 And welcome to our session, How to Contribute to the Ansible Community. We are Anwesha and Carol and we will do a brief intro of ourselves. So I'm Carol Chen and I just listed a bunch of dates because I just wanted to show that I have been a Linux user for a while. My first digital was actually Red Hat Linux, not Red Hat Enterprise Linux but it was Red Hat Linux 6.0 something. And I actually finally joined Red Hat, you know, one of my dream jobs in 2016. So such an honor to be here. And I started contributing to FOSS projects around 2004. I'm actually a bit hazy on the exact time because I had to check my own LinkedIn page to find out when that was. And if I had seen such a talk before that, I probably would have contributed earlier because there's actually many different ways to contribute, not just code. So we'll go into that a bit in the talk. And the rest are just, you know, showing how much of an old geek I am. I saw using IRC a long time ago and nowadays I am on Matrix, believe it or not, I can learn new tricks. So I joined Matrix. I actually heard about Matrix in 2016-17 and already signed up for my ID, Matrix ID, like around then. So find me on both my work and personal Matrix IDs listed there. And I'm going to hand off to the much younger Anwesha who, you know, despite her youthfulness, has a lot of open source experience. So don't be deceived. Plus, she has some legal chops to back her up, so very powerful combination. But I'll stop talking now and let her continue. Thank you, Carol. And welcome. Welcome, everyone, to the talk. Hello, my name is Anwesha, Anwesha Das. I'm a lawyer by education and technologist by passion. I am one of the newest addition to the Ansible community team. I'm a software engineer at Red Hat. I help free and open source communities around the globe with my technical, legal, and organizational skills. I'm a proud Pai Lady. I don't know how many of you know about Pai Ladies over here. I am a Pai Ladies organizer at PaiLadies.com and also I led Pai Ladies efforts in India. I have a blog, Anwesha Das.in, where I translate legalese to English amongst many other things. And I'm a fellow at Python Software Foundation. Wow, I'm representing Red Hat. Amazing. Okay. Okay. I want to share a story with you. It was 2020 during pandemic. I was talking to a friend of mine who is a senior technologist who maintained colonel.org for a decade and who is an ex-Red Hatter. I was curious that what he is doing during pandemic. I was like, what are you doing? And he said that he's ancivilizing his whole infrastructure. I said, why? I was curious. And he gave me an answer which actually changed the whole perspective for me for Ansible. So he said, if something happens to me, then people will able to understand what and why about my infrastructure. Ansible helps you to think declaratively. The comment indeed was deep and it's a fact. But thinking declaratively, is it the only feature that makes Ansible cool? Not really. There is a lot of things in the list. Agent list, architecture, cross-platform support, easy way of deploying and deploying in the server. So there are many in the list and also it enhances the security and mitigates human error and makes so easy. I started learning my system administration through Ansible or lately in Ansible. So that is how we are pretty cool actually. So no wonder why Ansible is the most popular free and open source automation project. Now when we are talking about Ansible, we are not talking about a single project. Rather, we are talking about a whole ecosystem. Right now we have 20 plus project inside Ansible ecosystem. And like every other successful open source project, there are certain things which lies at the very core open source ethos, collaboration and community. What is Ansible community? Rather, who are Ansible community? You are Ansible community. We all are Ansible community, whether you are a user, developer or people like us who get paid to work on Ansible, all of us together form the Ansible community. Now if you are an Ansible community package user or you use automation platform or you are a red hat partner, you are a part of the community. Also if you contribute via content or code or if you evangelize and tell other people how cool Ansible is, you are a part of the community. Ansible is blessed to have a very strong community in regards of contributors. Ansible used to be the 10 most popular open source project in GitHub before 2020, before Ansible core and collection split it. Now if we talk about in terms of users, there are millions of, like the user base is in millions. And when we want to see what how big is our contributors base, let's use this chart. So this proves how big is our contributor base. This is a chart dated April 2023. This shows the contribution, like staff versus non-staff. So if you if we see here, it's 57% of the contribution has been made by the by the staff and the rest of it by the community. Now if we see the unique authors in this set, 184 has been staff and a staggering number of 4,170 being non-staff. We have used and we have considered PRs and review comments for the last three years on GitHub, where we have indexed like 50,000 plus items and covered 376 GitHub reports. Now is it actually the graph which shows how big is our contributor base? Actually not. We haven't considered the 33,000 plus roles and collections on Galaxy. We are pretty big. Now are you interested in like Ansible and do you find our ecosystem interesting? And maybe some of you want to start contribution or you have started your contribution towards Ansible. Let us give like both of us give you certain pointers to that. Like how can you contribute to Ansible and anyone and everyone can become a hero in the Ansible land? So how to become a hero in the Ansible land? There are many there are many options for you. If you want to contribute via code, which is generally, which is a norm, which is the first thing it comes to the mind. Of course you can. We are a Python shop, majorly our code basis in Python and as I mentioned we are a free and open source project and it is licensed under GPL v3. Now collections, if you want to share your plugins, your roles and modules and you think it can be helpful for the community, please come and share it. One of the major reason why Ansible is so successful and has been adopted by a large number of people is because of its documentation. I am a living proof of that. I have learned Ansible by learning from the documentation. Now this documentation not only our documentation not only describes the tool rather it gives you certain practical examples which is very, very helpful. So if documentation is your passion, please join our documentation team Ansible meetups. So meetups is a place where upstream and downstream the users and the contributors, the whole community collaborate with each other. We have 139 plus meetup groups and 52,000 plus members all over the globe. Find one and join one of such meetup groups and share your automation journey. If you are interested in web design, currently we are trying to build a website. We are in dire need of website designers, UX and UI, apart from the need which we have in our Ansible ecosystem, please join our group. Carol is going to tell you more about this in her later part of the talk. And most importantly, run Ansible meetings, share your knowledge, share your user journey, share your stories. This is your chance to give back to the community. Now in this section, the next part of our talk, we are going to describe each of these in details like how can you do that, like how can you contribute via code. Now as I said Ansible is a big ecosystem, so you can ask Anvesha, it's a big ecosystem, how can I find which are the spaces I should look for if I want to contribute to Ansible. So these are the spaces you should look for if you want to contribute to Ansible, three GitHub organizations and Ansible Galaxy. Then the next question comes, there are so many projects in the Ansible universe. Now which are the projects which might be interesting? You might want to go and check our new Ansible ecosystem page where you can find what is the definition and what does each of the project does. I have actually mentioned a few of them over here, but you can go and find about all of them in the Ansible ecosystem page. As I said, we are a Python shop, so if you are a Python programmer, please consider contributing to us. You can fix bug or you can report something which might be a problem for you, you don't know it might be a problem for others as well. So please start contributing by fixing bug or adding a new feature. Now how to find out, like if you want to start contributing, how to find out. So look for these labels, easy fixes and good first start issues, like easy fixes are the good first start issues. So these are the labels you should look for when you want to start to contribute. Now the next part is Ansible collection. If you want to start contributing to Ansible collection, it is a very good way of contribution, like place to start with. So Ansible collections is what gives Ansible the superpower and why I say that. Because Ansible, there are thousands of collections, as I mentioned before, which is maintained by the domain experts, which keeps Ansible ahead in its game and also gives us agility. So if you want to start contributing to collection, it's great. Now how to do that, there's a link contribute to collections. If you want to contribute to collections, it's a document which will guide you step by step for that. Also you can upload your collection to galaxy.ansible.com and there you can share your collections with the bigger audience, with the community. And that is how you can become the guardians of the galaxy. Now if you want to start contributing to any of these projects, I would strongly recommend you please do come to our booth and talk to Andhrae and a majority of the Ansible engineers over here. If you have any questions you can turn around and talk to Adam and Chad who are sitting over there. So please do that. And now Carol is going to tell you what are the other ways you can contribute to. Thank you, Anwesha. There's so much great information in there. So let's continue. All right, Anwesha already touched a bit on documentation. And one of our main docs person is over at Ansible booth, he's Don Naro. So if you have any documentation questions, you can go talk to him. And actually tomorrow we will have a talk at 2 p.m. and it's about some of the progress and things we have worked on this year. And one of the major things is using personas to define user journeys in the documentation website. And Don will be the person who will be at the talk talking about the details. So I'll let him do the honors tomorrow. So please come to the talk if you're interested. Then, oops, my speaker notes. We think about documentation and sometimes, you know, like you're thinking, oh, I'm new to Ansible. How can I help in the documentation? And actually, new users can be great help because as you go through the documentation to get started, you will probably notice ways to improve to make things clearer that some of us who have used Ansible before take for granted. So if you find some way, like, oh, this is actually missing a step that if it's specified, it will help the process of learning, of explaining the steps of using Ansible. So you can create an issue or a PR to bring that to our attention, to the community's attention, and we can improve the documentation with your help. If you're interested, we have a documentation working group, DOGS, DAWGS, and we have a cute doggy mascot there. It's every Tuesday at 1800 UTC, and it's our matrix at the docs colon ansible.com matrix room, which is bridged to the Ansible-DOGS RSC channel. And actually, this room is also bridged to a Discord channel because we actually have a group of writers from Nigeria, I think, who are also contributing to Ansible-DOGS. So it's definitely a global community-wide effort to improve to DOGS. Similarly with code, there are some issues you can find in the DOGS site repo that are easy fixes that you want to get started with. You can search with these labels to find these issues. And the bit.ly link below Ansible-DOGS contrib outlines the process of how you can create a pull request and submit it and what information you need to contribute to the documentation repo and improve that. Again, I want to touch a bit on meetups, so I'll mention a bit more about how you can contribute by organizing a meetup. These are great numbers, tens of thousands of meetup members, more than 100 meetup groups. But honestly, not all these meetup groups that we support are active. Partly due to the pandemic, partly due to various reasons, some people started the meetup group, changed jobs, lost interest, things in life happen, so they may have abandoned it. So please, if you know of an Ansible meetup group in your area, if you go to meetup.com, search for it. If you find it and it's not active and you're interested to make it active again, come talk to us. If there's no meetup group in your area, you want to start one, also come talk to us. And if you find a meetup group with NCBool as one of the organizers, that's probably supported by us. And also besides meetups, which are more kind of local and regional, sometimes in your different languages, depending on your audience, we also have presence at many major force events, such as this one. But as much as our team would like to be everywhere at once, meeting all of you, we actually depend also on the community, such as you to represent us, represent the community at events. So I want to give a shout out to Daniel Shire, I think Slantzlemies, who actually did that specifically for Chemnitz Linux days in Germany. We were not there. He approached us. He said he would like to have an Ansible workshop or a talk or something and even had a booth and we sent him some stickers and he was there just sharing about Ansible community, contributions, the joy of using Ansible and things like that. So these are little things that if you have the interest, we want to support you and help you to do things like that. Sure, sometimes, yeah, sometimes organizing a meetup, it is a lot of work. Not sometimes, it is a lot of work. But there are ways that even if you don't have all the time to do the main organizing, you can help in many different ways. If you have a space for a meetup, you can help to host it. If you don't have time to take care of all the organization, but you have a topic you want to talk about, approach a local organizer and offer to speak at their meetup. And even by attending a meetup, you are contributing, you're helping them because a meetup is nothing without the people, without the audience. So there are many ways that you can do to make meetups happen and be a part of the community. Another thing we want to mention is we are working on Aung Wai Shui's leading this effort, we are working on a meetup toolkit for organizers. There are sample emails to find locations, speakers, templates for social media posts, and something to get you started. And of course, this thing will also be open to contributions because we realize that many different regions have different challenges and variations about how meetups are organized. So you can also as a meetup organizer, help other organizers to improve their meetups. And also, one example is if you want to do a presentation on how to contribute to Ansible, we will upload these slides to the schedule.com after this, and if you notice on the first slide, there was a Creative Commons license, so feel free to use these slides at your next meetup to talk about how to contribute to Ansible. Chatting sounds like a fun, easy way to hang out with people you share common interests with, right? How is that contribution? Well, by chatting with people in the Ansible space, we have a matrix space, space on matrix, similar to the DefCon space that some of you are now into, you know, join, participate in this event. By, you can help by answering questions because a lot of users come on these chat channels to ask questions on basic usage or on contributions, quote questions, event questions. So, you know, a lot of you have a lot of great knowledge to share, and even if you don't know everything, well, because I usually don't know, I don't have most of the answers, but I know where to look for the answers, so I help like, oh, maybe you can talk to Anwesha for this, you can talk to Andre for that. So, you know, you can be the person connecting more people in the community. That's a great way to not just help each other, but also build the community spirit. So, what's a community without, you know, these strong connections and links to each other, right? So, chat, chat, just by chatting is a great way you can contribute. And if you're watching or chatting on matrix and having questions, we will hopefully be able to answer them soon, and I'll look at the matrix room after this talk. Oh, this is actually an XKCD comic that, by the way, the slides were put together by Leo Gallego, our teammate, so I actually found this tweet that somebody tweeted to me a while ago, because I used to be a hardcore IRC user. I'm like, I'm not, I'm going to stay here for life, but I got converted to, and now I'm a main matrix user, although I do have my two accounts breached to IRCNICs, but anyway, join us on matrix. So now is audience participation time. Hopefully you'll be able to scan this QR code, take out your phones now, start scanning, I'll give you a couple of minutes. And again, this is because Leo put together this initial set of slides for Red Hat Summit, Ansible Community Day last month. Thanks to him for finding a bunch of cute cat pictures. So if you scan it, you'll find out what I'm talking about. Please vote. And like Leo said, don't just vote for the cutest cat or funniest cat you see, but think about what you might be interested in contributing or what are your strengths and interests. I'm just going to pause for a while. If there's any questions at this time, we can maybe take one, if not, we can wait till the end. All right. So we've gone through quite a bit of many ways that you can contribute to Ansible Project. And there's definitely not an exhaustive list, there's definitely other ways that we have not mentioned. And there are also a couple of things we're working on that gives you more opportunities to contribute in the future. So if you are aware of some of our strategies from the beginning of the year, we talked about how, like Ansible is a large growing project, it's a lot of different sub-projects and different parts of the community. And one of the growing problems, growing pains is that things can get fragmented. So in order to kind of address this fragmentation, two of our kind of main strategic items for this year are to create a new website and to create a new forum. And we've definitely discussed this very thoroughly with the community. We have had meetings and GitHub issue discussions and things like that. So just curious, how many of you here knew that we were working on a new website? Good, thank you. So it's a work in progress. There is a repo that's doing this with the community and you're welcome to join the website working group, our matrix, at website. As with website, there's a lot of content that needs to be added and there's a lot of visual designs that needs to happen to kind of pull everything together. And we have great engineers and writers and stuff like that, but unfortunately we are lacking in some like UX, UI designers, people who have that ability to create engagement through the online presence. So if you have that interest, it's an easy way to showcase your talent and also help this Ansible community. And as the website launch in phases, there will be additional ways to contribute like writing blog posts, creating video content. And if you have great ideas, please come talk to us and also join the website working group to share your ideas. The other thing I mentioned is the forum. So it will be based on discourse. And it's just a way because we have many, how many hundreds of GitHub repos, right? So each of them have discussions and issues. And sometimes it's really hard to find, if you're looking for something specific to have a central place to find that discussion that's happening. So we hope that this forum will be able to kind of address some of that and pull the community together in one central place that you can share different ideas. And it's almost close to the end where in the finishing raised the finish line here and hopefully within the next couple of weeks or at least the next month we'll be able to share the availability of the forum. It's 99% probably it's going to be forum.ansible.com. So once it's confirmed, we will let you know. And please subscribe to the Bullhorn if you haven't already to stay updated of this. So how do you subscribe to the Bullhorn? How do you follow all these things that we've said for now? Since we don't have the website ready yet, we do have the ansible.com slash community page that has the Bullhorn information, has some of the project information. And so in the meantime, please keep your eyes on the page to stay on top of the updates. Once the website is ready, it will definitely be announced there and you can continue following us and interacting with us on the website and the forum. And if you have any questions that you want to reach out to us directly, of course Matrix is one thing, the ansible space and also ansible.com is another way to reach our whole team directly. And speaking of the whole team, Anwesha, would you like to share with us about, tell us about this? OK, Carol and I might be present over here, but this is a work of all these wonderful people. Carol and I also included in those list of wonderful people though. But you can see many of them in our booth and some of them who are part, as I said, of the bigger ansible ecosystem will be there in our booth as well. So please join us in our booth and have, if you have questions, we'd love to be interrupted. And so whenever you find us, grab us and ask whatever you want to ask about ansible. So here is our wonderful team. So this slide, as Carol has been mentioned a couple of times, has been made by this person with a red hat, Leo. And thank you, Leo, for that. And many of the questions which we said in this talk, like answered in this talk, has been answered by them. We are just echoing their thoughts. So thank you, our team. So every project, as we were discussing, every project advances and progresses. So it is very essential that we work on the core of that project, like what is the thing, what we are working for, the mission statement. So we are working for our mission statement. If you can go to this QR code and we are having a feedback, like we want your feedback, we need your feedback for describing and having our new mission statement for Ansible. Please consider giving a feedback over there. We would really appreciate it. And with that, do we want to say thank you? Of course we want to say thank you, but before that, any questions from here, online perhaps? Thank you very much. And again, if you haven't scanned the QR code, it will be available at the booth as well. Please come talk to us. We would love to hear from you. Enjoy the rest of the F-Con. Thank you so much.