 Hello, friends. My name is Ruth Sealy. I am Director of the Community Outreach Team in Red Hat's Open Source Program Office. For those of you who are in Austin, I am so sorry not to be able to join you there in person and I very much hope to see you at the next in-person gathering. In the meantime, wherever you are, you can chat with me, you can feel free to tweet at me now or anytime. Really, my handle's on the screen. It's my last name, SUEHLE, or you can shoot me an email and then you don't have to spell my last name. I am just Ruth at redhat.com. I'm always happy to chat about anything I say today, anything open source really. So I have been at Red Hat for almost 15 years now. I've done quite a variety of things there, but one of them is to help start and continue leading one of our many communities of practice in the company. I suspect some of you are here to hear about what a community of practice is and how that works in a company. Some of you are probably here because you've been waiting for years and years for open source and video games to be better friends and you wanna hear more about that. I promise I will get to both, but let's start with what a community of practice is. And from here on out, I am more likely to simply refer to it as a COP because that is way fewer syllables. So a community of practice is at the most basic level, simply a group of people who want to work together around some common topic. We say it turns conversation into collaboration. COPs may be formed naturally. At Red Hat, we often form them deliberately through a formal program. It's an incredibly collaborative, transparent, open company in many ways. We don't just develop software the open source way, we do everything the open source way. That does not guarantee that everything always works perfectly smoothly as you all know from working in your open source communities. So for example, a lot of our teams have always been remote even before two years ago, but maybe they would see each other at events like this and that was really important to them. So we've been dealing with those interpersonal connection questions for a long time. It's been pretty hard for the last two years. We also sometimes as a company struggle with communication and collaboration among teams, like for example, between the field and engineering, between different types of people who don't necessarily communicate quite on the same path. I'm sure that you know of many cases of your own companies in your own communities that are the same. So for various reasons, those connections aren't quite as strong as they could be. And we may be missing opportunities because of that. And of course, open source and a global company also means collaborating across time zones and different languages and different cultures. So communities of practice are one of the ways that we try to fill in all those challenging gaps and improve the collaboration that we're already pretty good at, but to do even more things better and to do them better together. Now, I've oversimplified it a bit there. It's not just a group of people. Not all groups of people with a common interest are a community of practice. So what you might have is actually just a group of people who want to chat about something. And that's totally cool, but it's not a COP. It is how many of our COPs get started, but we call those communities of interest or COIs. COIs are distinct from COPs because they don't have a well-defined mission or goals or projects that they're working on. In contrast, the COP is at the intersection of a few factors here. So tomorrow I'll be giving a talk on a Red Hat program called CoLab where we teach collaboration to middle school aged girls who generally don't know what open source is. So when I explain it to them, I use the cookie metaphor. You may have heard it before, but if not, in short, it's let's say I have a great chocolate chip cookie recipe if I share it with you, then you can build on that. Add cocoa powder and nuts, you have a whole new cookie. But if you didn't have that, you'd have to start from scratch to figure out how to make your cookies. So basic open source cookie metaphor there. So let's build on our cookie metaphor here because who doesn't like cookies? With the exception of like one kid ever in the CoLab program who told me I don't like cookies. Most of us like cookies. So let's think of COPs as a cookie exchange party. If you've never been to one of these, you should definitely throw one or go to one. The idea is everyone brings a bunch of cookies and then you stand around eating cookies and you take some home along with the recipes in case you tried something really, really awesome and you want to make it again. So the domain is an area of shared interest. In this case, it's the cookie. Everyone at the cookie exchange party is interested in cookies, either eating them or baking them or probably both. In our gaming COP, everyone is interested in gaming in some fashion, the video game industry or adjacent things. The community then is the group of people who have come to your cookie exchange party. Your friends say, mm, we love cookies. Today we're gonna have a community gathered around cookies. You build relationships talking about the cookies. And then third is the practice. That is the recipes or more formally, it's the body of knowledge that each person has and the best practices that they've discovered about baking cookies. So like I said, you're not just bringing your cookies to the party, you're bringing the recipe to share too. So everybody gets to learn something together. Like you might say, Ruth, I have had chocolate chip cookies before, but yours are some known fine chocolate chip cookies. What is happening here? And so I tell you, you brown the butter before you make your cookies. And even if you don't learn anything about community or gaming or anything else in this talk, now you know pretty much anything that involves butter will be improved by browning the butter first. Rice, crispy treats, brown your butter. Cookies, brown your butter. And Sage, just some brown butter, put it on ravioli. You will thank me later. I can talk about food all day, but you wanna talk about her cookies, making pasta, hit me up on Twitter anytime. I will get back to the whole COP thing now. This intersection of the domain and the community and the practice, that is what makes a COP. So after a number of years building these communities at Red Hat, we have 56 of them now. You may be able to tell from even just glancing this list, the vast majority of them are not directly connected to Red Hat products or even verticals. They're in that space in the middle. Cross cutting, meaning across products, across verticals, across regions and everything else, and delivery excellence, which of course in many cases, if you look at those, touch all of us. So the gaming COP is listed under verticals, which is accurate, but cross cutting is also a solid descriptor of what we do in a slightly different way. It is probably obvious to you, if you know what Red Hat is, that Red Hat is not about to bust into the video game production business, but we do have a lot of things going on that are relevant to that and the mini adjacent industries. And beyond that, the people who have come together in this COP, as with most of the other 55 COP's, come from every business unit and function and different regions and backgrounds and experience. And that kind of mixes where the magic happens, where the most collaborative benefits really start to happen when many diverse voices come together. When you're in a room together, probably virtual, not because of your job title or your role, but because you're passionate about the same thing that many other people in the room are passionate about, that is when the real collaborative benefits start to happen. And the benefits stretch beyond that mutual topic, whatever you've come together at the gaming, the cookies, whatever it is. I started at Red Hat when we had 2,000 employees and I was at least familiar with a good number of them. Like I recognized their name from a mailing list. If I didn't know them personally, I at least knew that their jobs existed. We're closer to 20,000 people now and I definitely don't know who all those people are or what they do or in some cases that their department exists. I never would have met most of the people that I work with in the gaming COP if it hadn't happened. But now I do know them and that means that I turn to them when other interesting projects come up or to talk to them about things that I know that they're experts in. COP's are really solid opportunity and network outside of your usual circle in your job function. So that sounds awesome, I hope. How do you make it happen? Red Hat has now this pretty robust COP program and a dedicated team managing that, but we didn't start there. You can't start at the end with anything. You start with one COP, you build one community and you can build another. Then you can build it up to a COP program in your company or project or whatever organization you're interested in. And this is not quite as linear as this looks but this is the basic number of things that you need to think through. Step one, if you're doing this in a corporate environment is to find your executive sponsor. Someone who believes in what you're doing. Someone who will help you ensure that your community's goals align with your company's strategy and goals. Someone who can advocate for you, perhaps even secure some budget for you if that is necessary or helpful to what you want to do. So now you have an idea, you have a vision. You have someone who cares about it. You have your executive sponsor. But it's good to also formalize your community's mission statement. Explain in words how you're going to achieve that vision. You can do this in partnership with that executive sponsor to help align what you're doing with your company's overall vision. And then as with any project you want to set your goals. How are you going to achieve your mission? Give your community a clear road map about what you're trying to achieve together. This is ours, so this is an example. I admit it's on the fuzzy side. I don't think we have been back to it since the early days. It could use some refining now. So but some words are better than no words. And so don't take this example as masterful perfection of mission and goal setting, but as an example of where you might start. Now, if you haven't already, it's time to find your core team. Probably along the way as you've done those things you have found a couple of people besides yourself. Hopefully you know where to find a few more people who are interested in what you're doing. But you've done group work before. You've done communities before. You know how this works. You have that core of folks who care deeply and do the bulk of the work. And then you're gonna have a larger team who are interested, they jump in here and there. Building that core team that is always there that really cares passionately is essential to your success. And I'll talk a little more about that as we go on talking about building the team. Now I'm going to guess that you and your fellow COP members are probably not all in the same building. Probably not all even in the same time zone. Not gonna lie, our most recent win is good pull to find a meeting time for the gaming COP was a hot mess. You just make it work. You find the communication channels that work for your community just like in any other open source community. So for us, it's largely an internal chat room. We also have a weekly meeting. We have a mailing list. I'd say for us, the meeting conversation happens in that weekly meeting and that's why it was important to us to find a good time for as many people as possible. And then it spills over into the chat room. The mailing list is pretty low traffic. That isn't necessarily true for every community. I'm sure if you think through the communities you're involved in, they all communicate in different ways. So you have to find what works for your group. Maybe yours is all on the mailing list. Maybe it's IRC or a Slack channel. Whatever it is, find the communication that works for you. Don't be that community that meets once a month and then everybody forgets to do anything until you meet again the next month and go, oh yeah, I was gonna do a thing. A few last tips on building all of this. If you build communities around content and projects that are relevant and interesting and important to people, they will totally show up with bells on and jump in to help with both feet in no way whatsoever. Has that ever been true? So think of all the things you've been a part of in your life, not just the software projects, the club and the soccer team and the HOA and your D&D group and the PCA, whatever, all those groups, some of them as soon as you heard about it, you wanted to go all in and you did. You're there every meeting, you're on the mailing list, you're calling people, you're doing all the work, other things, you are more casually involved in. You just show up to that meeting once a month and you kind of care about what's going on but not enough to do a whole lot and that's okay too. Both of those people can exist. It's important to understand that there are different levels of participation in the community. You are presumably starting this group, so you're the one who's all in but you'll also have lurkers who just kind of watch from the edges. You will have consumers, people who use your output, your content, whatever it is that you're doing but don't actually contribute to the community and then you'll have those contributors. Some of them just pop in for a day, do a little drop in, drop back out and then some of them will eventually become part of your core team. So those different people all exist, it's okay that they aren't all all in but you can't help encourage them to move along the path. Turn a lurker into a consumer. Turn a consumer into a contributor. Turn a contributor into one of those core team members, maybe even its next leader. Always be looking for how to replace yourself basically. Look for people who can share the load. Looking at the what's in it for me will help you figure out how to do that and it's different for each group of people. You can also incentivize participation and that might be that in your company, participation in a group like this is a solid line on your promotion justification or for a raise or whatever. It could be a financial incentive. So we have something at Red Hat called the give back program. COPs are just one of the ways that we're dissipating in the give back program but they're a really solid option for doing so. The way that works is when you do something cool or helpful, maybe you give a talk at a conference, you write a blog post, you write some code, whatever it is that contributes to the COP, you acquire give back points and as you go acquire give back points you move up stars, give back stars and you can get financial rewards. You can get badges on your employee profile. Your manager gets an email talking about the cool stuff you did. You can get swag. So I've long joked that in open source communities, T-shirts are the currency of our people, T-shirts and stickers. Turns out this is true in COPs as well. People are often happy to receive T-shirts and stickers in a sort of other swag. So now that we talk about COPs a little more generically let's talk about the gaming COPs specifically and how all of this has worked for us there over the last, I'm gonna say three years not actually precisely certain. Time flies when you're doing cool things with friends. So we have an advantage, that whole cool doing things with friends thing. We have an advantage and an easy obvious opportunity to engage our community in a really fun way because whatever you're doing it's super important to remember that this is all volunteer work. This is extra time. This is nobody's core job. They're here in your COP because they want to be, they want to do this awesome thing but it is not what was in, ooh, sorry, it is not what was in their job description. So identify areas where there's an opportunity to overlap team building with your community's goals. For us, one of those things is participating in CEA the Corporate Esports Association. That's a seasonal Esports League that raises funds for charity. It's a great way to bring employees together whether or not they're in the COP and also gives us an opportunity to connect with partners and customers the other teams that we're playing against in a really fun, casual environment. And in fact, that has been also a pipeline for many of our COP members. They came to us originally from CEA teams which are, as you can see, our teams have grown rapidly. And now, besides just playing they're also helping us in the COP to build cool stuff and do a lot of cool stuff such as. This is a list of two things really. It's a list of some of the cool things that we've done through the COP but the pieces of it go further back before the COP existed. This is kind of a story of how the COP came together to begin with. So one of the benefits of being around a company for a long time like I have is that you end up knowing lots of people in different places and you hear this over here and that over there. So about five years ago, I realized that there were a lot of people around Red Hat doing gaming things that mostly didn't know the rest of the other folks existed or what they were doing. So we had some folks building games for demos and keynotes and our brand team had sponsored DreamHack which is a huge eSports event. I had helped start the open source special interest group in the International Game Developers Association. And about the same time that I heard all of these things going on over here, over there, the company's COP program was really taking off and I heard that that was a thing. So I said, hey, friends who are all interested in gaming things, how about we all get together, build a COP and do these things together in a coordinated fashion. Try to all aim our ship the same direction. So that's how the COP began. And it's also a large part of why we have easily gathered such a wide variety of folks represented from so many different functions around the company. Also it doesn't hurt that lots of different kinds of people like to play games but naturally so many folks had gravitated in this direction. It was great to really bring them all together. So we've taken all that cool stuff that people were doing on their own and started doing it better together. That's the whole open source way, right? This is just a few more of the things that this awesome group of people have volunteered their time to do. And I really mean that. I don't say awesome people just to blow smoke at people who mostly aren't even in this room. I gotta say this COP has been one of the best, most smoothly functioning teams I have ever worked with. They are all truly passionate about their work. They're all really good at what they do. I never ever look at a meeting on my calendar with any of them and go, okay, let's get through this hour with so and so whatever. I'm always genuinely excited to work with every single one of them. They are fantastic. And it's because they do all of this cool stuff and they do it so well. So I mentioned the demos a bit. Those are a super fun way to show off Red Hat technology at events like this one. We also have Red Hatters who for quite a few years now have run a Game Jam in October. It's openjam.io. You can go check it out. It's a weekend long competition to create an open source game. And that's it. Then last year, we applied that experience to help do the first O3DE Game Jam. And I'll tell you about what O3DE is at the end if you're not familiar with that. I may have briefly mentioned the arcade cabinet. So we have a podcast to Red Hat called Command Line Heroes. I am a big fan of the Command Line Heroes podcast. I do not love all podcasts universally and I do not recommend it simply because I'm a Red Hat employee. I actually genuinely enjoy that podcast. And someone thought, wouldn't it be cool if we could sort of bring it to life a little bit? And so the Command Line Heroes team had these custom arcade cabinets built. And they feature games that come out of open jam. They're all open source games as well as other games developed by Red Hatters. You may have seen them at some pre-COVID times open source summit. We had them at KubeCon. We've had them at a number of events. We loved taking them to events. But then March of 2020 happened. Events stopped happening in person. Very hard to just like lift an arcade cabinet up to your camera and have someone play it. So the COP pulled together and built a virtual arcade, built a virtual version of everything that was on there. And we took it to a few events. We took it to the first virtual open source summit and a couple of other things. And then we made it a permanent fixture. So you can go check it out. You can play all those games right now or preferably when I'm finished talking at arcade.redhat.com. I'm gonna warn you if you can't wait until I'm done talking and you're in the room with other people right now some of them are really loud. So that's your fair warning. In other projects, our brand team has always been super supportive of the COPs output and was also one of those groups doing gaming things before the COP existed. So they've been on board since the beginning. I can't say enough times how much value there is in having a really broad group of people coming together. Most of the folks on our brand team can't write code. Our engineers are in general not very good at marketing sorts of activities and so on and so forth. Everyone is bringing something to the table and side note also super important. Everyone values everyone else's contributions. None of them are more important than the others. And that is critical in absolutely any community. Your COP, your open-source software project community. Again, back to all of the communities you may be involved in in your life. Everyone's contribution is important. So one cool place where we really all came together with those different skills was last summer in downtown Raleigh where Red Hat's headquarters is Raleigh, North Carolina. We worked with the city of Raleigh and a local artist to create this mural that you see on the right here. It's called 8-Vit to 5G representing the history of gaming. It also has a plaque beside it with information about the mural in Braille as well for accessibility and it has a QR code that you can scan to interact with the mural. So you can watch, there's a whole mini documentary on YouTube but I'm just gonna show you a quick clip so you can see the mural being made because it's really fun to watch. I think it was like eight seconds. So maybe we wanted to capture the essence of the evolution of gaming designing graphics. Now the mural came to life as a byproduct of the city of Raleigh putting out a community arts grant and that's where our friends from Red Hat stepped up. And I think that's fun to watch of the time lapse of it all coming together. I'll show you the link at the end if you want to watch the rest of that but it's a really cool looking mural. Then, oh, it wants to play again. This is just one last example of a cool collaboration that only happened because we were able to bring together all the right people with a mutual passion and a lot of different skills. So I mentioned I'm doing another talk tomorrow about how we teach collaboration to middle schoolers. That's a program called CoLab. And until March of 2020, just a similar situation in the arcade cabinets. We were doing that in person with arduinos and copper tape and LED projects and things like that. Things that were really good to do hands on in a classroom with kids. It's a lot harder to do that and a lot harder to teach collaboration over video chat in general. But fortuitously, we had a new Red Hatter come in who had written an open source text game engine like things Zork style. And we had a CoLab curriculum that was built around a short story that was basically a dungeon escape story. So we brought all this together. The CoLab team and the guy with the engine and I rewrote the story from the earlier CoLab project to be a game. The highlighting you see here, we don't actually try to teach kids to write code in a day, half day or day or however long different programs last. But I show them the code that runs their game and show them even if code sounds kind of scary, they actually can read this and more or less figure out what it means. So that is a really good example of where the COP can be valuable to the company. All these things are making demos more engaging, finding new ways to reach customers, supporting sales teams in spaces that they might not know as well. And it turns out plenty of Red Hat products and upstream projects that we care about are used in games and have connections to the gaming space. This is just a handful of examples of places that we contribute, upstreams we care about, things that are part of our ecosystem that are also important to the gaming space. Because the flip side in our case of having a really cool, fun thing that people wanna be involved in, everybody loves games, it's also really easy to say games, not important, not part of our business, et cetera, whatever and to blow it off. And we do like to have fun, not gonna lie, but there's also a lot of value here and it's important to be able to demonstrate that, especially when instinctively it just seems like, oh, you guys are just playing games, right? And of course, if that doesn't justify it, there's always hard numbers about the market opportunity here. Oh boy. So even people who are big fans of gaming and eSports are generally surprised when I start dropping these numbers. So global eSports revenue grew 20% in 2021. And if you happen to be here more for the COP than half of this and aren't really familiar with the idea of eSports, it's watching people play video games. That is the basic concept here. And it's huge. The pandemic helped, but this ball was already rolling. eSports viewership is now overtaking traditional sports viewership. This is a $200 billion industry that is growing rapidly with a huge audience, many of whom conveniently are either customers or potential customers with a lot of overlap. So while it seems like this may be irrelevant to Red Hat, it is definitely not. And I could show you infinite slides of numbers and charts that might belt your brain a little bit because most people don't really aren't aware of this. But if you just look in your pocket, you've got a gaming device. Some of you may have more than one, but most of you at least have a phone. And that is a gaming device and that is a huge market. This slide kind of wild, you can look at it on the slides later if you're interested, it's kind of fun to pick apart. But it really demonstrates that growth from Pong back in 1972 to a really robust gaming market across mobile, PC, console, still a little sliver down there of arcade gaming. And then a glimpse towards the future where we're staring down VR and whatever the next generation of the web might be and what that looks like for gaming. So you take that and say, okay, where does it connect to the business? A lot of places it turns out, a lot of partners, a lot of customers, a lot of collaborators and community members, people we work with in projects and in foundations and particularly in the gaming space, a lot of folks we'd like to see more of in those open source spaces. And Red Hat is, I'm gonna say pretty well qualified to help lead those conversations about how open source can be really successful for a business. There's still quite a few industries that are reluctant to embrace open source and the gaming industry is certainly one of them, but that is changing. And one of the ways is through O3DE and it's foundation O3DF. So O3DE is just hitting its first birthday. So if you're not familiar with it yet, you're not too far behind, but it is open 3D engine is what that stands for. It's been a heck of a first year. This is a fully open source 3D game engine. And so far I've spent a lot of time saying the word gaming a lot, but now when we're getting down to talking about the engine, it's not just about gaming. It's about medical applications and scientific simulation and stuff in your vehicles. And now you're talking about a whole lot more markets and then we can go back to that market opportunity idea and you're talking about a lot more spaces. So if you're interested in that, hit up O3DE.org. That is oddly hard to say O3DE.org. And there are quite a few O3DE folks around this week you can talk to. In addition, we'll be having an O3D con event back here in Austin in the fall. So although I can't see you all in person today, I hope maybe I will see you there in October. And finally, I hope you're ready to head out and start building your own communities of practice and to put that power of real collaboration to work for you, whatever your goals are, whatever your community interest is. And if you have questions about it, I'm easy to find. Again, I am Ruth at redhat.com. So you don't even have to remember how to spell my last name. If you do wanna find me on Twitter, you do have to spell it. So I will hit this last slide to help you out. It's S-U-E-H-L-E. And I've got a few links here. I'll tweet those out now for your convenience or you can download these slides later. Building a COP in Five Steps is a blog post that walks you through basically what I was talking about earlier, that very basic how to build this. The opensourceway.org is a great resource for open source communities in general, but also hits on some of this community of practice content. And if you'd like to watch the rest of that 8-bit to 5G video about the mural, you've got that there. So thank you for coming and good luck with your own COPs.