise kind of concept? I'm not too worried about that because I think that the, you know, to your point, we've been, by nature of just the nature of how we are, like we've been kind of old school and how we've been operating this, right? It's been very much like maximizing visibility of your participants. KubeCon's a great example, you know, one of the things that drives me nuts about this world and especially living in the Bay Area is there is an assumption that this is what the whole world is like. And I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley don't realize that this is not what the rest of the world is like. Like if you're working in an enterprise window shop, you ain't going to KubeCon, right? You ain't going to the open source summit. You're having a very different lifestyle. So one of the things I'm a big fan of doing is like, I think there's so many people out there who are excited by this world but they don't know how to get into it and they feel really insecure about making that first move because they're like, look at all these super smart people. I don't know if I can hack it in this. And that's where, again, I think the scale of AI and I don't think AI should ever communicate with human beings and pretend to be human. I think it's disingenuous. I think it's deceptive. But I think AI being my teammate, my team member who gives me visibility to enable my human interaction with people at scale will enable those 57 or 58,000 people where KubeCon was their first time, where they're in Europe and they see, a lot of this is largely an American proposition, like, oh, maybe I can have an impact there. But the likelihood of them having an impact is not going to be through a tutorial that they'd read on a website for how to get your first pull request in. It's going to be someone in the community coming up to them and saying, you know what? I think that would be really cool if you had to go at that. Yeah, and you're smart. You can do it. And I believe that you can do this. I think that assistance aspect is huge. I think people are also intimidated by the imposter syndrome that they don't necessarily have, but Silicon Valley is like, whoa, what do I do? I might stumble. Will they laugh? I mean, it's a human response. Yeah, totally. It's a human thing. And I think what I can do is can level people up faster. I think when you're leveled up and you feel that you can hang, that's a good dynamic. So I think AI will be a nutrient for communities. And that leads me to my next question, which is how do you measure community beyond GitHub stars? Okay, because I think people are going to start to migrate around based on the shiny new toy and then settle into their core domicile, if you will, community, but also want to cross migrate around. Some people that will be bunkered. I'm the captain. I'm staying here. I'm not leaving the ship. But people want to migrate. And the old forms felt locked in. How do you create some traversal, but yet call home? And how do you measure success and health and community? It's a big topic. It's something I've actually been thinking about a lot recently. The topic of ROI and community is something that comes up pretty regularly. There'll never be a single number because community, as we all know, there's certain things you can put into a spreadsheet. Like I can, to a reasonable degree, track the impact of community on churn, cost of customer acquisition, on lowering support, ticket costs, things like that. But the kindness, the empathy, the mentoring, the support, the things that people really love and their bones about community you'll never be able to measure. So to me, what's interesting about this is the ultimate success of community. I go back to what Seth Godin says, who's a famous marketing guy. He says, if you're in service of other people's success, good things happen to you. So when you maximize the number of individual touchpoints or you support somebody else's success, there is an aggregation in good things happening to you, whether it's going to be people recommending your brand or engaging with you or contributing or whatever else. The tricky thing is that's too fluffy, right? So I tend to look at it in two ways. One is, what is the data that we can generate that supports success in some meaningful way? So one thing that people always ask me about is sales. Like I want to keep my salespeople out of my community because they're going to mess everything up, right? Which is not not true. But to me, what I always say is, don't have your salespeople doing outbound sales to your community members. That's going to end in disaster. Design a system where your community members become inbound to your sales. So what you do is you have your sales team over index on value. Your community members are already receptive to value because they love what you're doing. So they get into a value conversation. It can be as simple as running a webinar where you solve one of those problems and then you have a little pitch at the end. Community members are usually fine with that as long as they opt into it. So to me, it's like, but then what is the data that I can generate in my community that supports that motion? Like if I can go to my product team and I can say these 10 people are super active in this particular part of the product. I want you to get on a call with them for 30 minutes a piece. You'll get so much product feedback out of that that it will be super valuable. So that's a data-driven piece. And then the classic metrics around active users and things like that, we can fill in again. And it's also some contextual value. Each community might have different... Context. Some might value certain things over others. Some might be more transactional. You know what I'm saying? That's a hard thing to prototype and generalize. Well, and it's tricky because I kind of went down this pathway of like, I sat down, I've actually been doing a lot of work in this recently where I've been just talking to people about the concept of our way in community. And one of the things that Erika actually, my wife said is, I think one of the things you got to be careful here is, there's an executive education component around this of making it clear that there is no number in a spreadsheet you can track. So setting the expectation with executives and leaders that a certain amount of this is just going to be, we're going to be kind of fumbling around in the dark a little bit. You're not going to see the full picture. But I think you can feel it, which is an awkward thing to say in a business context, but you can feel when a community, Hashicorp knows that the community's been huge. They don't need to put it into a spreadsheet. I mean, it's energy. It's energy. It is energy. It's energy. It's turning into this kind of thing. I mean, that's where KPI's have to be really well thought out. You can say, hey, if you have online activity, that could be a proxy for testing energy, but it's hard to nail a KPI for something that's elusive like that. I actually was at a startup that was doing open source before coming here and doing this hosting bit. Oh, cool. So I was the product guy to your point. I actually required my product managers to go and provide value at, to talk to use cases, not to product at meetups. And I said, what I want you to hear from the community is, what's missing? What's hard? What's difficult about what we're doing? And bring that back in because to your point, I go, that's the value of community, is that you have, even if people haven't paid us, they're using our free product. What are the actual things that have made their life hard? And we'll either put that into the Apache 2 part where it's maybe part of our control plane. And I think that too many people get wrapped around the axle that everything in the community has to be community versus you're going to learn both sides of what is in there. I could not agree more with you for two reasons. One is, there's this perception that community is just your disco or your forum or whatever else. The community is every interaction that builds trust with your audience. That's the community. But the second thing as well is that value does not exist in the world. If you're a company and you build a product, you put it out there, you're building an open source project, you don't create the value your audience does. Because for example, when I work with my members in my community leadership core accelerator where I'm working with consulting clients, when I tell somebody what I'd recommend they do and how they build their community, that's not value. It's only value when they put that into action. It's words. So to me it's how you get them to really extract the value and implement it as the key. John, well you have been adding a lot of value here on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. Thank you. And for that, we'll give you one minute to put a plug in for what you're working on. Tell us what you do on these days. You're talking about ROI, you're doing a lot of thinking around that. Is there, so you got your consultancy. What are some things you're working on? How do people engage with you? Give, take a minute to talk about what's going on with you. So I recently, I've been consulting for a number of years but at the beginning of this year I launched an accelerator, a community development accelerator called the Community Leadership Core. Because one of the things I discovered when I was playing around with this a little bit last year was I spent a lot of time working with clients but there's real value in a peer group. So I started this accelerator where the whole point of it is where companies join and it's all about optimizing the efficacy and the speed in which companies can generate, can build their community. So companies sign up for a year, every quarter I generate roadmaps for them with really clear training and real accountability where I'm checking in with them and we're all kind of working together as a group. They have as much access to me as they like through almost like a fractional chief community advisor. And then we have group peer settings. What's really, group peer calls and what's really interesting is watching people in similar companies and also in different companies sharing and learning and growing together. So I kicked it off a little. It's like your school now. You're scaling your capabilities. Watching if you have a two-way mirror, look at that, write that down. Always good research. Yeah, well you know, in the absence of me becoming a male model this is what I'm going to have to do. You have a good look. I think you do well there too. John, great to have you on. Say hi to Erica for us. Erica, hello, we miss you on theCUBE. We'll certainly come check in over at your VC. Great stuff. Thanks for sharing the expert masterclass on what's going on in open source and your thoughts and views of the changing landscape. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, appreciate it. Okay, Mr. Cube, we're doing our part with the community, giving, sharing all this open content for free here in a beautiful Vancouver. We're looking at the beautiful ocean and mountains. You can take a look at it now, turn that camera around. Love these robo cams. You can see what it looks like. This is our office every day. Day two, tomorrow will be day three. Live streaming, I'm John Furrier, Rob Streche. Day two, about to end after our next interview. Stay with us for our last interview of day two. We'll be right back.