 Hello everybody and thank you so much for coming out to hear me speak today. It's an absolute privilege to be here with you in Dublin at the Open Source Summit EU. I'm Swift, I'm the CEO and co-founder of Major League Hacking and I'm here to talk today about Open Source the next generation. I'm a huge Star Trek nerd so you may if anybody else out there is a Star Trek fan the theming of this presentation may be somewhat familiar to you. Even more than two years into the pandemic we are all navigating uncharted waters still to this day. COVID has completely thrown the future of education and work into flux and it's exacerbated and accelerated a global skills shortage that's been brewing for literally decades at this point and on top of that the technical infrastructure that literally every single company in the world depends on is starting to crumble underneath its own weight. If we want to reverse these trends we need to radically rethink the way that we train the next generation of technology talent and everything we knew about that educational pathway about how we help build the next generation of great Open Source citizens. I'm here today to give you a small preview of what that world can look like and some of the work that we're doing at Major League Hacking to help turn that into reality. So for those of you who don't know me yet my name is Swift I'm the CEO and co-founder of Major League Hacking which I'll tell you about in a bit. I was an aspiring lawyer who fell backwards into a software engineering role after I attended my first hackathon. Since that day more than a decade ago at this point I've been doing everything in my power to help train that next generation of technology talent specifically helping them to learn the skills that they actually need to get started and the networks that are going to make them successful on their career journeys. The day after I got home from my first hackathon I immediately changed my major to computer science thinking that was the logical pathway into a job in tech. As an outsider that just seems like the default way that we all get started but what I really quickly realized was that the things that you learn in a computer science classroom are not actually the things that you need to be employable as a software engineer at all. There's a lot of theory a lot of things that are really useful once you have a job but you're not learning the practical skills that employers are looking for in terms of how to solve problems with code. Luckily though I was getting a world-class education that at hackathons every single weekend as I went out to them and it ends up that I wasn't the only person who felt that way either. In fact 88% of aspiring technologists today say that they aren't learning the skills that they need to get started in their careers in a classroom. Meanwhile on the employer side something like 90% of hiring managers say that it's difficult to find and hire tech talent with the specific skills that they need. And those numbers are all pre-COVID too it's actually only gotten exponentially worse since the beginning of the pandemic. Now the disparity between those two data points is what we call the tech skills gap and it's the number one threat to business that's on most leaders mind today. At the beginning of 2020 so again pre-pandemic there were already nearly one million unfilled jobs in tech in the US alone and globally it's significantly worse. Access to talent has consistently been rated as a greater threat to business and access to capital for most leaders. Between the great resignation accelerated transitions to digital driven on by the pandemic and eroded faith in our education system that again has been brewing since technology changes so quickly that our curriculum can't even you know think to keep up with it. We've just started squeezing the job market hard from basically both sides of it and helping to close that tech skills gap is actually one of the main reasons that I started major league hacking or MLH as we're commonly known in the first place. For those of you who might not be familiar with us MLH is a mission driven B Corp that's helping to empower that next generation of technology talent and helping them learn the skills that they actually need to be employable. We do it by creating hands-on educational programs where they can get their hands dirty with the tools that they'll actually need in their career so things like hackathons, meetups, conferences, open-source fellowship programs again anywhere that that aspiring technology can really get their hands into those tools and demonstrate proficiency not only to themselves but to potential employers as well and where they're supporting them on that journey. Last year we actually helped more than one-third of all of the computer science graduates in the United States get started with their career. The community over the last nine years has grown to include more than half a million members worldwide. I actually think we passed 600,000 members earlier this week which is pretty cool and they it's truly a global community. We have community members coming from 93 countries in the last year alone, thousands of universities, boot camps or just any background or pathway into technology that you could possibly imagine at this stage. It's the largest community of its kind in the world and it's also the most diverse. While you know gender is just one metric in all of this, last year about 47 percent of our community identified as non-male. You can compare that to about 18 percent in a typical computer science classroom. In fact something like 59 percent of our community broadly identifies as part of an underrepresented group in tech. So we are truly helping to change not only the shape of the tech industry but helping to bring people into it who otherwise may not have had access to these type of opportunities in the first place. And fun fact for some or possibly many of you our alumni are probably already working at your companies as engineers. Just pull your team when you get back. That's because we partner with the world's leading technology companies to help them build strong diverse technical talent pipelines. Working together to identify both hard and soft skills that developers actually need to hit the ground running and creating training pathways from our community to help them actually learn, apply and demonstrate those skills along the way. During that entire path we're collecting thousands of data points that our customers can use to do everything from identifying macro trends to individual talent that they want to actually bring on to their team. Between our community and our customers out there's another trend that we've been observing that imperatively requires the attention of the people in this room and broader in the tech industry as well. That trend is the looming open source infrastructure crisis. The demand for high quality open source software as we all know is rapidly outpacing our ability to supply it sustainably specifically. Many of the open source technologies that we rely on every day are at risk of going un-maintained or entirely abandoned and with more than 90% of software depending on open source technologies and in fact I think that's actually probably under reporting the reality of where we are. This threat is literally existential to all of our businesses and technology industry as a whole. Using GitHub's public data sets we can actually visualize this trend by looking at the growth of new unresolved issues created year over year. While it shouldn't surprise you that the number of relative opened and successfully closed issues is going up exponentially especially in recent years, the alarming stat is that the number of unresolved issues so meaning issues that are opened and never closed is also growing by nearly 40% year over year. We've literally created a backlog of more than 19 million open issues that are likely to continue to go unresolved and are literally crumbling the infrastructure that we all are depending on every day and that's just public repositories. Imagine the amount of unresolved issues when you include the closed source repositories and other platforms outside of GitHub as well. Literally this perpetual backlog is starting to drown maintainers and burn them out and that is creating a problem that we all need to work to solve. In fact you know when we survey maintainers resounding you know three and five of them have either already quit or seriously considered quitting maintaining a project that they've been responsible for shepherding um that's due to feeling overwhelmed underappreciated you know as we all know open source is a labor of love and even if you are working on open source for your employer that can still be true I literally had a conversation downstairs a few minutes ago with somebody whose full-time job was to work on open source software for his company but he continuously felt pressure from executives to work on the closed source backlog that was also growing at an unsustainable rate. It's thankless work that often piles up faster you know than any of us can manage and often success is our own worse enemy because suddenly we have so many more community members counting on all this software just continuing to add to that perpetual backlog and it's not like maintainers aren't asking for help either like let's be realistic. In fact 80 percent of them listed finding and recruiting new contributors and 90 percent listed improving the experience of new contributors as one of the top three things that they need help with today and in order to get out from under that backlog and alleviate some of that burden we need more hands on deck to help these maintainers and make sure that again that software that literally every company and all of us in this room depend on doesn't just disappear out from under us when we're counting on it the most and maintainers are not the only people who are worried about the lack of new open source citizens to help with this burden either. In fact 92 percent of employers broadly say that finding talent with open source skills is difficult and meanwhile more than half of businesses say that they're hoping to increase hiring for these specific skills that are critical and hard to find over the years ahead. So given that tech unemployment across the entire globe is so low our only hope if we don't want to just battle ourselves to the death over that small pool of people who can actually do this is for us to widen the top of the funnel and bring in new future tech talent and help them become great open source citizens. And it's not like you know all those new developers many of them who we work with at Major League Hacking don't believe in open source you know when we pull our community something like 93 percent of them say that they believe open source is going to be important for their future career. So where the heck are all these new developers? Well it ends up that more than half of them are actually struggling to figure out how to contribute to open source in the first place. There's a massive opportunity cost for maintainers and businesses that depend on that software. We need to help make sure that those people have a seamless entry into the community and that they actually are successful in becoming great open source citizens and staying that way. And it gets even more frustrating when you actually dig in and you start asking them why so many of them are actually struggling to get started with open source because it's something that is entirely addressable by this community. For 33 percent of them it's not just about not knowing where to start it just think about that huge backlog of open issues we talked about they just don't even know how to make heads or tails of that and figure out where they should actually get going. And another 31 percent say that it's actually about a lack of confidence in their skills. But again there's such a wide range of issues that there's inevitably something for everybody of any skill set that's out there. So to recap you know where we are today the demand for qualified tech talent is dramatically outpacing our supply. Our open source infrastructure is starting to crumble under its own weight and our classrooms aren't teaching practical skills that you need to be able to contribute to open source and or hit the ground running. And all of this adds up to an existential crisis that we need to deal with. So the question then becomes what can we do about all this? Well at the beginning of the pandemic at Major League Hacking we saw an opportunity to start tackling some of these issues and we teamed up with some of our close partners to launch a new program specifically designed to help close that gap and I want to share a little bit about that and some of the results we've been seeing. So I want to introduce you to the MLH fellowship. We match developers from our massive community with real world open source projects that are in need of contributors from partners like GitHub, Meta, Amazon and many more. Over the course of about 12 weeks they collaborate with other aspiring software engineers from around the world on these real open source projects have access to an amazing group of technical mentors both from those partner companies and the broader MLH network. They participate in events like hackathons and speaker series navigate a fully integrated skill based curriculum throughout that entire journey and at the end of it all every single person walks away with an amazing portfolio piece for their resume which is a real world contribution to one of these projects. Not only that but they've built a relationship with a maintainer or a project sponsor who works at one of these employers who now has direct visibility into this person's skillset and a direct pathway to a job or internship at that company. From our partner's perspective this is basically a dream come true right they're investing in both the technology and the talent pipeline that their businesses ultimately depend on and it's not a dream on those internal resources that are already stretched thin for maintainers because MLH actually comes in and takes care of everything from sourcing screening matching management mentorship and providing an evaluation of the fellow at the end of the program. So your team can focus on building a relationship making real progress on your road map and finding that future talent that's going to ultimately help contribute to your open source projects or help build the team at your company and the results have been pretty incredible so far. So it's clear that developers love this idea because we had about 30,000 people apply just during our first year alone of running this program and that's only growing and this isn't just somebody like putting their email address in a form I want to be clear about this this is much closer to like filling out an application for a university on average completing it takes somewhere around 45 minutes to an hour complete with code samples essays references and literally giving us a whole perspective of who you are and what you want to do in open source and why this matters to you. We use the that information along with all of the data insights that we collect from people as they go through the language community participating in our hackathons and our meetups our conference at our workshops and we use those data insights to match this early career tech talent that's right on the cusp of being able to be a great open source citizen and just needs a little help getting over that hump into into actually being able to contribute and I'm proud to say that so far we've enrolled and graduated more than 800 fellows from around the world they range from current university students to bootcamp grads to career changers to even existing engineers who just wanted to come back and polish up their skill set or learn about new open source technologies that matter to them and their employer they learn software engineering best practices going through that curriculum they tend daily stand-ups show and tells they do retrospectives and ultimately they learn how to contribute to an open source project that literally thousands of companies around the world depend on with more than 70 percent of our fellows coming from underrepresented backgrounds and tech too it's also among one of the most diverse talent pipelines helping people get into open source who may not have had those opportunities in the first place and to be clear these fellows just aren't working on tutorials they're contributing to major open source projects making real contributions to projects like react just homebrew flask and so many more and with uh you know collectively they submitted more than 1300 pull requests on those projects and within 80 to 90 percent merge rate they're actually meaningfully helping to drive those road maps forward and not only that but the companies that have sponsored their ability to participate in this program depend on the software so it's highly likely that by the time they start working there they already have code in production from day zero literally the second they walk in the door that's already being used that's a really really powerful effect but you don't have to take my word for it hopefully this video will play but we can hear from some of the fellows who've actually been impacted by this program as well the mlh fellowship exists to help the next generation of software engineers start their careers they'll work on a variety of projects which give them the ability and confidence to go and land a job it's been three months i didn't even realize how fast it passed the fellowship is basically a bunch of people that are super into uh tech and super into building cool stuff and learning most of all and uh everybody in the program showed that we all went from open source consumers to open source contributors but what i took away from the program was so much more than just how to contribute what i took away was amazing sense of community i'm coming out of the fellowship the explorer fellowship with three amazing open source projects that can be real products in the real world today for what is fellowship i only last three months i know its impact will last a lifetime mlh gives me this sense of um of um one big family which is it's really a reason to smile every day great i have to say it was the most incredible experience and the mlh fellowship gave me the the opportunity that i don't think i would have otherwise i actually do feel more like a software developer today than i felt before because it has given me this motivation and a huge portfolio that i can now present in front of potential employers clearly fellows love this program but are we actually helping those graduates get started in their careers too well the answer is a resounding yes and i'd love to share one story about an individual fellow who is one of our recent graduates here in in the u who we helped actually land his dream job so meet christos christos discovered coding during his first year of university after he registered for some computer science classes much like me unfortunately though he found the classes to be a bit boring because they were basic or theory heavy they lacked practical applications that he was excited about it got so bad that christos actually even considered changing majors and was actually on the verge of dropping out of his computer science program around the end of his second year though he just started to decided to start doing some research on web and desktop development and up to this point in his journey christos had only ever really built terminal applications for a class so being able to create things that real users could engage with ignited a new passion with him and helped him want to find a way to make this work so he through his pathway of helping other people with his code started looking for other opportunities where he could develop more of those practical skills eventually time came for him to start looking for a job in in software engineering though and that's when he encountered the classic catch 22 in tech in order to get a job employers want to see experience on your resume but in order to get experience on your resume you needed to have a job in the first place so where do you get started well christos like many and myself included needed somebody who was willing to take a chance on him and that's when he discovered mlh and the mlh fellowship after researching us in depth and reading all the positive feedback from fellows he decided to apply for the mlh fellowship and to his surprise he was actually accepted he got matched to the apache ozone project which was being sponsored by g research a fintech company that was interested in hiring early career hackers christos had never contributed to major open source project before but thanks to the mlh fellowship on all the supporting resources provided he was actually able to make a number of really impressive contributions that all got merged in those contributions made an additional amazing additional addition to his portfolio and ultimately led to g research actually offering him a job to join their team full time as a software developer today christos is still contributing to apache ozone and working full time at g research and he's now looking for opportunities to help inspire other engineers and so he's now involved in the fellowship as a mentor working with the next generation of fellows and helping to bring even more people into projects like apache ozone and helping g research hire even more amazing developers now fellows like christos weren't the only ones with things to say either here's a quote from one of the core maintainers of the powitz project which includes tools like flask and click and ginger that you might be familiar with millions of python developers literally depend on on these projects having mlh fellows actually enabled him and his team to be more productive and make an impact on the roadmap and in addition to making maintainers lives better the program has also helped existing employees feel more engaged with hiring and open source which is critical for all of us so here's a quote from one of our mentors from a recent program that we ran in partnership with meta from her perspective participating in a program like this as an ideal onboarding experience for a new you know team member and frankly i i share her sentiment the opportunity to learn the skills and tools that i would need to hit the ground running on day one at a new job would have been a dream come true for me and being able to contribute to a real open source project and collaborate with some of my future peers before i was able to even starting there i mean that's icing on the cake too so looking at the results it's clear that we're on to something big here right we've been able to build an extremely diverse talent pipeline that's trained in open source and software engineering best practices and with a proven track record of emerging production level code and the confidence and the network to support them on their journey and meanwhile our customers have been able to demonstrate clear meaningful roi across engineering hr their ospo and devrel so they made real progress on their roadmaps too strengthening their most critical tech infrastructure building meaningful relationships with the future talent that they you know will depend on and improving the happiness and satisfaction of their existing employees and maintainers plus the whole thing is faster more cost effective and produces better results than traditional internship programs so you know what's not to love so now i want to go a couple steps back and actually generalize this into something that we can all take away and learn from what can you start implementing you know well not tomorrow probably when you go home from the conference i assume that won't be that immediate but i have three takeaways for you and coincidentally these are bits of advice that i've been giving to devrel programs literally since i started my career you know more than a decade ago in devrel and i think that there's actually a lot that open source and ospo is in particular can learn from you know that community and vice versa so the first takeaway is that the traditional silos between teams no longer work at this point in the post-covid world rapid digitalization has dramatically increased the interconnectivity between individuals teams goals and organizations you need to form cross-functional coalitions that align around each team's core metrics and reinforce those when our partners in the fellowship always had a champion you know from engineering or the ospo or devrel or hr the most successful customers have actually been able to bring in their counterparts from those other teams to provide additional budget project resources and these partnerships are stickier more visible and ultimately produce better results for all of our customers and for everybody in general the second takeaway is that programs like these need to be demonstrating r y from day zero as everybody who works in devrel or an ospo knows there's a massive misunderstanding about what our teams actually do and why they're important to the organizations that we serve the result is often budget cuts from our programs our staff consistently shifting metrics and frankly you know demoralization and burnout across the entire industry the ability to demonstrate clear meaningful r y from the very beginning that ties into business metrics like talent or engineering roadmap progress aligns our success as an ospo with the success of the business overall and consolidating these you know business metrics into digestible content that you can then turn around and share across the entire organization either during all hands or an internal message board on a regular basis and ensures that our traction is always top of mind across the entire organization as well and finally my last takeaway is that you need to be thinking long term the existential problems that we face in business or society you know frankly are rarely resolved with short-term solutions we need to make investments that will also pay off in three five ten years from now you know remember that tech unemployment is so low right the only way for this not to be a zero-sum game where we're fighting over literally the same group of talent is for us to actually increase the top of the funnel that's going to help us make sure that this is sustainable and investing in programs that drive up new contributors without training them is also unsustainable right it just creates more work for maintainers to do so we need to figure out ways to support maintainers make sure that that new talent has the skills and the training and the support that they need to be successful actually contributing and we stick around in the long term that creates an opportunity for a long-term scale and long-term ROI so there you have it focus on building cross-functional coalitions that align around every team's core metrics find ways to demonstrate clear measurable ROI from literally day zero and tell that story as regularly as possible and think long term when you're designing programs looking for exponential increases in ROI and scale down the road in addition to our short-term you know benefits as well of course anybody who's struggling with these challenges I'm sure everybody in this room we at MLH would love to talk to you about that and figure out ways that we could either share the best practices that we've learned partner with you or you know support their work that you're doing in any way you know if you have a program that's looking for contributors if you are looking to bring in more early career tech talent or you're just looking to make an impact on the next generation of technologists we're great partners to talk to about that you can learn more about MLH the fellowship program in particular on our website that fellowship.mocho slash partners we're running three batches of this program every year right now and it's perfect time for you to start thinking about your 2023 strategy you know right now actually so we would love to chat with you we have a booth downstairs in the expo hall and I'm here with my colleagues Max and Alex Ron is also down there as well can come and find any of us so we'd love to chat with everybody I'm excited to hear what you all are working on but I just want to say thank you so much for having me my contact info is up here on the slides and I just want to thank the Linux Foundation one more time for hosting us and putting on this wonderful event that brought us all together here in Dublin so once again I'm Swift from Major League Hacking and thank you so much happy hacking everybody so I will take questions for a few minutes if people do have them yeah go it's a great question so how do we go about finding high quality projects for our fellows to actually contribute to so first and foremost we actually work with our partners to identify real projects that they actually depend on often going out looking for projects without having a customer who has a clear tie to that project is a recipe for us to find a maintainer or a mentor who's uninvested in a success of that project often those people when they really use and depend on those projects every day also have really specific things in mind that would help improve the quality of life for actually using them between those two things we now have you know a handful of projects that we can look at and and can think about in addition to that our community which is you know obviously a massive community of developers depends on open source all the time so we can talk to them about similar projects that they use on a regular basis so that gives us our initial pool the next question once we have that pool of projects is narrowing it down on the scope of specific projects that we want to work with during the fellowship program and identifying the specific issues that fellows are going to contribute to during that narrowing down to the projects itself is often about making sure that we have developers in our pipeline that map to the skills and interests that would be required to contribute to those projects you can imagine with such a large developer community we have an extremely diverse pool of talent however we don't want to just take people and push them into the deep end without any resources to support them so we build up infrastructure both in mentorship and curriculum to make sure that we have the training and support resources to help somebody with specific issues they might encounter so for example so far we've developed programs around python typescript javascript java dev ops and and site reliability engineering web 3 with rust and typescript as well and we're going to continue to add new languages and new support mechanisms to help make sure that we have alignment there finally it's about scoping down the issues we have a team that literally has helped you know merge 1300 to think of these you know issues over the last year or more in fact it's actually but we just finished our summer batch and had it was the largest batch ever so that number is probably actually out of date already but our team has done a really good job of learning about how to really scope out a first issue make sure that it's something that's digestible we typically look for issues that are going to be doable in you know four week chunks and that we can involve multiple fellows in across those issues that have some synergies between them and the idea is that not only do you have multiple people working on the same subset of issues with similar skill sets they can learn from each other working on the same projects collaborate pair and give each other feedback but also those kind of shorter issues both deal with the ramp up time while also allowing us to close out multiple issues over the course of a term as well so between those kinds of things that you know that that really helps us but again it's really about making sure we have project people really depend on making sure that the projects we have have the we have the right skill sets and fellows that can contribute to them and that we have confidence to be able to support them and making sure that we have issues where we've worked with the maintainers to identify the ones that are going to be digestible and doable in a short term and can involve multiple people in them awesome yes please yeah it's a great question so you know in addition to having lots of unresolved issues we can have lots of unmerged pull requests what does our program do to help make sure that the fellows are actually setting those pull requests up to be merged in the first place and also keeping them around in the long term to help become contributors or maintainers on those projects which is a really great question and part of that is about education right the first time I submitted a pull request I had no idea what went on on the other side and part of our core curriculum that we you know introduce every fellow to is about the pull request merge cycle and helping them build empathy and understanding for maintainers lives and what they actually deal with when they're trying to merge something you know from a fellows perspective the first time they're contributing they might not realize that you know having documentation around how you actually thought about putting together the pull request and why you architected the way you did might help a maintainer get up to speed more quickly similarly recognizing that you as a first time contributor may not have the full scope of the project the historical context of other pull requests or issues that are relevant or other parts of the code base that you didn't think to you know structure things around and recognizing that a pull request has not done what you've submitted it but it's actually an iterative process that involves feedback and back and forth so I think that education is a first step the second step is that we actually have so unlike other kind of open source fellowship programs MOH takes a much more hands-on approach working with the fellows individually we have community managers that literally are running daily stand-ups with these fellows every single day doing pair programming doing code reviews working with the maintainers to help get the feedback about the pull request to the fellows making sure they understand what needs to be done so there's additional layer of support helping maintainers to ensure that those those pull requests actually you know get the information that they need in order to you know get done and that somebody's kind of project managing and also communicating with the fellow and then finally when it comes to helping to build contributors or maintainers we actually have a process ensuring that once somebody is graduated that we're following up with them encouraging them to continue to be involved a number of our partnerships are actually specifically designed around helping to build long-term ecosystems around specific project subsets so one I'll call out as an example is the Solana Foundation so obviously Solana blockchain technology heavily dependent open source you know there's such a small number of developers in that ecosystem they're looking to grow it rapidly it's often really intimidating we've built a program we have people not only contributing to major projects in the Solana ecosystem but also helping to provide structure content and feedback to help keep people in in the long term building that ecosystem and ensuring that it's actually sustainable and that the maintainers are not just you know the only one stuck dealing with those issues so a lot of it's about encouragement though it's about aspirational storytelling inviting people to be a part of it and ensuring that people have the education and know what's required and why it's important to continue doing those things it's a great question yes please so what did we do to actually achieve the levels of diversity that that we have been able to see it majorly hacking it's a really great question it actually comes back to those same points that I was just making earlier so when I started this company and I started first attending hackathons we were lucky honestly to even break like one in ten non-male participants and gender diversity was one of the first issues that we as a community came together to tackle it started with thought leadership so making sure that our leaders in our community Emily just structured as almost like a federation of different clubs or like membership organizations across thousands of campuses around the world making sure that people who lead those individual collective communities have best practice like things like knowing that you need to have a code of conduct and how to enforce it making sure that you're not using gendered language that might make somebody feel you know excluded making sure that you're you know representing your event through diverse photos things like that so making sure they have best practices and a framework to set people up for success who may come from an underrepresented group or one that's not present in that community so far the next step is about aspirational storytelling so often when people who aren't represented in a community show up and they look around a room they don't see anybody who likes looks like them and they recognize that they might not belong because there's nobody who they can relate to that they can visibly see we elevate the stories of diverse community members front and center and tell that to our entire community to help ensure that when we have people from other underrepresented groups who are looking about you know intending and participating in these events that they feel like they have a pathway they can follow and that there's somebody whose footsteps they can you know mirror as they go through their own journey and the last bit is about direct outreach and specific partnership so we work closely with organizations that serve specific underrepresented groups and create pathways where we can invite their community members to come and participate in our events and our community and have somebody with open arms welcoming them into it and the mistake that many organizations make when they do this is they think about it as one directional marketing so they reach out to all these organizations are like oh share the details about my event or my program or my open source project with your community and it's one it's transactional in one direction right um when we do this I'm usually hacking we often are building support partnerships with these community leaders teaching them best practices that we've learned about you know planning events coming in doing events specifically for their community and partnership and in general giving them feedback whether it's through sharing those success stories or data that helps reinforce the work they're doing so it's bidirectional which creates a not only a pathway but a partnership where they're getting value in addition to sharing value with another community so we use that really successfully over a long this is not an overnight solution that took literally nine years of work to accomplish to get where we are today with gender diversity and it's we still have a lot of work to do in that area and we have slowly started using that same pattern in other areas of diversity whether it's race ethnicity or socioeconomic background or geography neurodiversity um type of educational institution and we're continuing to mirror that that pattern it requires a little bit of tweaking depending on who you're serving and what you know the population that you're reaching but as long as you kind of you know think in that framework of okay we need to make sure we have the foundation where people can come here and feel welcome um we are telling stories about the success cases making sure that people see someone who they can follow in their footsteps and that we're partnering with organizations that specifically serve these communities like that that's a really good starting point to build from any other questions amazing well I want to thank you all once again I really appreciate you coming out to my talk um we will be sticking around to chat with people and of course you can find a standard our booth in the expo hall but we would love to meet with all of you and hear about what you're doing and figure out what we can do to either share our best practice there's a support the work that you're doing so thank you all and enjoy the rest of the conference