 I'm very excited to be presenting remotely for OspreyCon. Of course, I'd be more excited to be there with all of you and to see all of you, but I'm still really happy to be able to present today. So hi, my name is Emma Irwin, and I started my journey in open source as a developer back when offering customer solutions in open source was all about pitching how much cheaper it would be than enterprise. So we come a long way from then, and personally, over time, I started to see the huge impact open source had on customers and the accessibility of software solutions for a broad group of industry and people. But personally, started to learn and advance my own skills. I found inspiration in open source communities, and as part of my job, but also it's something that I did on my free time to start to learn new technologies and to find mentorship. And then what started as an intention to let others know about open source and open source communities in my job, but outside of that led me to a number of open source projects to support their success actually on the other side of things working with contributors. Some of these projects included MIFOS, Sahana, Wikimedia, and Yusha Hedi. And then I worked for Mozilla, that led me to Mozilla where I worked for seven years, focused on open source strategy and community empowerment. And then finally, which most recently led me to Microsoft's open source programs office where I've been for about a year. And part of my role is to do just that, so teach and empower others to find their success as well. And no matter the audience or the purpose, I've always found that creating the aha moment for people in open source is really important to unlocking the potential of people. And so there's perhaps no better example of an aha moment, at least in technology and programming, than the good old hello world, which is always sort of proof that you've learned the very first concept in programming languages or other things. And so that's the lens that I bring in, we'll refer to throughout when teaching open source. And so I'm just gonna be a quick agenda, so you can sort of see where we're going here. I'm gonna give you a bit of introduction and background to the topic, which is using connected learning to teach open source. I'll share some of the research and learning I've done in the last year at Microsoft to understand what that means in the context of an organization, and as a service of an open source programs office. I'll be describing how we designed those courses and learning engagements, what we've learned from that so far, and then how this is all leading us to an open source learning as a program or an OSPO program. So first to research and learning, I'll just first say that when we talk about teaching open source in organizations and as a function of an OSPO, the people I'm thinking about are in basically three groups of courses, people on the edges of these, but those working on open source projects, but without perhaps a lot of experience or just very specific experience before actually joining that project and the company. And this does happen all the time where people are hired for a specific skill set, like the MySQL or like specific web technologies where they haven't actually worked and they open very much. So I think about that group a lot. The second one is those considering releasing, using or contributing to open source, but who haven't had a lot of experience in one of those three pillars. And then the third is the managers of those two groups. So being able to, the managers have to have an understanding of the value of open source and the opportunity to learn and improve the product as part of engineering excellence. I tried not to come in when I joined Microsoft with an opinion about what people needed to learn or do. So I spent a few months, two, three months doing a lot of research about what open source at Microsoft meant and took a qualitative and quantitative approach to that. So I interviewed a lot of people and then from what I learned in that, I ran a survey. Probably most notable to share is that both of those were created around these sort of four pillars of culture and building healthy culture is defined by the culture code, which is a book on building healthy communities, wherever you want to build communities. And I highly suggest it to think about. And so basically the four categories are probably in some ways self-explanatory, but others not. So belonging is just really asking do people feel like they belong to the open source culture at Microsoft? Do they feel like they belong to open source generally in the project that they're doing? Is there vulnerability and trust? Can people learn and grow or is there anxiety or mistrust that investing their time in learning and participating will go without reward or recognition? Are people empowered or enabled to do open source work or is it something that feels separate, which is not unusual in open source generally that people are doing open source on the side of their desks? So understanding where people are in that. And then is there a purpose associated with people feel purpose when they're working towards open source solutions? So these are the categories that the questions, my interview questions and ultimately the survey questions were focused on understanding. The initial, sorry, about five from the, sorry, from the interviews, I had about five specific themes that came out of that. So I won't read the slide to you, but basically there's a theme around empowerment, confidence and connection. How confident people felt to, how well they understood how to collaborate internally or with others. And some folks had some great ideas for how to do that. There seems to be a missing term. The pillars of use, contribute and use, contribute and release seem to be missing grow, right? Like everything is kind of shoved into release and that was making, like talking about growing open source projects and moving beyond release a little more challenging. So I felt like this needs to be its own category, just to get at some of the things that we need to learn and do. I found that storytelling needed a bit of work, mostly though around myth busting, rather than people not understanding open source or the value of it, just that there might be some misunderstandings around what that meant in the context of Microsoft or just the technologies associated. Lots of great energy for funding FOS and ideas for how Microsoft could do more and do better. Some of those ideas we're already doing, which was encouraging that I was able to reflect back to people, oh, that's already happening or here's, so that we could kind of think about building on what we're already doing. And then finally, but maybe most importantly throughout all of this is this need and understanding for a value exchange. And that's the visibility of open source on career goals and in manager reviews. Starting, I'm starting to refer to this as professional recognition. So we talk about recognition a lot in open source communities, but professional recognition is really, really important and we're gonna encourage people to invest their time and their brilliance in driving that forward. So professional recognition. And then the survey that I ran after that is largely based to test some hypothesis from the initial interviews. And so some quick things that we learned through the survey was 70% of the people responding expected their activities to grow in 2021. We just definitely call to action for an OSPO to think about how we can support those folks. And then really, really interesting, we asked a question about what type of support would you like this year to help you be successful in open source? And we had equal parts requests for technical support and technical learning as we did cultural support and cultural learning. So you can see each of the bars here are topped with orange or purple. The orange represents cultural requests and purple. Technical, of course, there was many more than this. I'm just highlighting these specific five. And the fact that connection with others internally, working with others internally and externally in open source was equal to the contributing on behalf of Microsoft. So the fact those were our two number one requested supports was pretty interesting and it kind of continued as we went down. People wanted to learn more about security, but also community building, diversity inclusion. And then in kind of third place there was using GitHub. And so that was really interesting, I think. We also saw some misunderstandings around security specifically. We asked a question, I was curious, if people understood some of the basic workflows associated with security with the question, what would you do if you were to open a, if you were to discover an upstream risk around security and the number one answer was to ask for support or open an issue in the open project, is not the right answer. But this was a bit of an aha moment, like speaking of aha moments, that happens as a two way thing for me and that I needed to be not just looking for what people thought they wanted to learn and know, but I'll always try and find gaps in what they don't know that they don't know. And this was an example of that. So the answer to this is actually, we have an email alias that you just reach out to and that kicks off a whole process. So that's some of the learning. There's a lot more, but of course, I only have so much time here to get through all this, but those are the key learnings that informed the next step, which was design learning. And so I mentioned that connected learning is how we've built this initial set of workshops and learning and connected learning itself as a relatively new term, having arrived on the scene, basically through the rapidly evolving digital technologies related to education that allow us to learn together online, which in the age of COVID is the only way that we could learn at the moment. And so when I say connected learning, basically what I mean is that prioritizing connection between employees in a way that advances their personal and career goals, sparks their imagination while providing the organization with the competencies their teams and customers need. So that's what I mean by connected learning. And I'll get into the design, which I'll probably expand on that for your understanding. So the first thing we did around course design is to pick some topic areas. And these were based on the surveys and themes that you saw. And we decided to start with four different workshops. The first was focused on code of conduct enforcement for inclusive communities, based on people's request to learn more about community building, diversity, inclusion. And also my own opinion that everyone should understand what the supports are in an organization to help you be successful in enforcing code of conduct. GitHub at Microsoft, which came as one of the top requested technical skill sets, contributing to open source on behalf of Microsoft, of course, another top skill, and then releasing an open project. So those are the initial four topic areas that we chose. And then when it came to designing the connected learning format, we decided that an hour was probably the most we could really ask of people's time, especially if you wanted to be successful in the first kind of pilot of this. And that we would split that hour into four parts, the first being presentation. So high level, we're not trying to get into everything, but we wanna help everyone understand the key pillars and our topic areas related to the thing we were learning to have breakout discussions where people would discuss their biggest challenges, their experiences, opportunities, the questions are always like related to the presentation itself. And then to come back for the next 15 minutes or so to, for people to share the things they heard, their themes. This happens a lot in workshops, you've probably been a part of in person. It's a little more challenging remotely, but this was anyways, our first connected learning design for open source. I'll also add that central to all of this content was storytelling. So from an inspirational perspective. So we didn't, although we did have some technical videos, we also, like at least for half of us, the course would also tell stories of colleagues and projects who are part of open source, like Nell Shamrel Harrington, who is my colleague on the open source programs office, who is also the lead maintainer for clearly defined and a board member for the Russ Foundation. So they're just two and a half minute videos where folks tell their story, how they came into open source and they've been really great in helping people, not just meet others in the organization through video, but also think about where they are, where they can go. From a project perspective, I like to tell stories of projects like Babylon JS, which actually started as an idea of an open source, of an employee and an engineer inside Microsoft who was able to pitch that and has since grown it to get a successful project with a team and with a community that supports it. So the inspiration here is that people's ideas matter inside of Microsoft and that you'll be listened to. So that's a second type of storytelling inspiration. And then finally, I branded all of this as the open source maintainer learning series. And the open source maintainer part is meant to be aspirational, not so much prescriptive in that the skills of an open source maintainer are highly in demand. They represent leadership in open source and their skills relevant to goals within the company. Just that it was recognizable. There's not a lot of explaining I had to do. People came with already an idea of what that was and that it felt positive. So that was the title and branding and the four workshops that we started. And so here's what we've learned so far running these. So we've run about 28 of these workshops which estimated around seven each. We had about 1500 registrations across these of which about 700 people turned up. So almost predictively half the people who registered turned up, so that's helped me properly resource things. But something I need to figure out is how to re-invite those folks again to see if they're still interested because we do run the workshops on a regular cadence. I can't share the diversity numbers but it's twice that we had goals for regional experience level and other dimensions that have had good representation. So that's been good. Some other things that we learned or like I can share with you is outreach can be hard even though we knew that people wanted this type of training and needed this type of training, helping connect that with people across a company especially as big as Microsoft was challenging. Some of the ways we're able to break through that was to request that executive and leadership email their teams to tell them that this is a good training to take that always resulted in registrations. Regularly putting in internal newsletters including engineering newsletters including the learning team newsletters and just attaching it to other initiatives of learning. We also created an OSS open source mailing list so that people who are interested could stay in touch on those courses. We're not constantly reaching out to people that they land in a place where if they're interested they can stay in touch. Something else that came out of the actual training outcomes itself so the code of conduct enforcement training did not effectively address some of the daily challenges of managing disruptive behaviors and while helpful processes policy tools it left out many questions and answers I guess around handling day-to-day microaggressions and other behaviors that over time can wear out a team and a community. These are things like people refusing to accept decisions reopening issues spam cross posting generally causing havoc that isn't specifically mentioned in a code of conduct. So that was something that was really interested in I started to call this that we're missing how to build a set of etiquette guidelines. This is more around content structure but having steps in the city this is one of my agendas for growing open source having steps are really helpful at translating to learning progress and then associating in a ha moment so a hello world type of moment or activity with each of those is really helpful in moving people through that process. Definitely working in open source is intimidating something constantly coming up against especially for people who haven't worked in the open but the inner source of the collaboration between internal teams on solutions like tools that people are using internally is actually a great bridge to open source so that it was really met with a lot of relief that for people that they could practice collaboration and issues and pull requests in the kind of the safety of the organization. So that's something that I encourage over and over again have examples in my presentations of inner source projects that they use every day that are examples of success and squarely in the realm of becoming successful in open source. The other thing I learned is about breakout rooms and I knew I was gonna learn about breakout rooms because although I've run some of these with COVID and the topic area I knew I was gonna learn more. So the one thing they did learn is that while it often worked to send people to breakout rooms with a series of questions related to the content they just learned it's actually way better to give them a problem to solve especially if you have a room full of engineers giving them a problem to solve together is nine times out of 10 gonna result in those folks trying to solve that problem. And so I've created since the beginning of these workshops I started to create exercises associated. So in the code of conduct they build and etiquette guidelines together in open source project they work through the steps to release a project and answer questions and then come back with how that was. So I can't recommend enough having some sort of small problem for people to solve together versus just open discussion. Again, this is something I learned earlier but I had almost forgotten about. So you can't just shove everything into a releasing open source course in an hour growing open source needs to be its own course. And so that is something we've actually evolved to. GitHub at Microsoft is better as a self study course. I mean, you can cover some of the basic concepts in a workshop, you know, talking like I am now but people really need time to work through a first pull request or, you know, getting things set up. So we, that's something that we've done as well. And all of this, all of this activity to build this connected learning workshop and these aha moments it sort of led into open or leading into open source as a program or rather a programmatic approach to open source learning in the organization. So the open source maintainer learning series now run on a weekly cadence and time zones. So we've gotten effective enough at running these and the outcomes and the aha moments all those great things are happening and we've updated it based on what we learned. So the code of conduct course now includes building etiquette guidelines which roll up to the code of conduct but deal with those small microaggressions that I had mentioned, releasing open source and growing open source are two different workshops. And then we have the contributing to open source on behalf of Microsoft. Allowed that we try to have experts and people in our open source champs program which is a internal leadership program and open source attend these calls to help give part of the presentation and answer questions. So we're actively trying to involve as many people in the presentations as possible to diversify the learning. And then we've also moved forward with self-study. So we learned that GitHub 101 needed to be its own course, it's its own course now. We recommend it in lots of different areas when we run into people asking questions. We also have a self-study for code of conduct and etiquette guidelines, which is a resource that people can refer to. And same with the GitHub 101 honestly, that the benefit of self-study courses also that becomes a resource that people can check back on. So both the GitHub 101 and code of conduct are areas where I think it's good for people to have resources to check in on. And then third, we've created a course called a self-study course called mapping your open source career which is an activity specifically using HR mapping resources to help people document their goals designed to support manager discussion. So that's that value exchange from the interviews like getting back to how we can help people understand and then talk to their managers and others about that value exchange. And one of the cool things about Microsoft that I've appreciated is that part of your performance review is that you're asked how you build on the work of others and that open source and inner source is squarely focused on is a great answer to that. So the mapping open source career helps people just work on that discussion. And the other thing we're doing is starting to bed these workshops and learning in onboarding programs. So there's lots of ways that people come to Microsoft and we start to figure out ways to offer this these or customized version of these based on the group as an onboarding to Microsoft 101. So we're starting to do that regularly as well. And part of that is that we might run a workshop but we also created an onboarding project boarding GitHub that people are assigned when they join Microsoft or they join a team maybe they've moved over. So we'll just get an issue assigned to them for a project work board and it's something that they can work through. So it's not meant to be it's meant to kind of combat that overwhelming like here's all the things that are open source and join this list and take this course and which is all overwhelming. So in the project we've broken into first steps in the first week in the second month and then helping people gradually track their progress which will help manager activities as well. So we're kind of excited to see more people connect with open source through this issue and progress tracking and onboarding. So that's the open source learning program that's starting to evolve. I hope that through this presentation which maybe hopefully I didn't talk too fast that there's some inspiration for you maybe there's something you've done that you'd be interested in sharing and I'd love to talk to you I'd love to answer your questions and just think so much for your attention today. Thank you, take care.