 OK, I'm going to start since we're running a bit behind. And thanks for coming to my talk. I actually found the previous talk quite interesting about Kubernetes operators because we actually have an operator framework. And if you are not a goal-length programmer, if you want to find the easier way to do that, you can actually use Ansible to write Kubernetes operators. If you want to know more information about that, I will be at Red Hat booth after this. However, my talk today is not technical in nature. So it's a little bit more about community management and also conducting an orchestra. So I hope you find this interesting. And my name is Carol Chen. I work for Red Hat. And I support a number of upstream projects as listed here. So I forgot to mention, this is my third time at OpenStack, OpenInfo Summit. This is my first time speaking, so I'm really excited. OK, about me, since this is a lightning talk, I'll keep it short. You can find me at Cybat on Twitter, on WeChat, on Free Note IRC, and many social networks. So that's my nickname I go by. If you want to know more information, just search for that. OK, and I put this common time. If you know a bit about music, that's usually a notation to say, keep things going faster. Because again, this is short talk, so I'm going to try to get through this as fast as possible. All right, so what does a community manager or a conductor do? Just curious by a show of hands, who has played in an orchestra or a band or some kind of a music group before? No one? OK. All right, there's one over there. I myself, I play in an amateur orchestra in Finland. I'm a percussionist. And who has, well, if you have not played in one, has anybody conducted a music group? Perhaps? Oh, cool. All right, that's very nice, very interesting. And who has community management experience or kind of? All right. My partner over there from RDO, community manager. So I think people who see conductors on stage, especially if you're not familiar with music and orchestras, you see them waving their hands a lot, conducting the orchestra. And you wonder, what is it that they're doing, just flapping their arms or waving the stick? Similarly, a lot of times I get a question. So what do you do as a community manager? What's like, how do you define your role? And it's not as clear cut as, if you say I'm an engineer, it's very clear what you're doing. And of course, you can elaborate on the topic or the project you're working on. But when it comes to community management, there still tends to be this kind of question mark about what's the role of this person. So I found this also like, I actually borrowed this from somebody else's slides. I've attended a previous talk about community management. And I think this kind of describes the ambiguity and confusion about our role as a community manager. Like what is it exactly that we do? I will have to say I really face palm a lot. Well, not really, but it's part of my job sometimes. So I think both are often misunderstood, but a lot of times what you see, what you don't see is a lot of the work that goes behind. So the kind of value that a community manager brings to the project and the community is often behind the scenes. Similarly for a conductor, it's a lot of times before the concert or the performance when he works with the orchestra that actually brings the kind of the main value of his work to the orchestra. So a lot of times, if you're just a solo player, a musician, you have a soloist, you don't need a conductor to conduct just one person. Or sometimes even a small group, like a quartet or something, four persons, again, is something a bit simpler. You may not necessarily need a conductor. But as the orchestra grows or as the group grows, similarly as the project grows, things start to happen. Things, the dynamics change. When you have a bunch of people coming together, even if they're all experts individually, you will need to bring balance and kind of management and collaboration between the people. And it's not just saying, hey, throw them together in a room and things will just happen so that there's some things involved. And also, when you have community versus different companies working together, it's almost like inviting a guest player to an orchestra. So if you are not familiar with each other, how do you bring together the communication, the exchange of ideas, and everything? You have to be the glue that kind of makes these auditions connect together. So how does this happen? As I was saying behind the scenes, when I was in Singapore this year in March, I had a chance to go to an open rehearsal, which are really cool. Even if you don't have a chance to go to the actual concerts, if you have a chance to go to a rehearsal, that's where you can see a lot of so-called behind the scenes happening, where the conductor interacts with a guest player, in this case, Ray Chen. Andrew Leiden was the conductor. And so you get to notice the things that they work on, what are the kind of the challenges in the pieces or where they kind of have to sync together a bit more than other places. So of course, it may not be the perfect polished piece that you hear at the end during the performance, but it gives you more of an insight about how the orchestra actually works. So similarly, for community for projects, a lot of time at events or some kind of a release thing, you have the final product, which is brand shiny new. But behind the scenes, a lot of things have to go work to make that happen. And also, community managers tend to have different backgrounds. Rain over there who has been waving and saying she has experienced the music and community management, she has a more technical background probably than I do. Some people were previously part of the engineering team. Some perhaps came from marketing. I know community managers who has a major in English for some reason, and maybe they were in documentation or design. So there are many possibilities to participate, so also become part of the community. So is there one thing that is like when you talk about mastering something, is there one thing that a community manager should be a master of? I think, if I remember correctly, Andrew Litten himself is a pianist. He's a very good accomplished solo piano player, but then he went into conducting. The next one, let's say, last week, I was in Lyon for Open Source Summit. I had a chance to catch the National Orchestra of Lyon, and Giovanni Radivo, he's actually, whoa, that was not what happened during the concert, but he himself is a violinist, and he was conducting and playing at the same time. So sometimes that happens too. Like I said, sometimes the community manager could be the engineer or something. So is there a certain skill set that, no, do you have to be a violinist or do you have to be a pianist? Do you have to be an engineer to be a community manager? Do you have to be a certain instrument player to be a conductor? I think a lot of times the person has to be good in many areas. Doesn't have to be expert in all the areas, but you have to really kind of learn a lot of things. Like we work with the engineers a lot. We definitely do a lot of events, so we are pretty good at event planning. We know enough about marketing and communications because we are spreading the message of the project. You know, translations, design, what have you, that's different emphasis depending on the project. So a lot of times we either know a bit of everything or we kind of have to know who to go for for these different areas. So how do you kind of keep track of all this and get people together and help yourself so that you are not overloaded? Sometimes we try to take on too much as well because we are kind of expected to know a bit of everything. So I think, I hope I still have time left. Yeah, so if I say we are kind of like a jack of all trades, if there's one thing I think we need to be a master of, I think it's this communication, which a big part of it, I always say communication is two ways, it's not just you telling people stuff, but it's also about the receiving end which is the listening part. And that's such a huge thing that people sometimes tend to overlook or miss when they talk about communication. So you have to be able to listen to find out what are the areas that's needing something. You may not be able to do everything but you can see who needs help, who needs more attention. Like in an orchestra sometimes this section needs more work, that section needs more balance and so on. Similarly in a project, you want to bring everything together in harmony and listening is like a big part of making that happen. And this talk was supposed to be more like a longer session so I would have gone more into like the tips and processes of how to listen, how to collaborate and hopefully maybe next time we can do a like a ball for a panel, I do tend to wave my arms around but I think that's in a way we try to get people's attention, we try to let people know who to talk to, where to go, how to best help them and answer their questions and so on. So just a couple of weeks ago, I received on Twitter somebody pointed out this article to me and back to the same question, what exactly does musical conductors do? And I told him to come to my talk but he's not here in person so I'll share my slides with him. But anyway, I really like a quote in the article which the source is in the link here. It says, a conductor's job is communication, not only musically but also beyond the music and in the same vein, a community manager's job, the main job is communication, not just about the project but beyond that, it's the people, it's the events, it's the situations, the collaboration, everything all coming together. So and not to forget that we're a part of Red Hat, we have a booth right over there in that corner. We have demos, we have, you know, information about OpenStack, of course, we have OpenStack Summit and RDO, our stream distro, the two events were sponsoring project team gathering and the diversity networking lunch which starts on Wednesday. And we're running out of t-shirts but we still have more stickers coming tomorrow. So I think, oh, of course, we do all kinds of stuff including folding t-shirts and spreading, you know, general cool stuff for everyone in the community. So again, thanks for being here and if you have any questions, feel free to look for me at the Red Hat booth.