 Hello everyone welcome to this quick lightning talk hopefully on hackathons open stack hackathons I'm hoping not to be too long today mostly because this is going on YouTube. So hello YouTube viewers So keep it towards the five minute in so this is this is nice and quick just quickly. I'm David Flanders I work for the open stack foundation I'm specifically in charge of trying to support the application developer community and all the things kind of built on Top of open stack. So at this conference. We're always talking about, you know, the core infrastructure as a service Well, my job is to figure out how these kind of things sit on top of of course It's the impossible mission because there's so many of them nonetheless Hackathons represent a really important activity because it's the place where we bring not just open stack Developers and people around open stack DevOps network engineers system it engineers But all the application developers and all the other tooling open source tooling that you can have on top In fact, let's actually get into it. So hackathons leveling up the stack What I'm going to cover in the the nice little lightning talk we have today Well, what is a hackathon? So why do we do it? Well, we want to bring the whole community together Do you want to host a hackathon? And this is really what this primary talk is for is to encourage those of you who want to bring and level up your Community hackathons are an incredible way to actually grow your community and bring other open source Community components together all in the same place Where do you get help? Open stack community is fantastic for putting the help sending experts mentors all the rest of it The planning tools you'll need to run a hackathon. It is a big undertaking There's a little bit of expectations management to have and how much effort and people you need to run a hackathon And then finally, what's the value you actually get out of it? So after spending, you know a significant period of your life doing this event and getting to it What are the actual things that you can look back and say this is the value we got out of it? This is what was achieved and then we'll have some time for Q&A as well for everybody to ask questions. So Onwards and upwards. Let's let's look at what a hackathon looks like. So here's a little video of the last hackathon We ran in Guadalajara, Mexico. Whoops go back Here we go Hackathons are incredibly inspiring so inspiring because it's education. It's helping application developers understand the opportunities of cloud computing and come together and start to build a community Enable them to think creatively. It allows more people than ever before to have access to technology All collaborating, sharing ideas, being able to make digital things and digital ideas is what a hackathon does Guadalajara is one of the fastest growing technology cities in the world We're very happy to be here for the first-ever open-stack application hackathon in the Americas This is the second one that we've done. The first one was was in Asia Behind me in the room. We've got around 200 people participating the theme that they try to get the teams to develop around our Applications that can help make an impact on society and improve the quality of people's lives 48 hours 72 hours and really go after that The really exciting thing of course is the hackathon also is a competition. So what is the best idea? Welcome to the open-stack community. We consider all of you a part of it now So I'm gonna put pause there You can watch the rest of it on YouTube if you like it goes into and just shows the incredible Diversity and everybody actually engaged in it, but I just wanted to give you a feel for what it's like and all the rest of it But like I said, you can also watch the summary video of the Taiwan hackathon As as well as this video with a Guadalajara. So What are hackathons all about? So really the hackathon what we're trying to do is bring together all of these application tooling communities All in the same room. So it's not just open-stack. It's getting Kubernetes or OpenShift or Cloud Foundry or Messos or Docker Swarm Provisioning tools for applications like Ansible or Chef or SaltStack SDKs, GopherCloud, Ruby's Fog, Apache's LibCloud and Python. So all of these technologies These are the ones that we pick and choose based on your local community We build that infrastructure in that stack. We decide which tools you want We get in the mentors and experts you need to be able to actually train people in this and get them ready for the hackathon And then most importantly the experts and the mentors in the room to help the teams competing Oftentimes we do these events with universities. So there's kind of two sizes of events We do either large events which do take quite a bit of planning And those are with universities governments companies all engaged usually it's university students or researchers participating in teams of about three to six people and then a bunch of mentors who are in the red shirts The teams are in the black shirts and the mentors are going around as experts in helping use and teach the teams How to use these different tools in situ as the hackathons going we also do a bunch of training beforehand as well Send some video pre-training skills to the teams about a month in advance So they can watch some screencasts get to know the mentors who are going to be there And also just learn these basic technologies on how you actually are going to use these application skills And that's really one of the coolest things about this and why it does take around six to nine months If you don't have a cloud, we got to figure out how to partner with the cloud build a cloud Then we've got to figure out how to put these other application tools on top So that can take up to three months some time for us make sure to not only build the cloud you want But to decide which application tooling we want on it along with the experts and mentors and then also do some testing because we obviously have You know, we had 50 60 teams up to 300 400 people in Taiwan in the room The last thing you want is the technology to fall over. It's just a great way to also test a new cloud So if you got a new public cloud provider or a new company starting to provide an open stack cloud It's a great way to get them involved so that they can test their Infrastructure and see how it works in the reeled with road users. We also do smaller hackathons So if you're from a company and you've built an internal Open stack cloud very specific for your company Say a bank or something like that and you want to start to roll that out to your developers Internally within the company. We also have a formula for that and that way it's obviously more usually more of a closed event It can be an open event as well as you want But a lot of those times it's a great way to get your internal organization to bring your different developer teams inside of that Organization and kind of do an internal hackathon, which is really a great way to actually promote New skills training in a way that isn't chalk and talk, you know, this is a bit boring you all having to listen to me and point At things so it's a really interactive training methodology hackathons provide for being able to roll out these systems so Community coming together is really the key in this right so we don't even label these necessarily as open stack hackathons a lot of the time We'll just say it's a cloud hackathon It's an app hackathon and the reason is is because we want to break down those found those barriers between All the different open source communities. We're all open source. We all believe in the same thing We want to couple these technologies together in the right way and most importantly We want to bring not just the different technologies But the different skill sets in this community You'll see a lot of dev ops a lot of sys admin a lot of network engineers in other communities We want to get the application developers. We want to get the site reliability engineers We want to get the UXers the behavior-driven development testers the idioters the innovators We want all of those people to come together and that's actually one of the most empowering thing about hackathons Is that it's a whole of community event Sharing experience and explaining your point of view to somebody else in a real-world experience of trying to build those applications We also make sure obviously to Have your participants there So we usually go around to the the universities and ask them to send teams We also get startup the startup community. We go ask the other meetup groups to participate in it So it really is a large partnership activity to bring all the different developer communities in the same area Mentors as I said are really essential Not only to be there on the day and to act is kind of substitute team players to go into the various teams and help them But also like I said a month in advance We get those mentors to create nice little video screen tutorials that they can send to the teams So the teams can meet up watch those videos start to play with those different technologies and understand those technologies One of the coolest things I love about it is we get to do These tutorials in different languages, so obviously you could see Where we did the Spanish language ones we actually would if it wasn't in in Spanish itself We would transcribe those and actually provide language specific tutorials Which is one of my favorite parts of the job is to actually reach out and make sure we're we're hitting the whole world That is it isn't just English centric Judges we usually get some high-profile judges to come around and as you can see We had one of the leads of Intel come by one of the leads of IBM They're looking for new talent. They're looking potentially to even buy the teams in Oftentimes will fly them to a summit to meet other CIOs and CTOs So it's a great chance for especially new developers or Developers in general to actually get that next level job that they want and to prove themselves so that they can go in And and have that opportunity Promoters naturally we're really good at promoting all those technologies and tools So we make sure to have a media team support you do media interviews We get the newspapers in do some interviews so forth and so on And then not last but not least we make sure to have good event organizers So we contact your local meet-up advisors We get the whole group working together to be able to put this hackathon on and then of course the foundation Usually via myself I'm there to support you and provide liaison and connect you with the different people that you need connected with And to hold your hand a little bit hackathons can be a bit scary I think I've been through about 50 of them now over over my career So I've got plenty of advice, but everyone's been different. Everyone's had its own little unique thing Okay, so you might be saying I don't want to run a hackathon I do want to run a hackathon It is a considerable investment of your time if you do want to run a hackathon Please please get in contact with us the way that the process begins is you just email events dot at open stack dot org You're probably forwarded through to me from there. I have you meet with our hackathon working groups So these are people who have run hackathons in the past who just interview you make sure you're aware of the obligations At what goes into it? We have a nice little checklist a little toolkit of things you need to commit to And once you've had that interview then we get the foundation agreement signed we find out what resources you need Depending on the size of the hackathon the foundation can either help provide liaisons and contacts to people who could provide Sponsorship sometimes the foundation provides a little support itself if we can And most importantly we make sure that you have that steering committee because like I said We don't want this to be a vertical open stack event. We want this to reach out to all the Technologies and communities that surround the open source cloud ecosystem. We want to bring everybody together Also the steering committee is obviously really important to just as I said the events are usually anywhere from two to four hundred people So you need that steering committee to help invite people and take care of the different aspects of the event and again We've actually got a great kit which will allows you to understand what those different roles are and how people participate in that Last but not least things like understanding sponsors prizes media swag registration process and promotions We've got templates for most of those so it's it's really easy to just get the event bright up in the right way Know what your media stage needs to look like what kinds of questions to ask your newspaper people and to really make the event Something that is going to get a lot of attention and level up your community We never want to run a hackathon where we don't know that after you know The the promoters and the people are all around it that that local community is going to carry on and be bigger And better connected, you know, we want to always be improving the open source community As I said I already talked about the mentors we provide for you and getting those training videos and in the language to suit Getting the mentors and judges to arrive. We often have done pre-training as well So usually the hackathon happens over the weekend Friday to Sunday or something like that over 40 hour period Usually camping depending on on the environment obviously not in the company So we don't have a lot of CIOs to get tenting out yet, but maybe one of these days But yeah, we make sure to have the mentors and judges there to participate And then last last but not least it really is a crazy adventure It's very tiring, but I walk away from every hackathon just truly inspired And I think that's one of the most important parts of open source is that you can walk away with that feeling that I Know people I've got I've never walked away with hackathon where I haven't had New sincere friends that I stay in touch with and I really adore and yeah, they're just people I really love to work with So who helps you do all this again, I can't overstress this sounds like a big undertaking But what the foundation does is it brings the full force of the community? Behind it to make sure you are supported and you have the people and understanding for being able to run the event you want so Obviously we help you get that cloud infrastructure up We get you connected with the other communities So I will can't you over to the lead of open shift or Kubernetes if you want to use those different technologies The lead developers of the different SDKs we make sure to provide all those contacts So one of the coolest things if you decide to host a hackathon as I guarantee that your your Rolodex or your list of contacts of people who are in the know and making stuff happen It significantly increases you really all of a sudden level up your your own personal career in terms of knowing The in people in the in the open source the movers and shakers of the open source community Obviously registration promotion and feedback we make sure to support you on that sponsorship guidance training in a box Safety and community code of conduct. I myself usually attend to make sure that you are following the community code of conduct and that there's no That if something does break down, there's a correct process for dealing with it It is a competition So you have to set up your judging process very carefully make sure it's fair And we really make sure to actually monitor that and audit it so that if anybody asks why or why the people won the competition We have a very a very excellent process for telling you why we made those decisions and that it was Transparent and fair and all the rest of it, which is really essential And last but not least is Just I cannot stress the the tidal wave of support you get from the community We've had people fly in from all over the world for hackathons because it's that inspiring the people in this community Love coming to hackathons once they've been there because it's just incredibly Empowering and it's great. It's a great way to meet all the all the people who come to these events as I'm sure you know over 60 Countries are represented at the summit this year. So Really great way to engage that international community even though it's a very local event So finally, I'll just leave you with the the kind of output So once you finish the hackathon you got to ask yourself. Well, what did I actually get out of this? I've spent a lot of time and effort in it And these have been the things that when we've interviewed people and talked to them They've said this is what I get one is leveling up your community to the next layer You know, you might have a couple of dev ops and people who like to install open stack Well, this is really going to push them This is going to make sure they not only have a cloud that works with a lot of people But you're actually going to build application technologies cloud technologies on top of that that are going to Make sure that that community is coming together and that a larger conversations happening You're going to increase the size and shape of your community So it's not just going to be dev ops or business people You're all of a sudden going to start getting app dev who are engaged in this usability engineers You're going to get a larger skill set a larger shape and size of what your community actually looks like Training training training, you're going to have these videos You're going to have all these people skilled up and new skills These are great resources which when you go on to continue to maybe do other hackathons in forthcoming years You already have those resources so it gets a lot easier to onboard new community members because there's a lot of skills to learn in this space Usability is one of my favorite things so often times we'll take the mentors and we'll interview them and we'll say where were the problem points You know and that's that's one of the cool things about open source is that you know We're very careful in the way we address this but not all these technologies work perfectly with one another and sometimes It's hard to eat your own dog food and this event is a fantastic dog fooding event for understanding How these different technologies build on one another and how to use them And finally is just the real-world human testing of it all when you get DevOps in the room with sysadmin network engineers application developers usability people all of them have very different perspectives on the world and The way you break those down and you stop the arguments is actually just getting them together Solving these problems with one another and people walk away from it with their with a shift in their mindset They think about things differently developers who might be saying no I'm not going to change my point of view on this feature all of a sudden because of the human interactions and seeing the pain on somebody's face When they've got to use a technology and it's not working. That's the magic sauce That's how you get people to realize what real Usability features are what key features are versus just the features which are cruff and you know part of the long tail So I'll leave it there I've gone on more than I really wanted to but I get excited about this as you can tell I apologize if I've spoken to you quick But this is a good opportunity to ask any questions people might might have around hackathons Perhaps perhaps I can ask a question first of all of you. How many of you would consider I'm not committing you How many of you would consider running a hackathon? Okay, that's fantastic. That's really great. I'm glad I'm glad so what kind of questions can I answer? If there's no questions that great then that means the presentation was good, right? Yeah, so the question is What are what's the biggest obstacle in trying to I guess engage an application community or? Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, so Look, I think it's hard to speak of obstacles But I will say that one of the reasons why you need a kind of six month planning period at the very least is because Most of the organizers of hackathons go and stop by a bunch of different meet-ups and they say hey Ruby people Hey, JavaScript people hey Python and it's different in every local community, right? And that's what actually begins the decision for which application tool sets you're going to build on top So they'll go and they'll meet with the Ruby people and the Ruby people will be like Oh, yeah, we would all love to use fog the SDK that works on top of open stack And you're like okay great, or you go to another community and they say oh we really use Java We want to use Cloud Foundry because Cloud Foundry's got a bunch of good Java modules for being able to use it So going and essentially doing those interviews that's probably it's it's not hard because believe it or not You go to these other meet-ups and they're just really happy to hear you're trying to bring things together because meet-ups have really Siloed groups into certain things and some people have come together You know like there's a DevOps meet-up But those DevOps meet-ups now aren't talking to the application developers and they're the people they're supposed to be working with so I think that just going out and being humble and saying hey I'm trying to get together a bunch of meet-ups to actually Run and do some new ideas and do some new training It's a bit scary because you're putting yourself out there, but at the same time It's incredibly rewarding because you're gonna make those new contacts You're gonna have a better idea of what your local community looks like in terms of the tools They want to use we want to use Ansible with OpenShift. We want to use Go for cloud with Docker swarm and that's people. It's not it's not the technology It's actually the people who want to use those things So it's just taking that time to go and and do the meet-ups. Did that that kind of answer your question more or less cool Any other questions? Gonna get off easy Yes, please You don't people do fumble And that's that's why it's really essential that we a a month in advance So we get a steering committee going about six months out and that steering committee decides What are the tools and technologies we want to use? So we build that in the infrastructure and then we go and we find the mentors the people who have actually done that stuff To then provide some video training so a month from the hackathon We start to send this this training in a box So the teams that start to register we say hey check out this training on how to use Shade with Ansible and so it's a big Python shade is a really good Python library So we make sure to work with the Python group and we send them videos saying hey, here's how shade works Here's a screencast of the code working Here's some things that are gonna break down best of all after you've watched this video You're gonna show up at the hackathon and I'm gonna be there and you can ask me directly And so that mentor during the hackathon they're all wearing red shirts, you know So if you look in this diagram you see you get the mentors help desk right and they're all wearing red shirts And then you have all the teams in the middle and so those red shirts are kind of swarming around the room And it's if you saw in the Guadalajara hackathon It's a really cool effect because you'll have you know that developer bouncing from table to table saying Okay, this is the way you need to understand shade and the coolest thing is is all the value that those Those mentors get because the lead shade developer will be there talking to this team who's like Oh, I don't understand how I do the Authentication configuration to be able to use multiple clouds. Well, all of a sudden that mentor goes back and says I need to improve the documentation on that I've seen the pain on somebody's face and that's really the best part is Hackathons you're gonna get some failures There are some teams who are not gonna get to the finish line in that amount of time The best thing is is that we can feed that back and we can actually do usability checking on this And that's one of the biggest thing open source misses is it's scary to dog food. It is scary to see somebody's face in person When they're actually using your technology Did that answer your question? Yeah, cool Yes, please. I don't really know that there's an answer to that I think that the reason why we've done sizes of three and four hundred is mostly because we partnered with universities Universities end up sending their computer science group along with several other computer science groups and Actually, it's been interesting. We've had other non computer scientists as well But it's that feels like a number that's big enough that justifies the six to nine months of prepping a cloud and getting it All built but if you've already got so if you were to do an internal hackathon And I can't talk about these hackathons because we're NDA 8 on you know Which bank or whatnot? We've done but if you're to do an internal corporate hackathon you can do those a lot smaller, right? that could be 20 people of you know teams of three or something like that, but It's got to justify the the cost in the time of somebody so usually what you do is you'd meet with our hackathon working group And they talk you through a little bit about the time commitment and the resources of why you'd want to do it and if it justifies it for the business where the business is trying to roll out a Continuous integration continue CI CD pipeline for publishing applications Which meet a regulation for a certain country on a bank size That then becomes a justifiable cost because they need all of their application developers in that company to understand that That's the process that they have to use otherwise They're breaking the law and the way they do these things so it's really just up to probably the company But if you're gonna do a public open hackathon you want it to be probably 150 at the minimum. Yeah That feels like a good size for competition prizes Any other questions Excellent. Thank you so much. Please do get a hold of me. Like I said you can reach me It's pretty easy. Just Google Flanders and OpenStack I'm sure you've all seen the television show next to our neighbors at the Simpsons. It's now stuck in your head You'll never forget me. I apologize. I've had to live with it since 83 Thank you very much. We'll see you around