 Hi, everyone. My name is Tila Fabi and today I'm going to talk to you about growing sustainable contributions through Ambassador Networks with Allison Yu. I work as an open source program manager with a focus on community building at Comcast. My name is Allison Yu and I am the open source community manager at Indeed. So today we'll just be talking about our ambassador program. We're going to give a quick overview of what an ambassador program is and then we're going to jump to seeing into two different case studies for both Indeed and Comcast and how we utilize open source ambassador programs at our open source program offices. So what is an open source ambassador program? It's a working group made up of volunteers who represent our various technology offices. Ambassadors are open source champions or evangelists and they serve as a point of contact for all things open source inside the company and they help us scale across the very many different technology offices that we have. You might be wondering why someone wants to be an open source ambassador. So one of the few things that both Indeed and Comcast very much focus on is career development. We're talking about how can we help people either become mentors or find mentors, giving people more training around speaking or blog writing or communication and then really finding out how we can give our ambassadors more cross-team collaboration and visibility across the organization. We also want to make sure that they're staying up to date with what's going on in the open source community so we give them first dibs on any conference passes or discounts to open source community events such as open source them at North America when available. We also want to make sure that they are having the opportunity to expand their professional networks not only internally but externally. So how can we connect people to others who are doing something in the same vein at other companies or even internally? And then last but not least of course we have ambassador swag. So what exactly do ambassadors work on or what can they work on? So a few things we've listed out here. Evangelizing open source is one of them. Speaking at internal events, the open source program office schedules a lot of internal events through the year so we give them tons of opportunity there. They can also help answer questions related to open source. They explain the benefits of using open source software to our greater community. They also connect our teams to other teams within our organization who are not only using but contributing back to open source that may not be aware of us or we might not know of. They also help conduct policy reviews and sometimes they even help approve the use of open source licenses. Now that we've gone over what the ambassador program can encompass, we're going to go jump into our case studies. So I will go ahead and lead us off with Indeed's case study. So Indeed's open source program office was established in November of 2017. We are currently seven people strong with three people on the program side and four people on the engineering side. Indeed's open source program office is largely based out of San Francisco with our engineering manager based out of Seattle. So as you can see on this map, there are many, many, many different Indeed offices globally. Any of the ones that have a label are the ones that there is a technology center based at. So as you can see with so many different offices and us only being in the Pacific time zone, we felt that we needed to have more options for people to get their answers, their questions answered during working hours throughout the day when anything came around asking about open source. So we decided that we would have an open source ambassador program. And right now we currently have ambassadors in Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, Hyderabad and Tokyo. So our Indeed's open source program office had a few goals that we sketched out for our ambassador program. One, we have a very strong focus on community sustainability. So we wanted to make sure that we were growing our internal community of regular contributors. This is one of our main goals and it's something that I've been focused on since the beginning of my tenure at Indeed. We also wanted to help the Indeed employees who decided to volunteer for this program to grow their careers and their adjacent skills. So that might be anything from being a mentor to building out different programs or how to contribute to open source to even being a presenter at a conference. We also wanted to create opportunities for mentorship and skill growth every six months. So having rotating lead ambassadors at sites at the different sites where this is going to be the person to contact with any questions and to make sure that they were the ones who would have an opportunity to teach others about open source. We also wanted to highlight Indeed's open source work externally and increase brand presence by helping those who decided the ambassadors if they so desired to have training to become open source brand ambassadors externally by speaking at conferences or by doing a podcast or even releasing their own open source projects. And then we of course wanted to streamline and expand opportunities for evangelism and highlight globally. So we didn't just jump two feet in to a full-fledged ambassador program. We decided to do a proof of concept which we term the ambassador's light program. We time boxed it to three months or one quarter and that was Q4 of 2019. We had one very, very, very focused goal which was to double all contributor metrics across the board from Q4 of 2018 to Q4 of 2019. We had a pretty limited budget by this point. We decided that we would do this program in Q3 in the beginning of Q3 of 2019. So we weren't able to go back and ask for additional budget. So we worked with what we had and then we drove ambassador signups purely by word of mouth. We wrote one page on our wiki, our internal wiki about what we thought this program might look like. And we saw a lot of people asking how do they could get involved with this program. And that was really exciting because we knew that there was an appetite for this. So we were able to show pretty great results, preliminary results with our ambassador's help for October 5th. So this year over year we've more than doubled every single goal or every single metric for October 5th, year over year from 2018 and 2019. And this was a great showing of how people who were in different offices could really help expand our reach and participation in open source. So we're really thrilled with these different results that we found. With those preliminary results from October 5th, we were able to then ask for the overall urgent budget for the full-fledged ambassador program. We made sure to ask for one comprehensive ask, which was for an ambassador kickoff week for each class, which would cover our history, our program goals, any career development and coaching, presentation workshops and networking. And we actually then asked for additional stipend for each ambassador and a quarterly event stipend for each office where we had an ambassador at. We wanted to make sure that each of our ambassadors were set up for success and making sure that they would be able to network with others in their offices that may not always have been traditional open source contributors. So we did get a few lessons learned from our ambassadors during this time. We noticed that they wanted, and they really much appreciated structured, clear and concise goals. So having that one goal was very important and very easy for them to then drive towards that goal. They need more support from the open source program office for events. They noticed that while they could really gather people who were excited about open source, it wasn't really in their wheelhouse to help or to really find out how to get catering, for example. Done at the office. So more support. They, they were asking for. They wanted more opportunities for feedback. And they wanted to tie their ambassador work directly to their review cycle. So what we did is we set up recurring one on one with each one of our ambassadors to have them give us feedback. And we also have monthly feedback cycles. So they could do it in a group or if they were uncomfortable, they saying something in a group. They were also able to talk to us on a one on one. We also needed to make sure that we could secure full commitment from the ambassadors before the program starts. So we had to ensure that we had at least 10% of their time set up for the set aside for the program with manager approval. So obviously with the current climate, we've had to do quite a bit of pivoting. We did a lot of pivot to virtual. So we moved to a 12 month program from a six month program, which we initially thought of. And we decided to host our in person ambassador kickoff week virtually. So we're holding these in multiple time zones and we're holding these also as a series instead of giant blocks of time. So instead of doing one large week, we're actually doing monthly series where they can stand between one to two hours and we bring in external speakers. We're also capitalizing on virtual external events because they're more cost effective work, then able to send more ambassadors to get more involved with our communities. And that's allowing us to connect them with other people in the community as well. And we're also setting up virtual happy hours and networking and office hours for each one of the open source ambassadors and each location. So moving forward, we're going to maintain our commitment to meet our ambassadors where they are. We have to take into consideration any changes that have come due to COVID-19. We understand that many of our ambassadors are now not only balancing working from home, but also childcare and teaching their children from home as well. We also are working vigorously to tailor involvement to meet their professional goals. So we're really trying to make this program as impactful as possible for each one of our ambassadors. We're going to continue to host virtual sessions. And then we're also going to move forward to a nice and fun surprise and delight swag model where we surprise and delight not only our ambassadors, but other open source contributors. And with that, I'm going to hand it off to Sheila. Thank you, Allison. That was awesome. Now let's jump into the Comcast case study. So a little bit about the open source program office, the team that I work in. We opened our doors in 2017. We support around over 9,000 technologists. We have over 200 repos on github.com that we also manage. We are a six person team. We have an executive director, Nithya Russ, who's pretty active in the open source community. We also have two program managers that focus on compliance and we also have two program managers that focus on community as well as a software engineer who helps us with our tooling. A little history of the open source ambassador program. We launched it back in late 2017 when the open source program office was a three person team. So now we're a six person distributed team. But as you can imagine supporting over 9,000 technologists. It's pretty hard if you're only three people in. We wanted to scale across the different offices and so that's sort of how and why we launched the program. In the very beginning, we met with new teams each week to familiarize ourselves and a team with the community as well as the open source program office. And the ambassadors were essential in helping us get that word out. In the very beginning, we would ask our ambassadors once we rolled out the program saying, hey, do you know of any teams in your respected offices that are doing open source or using open source? We'd love to meet them. And so that was really helpful. Our Comcast open source ambassadors are distributed across the US as well as in tonight. We they're located in DC Philadelphia. We have Sunnyvale and Austin and you'll see all the all the offices here on this map. In 2020, we're looking at doing an org wide ambassador program. So that was that was something that was new for this year. We have our general technology organization is called technology and product experience ppx and within that organization we do have three different types of ambassadors. We have the open source ambassadors. We have cloud ambassadors and software architecture ambassadors and those ambassador programs were modeled after our program and we're really excited to make this streamlined across the larger organization. Some of the open source ambassador programs that we modeled after are actually prevalent in the open source community. So the CNCS has one open spec has one cloud foundry has an ambassador's program. Yachto project has one. I won't list all of these, but they're great resources to look at and to sort of learn from to see what those ambassadors programs look like in case you want to run your own. An ideal ambassador for us in the Comcast case study needs to have managerial approval prior to joining our program. We also have a learning assessment that's online. You can take it online. You don't have to go into a testing center, but we do ask that folks get an 80% score or higher, and you have maximum of two attempts. And in that online assessment, we ask questions about your open source history. We also ask about licenses and compliance. Also, you should probably be an open source advocate. If you'd like to be an ambassador, generally a good fit if you are an avid user of open source or if you're a contributor. And also, like I mentioned, having experience in an open source driving community already as a maintainer or someone who is already contributing back is a great fit for us. Some of the tasks that our ambassadors are assigned to, we do have attendance. We have quarterly meetings that we do. We have also, we do these virtually as well, and we have to per quarter. We also have an open source day that we've pivoted also to virtually, but by annually we've been doing open source days where folks can come in and speak about the open source work that they're doing as well as sharing stuff that they've learned through projects out in the community. Occasional policy reviews, you have the opportunity to participate and speak at open source events. We also have them approve the use of open source licenses within Comcast, and we have some usage guidelines that we ask our ambassadors to study and know. They help us answer questions in Slack. We have a pretty thriving community out in Slack. And so having more support is really, really helpful. We also blogging news and conferences, those opportunities and platforms are available. And so we help our ambassadors sort of get their messaging out. We help amplify and we also ask our ambassadors to help amplify. So if we have a new blog post that came out that talks about a new open source project we've released, we definitely share with our ambassadors and we ask them to amplify with our greater community. Some of the lessons learned from the first year's program. So we, we decided to have tighter prerequisites to enter the program. So this year we had added the online assessment with the passing core of 80% and above. Before it was just raise your hand if you want to be an ambassador and you're an ambassador. So now we've, we've sort of tightened that up. We have open source contributions or at least have a heavy involvement or usage with open source. We scheduled to ambassador calls instead of one to accommodate the different time zone. You may have noticed we have a Chennai office. It's probably better to have to one APAC call and one US call so that we can make sure everybody's included and they have the opportunity to join. More swag. That's always a plus. We also share our expectations with ambassadors beforehand of what we're looking for. Make that very clear and then provide training for ambassadors. Last, last year we did not have any training or much, much, much mentorship opportunity, but this year we're looking at doing a lot more of that. And then generally just giving ambassadors more work to do. We're looping them in whenever we have tasks that we need a second pair of eyes on if we have do docs that are going to go out. We always try to loop them in or if we have some new policy. So that's been really helpful. Some of our future plans. It would be awesome if we can get profile badges on Slack or some way where you can easily identify ambassadors online. Also, more opportunities to showcase our ambassadors and include them in our, our open source program office events. And then also having mandatory check ins. You don't have to make it to every single meeting or every single event that we have. But just knowing that you're still present and available and interested in being in the program checking in is really important. And now I'd like to bring Allison back as we conclude and take questions. Thank you. Thanks everyone. Also, if you'll see on the screen where Sheila and I have also started a group for open source community managers where we can share and generate ideas, different playbooks, or any documentation for programs that we're running. So if you're an open source community manager or you're interested in joining, please go ahead and follow that bit. Link and join us in our community. We're also very much looking forward to connecting with everybody and answering questions. And with that, we will join you guys in the Q&A. Thanks everybody. Thank you.