 This is our second talk from the second session about federal community outreach revamp, and I would like to welcome Maraina Balla, Marie Nordin and Sumant Rokmukherji for this live panel. And yeah, take over to you. Thanks, Surya. Not sure where Sumant Rokmukherji is, I'm sure he'll join us shortly. We decided to do our session live today so that we could interact with books as we're going through and also we've done it a couple of times, so we're ready. Also, just make sure to add any questions under the Q&A tab and we'll make sure to get to them at the end of our session. So I am Marie Nordin, I am Fedora's Community Action and Impact Coordinator. That is a long community force title for community manager, architect, support person. And I've been involved in Fedora since 2013. I actually started with an outreach internship and I stepped into this role right at the end of 2019. So right before COVID began and I've been in the role ever since. So I'll give it over to Marianna to introduce. Hi, everybody. I am glad to be at DefConf US. This is the very first time DefConf US, I attend. My name is Marianna. I am a Fedora contributor since 2016. As my day job, I am a product owner for PH Feliz which is an open source email marketing solution. Besides the Fedora project, I really enjoy contributing to several other open source projects. And I am also a member of a local open source community in my city. Cool, thanks for that. So Sumatra was gonna start us off. I think he might be having some kind of emergency. I just messaged him. So we're gonna do our best through his section. So Marianna, do you wanna just go ahead with the slide here? Yeah, so the thing is that we have both the Fedora Linux, the operating system and the Fedora community. And certainly our presentation, our initiative with the revamp has always been around the Fedora community. The Fedora community is a global community of people which means that it is a very diverse community consisted of people coming from different countries, different areas of the world. Speaking certain different languages, different ages, backgrounds, et cetera, et cetera. Hi, Sumatra, I'm glad you're doing... Yeah. Would you like to start with a brief introduction of yourself? You just started actually. Sure, so sorry for being late. I'm Sumatra, I work as a part of Fedora QA team and I've been in Fedora Council and currently leading this effort for community revamp. I usually host test days and the rest of the events. You can find me here in Fedora Joint and we can talk about more if you have interest in contributing to Fedora. So having said that, since Marianna has started off the slide, I would just go ahead and add a few things. Fedora is a very welcoming community and we are pretty much globally spread out which means we have about 4,000 odd contributors going across the globe and that's a very diverse way that we extend the project. We try to be more user-focused or rather we deliver solutions which run on your laptop, servers, cloud, containers, everywhere you may need it and those are most user-focused solutions. Back to Marianna, you can take over the last one. Yep, so the Fedora Linux operating system is certainly a user-focused operating system. The very short release cycle of only six months aims to bring the latest technologies and the latest updates of any software that the open source community out there prepares. Also, there are different Fedora flavors which are meant to suit the needs of different Fedora users, different end users. My favorite one is the Neuro Fedora which is suitable for scientists and people that do research in different areas. When it comes to the four foundations, friends, features, freedom, first, as I mentioned in the beginning, we are a community of people from all around the globe and making the community and the software available and accessible to everybody. One thing that we aim to do is actually translate and bring the software, but also ask Fedora which is a community forum where people go and ask questions of their sections in different languages where people can ask and also reply in other languages beside English. So I want to go for the next slide, or Marie? Sure, all right. I have the next slide, so, right. So what are we here talking about today? We're talking about Fedora's community outreach and I just want to give folks a little bit of history of the ambassador program and some of the other teams that have kind of popped up as the years have gone by. So what is the Fedora ambassador program? It's a 15 plus year long program focused on ensuring that the public understands Fedora and the work that we're doing. Also to help to grow the contributor base and to be a liaison between Fedora and other free and open source software communities. So what are the JoinSIG advocates and comm ops teams, right? So these are kind of all other outreach teams that have grown up over time. So we have the JoinSIG that's specifically for newcomers, complete newcomers to our community and this is a chat room for folks to join and kind of have some guidance about where they might contribute in Fedora. So they open up a ticket for that person and kind of work on welcoming and helping them explore the community. Advocates are folks that run events but aren't necessarily part of a bigger team or program. They basically just request budget and run that event. The comm ops team is short for community operations and historically they've focused on tools, resources, analytics and improving communication between the teams and basically internal outreach. So we have all these kinds of different teams but how did we get to the community outreach remand, right? So over the years, there was a lot of different things that came up. The program really grew without scaling. So the documentation wasn't necessarily sustainable for the team. There was confusion about how to become an ambassador or become what's the difference between join and ambassador or advocates. There was also a burnout. There was folks who had been doing ambassador and outreach work for Fedora for many, many years but because we weren't onboarding new people, we know what that leads to, burnout. There was also some changes in how things were operating. We had external budgets sort of, so we had these local budgets that our local ambassadors were managing and we had to change that process. Wasn't really something we had a choice in so adapting to that didn't really go so well. There was a lot of empowerment with that, having that control over that budget. So changing the way that operated, confused things a lot and made people feel like they weren't even sure why they were doing this. And we also had a shortage of mentors and people who had the capacity to bring people on. So we had all these kinds of different pieces piling up of reasons that inactivity was happening. So I came into this role in 2019 and I actually avoided the topic for a little bit, getting myself comfortable. I knew it was this kind of longstanding thing but I came up with a proposal to revamp Fedora's community outreach and I was inspired by a book that I read, Switch, how to change when change is hard and it really just gives you yet another formula for making change happen but it was enough to inspire me to kind of make this plan which was really what we needed. So I made the plan, I wrote it up, I proposed it to the community and we worked together to make reviews, edits, changes based on what the community faults. You know, we had, so for example, we included the joint Zagan and it turns out that they are happy doing their job and they're functioning really well the way that they are. They don't want to be more involved. It's a low effort type of group. So we kind of, we took these sort of pieces of feedback and put it into our proposal and from there, our Mindshare committee approved it. At that point, we, yeah, at that point we worked for co-leads and we just invited I think four or five different people who we thought would be a really good fit and two of those folks were Sumatra and Mariana and they said that they were able to commit to working on this project and have the interest and the excitement. So Mariana and Sumatra became our co-leads for this revamp and I'm basically their, I guess the third co-lead or a support person. I'm like their project manager. So the three of us are the main team that work on this. So I am going to hand it over to Mariana to talk about some of the steps we've taken. Yep. So as Marie mentioned, once our small team was formed, we started working on separate pieces. The team was formed in late July 2020. It's been a year now. And the very first thing that we did was actually try to have a structure of the task that we were going to work on in the future. We created a trailer board, which later on was retired. We added there some pieces that we thought we might be of use and interesting to work on in the upcoming months. The trailer board was later on retired because we realized that did not attract much attention from the community members. It's there for kind purposes, but it's no longer maintained. Instead of the trailer board, now we have a HackMD file, a public HackMD file where we store all our notes from every meeting that we have in order to make sure that we keep track of everything that goes on. Initially, we presented the initiative of the community with several calls that we had, both video calls, but also some IRC meetings. And then we started working on specific topics. The very first one was the ambassadors group cleanup, where we ran a script and we came up with a list of people that had not used their FAS account, which is the account that we have as Fedora contributors for the past six months. So we did that in November 2020 and going back six months, we reached out to this group of people. We told them about the revamp. We told them that they are going to be moved to the emeritus group. And if they wanted to come back, they were more than welcomed. And indeed we hear back from some of these people. The next thing that we worked on was to prepare a community outreach survey. We came up with a list of questions and built a survey. Our aim in this case was to identify what were some of the pain points of the community when it comes to organizing events or actually contributing in being part of the community. The most interesting outcome from this survey was that we realized that people love to self-organize and not share much details with the mind share community, a committee, sorry, or any other group within the Fedora project. This means that there's a lot of Fedora activity out there that we're not aware of, which is both good and bad because that way we cannot measure much the engagement of the community. Next thing, we did on similar to the survey, we prepared a list of questions for the mind share community members. So the mind share community is made of people that come from different groups within the Fedora community and together they meet every week and discuss things that are ongoing within the community. Again, the idea here was to see what are their suggestions or something they would like to change and see how we can fix that. The next thing was becoming a Fedora objective. So the Fedora project has some objectives, some milestones you can call them, which are long-term projects, if that's the correct word. Usually they are technical things to work on, but not necessarily. So our revamp was not technical, but we became an objective, which is meant to end in a few months from now. The next thing, as members of the Fedora council, we helped edit and prepare some questions for the community engagement survey, which was a survey that the council is going to be launching every year. This happened in June, two months ago, where the council wanted to see how both technical and non-technical contributors feel about the project and also the operating system itself. Our ongoing project and ongoing thing are the role handbooks and the documentation. We worked on that a lot on a live session during NEST 2021, which is the Fedora contributors conference. So mantra will give more details on that a little later. So the thing is that we are going to launch this thing in a few months, but we want to make sure that the documentation is there for anyone that will read it in the future or for people who are currently ambassadors and contributors and want to see what we're changing and why and how things will work from now on. And everything will be based on the feedback that we have collected in the past months. The important thing, can I have one more thing back on the previous slide? Either way. The important thing here is to have clear documentation and constantly communicating with the community and not deciding anything how we think it should be, but it should be based on the community's needs. And the way we do that is by having public notes for everybody by posting, hopefully, community blog updates. This supposed to be happening monthly, but we have been quite busy because we have been presenting in several events in the past months. We have been at the Federal Linux 33 and 34 list parties, NEST, 2020 and 2021, DEF CONSISET and the OpenSUSA conference. And we also have a large, the session that I mentioned at NEST where we constantly try to share with the community what we're doing and ask for their help and their feedback. Now you can Jane. I kept trying to go back and I clicked and it just kept bringing me further and further forward. That was funny. Okay, so another exciting part of the revamp has been an outreach intern. So we had an outreach intern for the summer session and I mentored that intern in graphic design. So the project was to develop and design assets for the Fedora community outreach revamp. So our intern was Daria Chaderi and she made so many things. She did an amazing job. She went honestly above and beyond what we had set out for her and it was a really successful internship. She also grew as a designer and in her confidence and kind of comfortability in the Fedora project. So overall it was an amazing internship and out of that we got updated logos because we have a new Fedora logo. So we got updated logos for the various teams. We have worked on sticker sheets of these things called Fedora Cheat Cubes. We have these how to join Fedora handouts that are printable or online versions. She also worked on getting translations of those. I think she did a team, a poster design that actually hasn't quit out yet. And she also designed something called the Fedora Museum which isn't on the slide, got to add it on here but is a really cool work adventure platform that's pretty much for Fedora moving forward and it's a customized 8-bit kind of adventure map for people to socialize on. So that's gonna be a huge basically asset for the Fedora community meeting virtually for the time being, for the foreseen future basically to interact in kind of a more fun way. So that internship was a huge success. Simaanchu. So yeah, so continuing with the state of improvement we have this year, we had Nest which is the annual contributor conference that Fedora has which is to the flock but then with COVID we have Nest now and during Nest we planned this two hour doc sprint where we invited folks over to write out documentations which actually fit into docs.fedora.org so that's the home for all the documentation that we're trying to build in and successfully we had committed about 30 or 20 bests and huge shout out to Justin and all the other folks who contributed to make this possible. We initialized all the pages including the ambassadors with the new ambassadors page, the ambassadors, Emirates page and what's the process gonna look like? We redirected some of the old Viki pages which were no longer relevant. We chucked them out and we transferred all the new links back to the docs pages where they should be up right now and in the coming months the idea here is to feed the entire documentation in its own place and then put those all the and then wipe out all the Viki pages which are no longer relevant to the ambassadors program. So that was the motive of the doc sprint which we kind of accomplished with the last doc sprint and going forward to we'll be seeing more improvement in terms of documentation access. So yeah, this is interesting. So all this effort that we have been trying to do with the help of community has boiled down the success metrics to a couple of very strict words and I'm here going to explain some of them and I'll be talking to you. So sustainability has been the core issue that we have been trying to bring over for since this revamp started. So the program at the scale was one of the very hard things to do and we figured out that we are not the only community who has been trying to work based in this area. There's a lot of other communities who are and we want to be a reference model to other communities as we go by and bring the entire revamp to completion. We want to actually bring this down to a reference model which other communities can use and bring them to somewhat like a better answer. More importantly, to make that sustainability go in the success, we wanted to focus on bringing something called full handbooks into the picture which are somewhat like describing the exact identity of every outreach team and what they're supposed to do and this is going to be helped by the power by the outreach internship which happened which in turn was supposed to be multiple language translations of the same full handbooks which then would be spread out to the global community for more and more empowerment of individual teams. Coming to individuals and empowerment, that's the third point and it finally boils down to reinforcing some of these identities that we have been missing. Back to the teams which they came from, like for example, if someone were to do a lot of marketing and design, they would have to work together with the marketing design team in unison and to empower that, we kind of wanted to make sure we get all those teams some kind of onboarding guy, some kind of help with translations in terms of what is the long term strategy going to look like for them and this bringing to long term strategy, there was a sheer need for us to kind of run old interviews and whatever we could go understand or rather grow an awareness between contributors and the existing community outside that we are trying to revamp the entire Amnesty program and it was for the benefit for the entire project to participate and gain more and more awareness as we proceed with this program and we hit that beating nail pretty hard. We have gotten the awareness kicked in. All the meetups that we have been presenting on and with all the guides that we have written, we are getting a lot of people ask questions about here. This is what we are finally launching which is a good success matrix for us and we would want to keep that ball rolling. Bringing back something that was the core fueling part of this entire initiative was recognition. So a lot of folks who kind of stopped contributing were kind of lacking motivation in terms of the recognition in the community and to address that, Marie has a long slide in terms of rise which she's going to talk about. But in short, we kind of built Marie kind of built on this success matrix which basically helps us to now fuel all the motivated crowd back to the community which then they can, they can put efforts and they can make it better. Finally, coming down to listen feedback. So Marie and I pointed this out to you earlier in the slide which is we always want more and more feedback from people and we three are just people who do not take decisions of our own, we listen back to community and the way we do it is we try to actually write our notes on a hack and dee, publish as many blog posts as we can, work on polls and get those exact ideas back from community as a part of, feedback and then we put that feedback loop back into the program. So it's not like we take any decisions, we actually listen back to feedback and adopt to whatever the new feedback is coming and that brings us to a new thing. We kind of learned a lot of cool stuffs that have been happening in Fedora. We have not noticed, one of them was there was a lot of diversity in the communities. There were people who wanted to do events by themselves. Some people wanted help from MindShare or some people just wanted to be working with local representatives. We are an open group of people and we kind of adopt to any of these situations and we try to support contributors and outreach team members in all the formats we can. And that's exactly where we stand right now. We want to actually go ahead with this sustainable community with adaptation to whatever new changes that's coming to the program. So next should be Marie with the next question. Well, I do see we are running a little bit short on time. So I'm gonna go through this one pretty quickly. And but at the same time, if folks listening have some questions, feel free to drop them now. Hopefully we can answer in the chat or have a minute here at the end. So just a couple of follow up thoughts on all this work that we're doing for applying something called Rise to this initiative. So I came up with Rise as basically a framework to think about contributor and community health. So four things that I feel like are really important in building a healthy community of contributors and keeping people happy and satisfied. So recognition. So we're making sure that we have recognition built into this by having badges created for all of the associated teams and making sure to give recognition even to the co-leads here and other people who have been working on our revamp with us. So incentive badges does tie back into that one but we're still working on this. This is like a really tough one for community health in general support. So providing and creating the right types of assets for our outreach teams to go into the field with. Having somewhere to go that people are going to answer if they have questions. These are the types of things that we're making sure are in place. And also empowerment, providing those pieces, providing budgetary support, providing swag and just generally giving people the confidence to go out and do this type of work. So last but not least, we've seen the shift in attitude from the community. When we first started doing this, when I first put the proposal out, I knew what I was gonna get back which was a barrage of complaints and problems and things that seemed kind of insurmountable. So as we've continued to do this work, people are seeing our consistency, people are seeing the things we're working on and producing. We've seen the shift in attitude. Also the three of us have been, oh, I think we're right at our time but the three of us have been taking feedback and, sorry, got distracted because we hit the time. So we've seen a shift in attitude. People are feeling positive about it. People are like, when are the meetings starting? So we're really excited about this work and I'd say we're about six months away from having everything done, including documentation and follow-ups and plans for the different teams to move forward. So thanks again for coming to our talk. I don't think that there's time for questions here so meet us in the breakout room if you're able. Thanks.