 Good afternoon morning evening whatever we have a you know live stream so people can be whatever time of day they want How many of you are familiar with the idea of a community of practice? How many of you are mostly here because you've been waiting for open source and video games to be friends for like 10 or 20 years And you're gonna talk about that Okay, that's reasonable to you cool, so My name is Ruth Sealy. I'm a director of a community outreach team and Red Hat's open source program office I'll let Derek introduce myself Derek Reese. I'm a principal engineer and I work with our gaming community of practice And we got together a few years ago to create this so Community of practice is basically a group of people who want to work on the same thing So the way it works in in Red Hat and a lot of places is We all have a topic of interest that that we come together around and we all work on that together But we're not a marketing team. We're not all in sales. We're not all in anything In fact, there's a good chance. I never would have met Derek otherwise What happened in our case was about three years ago. Well actually more than that several years before that I had worked on helping start the open source SIG and the International Game Developers Association Red Hat was sponsoring Dreamhack. We were doing a game jam, which by the way if you want game jam stickers I have those later remind me Derek was doing stuff and we all kind of found each other and created this community of practice together So let's back up a step and talk about what that is They are they could be formed deliberately ours was formed kind of organically kind of naturally We all were doing the same thing and said hey You know what it would benefit the organization if we were doing all of this stuff together if we're all aiming the ship in the same direction, right? so Not all groups our communities of practice You could have simply a group of people who chit chat about something and the way we do it We start as a community of interest and so those groups don't necessarily have quite as well defined a mission goals a project They're doing what we do have Those things and where a community of practice actually happens is at the intersection of all of that So I like to often describe Open source through a cookie metaphor and you may have heard it before about you know Having the cookie recipe and making adaptations and how that works so the community of practice is a cookie exchange We have our cookies made we're going to exchange the cookies So the domain is a shared area of interest so for our cookie exchange It's it's the cookie everyone at my cookie exchange is interested in cookies everyone in our COP is interested in gaming And then the community is the group of people who comes to your cookie exchange your group of friends who are like love some cookies Let's get together. Let's talk about some cookies. Let's eat some cookies and Then the practice is the recipes that they bring together So if you've ever been to one of these cookie exchanges, you don't have to just bring your cookies You have to bring your recipe and share it So everybody gets to learn together and you get to sit around eat your cookies talk about oh Well, I actually like to brown the butter in my chocolate chip cookies It gives it a nice little extra thing which a plus you should definitely do that but Aside from the gaming we can also talk about cookies later So the the community of practice again is the intersection of all of those pieces That's what separates it from being just a group of people to chatting about cookies or about gaming And at Red Hat this has become a really successful model for discussing a lot of topics So we have quite a few of them now This is I believe our most current list of all the the COPs in Red Hat Several of them are grouped around our product business units That's those first few but you can see the vast majority of them are actually in this group called cross-cutting And that's really where we fit in There is no, you know red hats not producing a video game anytime soon. I mean that'd be super fun We should work out. No, we should not work on that Nobody's gonna go for that But we have lots of other things that are relevant to the business that we can do around video gaming And we're gonna get to that But that is where a lot of these communities of practice that are most successful sit is those cross-cutting spaces that are not connected to a business unit But are important to the business We are up to 40 of them if you you know didn't take a moment to count all of those bullets with 95 COP managers like us across Four regions across pretty much every business unit and that's where the magic happens It's when all of those diverse interests and people and places come together to work together So what we've learned in the process of how to create this I mentioned we kind of start with that community of interest The way Red Hat structures this program you have sort of a 90-day test period to Work out what's going on to set up how you're gonna do things to create a plan of action There are different levels of participation in your community You're gonna have people who just hang around and we'll look at that as we talk about the process of forming But it's important to think through exactly what you want your your community to accomplish So let's look at how how we would walk through that. This is a pretty well-tested set of steps to go through so First of all if you're doing this in a corporate setting executive sponsorship It's always a good place to start Somebody who gives a crap about what you're doing and is going to continue to give a crap about what you're doing Because that's where the money comes from Then you start building a core team Finding people who will you know show up for the meetings every week lead the meetings and then a group beyond that So we actually have I'll get to it. We have quite a few people I'm sure everyone's heard the 80-20 kind of rule. You've got 20% of the people doing 8% of the work. That's okay That's cool. You actually want different levels of people different levels of interest different levels of participation You're gonna have people who have a ton of core expertise and that is critical to a COP But there are also people who just want to learn who then will work their way up and may become that next level later You need to then Decide what you're going to be doing. That's when the knowledge management and tooling comes in that's going to be different for all of those 40 COPs everybody's got different things going on and Finally figure out your communication channels. So I We don't have a ton of time. I talked a little bit about the executive sponsorship You do you want to define admission once you've established what your vision for the community is figure out what the What the goals are so for the most part it's not going to be a product You know there were those handful of C OPs we have that are aligned to business units But in general this is not about a product about something adjacent something else. So what is it? You're going to be doing This is our team I mentioned This is my kids call these the Skittles when they get on virtual school and you get the bubble instead of an actual Human this is our Skittles of all of our team Derek and I lead the team we have Out of this group a group of probably I don't know 10 or 15 who regularly show up for meetings That's our real core team that's doing a lot of the work And then all these people who are interested as well people sharing their relative Relevant content their best practices the things they know we're all coming from very different places Derek has a lot of game industry experience. I have a lot of open-source experience Everyone coming to the group is bringing different things and that's how we get to all those cool things that we can do That we're going to talk about more in a second This is this is actually just a screenshot of our intranet the communications channels We've chosen it would be different for whatever group you're talking about whatever you're going to do I know I'm going really fast. I want to get to the fun video game stuff that you actually want to talk about This is important. However, and it's something that we've run into like a big old wall. These people are volunteering their time This is not part of their core job In some cases they might even be pleading with their manager like I need a little extra time to do this stuff I swear it's actually relevant and important don't burn them out And so that is when at least in our case we get to some super fun stuff that helps sustain their interests So in anything any volunteer work you do there's always the work But there's always the play and you need a good balance of those so here's where we start with the play Do you want that I would love it. Thank you. Thank you think about right now is cookies That's the only thing on my mind is just cookies and for me gaming is those cookies and for very much most of our Associates it's the same sort of thing if they're involved in the gaming COPs because they're passionate about gaming They're passionate about open source and you know They do stuff on their own time like set up Lutris or you know Get the latest overwatch game running on Linux and then go into a competition with it And that's one of the places where we first made that connection and building this community And this is kind of something that you want to find at your own companies What is that initial connection you can make to your colleagues to bring out those passions? So for us this was the corporate eSports Association It's a awesome company that we've partnered with they also have you know Google Microsoft Amazon all the big names and we get to go in there and Play and have these intramural matches with competitors with partners with our customers and really engage with them and this kind of Casual way outside of the work environment and sometimes during the workday And this gives us this avenue to open these channels of communication to start up this community and get these sorts of things approved and this is kind of those baby steps that we were talking about a little bit earlier when you Want that executive sponsorship being able to say hey, we have a community of you know 100 200 plus people who are all willing to go in and file these expense reports and say you know Hey, I want to do this intramural thing and they have these conversations with these managers Let's get this moving Let's get this ball rolling and open these channels so that we can have these conversations inside our company and make this Something that is a little more official and maybe over greatest assets in this community We talk about like 15 or so people who are extremely active and then this community of 200 plus people that you know Support all of the efforts that we're doing most of them came from these these humble beginnings of just playing games together You know after work and connecting with other companies and other colleagues and customers and when we started You know it was again a very small group But just within a number of seasons right and this is over the course of just like three or four years or so We were able to grow this group to about a hundred or so active people and then the 200 or so active people within the gaming COP So speaking of the way that you're going to engage with your associates The other thing you really need to do is market internally and that sounds kind of scary Especially when you're a small group of volunteers that doesn't have much marketing expertise and you're like how do we talk to people and really? All you need to do is kind of find out what people are already doing in this space So we would start these conversations and say well What is it that we're creating internally here at red hat that really fits under this umbrella this shared passion We found out people were putting together game jams They were doing these customer engagements and working with customers in the gaming industry and having these really neat sorts of Engages with them where they would play games or have these awesome conversations about you know The favorite game that they played recently and so we would connect these people together and say okay Let's let's put this under umbrella Let's put this under a community and let's bring this into our weekly stand-up Let's bring this into the monthly conversations that we have with leadership and with our managers And we're able to go to a couple of different teams and say let's let's build a graphic on this Let's put this together This is something that we can send out in a single slide and shoot an email and now people understand What we're about and what we do and some of the other things we do that's really neat is we'll do like internal team building We'll help people and say hey, I want to do team building, but we have to be all virtual How do we manage that well our COP can actually help with those problems or we'll do things like? Consulting internal teams on products so the product team is like hey How do we appeal to the game industry here? How do we connect to those customers while our community has experts that know these things can answer these questions? So we'll get them all together and you know ship them into a meeting and have them work those types of problems out I Think you can really see they're the value of having people from various parts of the business contributing because you know Not to be cliche, but the engineers aren't so good at the marketing and the marketing people not so good at the writing code Exactly and speaking of which being able to collaborate between all these teams Let us do crazy stuff that we never would have thought of so if you're trying to solve some of these problems inside your company Like how do I build a community around open source? How I build a community around gaming think outside of the box or in this case a really tall arcade bark a box So our command line heroes arcade is kind of born out of this idea that you know Hey, we have our command line heroes podcast and it's really popular We want to be able to engage with people both online as well as in person And so we have these like built arcade cabinets that we now run the games that we built internally at Red Hat at events We also run that online We have the arcade that you see here at the open source summit You can go on like the little online thing our team put all that stuff together and coordinated those types of conversations We also have game demos that we run at Things like Red Hat summit or at some of the other conferences around the world will show up You know to GDC or Dreamhack or something like that and be like hey You know here's some some games that our internal teams have built because they're really passionate about showing off red head technology and open source Technology along with gaming and then finally I did want to give a shout out here this weekend We're actually running something called open jam so a couple of red hat employees manage and run this game jam that we put together and it's One of those things where it's just hey, let's like talk about open source and gaming So we have a list of all the different tools that are available There's all sorts of new things that have come out recently like at the keynote We talked about o3 ee the open 3d engine Those are all things that you get points for and we really encourage you to use in this jam And it's a great place to go and connect make friends Get involved with new people and be part of this gaming community Speaking of which We also when we were connecting with our different teams got really involved in marketing And this is a really exciting place to be because none of us knew what we were doing and we're like Hey, how do we like market this stuff and the marketing team's like oh we got you So we put together a couple of really cool things you can see on the left We have a booth that was really neat And then we also have this amazing little project that we did over the past summer that happened in downtown Raleigh And I have a video here. I need to press a button. Yeah click it one more time to play. Yeah Just click it one more time Cool We know how the audio is not coming out, but this is actually just sort of the making of the mural This is a local artist in rally at the murals called 8 bit to 5g And this is like just the eight second making of the mural But it's actually an ar mural and that aspect just launched this last weekend So there's a plaque beside it with the qr code You can scan and interact with it as well as some braille information so that it's more accessible to the whole community And all of this came from this gaming community of practice just interacting with different teams across red hat and saying hey We're a bunch of volunteers But we want to do some really cool stuff and just opening up those conversations and being willing to you know get Dragged into kind of crazy places So kind of to segue this to the most important part of having a community inside your business Is it does have to relate to your business? It needs to be something that you can bring up to leadership and say hey This is worth investing in and this is worth protecting and caring for and growing And so in our case right like open source gaming have actually been involved really closely together for an extremely long time And there's a lot of products here that a lot of people may know You know adacity blender, you know gem inkscape that people don't think of as being necessarily part of the gaming ecosystem But they're very vital into how the open source community and even game companies can build their games And that brings us to a lot of red hat products A lot of our upstreams are actually used in games a lot of our upstreams have connections to this community I'm not going to read off all of that list there. You can find it on the slides After our presentation But these are all upstreams that red hat cares about contributes to in part of our ecosystem And so being able to bring this back to the business and say hey This isn't just about having fun even though that is really important But this is about something that's very meaningful to the business And then all of us have a justification for spending some of our time on and caring about very greatly The industry itself, you know is absolutely massive. It's a 152 billion dollar industry itself for esports and gaming With a two and a half billion person audience that is only growing year after year after year And so, you know, we had we felt we had a really authentic story to tell in this space And we were able to go to leadership and say hey, you know, we did our homework We did our research. We've talked to game developers. We talked to game developers that are working at red hat We've talked to our competitors. We talked to our partners in this gaming community And we think there's you know, there's a really good place for us to Build something that can last inside red hat and that we can share with the community itself So just a couple of quick slides about the industry, but mostly it's just lots of really big numbers It's huge, right? Like you don't think about it, but like every phone can play a video game You know every device out there, right has some sort of gaming connection to it And the way that this industry has grown over the years is kind of almost a mirror of the story of how red hat has grown And so we're able to take those parallels and say, you know, hey with our gaming community, right? We're mirroring the business model that red hat has and we have this really good connection with customers And with people in the industry to be able to tell that story With just a couple of minutes left I did want to leave some time for questions because I know there were at least a couple here But really quickly like one of the important things about starting this collaboration All the way back, you know at the beginning with this just kind of like e-sports Intramural sort of like oh, yeah after work we're going to get together and play games, right? We were able to connect with customers and partners and even competitors all throughout these different verticals So in every single one of these spaces, we've actually been able to make a connection just in our community alone And that has really led us to some interesting conversations in business that are, you know, kind of a fun place to be like Oh, yeah, I remember you, you know, you shot me up in that game. We were playing the other week You know, let's that's a great way like great icebreaker, right to a business conversation That can actually lead somewhere and take you to places that you really do want to be And so finally I'm going to hand this back to Ruth to talk a little bit about what we also brought up at the keynote the o3d engine Yeah, uh, so if you saw the first day's keynotes, you heard about the launch of the open 3d engine foundation So, uh, this is a fantastic new foundation and project that we just launched over the summer It's a fully open source 3d game engine It is a good place to note that we've talked about gaming a lot and the e-sports is fun and all of that But when we start talking about the 3d engines, it's no longer just about gaming It's about scientific simulation and medical applications and stuff in your car Like the industry is far wider than just playing video games Um, and we talked about open jam open jam is a weekend long game jam that's happening now But uh, we're going to have a game a game jam specifically for o3d e uh, based games development Uh, that's going to kick off after o3d econ, which is co-located with kubecon in october in la Uh, and the game jam will be a month long So you have plenty of time to hop on o3d e and figure out how to use it and make something awesome So, uh, if you're interested in that o3d e.org is a solid way to get started If you have questions about that or anything else really i'm pretty easy to find i'm ruth at redhat.com So all you have to remember is that i'm ruth and i work at red hat and you can do all that And then i think we have probably like two seconds for questions four minutes Four minutes for questions And we'll put these slides up, uh, so you can grab all these links. You can watch the whole video of the mural It's pretty cool. Um, it's a little like making of many documentary I also have if anyone's interested in it a pdf that's about how to create a community of practice I do not have it conveniently published somewhere. So if you would like that I will be happy to email it to you and work on figuring out how to put it on that internet thing I've heard about I don't know if it's going to catch on that whole internet Any questions Oh three is fantastic. So, uh, how many of you heard the keynote about o3d Yeah, so it looks like most folks probably heard about it So it for those of you who didn't its origin is in amazon's lumber yard, but it is no longer simply lumber yard Particularly the renderer is new and much much better the adam renderer This is just a little snippet a gift of what's going on there But I would love to see folks joining the community if you're interested in that There's a discord. Uh, you're welcome to hop in I'd love to see more companies joining Do you have any questions in particular about what's going on with our 3d? Oh, I just was interested in the second level of details Yeah, I would say the most important thing to remember about o3d is that it is a full AAA engine And so that's kind of like a confusion space right in like an open source You might you know know about projects like godot or that sort of thing They're kind of like in between that double a and triple a space But o3d is full triple a it means it's compatible with you know budgets in the tens or hundreds of millions It doesn't mean it's also insurmountable for indie developers If you're a single developer and you're looking to come in here and kind of build something really neat You absolutely can and it is extremely powerful like ruth mentioned the render itself has been completely rewritten So it's not the same renderer that was in cry engine in lumberyard. It's called adam It's completely physically based materials and lighting systems And so it's something that's you know completely compatible with the lover of quality that you would expect to see from like a Hollywood production or a modern game launching on like a ps5 or xbox system if you saw the new world's launch yesterday Which apparently is going very well like beyond expectations. You also can do 2d work despite the name You can do pretty much anything as best I can tell Yeah, one of the neatest applications that I think I've seen recently with o3d e and this stuff is like happening Like on a daily basis like I get tweets, you know tagging me every day where I'm like, whoa, how did you build that? That's crazy but there was an implementation where People were working through like city simulations on like traffic problems and things like that and typically you build lots of custom software and visualizing it's very difficult and so being able to just This team was able to build everything inside o3d You know it from the ground up and put in their data analysis and machine learning processes and have that interface very easily at the engine because again, it's open source There's nothing that's a black box in there It all makes a lot of sense and you can when you have questions You can go look at the documentation You can go look at the source code and really get an understanding what's happening If you go to o3d e.org you can see some really pretty stuff, but I think that about puts us at time. So thanks for coming