 Something else to crash. So we're going to go through this pretty quickly. That's not so much a word. It's a reality of our life, right? It's exciting. So kind of the the the link bait title, isn't it? It's 10 surprising lessons I hope they're surprising lessons. I learned while launching an open source tech comm startup So this is going to be a bit of a hero's journey without a hero And I'm sure some of you will relate to some of these adventures that we've had So this is the most tech heavy techs heavy one will have there's literally 10 lessons This is a shout-out to something that started a company called Red Hat you guys might have heard of there's a really cool team Including people like Lana people like Zach that were very important in getting this project moving as that project sort of evolved a Few of us started to think what can we do to get this in the hands of community? And we learned quite a bit by doing it So we called it Carilla because it's actually really really hard to come up with a name for a project these days You kind of start with social media and go backwards I don't know if I like it yet, but I like the the logo so we're going to stick with that So who am I? I used this slide at the STC conference in Bangalore in 2012 I thought it was very interesting. I followed up with this slide Which I thought at the time was pretty funny, but absolutely nobody in India found that funny So I should probably stop using this by now Shoutouts to Divya. Where are you hiding? Yeah, except my colleague from Bangalore who helped me sort of groom my message a little bit So I work as a content author as a technical writer at Red Hat So just your generic run-of-the-mill tech writer I have an interest in content startups and community and thankfully those three things came together really really well I will just pause we are a room of communicators right now So I would encourage everyone if you on the Twitter's We're actually looking at how much engagement we have on the LCA's I'm not suggesting we compete with the other mini comps, but this is a really full room So be pretty nice. I'm going to single out Lana because I know you're really good at the social medias and Alec because I know you're fantastic at the selfies. So if we can We'll do a thing. I have an idea if you it's like a selfie But you turn it around the other way and I'm in it. So if you do want to tweet anything Okay, so the number one lesson I learned is that there is actually a massive massive need for a simple solution for tech comps It'll be stating the obvious for some of you and it'll be kind of a shock to others because there's lots of products, right? Adobe they make a product 80% of the people in India use it. Divya was just saying earlier So we started to a lot of surveys. This was an internal one where I was very interested I asked people how often do you refer to documentation or content to assist your development work? We can see right down the bottom 61% of people believe that they constantly rely on documentation Constantly there is some data that is still relatively internal data That links this to the other end of it is that 85% of the people are desperately unhappy with documentation That's both technical writers and consumers of that documentation 85% of people And we have 61% of people out there who are doing anything of note or not of note in a lot of our cases That think they rely on it constantly. So what we do is very significant in this entire room In the survey we got some interesting feedback They think they need mobile Sick of Adobe. This isn't a dig on Adobe. This is just our community Local installs suck, right? Why do we have to keep it's their era of cloud and we're still installing things on computers? Expensive licenses absolutely and pointless CLI complexity. We're hackers So we've been doing this for a long time, you know, we're coding nerds So we kind of feel like anything that we think that we do with our craft is is relative and viable But the new generation coming through really thinks that that's complicated Number two Come on like we are really in the most exciting of times for tech comms I hear nothing but negativity on a mailing list that some of my colleagues and former colleagues introduced me to in fact I'll tell a quick story is when I was researching the role that red hat when I first went for the job I came across Lana sitting over here in the corner. This is like one of the most famous people in tech comms in Australia, right? Right there that person. Oh, sorry the infamous I get the iron bit at the beginning. I forget that There's a mailing list. I won't mention it But everything I saw in that mailing list was negative red hat sucks documentation sucks open source sucks It's completely the opposite, right and in that wave of negativity is nothing but optimism from the rest of us But we are a little bit cheesy. I'm definitely cheesy more tech more users more channels more words more power of narrative us Mobile devices we're no longer making books and I do a joke when I pitch one of my projects I carry big polar books and I throw them on the stage and boom I say that used to be the sound of delivering documentation the louder that boom was the more people would nod and smile But now we're fractured more channels means mobile stack overflow blogs Everything we just heard from the previous talk. That's super exciting and as people that can navigate that space We can pick those channels so that enthusiasm something that we're pushing very very heavy This really is the year of UX in open source any user experienced designers in here any UX and that's awesome Let's hire this guy. Let's get a more of them. Anyone enthusiastic about UX. I Like that was a bit scared then because if everyone kept their hands down I'd have to sort of think of a way to break you without swearing something told them allowed to use swears And as a startup guy, that's really hard So I said this at a conference got flamed once I was over at open world forum in Paris a few weeks ago or a couple months ago I said open source is one for developers, but we must create a beautiful user experience to win consumers So I use a MacBook. I dual boot it most of the time Sure of devices. I'm not really a zealot So for some of you I might be the enemy, but I'm using things that make my life the bitties And make me happier to get to an end result and I kind of think that's what the cloud space represents Let's keep our west people as hardcore as possible. Let's keep the cloud space really diverse and mixing it up I really really believe this. So when I see people using Heroku and they've got a an iOS device in their hand I start they got really nice glasses and cool shoes and stuff that I don't have I think what's this demographic because I grew up as a geek dungeon the dragons I grew bad facial hair and I still have bad facial hair But there's a whole new demographic out there that we need to engage because whether or not we like it They're not reading books So the really cool project that Red Hat built press gang still out there completely open source. Please check it out Please use it We didn't think in the early team Before it kind of got Zach's team took over after my team sort of created this and we made it busy What we've done now is what we're learning. Thanks to these UX people is they get I'll take some questions at the end If you don't mind I'll try to get through really quickly OCD We've tried to make it beautiful. So we can see the transition from things that was just developing for developers sake To trying to find new ways. This isn't perfect. It's a start and it's very very open source, right? So you guys can jump in and tell us how stupid we are. That's what I love about our community Number four, it's time for mobile first First time I mentioned this I got flamed. There's an awesome mailing list that we have at Red Hat an internal one Anyone can ask any question of anybody and challenge anything. It works really really well called me my list So did a survey Everyone told me that no one reads documentation on mobile devices our internal survey and this is the external one shows that what they do 86% of people nearly 87% of people have a mobile device and Look at that. We've got nearly 70% of people have used it to read documentation So there's a whole different talk. We're not going to jump in on here They do about push and pull factors. Why are people doing that a lot of documentation on mobile device sucks epically That's me not swearing Epically and yet there's some kind of a push factor forcing them to do it So as user experience designers and product designers, what can we do to make that experience better and create a pull factor? We're actually excited to do it. This is the future and this is 2015 We had a crack at some versions in our open source project Sometimes they work because it's an open source project and we're getting there So this is what I really love. This is a little bit philosophical Don't be known for no because yes has a funny way of happening, right? So to throw something in there and we can talk hours on this one is talking about moonshots So some of my friends at Google and they've now joined the project with us Really keep telling me the whole Google thing about moonshots. I heard no a lot when I first joined Red Heart I came as a business and data analyst from a coal company So kind of like a corporate enemy to a lot of open source and a lot of the questions I asked seemed really stupid and we we thought really Apprehensive of asking them. Can we use systems to automate our usage of content? Can we use blacklists to? Basically exclude us from using curse words in documentation, you know Because we're open source often means we're just dumping thing in a text file and we're putting in git or something, right? So we're thinking I was asking a lot of questions and feeling I hit no a lot And obviously as the story goes because I'm standing up here now. It had a funny way of becoming a yes So that's something we can talk about another time Open source is the ultimate MVP and this is one of those cheesy startup words MVP is minimally viable product Right, so we talked about when you make a startup It used to be like ego and you build this big thing and launch it and spend a lot of money Then absolutely no one would use it at all So that kept happening and happening and happening and when the dot-com bubble burst We thought it has to be a better way. How can we test things? So what we like to do is make these minimally viable products a simple set of code So I asked the startups recently in a project that I did at Red Hat Have you used any open source in your startup? I love that number, right? I mean immediately it's only 40 but that's 40 unique startups And I filtered them out as ones who actually have a product at market and they've raised money And they're building something of merit in the world, you know the whole Steve Jobs things like make a dent in the universe I absolutely love that and in fact sometimes I want to print that and put it on my shelf when I think Why am I bothering building this product? What types of open source have we used? This is so cool to me as well Nearly 80 nearly 100% for code language and toolkit. So you devs come on guys Nick the Python guys and just work that a little bit harder I want to see 100% there 73% are using an open source product like the product word is cool All right, so we'll jump through we're nearly in that It lets us use existing project components our components to test customer content, right? So this is really cool. We're making it easy for companies that do commercial things to use what we do to change people's lives wicked Open source still gets the money, right? so We had an offer To get funded by someone that just sold their company and made a fair bit of money offer a large media company And we said no it was flattering, but it was kind of scary because then we thought doing things like Hiring UX designers or collaborating or flying to things like this cost money But we found that people are still offering to help us and that sometimes it's not the money sometimes the resources Tech writing is content marketing I didn't want to put this one first because I think some people would stab me to death with what a sharpened opinion that is Essentially, I really believe this is no longer about books, right? It's about your customer and they're coming to you for help not so much Any stack overflow users? Really should be the whole room seriously So we're being naive as Documentarians if we think that what we're making is relevant to our users without looking at what they're doing in the community They're using stack overflow. They're going to blogs. They're going to YouTube They're using second-tier content that we're not authoring. So we're arrogant if we believe that we're not part of that ecosystem Nine team is everything. I have had an absolutely scary terrifying journey doing this But looking back at some of these I'm really excited. So I have a co-founder from Microsoft Top left the Lord Mayor of Brisbane is now supporting our project. He thinks it's something interesting the documentation space The red one near the top left an incubator in Paris has offered us a place there anytime We're there fish burners in Sydney top right my UX leave when we're in Helsinki a few weeks ago I now teach at QUT. I fly around a pitch with Luke It's an absolute crazy adventure and we are basically nearly going broke week after week after week to do this but it's probably been the best two years of my life and We're all wrong only the customer is right. I know it's a downer to end on but that's pretty much one that we have to end on You know to misquote Sun Zoo no documentation survives first contact with the customer If you make a book and you print that on their desk That's something we should probably do a couple of thousand years ago What we have to do now is look at the way that things are engaged red hats doing an amazing job with its new content team To look at the way people are consuming have a chat to Zach and some of the other red Hatters to to hear some of their stories. It's really inspiring stuff and of course my top 10 list as a number 11 Scope creep is everywhere. Absolutely everywhere even in my slide deck. So what do we talk about? There's the top 10 Because it's so quick each one of these has a full report coming out each week on Carilla.co We could put that somewhere else. I wanted to keep as open source as possible Didn't know really where to put this stuff except last night Yahoo business New Zealand Just asked me to start posting some of this there Any of you have open source stories about documentation, please get in touch with me I want to put you in touch with Vera so we can get our stories up there and through their channels as well Source code. It's open source. It's yours. Go nuts tweet me anytime Absolutely anytime. So the best one is at team Carilla to hit us all up or I'm personally on at Dave dry So thank you very much and again, I'm excited to see so many people in this room