 Okay, how's everyone doing? Really? Come on, how's everyone doing? All right. Okay. Good morning, everybody. It's wonderful to be here. When I was a kid, I used to live in a place called Bedfordshire, which looked a little bit like this up here. And one of the things that my parents and my uncles and my aunties and my grandparents used to say all of the time was that people don't really know the neighbors like they used to back in the good old days. Many of you have probably heard similar things. And what this was basically telling us was that there's this notion that communities are dead, that video games and television and the internet was rotting our brains and we weren't talking to each other and collaborating with each other in our local communities. In the last five to ten years, we've seen an incredible growth of community. We've seen local sustainable farming organizations getting together to teach kids how to grow plants and vegetables. We've seen the world's knowledge documented in Wikipedia. We've also seen the incredible growth of open source, which is running the infrastructure of the world and many of the devices in our pockets. We've seen the democratization of manufacturing with 3D printing and the businesses and the initiatives that this has spawned an incredible political change in parts of the world where we would never have expected to see this such as with the Arab Spring. So community is very much alive and well. And the question is, why have we seen this? Why have we seen this growth? And this is something that I've spent the majority of my career thinking about, which is how do we build strong and empowered communities and what's the magic recipe that we can find to do this? I think to understand why we've seen this growth and why our local communities are not dying, we need to take a bit of a look at history and there's been over the years many, many different revolutions. We had the transportation revolution where people could create things and ship them to different parts of the world, the industrial revolution in which we could build products en masse. We had the computing revolution where we could have a computer in every office, in every home, the internet to connect those different computers together for access to knowledge and education and of course this revolution in 3D printing as well. What's interesting is that when we look historically at these different revolutions, they're all connected. You know, the transportation revolution led to the industrial revolution which led to the computing revolution and so on and so forth. Now, what's interesting to me is that the major benefactor of all of these innovations over the years is people. And sometimes we forget that we're people. When you take away this enormous screen and all of the cell phones in your pockets and the tablets and the computers and the screens, we're all animals. We're all animals with a basic set of desires and insecurities. And I think that every person on this planet wants to live a life of dignity. That's what all of us are here to do. And when we tear open that human condition and we want to live this life of dignity, to do that we need to feel a sense of self-worth. And to feel a sense of self-worth, we need to feel like we have the ability to contribute. To contribute in some way, in some shape or form to society. It may be in your project, it may be in your company, it may be in your family, it may be in your local community, wherever it may be. But to be able to contribute, we need to have access. And this is the critical piece that we need to be able to feel that sense of self-worth. All of this that's happened in the last five or ten years, which has had a profound impact on the world, has been because we now have access. We have access to the tools, to the technologies, to the communication infrastructure that enables to build strong and empowered communities. So when we tease this open a little bit further, we can first of all look at the technology. And this is where we start thinking about exponential growth. So this graph up here, and my apologies to those of you at the back who maybe can't read this, shows the growth of technology. This is how much computing power you get for $1,000, okay? And according to this consistent growth curve, in 2025, a $1,000 computer will be as powerful as a human brain. In 2050, it will be as powerful as every human brain on the planet. And this is a consistent curve. This is exactly how technology is moving right now. This is not science fiction. This is not Star Trek. This is where we're going. When we look at the data as well of the internet, I mean, computing power is useful in an isolated form, but when we connect it with other computers, we can do incredible things. Now, this admittedly is a little bit of an old graph. This goes up to 2009. But we've seen the internet percolate into all different parts of the world. In 2009, a quarter of the planet was online. And the place and the destination in which this is happening, it's not on your computers, it's in cell phones. This is the graph that shows the growth of cell phones and the forecast for the growth of cell phones as well. A billion new minds are coming online through cell phones. And this obviously connects to population. This is a graph that shows population growth. And obviously population and overpopulation is a major problem that we have in the world. But one of the major benefits that we do have, even though we have this issue with population, is that the people who are coming on now, the people who are coming online have access to technology. They have access to the internet and they're getting online through cell phones. And just think about the impact of that. One of the things that I'm most proud about being a member of the open source community is that I feel like I'm surrounded by just incredibly smart and talented people. And the knowledge and the experience of folks in the open source community rubs off on other people. Just think about all of those different minds who are coming online to be a part of that new community. And this again gets back to people. But the aspects of dignity and self-worth and being able to contribute are attributes of an individual. But what are the attributes of connected people? When we get people together as a group, what do we want to achieve here? And I believe that what we want to achieve here and what people want to achieve in themselves is everybody wants to have a sense of purpose. And I believe that every single one of you in this room will have a sense of purpose. It may be to do with your project or your company or a product that you're building, whatever it might be. So everybody wants to have a sense of purpose in the community. But that is unfulfilled unless we can empower people to achieve that sense of purpose. And when we empower people to achieve that sense of purpose, we build this sense of belonging. And this is a very fluffy and in specific point. But again, we're people, we're animals, and this is the way things work, is that when we feel like we belong in a community, whether it's the LinuxCon community or whether it's in our own project communities, we feel like we're part of something that we want to be around. And this is what gets long, significant, sustained contributions out of people. This is when people stick around for five, 10, 15 years in a community. These three attributes, a sense of purpose and a level of empowerment and a sense of belonging, that's how we build phenomenal communities. Now, I'm a relatively simple person. I know a lot of you in this room, and I can see you all nodding. And I believe that all communities are basically broken into two areas, read and write. So read communities are, these are like fan groups. So this might be Taylor Swift or it might be Lord of the Rings or it might be The Matrix or whatever it might be. But these are people who get together because they share a common interest. They're relatively straightforward communities to build. You get people connected. You provide an opportunity in which they can share ideas and share perspectives. And people have fun. And if we look at the growth of read communities, this has primarily happened in many ways through social media. So we've seen that with Twitter, we've seen this growth curve. And rather unsurprisingly, with Facebook as well, we've seen these consistent growth curves. When we look at write communities, these are the communities that we're more familiar with in open source. We look at a thing, let's say a piece of software such as Linux, but then you have the ability to contribute to it and make it better in itself. If we look at the growth of write communities, a good example of this is Wikipedia. Significant growth. What about OpenStreetMap, which is effectively an open source version of Google Maps? Significant growth. Open source in general, significant growth. 3D printing, significant growth. The point I'm making here is that technology is exponential. We can see that with how computing power has evolved over the years. Access is exponential. But also community is exponential as well. Now, what this tells us is that we're in this incredible period of growth where we have the ability to empower people to do great things. What's interesting to me is that when you look at these graphs, these slides that I've put up, they show where we're going, when we know where technology is going to be, when we know how many people are coming online onto the internet, when we know how communities are growing. It provides the opportunity for us to think in different ways. So, for example, knowing that a computer in 2025 is going to be as powerful as a human brain, we can start thinking bigger. We can start thinking about ways in which we can apply processor-intensive technologies such as artificial intelligence. How can we use that in new and interesting ways? But the benefit of exponential thinking is that it allows us to look forward and have bold and audacious ideas. And it's bold and audacious ideas of what make incredible communities happen. So, I'm going to give you one example. Admittedly, this is a little bit biased because it's something to do with XPRIZE. A couple of weeks ago, we launched this thing called the Global Learning XPRIZE. This is the first open-source XPRIZE. And it's a $15 million competition. So, some of you may be interested in this. It's to build a piece of open-source technology that will run on a tablet, runs on an Android tablet that will teach a child to read, write, and perform arithmetic without the aid of a teacher, fully autonomously. There's 54 million kids in the world right now who have no access to education. They can't read, they can't write. Wikipedia, the internet, completely locked off away from them. There's 250 million kids in the world today who do have access to education, but their level of literacy is below the primary grade. They're illiterate. This is disgusting that this happens in the world today. And this XPRIZE is designed to provide an opportunity in which we can give them a tablet and those kids can learn from that tablet because we'll never build enough teachers to be able to serve this populace. In fact, we'd need 3.3 million teachers by 2030 to teach all of those kids. So, if you want to learn more about this, you can go to learning.exprize.org. But what's interesting about this and where I think this is an interesting example is that XPRIZE looked at the growth of technology. Tablets are getting cheaper, they're getting more powerful. The growth of access to the internet and the growth of community. And looking at that data provide an opportunity to set those bold and audacious goals. And we can do that in every single one of our communities today as well. So what we're looking at with communities fundamentally is value. I've got to admit to everybody here I hate the term community manager. Because there's a lot of shitty community managers out there. Bean Blunt. Because a lot of community managers will look at technology and they want to grow numbers. I want to get more Twitter followers. I want to get more Facebook followers. And the goal of a community manager in my mind is to identify how we build value in the product of the service that we're working on. And how do we build that journey in which communities can be a part of that shared success. So when we look at the value of the output of a community we can see things, we can see data such as this. Wikipedia was valued by the Smithsonian at tens of billions of dollars. Our good friends at the Linux Foundation did a study into the value of a Linux distribution at 10.8 billion dollars. And what this tells us is that the aggregate value of that community contribution is significant in terms of dollars. But most of us in this room are not the only value you get out of a community. You get knowledge, collaboration, expertise, consumers, you build more rigor. You provide the opportunity to think in different ways to have input and perspectives and ideas that challenge you and help you to achieve things that are far beyond what you originally expected to achieve. But the thing is, is that wanting that is not enough. There's a lot of people who will, if you go to anybody and say do you want to have a great community and the key thing here is, I believe, is that we have to be strategic. We have to have a plan. There are many examples of communities that have naturally and organically formed. Linux is a brilliant example of that. But when we can look at those, at that data, at that exponential growth and we can see where we go and we can have bold and audacious ideas and we put that down into a plan, a structured plan, it optimizes us for success in ways that we could never have seen beforehand. And that is where we have the place where we have explored and created great things that haven't yet hit the mainstream in some ways and have in other ways. Many of you will be familiar with this. This is the Innovation Growth Curve. This is a commonly used tool for describing how innovation percolates its way into society. At the beginning you have all of the innovators and the early adopters and then gradually the majority is using that technology and then it starts slowing back down and the late majority and then you have the laggards which are my parents at the back end of things. If we look at open source community management I believe that in 1998 we started seeing the real kind of early innovation happening here. We had seen it much earlier but that is when people started thinking about this notion of building structured communities with a plan in 2004 I think we really started seeing the early adopters. This is where communities were really starting to think about what is this notion of community management how do I put that together and in 2010 I think we started seeing this becoming a normal part of the open source community. If you're an open source company and you don't have a community management strategy you're going to find things a lot more difficult than if you did. It's not an option a community is not a nice to have it's a requirement for success in the world that we live in today. And if we apply this this is within the open source world if we apply this to the wider world I believe that the wider world is about there we're still very much in the early adoption we're starting to, due to social media we're starting to see more of an awareness of community but we're still very much in the early days of it. But what this tells us is that we have an opportunity here for those of us in this room who know about open source who are part of the open source community we have the opportunity to be first movers okay and I think this is how we do it now I can stand here all day and talk about the different attributes of how you build a community in fact I'm going to be doing that on Thursday at LinuxCon but I think broadly what we want to do is define that bold and audacious mission map that down to a strategy have a strategic plan, write it down have goals and objectives and success criteria deploy your infrastructure for collaboration for communication where people can work together and they've got the tools that they need to be successful create engagement on ramps think about all the different ways in which people can play a part in your community is it developers, is it documentation writers translators, all of these different pieces and provide a simple journey for how they participate keep score I was in an airport once and I got chanted to this guy at a restaurant and he said to me as far as he's concerned if someone's not keeping score it doesn't count, it doesn't exist absolutely true, keep score because that provides the opportunity for us to refine and improve the work that we do and then execute on that plan honestly don't only look at the successes, look at the failures as well and success is something that we need to define now many of you will work for open source companies who are interested in exploring community management as something that's going to be part and parcel of your business it's important to define what success looks like because one of the problems that we're seeing is that I organize this event every year called the community leadership summit about 250-300 community managers show up and share and learn from each other and one of the things I see all of the time is there's a tension between the needs and expectations of senior management and the actions and execution of the community manager and that's because there's no there's no balance in function between those two different groups it's important to define what success looks like so everybody's on the same page in terms of building that community out the other thing is that to build an effective community and organization that organization needs to be primed for success as well there's often going to be this tension between marketing and the community team and engineering and the reason why that is is through some day to day aspects of how we build communities and how we market and how we develop engineering but also some philosophical differences as well so it's important to sit down and define that criteria define what that success is and make sure all of those different groups are engineered into that process so they can share that success as well I want to touch on hiring a little bit as well I mentioned earlier on that I there's some not great community managers out there and this is normal this is part and parcel of any new if you look at every new area of best practice or a profession at the beginning there's a real variance in game quality you can see it in the early days of software you can see it in the early days of manufacturing there's a real variance in quality there was no consistency in quality this is one of the reasons that education and certification and schooling is so important in many different professions and we've got that in community management right now there's a lot of people who are joining up who are new there's not a lot of content for them to consume and focus on so therefore the results are sometimes unpredictable but there are great community managers out there the thing is the most important thing is to hire for the journey not for the numbers a lot of people say okay can you come into my organization and get my social media account up and can you get me more developers can you get me this can you get me that I believe a good community manager looks at the overall outcome that we want to achieve in an organization or in a particular product and says what journey do I construct to get us there what tooling, what processes, what procedures what governance do we need what's the experience of a new contributor coming in how do we ensure that they they can learn what they need they can find things to do and they can feel a sense of belonging in that particular part of the community it's mapping out that journey and then executing all of those different pieces it's not just about inflating numbers the other thing that I think is going to be critical here as well is to fail forward and what I mean by this is failure is good we have to fail otherwise we don't learn from our own mistakes and this notion of failing forward is that we we experiment and we try different things and then we fail but what we do is we look at that failure and we use that as a cathartic means in which we can identify things to improve for the future and particularly in the early stages of a new profession such as what we're seeing with community management it's important that we have that philosophy in place and I think that's a good philosophy for us to have in other parts of life as well so just to summarize community management workshop is going to be on Thursday here at LinuxCon we still have some spaces available for that I'd like to encourage you to join us there we'll be delving into this in a lot more detail and if you want to find out more about this I wrote this book called The Art of Community which I don't mind sharing because you can go and download this for free or you can buy it as well so thank you everybody