 Okay, fantastic. Thanks. So I'm sorry I can't be there in person. It's a great location for a meeting hope you're having fun. Hope the English weather is not uncooperative. I'm going to talk to you about the HPC social project and the motivations that came. It created it to come about the general. The general situation is that we were trying to. Oh boy, come on. We're trying to think about this issue for a long time. How can we combat some of the things that tend to be barriers to people communicating in HPC especially barriers for new people entering the field. You know, how can we deal with the fact that the HPC community is global but projects have, you know, particular scopes which are appropriate for them but sometimes get in the way of sharing expertise. How can you just ask a question of a general group of people to to help get past a sticking point or just to expand your knowledge. And then, you know, social media, as it as it evolved just seemed to be developing characteristics that weren't ideally suited to technical communication we could certainly use them and a lot of communities grew up within the content confines of commercial social media, but you know, the heads and algorithms and targeting and and you know political fight seemed to get in the way. But on the other hand, starting something new seemed hard. How do you get to know people, how do you just build relationships and, and how do you help share your expertise in both directions right how do experts communicate to newcomers, how to experts communicate among themselves how do you just learn new things. You know, the goals, you know, sort of simmering in the background for a long time. And what seemed to be missing was a community, you know, just general, general global community, what's missing to do that. Well, you need some social interactions maybe just want to share something funny you encountered you. If you want to put together a little group, you need tools to do that. Maybe you want to just see what people are doing just have showpieces or people can do these things. So, the motivations then to form a community to address these issues crew. I just like to be able to interact with my HPC colleagues as people, you know, my particular career has taken me all over the globe. I've worked in Asia Pacific region for a long time I worked at CERN for a long time. I've worked in, you know, Fermilab would highly international collaborations for a long time. I grew into HPC from particle physics and I'd like to have the same kind of interactions with my HPC colleagues as I have with with my high energy physics colleagues all over the globe. So it really seemed that a community heartbeat is is the missing piece here. So these were general motivations. And this was all very abstract until and I should have recorded some scary music here. So we saw the effects of, you know, billionaire dominated intrusion into technology play out in a particular social sphere and that was that of Twitter. That's an ongoing story and I don't want to get into it but Vanessa has decorated the edges of of this slide with the consequences the center is my fault but Twitter has become useless, but it is certainly changed and it was a motivation for us to look at the alternatives. A lot of people were looking at the alternatives. So that was really kind of a wake up call. Again, the motivations were there long before it. So back to the original questions how do we create and culture and nurture and effective global useful shared and human HPC community. So I started out just poking, you know, posting this stuff on on Twitter and asking, you know, you know, what should we do to put this together and this turned into a questionnaire. The questionnaire got got sent around and there were hundreds of responses to it and a little community group just sort we wanted. One of the questions we asked was how happy are you with the existing social media for exchange of information in the HPC space and the average rating was not very good. It was about 50% you know solid F if you're doing academic grading, or certainly not anything to write home about if you're doing anything more general. We also asked what sort of things they people would like to to exchange information about. So, you know, they seem to be highly interested in technical information hardware slightly more popular software interestingly enough, but they want to keep up, you know, and share information and personal interactions with colleagues were broadly popular. So we asked, we asked a number of questions and maybe some of you filled it out. So thank you if you did. There are this 307 answers to the survey. It seemed to be that they didn't want ads to be driving it that was really the takeaway here there were many others options we could find sponsorships from HPC organizations or industry sponsorships without any paid post rights or personal basically people didn't want ads. And that's kind of understandable. Now, I also knew that in the context of the previous conversations. Vanessa has been has been active in prodding the community to do things like this for a long, long time. She had developed and put out a bunch of tools that I thought might augment any further efforts we had not just have a replacement for Twitter but actually launch on this bigger direction of an HPC central if you will, a kind of a general global low threshold easy to join a friendly to newcomers community. So I'm going to, at this point, I'm going to stop my sharing and switch to a pre recorded video. It's early in the morning. And this is the equivalent of for for an SS she's pre recorded her video, and so I have to do this in just a few clicks here so bear with me. And I hope this works if not all monitor the easy build a slack and see if that works. Alright, here we go. Folks, I am this Vanessa person, and I recorded this in advance because I can guarantee you it is super early for me in your time zone right now, and I wanted to be physically present on this video. So I have been building communities for over a decade now. And one thing that is so important so that it's a joyful and fulfilling experience is just the simplicity of having fun. I believe that we can have fun and also do really great work in software and high performance computing. At the same time those things are not mutually exclusive. So we put together a set of initiatives for the HPC social community towards that goal. So let me present to you the HPC social community projects. Now when you first put together a community that the first thing you probably are thinking of is like I need a central place where people can come and find resources of interest. And so this was the same for us we wanted a central portal to find all of our projects our news our discussion our mastodon. And so I started to think about what is that portal going to look like. So this brings up things such as color logos branding maybe a mascot. So early on Alan had created this logo it's sort of a black and white with aqua around the edges. I saw it and it gave me kind of like cool 80s HPC tech logo vibes. I was actually live in the 80s I am that old hence the dinosaur thing. And so I came up with kind of a tip of the hat to that an HPC dinosaur he's sort of the HPC dino but he's also like an HPC Ninja Turtle dinosaur, just kind of a cool sense of branding and he's he's sort of looking up and being like, Yeah, that's what's up. So this is our site after we made the dino it very naturally kind of came together to put together the colors and the branding. There's a little hint so there's actually a little bit of an Easter egg here, you zoom in on his glasses you'll see a watermark for the HPC social logo. So the first project that we wanted to really get underway was our mastodon instance now available at mass HPC dot social. So our goals were to have a professionally hosted server that's also supported by the community. So here with mastodon it's kind of like that Twitter space, but it's more sort of an open source effort. So we started this back at SC and as of this month. We have almost 400 accounts. This does not account for the size of the true migration from Twitter to mastodon, because many people from the HPC social community joined, but they just joined a different server. So it really doesn't matter because mastodon is federated so all of these different servers can interact and network. So after we had our mastodon, well we kind of needed a place to chat. And speaking from personal experience, I might be working in a day and I find like a cool link about some new HPC thing on Reddit, or maybe I find a meme that I think is really funny and I think it's really fun. And at the time you know back back to the Twitter days. The best way that we communicated was like in private DMs there, or maybe in a public thread. And when I want to share something casually like this with my friends it's not really fitting for that use case. So this is why Slack. Well we think that many people you know express that they wanted a place like this. So we had a contention at first because there's like, Oh no not another chat place and like which job place are we going to choose but we kind of step back and we said okay. Let's start with simple let's create a slack instance and see how people like it. And very soon after that we found that actually also at SC the previous year, Hayden had created a discord instance. You can see the chat right there. And so now we have under our community umbrella the slack instance with about 170 members in the discord instance with 134 members of place where you can really come and like chat with your friends, and a really cool kind of sub features of this is that they've naturally brought together kind of sub communities. So the HPC huddle and hallways, and they've also afforded us a lot of cool automation that I will talk about a little bit later. Ah, so where are these community members very early on I thought it was really important to put together a map. So we can physically see where everyone is located. And one thing that was so cool about this is that even early on when there weren't that many community members. We had huge geographic distribution. So all the way from the United States, the UK and Australia. And this was just really just an attestation to how diverse our community is. How do you add yourself to the map. Well, it's really can be totally done anonymously you basically come to our site. There is a forum and it's like, where are you located like how do you want to identify yourself, are you sort of an anonymous individual are you a group. You can put a website if you want to. And this is totally automated so this form actually gets sent to a Google sheet. The Google sheet is parsed nightly. We check it for sort of malicious URLs and that kind of thing. And it automatically appears on the map. And so this is the first totally automated map solution that I've ever implemented. And it's cool. Yeah. So the other kind of thing that we want to share our voices of our community and so that for us means kind of podcasts. So it was very simple to kind of look around and be like what HPC oriented podcasts are out there where they might interview someone minimally that is of interest for our community. So to start the let's talk exo scale podcast science and parallel and a podcast that I host called developer stories. And we invite you if you host the podcast or you know of one that's relevant for our community to please contribute it that other community members can find it on these pages. So the different kind of voice is the written voice. So the blog sphere and this is definitely common if you have like a community with lots of introverts which I think we do. And to kind of step back to these Twitter days. One thing that you might have noticed I definitely noticed is that the voices on Twitter tended to be like the famous people so everyone knows HPC guru and they're sort of other famous people at different tech companies and then vendors. And those were the loudest voices and the voices that were harder to hear were kind of the smaller ones so people that you know individual bloggers that like learn something cool that week and then they went and they blocked about it. So the goal of this community blog was really to elevate those voices. However, we ran into a problem very early on that for example, an open source project or maybe even sort of a commercial entity would come to us and be like yeah I'd like to be a part of this. And we were actually being exclusionary because we'd say well it is not a personal blog, because if not you know it's not we don't really have a space for you. So of course the solution was to make a space for them. So we created, we transformed this one blog into the community aggregated blogs. So now we have three for personal blogs for community blogs and for commercial blogs. And these are also on GitHub totally automated so every night. There's a YAML file with feeds that are parsed. The new articles are added to the site and then as a community member you can come here, decide which category of blog you want to browse and browse away. Alrighty so as we're putting together all these channels for communication. One thing that very naturally happened is that people wanted to share opportunities. So hey I have a job. I have an internship I have this other thing. And so it very naturally came to be like well we should maybe have a jobs board. So along with having this jobs board that you can like search by keyword or job type or location or employer. The really cool part about this is that while you do start you post your job, or your opportunity here title employer etc etc. This goes into another automation workflow where we check for malicious links and that kind of thing. But the really cool thing here is that you post to this one place. And this is distributed by our super cute jobs bot to both discord and slack. And this actually runs a couple times a day so you'll just be like programming and then pop pop pop pop. Oh there's three new HPC jobs like cool sunglasses so this is a lot of fun. The next thing that we really wanted to support is our new community members so everyone here at some point was a new person, a new contributor. You know, if you remember those days you were excited, there's just so many projects and you want to try to figure out how you can start helping how you can start learning and that is a non trivial thing, especially with so many projects out there. So what, if you're familiar with GitHub. The issues boards are where people post issues like we need to work on this thing, and they have a feature where you can put a label called a good first issue. And the maintainer does that it's a signal to people out there like if you want to get started with our project, you might want to look at this issue. And so we have so many projects and we wanted to put together discovering these projects and these good first issues. So how did we do that. We started with the research software encyclopedia, which has almost 5000 repos. We find all the good first issues there. And then we populate them into a central place where you can search, you know, look by repository tags like hey I'm really interested in contributing to pandas or this, this library in Julia. And this is really cool because it's one central discovered place that someone can come and figure out how they want to contribute. And in that the research software encyclopedia also has its own automation that's populating this. It's kind of like passing it along so this good first issues board will always be updated with the latest good first issues. Okay, so another kind of unannounced thing that we're working on is an events calendar. This is similar to the others and that there's a form where you put your event and then you know it nightly automation. So it goes to this first checked. It goes to this calendar and it also goes to account feeds. And we haven't really pushed on or announced this yet because we're still trying to figure out like how people want to interact with us where do you want to see it posted is posting an event in a form, something that you actually want to do. So if you have feedback here for how you'd like to see events in our community. Please let us know. So, all of these things come together on that portal that I showed you in the beginning. This is definitely a central hub that you can come to learn more about all the projects find links for joining things or contributing to things. The coolest part about this is that most of these projects, the large majority except for like, you know, slack and mast on that kind of thing. These are on GitHub, you can go to GitHub and open an issue to ask a question you can open a pull request you can start a discussion like, Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we did this new thing. This goes back to that fun component that I was talking about earlier, we have fun working on these initiatives together. So here is what our GitHub portal looks like this is our GitHub organization, and you can see a lot of the things that I talked about today, how they map to repositories. And this is a really nice place to come to again see a nice list of all the things this could also serve as another portal, so to speak. So, what comes next. Well, as I kind of alluded to earlier, we're really building this community based on what you want to see. For the most, we want to know what you think what you're looking for you know, how would you like to interact with your friends. I have some ideas here I think might be interesting so I do think we should talk more about what we want to do with events, what kind of automation we want where we want to put them. I also think it would be super fun if we had some kind of an annual HPC social virtual community social event. Like Jeopardy some other kind of game hanging out with your friends and escape room I don't know what do you think. And then to go back to the original survey idea, it would be really cool to kind of assess the health and happiness of our community on a yearly basis, maybe. Something else. This is sort of limited by my own creativity so if you have ideas we hope that you join us in any of these avenues that we've talked about you know github chat space, mastodon and let us know what you think. Thank you for coming and listening on behalf of Alan and myself. We are so excited to be working on this family of projects and bringing together this community, and we hope that you'll join us. All right, so that's our presentation we have time for questions, but this is online. If you have any questions that go in that direction. I'm happy to answer any others. Thank you very much. You have time for one or two questions does anyone have any questions. This is a great initiative I mean we should all be following and joining all these, all these platforms, whether you're liking slack or discord or whatever. My main question is why, why don't you have stickers on your list there. I was, you know it's funny we almost brought stickers to super computing when we launched it but it was just a little short of time then. Someone did actually make pins and brought them to something. So yeah. Vanessa can't seem to unmute herself so if you could fix that that would be great. I will say that for me that the one of the highlights of this is the good first issues that steps in the direction we'd like to go not just another place to chat but actually, you know overlapping with the technical work of the HPC community itself. I want and I've already made use of the ability to ask technical questions of my colleagues and get answers. That should be mixed in with these other, you know, pet pictures and so forth which are part of the human part right so. Yeah you know when you look at the journey of someone that you know maybe it starts in some kind of program or graduate school program, at least in the programs I've been in there's no like I want to major in high performance computing or this particular you know, science and research software engineering so people usually see the area maybe they're supposed an internship and then they want to get involved and the path to doing that is kind of not well defined so I think, kind of go off of what Alan said, resources like good first issues that help people to get engaged with projects. They make a lot of sense and also it also makes sense because the projects really want that you know that. For example, a project from my lab staff. There are so many for questioning so so many issues and I would say that many projects, oh I'm sorry. That's back another project, not some other package manager. There's so much help that could be had from people it's really just about kind of connecting at the end of the day. I don't want it to be too dry right, and I will comment that while and everything else we saw as more people joined it became more fun. I am a little worried about the discord because it was started by very young people. Well from my point of view very young people and they were very active but when a bunch of us old guys got involved. It seemed to taper off a little. So, if you know young folks who like participating in discord, you know send them that direction. But we don't want it to be too dry we want it to be fun as well as helpful. I guess you need to move to tick to catch all the young people. I draw the line there, you do not want to see me do. Yeah, I think I might draw in there too. So for the folks in the room, you have what are your sort of inclinations for what you'd like to see next. I personally think a good idea could be something that covers events like like SC for example, the people who are there. Like something informal something like a huddle maybe where we've had huddle like this before which are very focused where we were doing daily huddles during the SC week so people can just pitch in and share what they discovered at the event or what really stuck out for them. Something like this could also be done I think on the umbrella of HBC social. Yeah, and I dismissed the tick tock thing but you know spontaneous video blogs I think somehow you know people walking around supercomputing having interactions and posting and that that really does sound like a good idea so I don't know the best way. Perhaps there's some fediverse version of tick tock that can be used. And then actual dinosaur walking around. I also a podcast called developer stories is one of the ones I mentioned and before the pandemic I was planning on kind of live doing a live episode from SC. And I also really thought about wearing kind of like a suit of like a dinosaur or I guess it was a different conference you could dress up like a gopher. I am totally down to do that. When the pandemic is less of an issue as it is now so I'm glad to hear that they have that idea as well. I mean well join and post and I will say that because there is no algorithm on mast done. You have to post and interact yourself, you know, the, there's no force feeding in that platform so you have to create the interactivity on your own.