 Hi, good afternoon everyone and thank you for being here today. My name is Nicole Huseman of Intel Corporation and we're here today to talk about the Diversity Internship Program that the OpenStack Foundation introduced in Barcelona at the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona. So with that, I'd like to start with introductions and then we'll quickly dive into what Sonia and Megan have been working on. So Sonia Ramza, Megan Guiney, Lauren Sell and Tom Feifield, if you could give introduction that would be fantastic, thank you. So as you know, I'm Sonia. I'm based in Melbourne in Australia and as part of my internship I've been in the community management division with Tom as my mentor and I've been looking at things like the ambassador program, helping manage that, look at the user groups which are trying to improve the process involved with new ones coming on or whether some that have died off and then revamping that sort of stuff and also driving the Australian IT community towards the OpenStack Summit in Sydney. Thanks Sonia. Hi, I'm Megan. I have been working with Chris Hodge who's unfortunately unable to be present today and I've been working with Interoperability and QA which is to say Interop Work Group, Tempest and RefStack. I've also done a little bit of work on trying to build out some back end for the licensing and trademark program. So yeah, it's been a good time. Thank you. And I'm Lauren Sell. Oh no. I'm Lauren Sell and I work at the OpenStack Foundation and I am filling in for Chris Hodge today. Unfortunately he had to fly out but I have the pleasure to work with both Sonia and Megan and just more broadly across our community looking at new folks coming in and learning to work upstream so it can bring a bit of that perspective as well. And I'm Tom Feifeld. I'm a community manager at the OpenStack Foundation looking predominantly after users and I've been very fortunate to be working with Sonia over the last couple of months. Thank you guys. So as we all know, really contributions are the life and blood of a project and the internship program that was introduced in Barcelona was really focused on growing our next generation of OpenStack contributors critical to the success of the project. What we'd like to do now is to talk a little bit more to Sonia and Megan about, let's start with what are some of your proudest accomplishments in the last six months in working with the Foundation? One of the biggest things for me was actually doing a talk yesterday and then that was about getting involved with the community without any code and then another talk about the ambassador program. That was a huge milestone for me because I was able to take everything I've learned in the short time I've been here since January and package it up and give a talk so other people can also get involved with the community. So giving back and taking what I've learned and just giving that out which was great. Excellent. Thank you. I know a lot of my things that I'm most proud of that I've worked on here are things that are just getting ready to go into production. One of them is, as I said, I've worked a little bit helping to improve upon the system that we have restoring licensing data and I'd have to say that my favorite thing that I've worked on so far has been building out a database for that and getting to write a script that syncs a spreadsheet and the database and keeps them both up to date. It's been really cool because it's given me the opportunity to build upon something that's a functional system but not necessarily ideal and move that on its way towards a way more ideal solution both for people who are on the more technical side and hopefully eventually will have good end points for people who are less comfortable on that side as well. I have to jump in here and say, when we interviewed Megan to come to the foundation she was like, I love database work. We have some projects for you. I do. I'm a big dork. I love data. So that's a real passion for you. Oftentimes we have surprises or challenges along the way. Were there any challenges that you guys encountered in your work and working with the foundation and getting up to speed on OpenStack and all of the complexities? Definitely that last part you mentioned, understanding the complexities and also how the whole community is structured. That was a massive learning curve to get my head around all the terminology like project technical lead, the user committee, the technical committee all those sorts of things. It was difficult to sort of, not difficult but just a challenge to take all that information in but once you get there you know it like that and it's been a good challenge to learn. For me one of the biggest challenges was something kind of interesting and it's because I come from a more ops background rather than development and so where I'm at even though I'm one of the big like pushers of automation and like moving forward in that direction I've never really gone through an intensive code auditing process before because if it runs like bug free in the environment where I come from it's good enough. So one thing that's been really interesting is learning to discipline myself a lot more and I've been really appreciative of the people especially on the rough stack side who have been very, very patient with me and they've been very good about giving their time to kind of give me really solid constructive feedback and so that's been like a real gift to have a team that's like so patient with my noobness basically. Yep. As you've been working this last six months were there any knowledge you want to share or any tools that you found particularly helpful or folks along the way too? Definitely Tom as a mentor he was really great in helping me get through just starting out and giving me the orientation I needed to start contributing and making a mark in the community. Sorry I thought you were going to say something. And also being so far away in Australia just having a time zone convert it was actually really helpful working out when we could have appropriate meetings that was actually as silly as it sounds it was a really big help. If it's okay I'll just jump in and say that in the OpenStack community particularly and I'm sure this is true in many communities as well there's just so much going on and potentially many, many different things coming into your inbox and one of the tools that I noticed Sonya worked with was Trello just to do a bit of task management and flow between different states of the user group approval process. The way is as you were mentoring Sonya were there surprises or experiences along the way that you'd like to share that could help other mentors to bring up people within the community? Absolutely. So as Sonya mentioned we're remote from each other. I live in Taiwan and Sonya lives in Melbourne, Australia which is about 9, 10, 12 hours flying time away but relatively time zone consistent and being that remote all of the aspects of managing remote workers apply and collaborating with remote colleagues apply but I find that in many organizations with remote staff they often assume that the remote staff are very independent and by themselves able to just perform automatically and I find that with people who are still growing their experience you need to make sure that you actually have touch points and I know that I went on a trip for a couple of weeks and Sonya actually had to remind me hey we haven't had a meeting for a while so make sure you're very proactive about communicating with each other and constantly sharing that. You've had many mentoring experiences as well in bringing new folks into the community. What is your perspective on what's been most successful for you? So sorry. You know we've had a couple different whether it's you know a new community member or an intern with the foundation I'm usually a throw them in the deep end kind of person but at the same time I think that there is a value to introducing them to different people in the community as soon as possible and getting them connected and not positioning yourself as a go between for that all the time to help them help them make those relationships find the resources that they need in a way that's very seamless I mean I know that I've had folks that have no idea that Sonya and Megan are part-time interns who are still at university and they think that they are full-time employees and they are very involved in the community obviously but they wouldn't have known that because that's not the way that they're necessarily positioned they're already so active they already have all of those relationships and I think that's really important to grow quickly and get going. Yeah one of the things that I quickly noticed this week in getting to know Sonya and then Megan as well is how quickly they've come up to speed and how integrated into the community you both are so that's been very impressive for both of you and also for the mentors that you have at the foundation as well did you have any hiccups or challenges along the way that you needed to overcome? So again a lot of my struggles in this were learning how to like discipline my code and make it so that it's really clean and consistent and solid rather than being like something I hack together in ten minutes but hey it runs the other thing that I kind of struggled with in the very beginning was reaching out because a lot of the people in this community are so incredibly technically strong and confident and like super impressive and like that was a little bit scary for me but like these people who are like impressively impressively more experienced than I have than I am have like really been incredibly open to reaching out and teaching me things and I've just been so impressed by the community and how it's really reached out and helped me adjust, yeah. Thank you for sharing that, I appreciate it. Sonya how about you? Were there any hiccups or challenges along the way that you had to kind of work through as you were kind of immersing yourself in the ambassador program? Just definitely as the time zone is a big challenge being Australia is now ahead so they're like already on Friday it's the middle of the night so remembering to sort of send the emails at the right time so they don't get to people at 4am in the morning that sort of thing and just also being able to follow up because everyone in this community is just super busy they're doing amazing things and it's always really important to follow up with people and then you sort of sometimes you can sort of miss that email or forget that you haven't got a response and then you go back and you go okay I've got to just sort of give a friendly reminder or follow up and say hey how's it going so just remembering to do that is a big thing. If you were to talk to other new folks coming into the community are there any words of advice or if you want to say top three things that you should or shouldn't do are there any words of advice that you would give to other folks like yourself who are coming into the OpenStack community? In terms of actually just joining the community I'd say find your local user group whoever's in your region and doing stuff with OpenStack find them, network and if you really want to get to know people the best way is to put your hand up and ask if they need any help because there's always things that need to be done and they will love to have you on board and that's also how you meet more people and then you also get to network as well with other individuals in the industry who are also doing other things with OpenStack and working at particular places so it can be a very good opportunity to also meet different people from different places. It's interesting because the environment I come from has turned out a couple people and some of the best advice I got is some that I would pass on to other interns and it's funny because I didn't even get it from somebody who's gotten involved in OpenStack and who's gotten involved in OpenStack's partner because they'd seen it secondhand and though my friend was a little less aware of her transition into the community her partner was definitely aware and Lauren you mentioned you like to throw people into the deep end and though there's lots and lots of support there's so much and so in the very beginning it can feel like an absolute flood of information and my friend's partner she told me that it's going to be hard in the beginning but you have to hang tough and put it in and what you get put in is really what you get out so like that would be the advice that I would give to really stick with it and it's going to be hard and it's going to be scary but you can totally do it because like you got this. Great, thank you. Extremely encouraging. I'm going to throw this to Lauren and to Tom now in terms of from a mentor perspective what are some of the top words of advice you would give to other folks like yourselves? Absolutely, so I guess this is something that's adjacent to what Sony was talking about for and the people often as the mentor the more senior person in the community you have a lot of those connections and really take the time to scroll through your Rolodex and find people that you should introduce your mentee to I'd highly recommend that as a beginning I don't know if you want to alternate perhaps? Absolutely, and the other aspect I'd probably mention is not to underestimate anyone so in the early first couple of weeks of working with Sonya she'd already very quickly burned through all of the tasks that we thought she was going to do so we had to rapidly kind of work out what was going to be next so it's important that you're not just going to come up with a front-loaded set of tasks that will be done across an entire time you have to be constantly thinking about what's next, how is the advancement working and it's really interesting to see that take different directions and forms as the process progresses I was actually going to say something similar to the second one No, it's good I was going to say not to think too small in terms of the tasks that you're outlining even if you're coming up with a project that might push your mentee or someone that you're bringing into the community I think it's worth getting that exposure and helping them through that process and kind of along those lines I would say just for me hiring anyone on your team or new people that are coming into the community you have this kind of idea of the role and the job description these outline of tasks they're going to do but I really like to pay attention to how they're performing what they're picking up on, what they really enjoy what they start to spend their time on and then kind of mold their path from there and not have it be quite so structured to what you thought it was going to be in the beginning just see what people really gravitate toward and how they're making the biggest impact in the community and then help them go that direction and the other thing just kind of a little more tactically but obviously we're a distributed community and having to talk online where the foundation itself is a distributed team so that communication can certainly be difficult especially as we're heading into things like the summit I know for everyone here it's a very busy time whether you're launching a product they're working on preparing for sessions but the foundation team it's like a month before the summit is just a crazy time and so it's easy to kind of lose sight of communicating or making sure that you get on video we use zoom meetings quite a bit or we use slack calls or Skype calls but getting on video and having those conversations making time for that is extremely important even though you think oh I don't have 30 minutes for this it can actually save time and help everyone be more effective heading into the summit so that's something that I fall down on sometimes but I think it's very important and try to find out some other questions that I'd like to ask towards the end is are there any questions that I haven't asked that information or do you'd like to share things that come to mind not off the top of my head immediately like a lot of my takeaways that haven't been technical from this are just like the absolute strength of community especially when the community is so like confident and strong and vibrant it's just awesome but other than that other than reiterating that I can't think of anything else that I would want to say just if anyone ever wants to pursue being an intern at the OpenStack Foundation it's probably one of the best decisions you ever make and even just advice being don't be afraid to ask questions you know that's the best way to learn and pick up on things and it's such a supportive and friendly environment they'll be happy to answer your questions or help you through the process as Lauren said you know throwing you in but they will guide you they won't just sort of leave you to go at it alone so things like that and then also making those connections and meeting new people as much as it can be like a bit daunting it's it is one of the best things you can do as part of it as well excellent they definitely toss you in but they don't toss you in without a pool floaty well I want to say a big thank you to Nicole I don't know if y'all have noticed that she's wearing this medal around her neck because she just won a community award for being the mentor of mentors and I just really appreciate all of her efforts to help organize this and not somewhat of a shameless plug but she helped get funding from Intel to support the interns that we brought into the community and help get more folks involved and grow there and I just really appreciate that and if there's anyone out there it doesn't have to just be an OpenStack Foundation thing if there's anyone out there who has internship positions at their organization or just generally wants to be a mentor in the community we would love to get you connected into a few different programs that we have like this one that that Nicole and Intel have helped support so just really really appreciate that and all of your efforts to make this possible and our interns are incredible well that's a tough paragraph to follow I'll fall back on something I've been wanting to do for the last 20 minutes which is wish a very happy birthday to Gene Kuo who's in the 4th row there he was one of our prior interns based in Taiwan and worked a lot on AskOpenStack.org so thank you very much Gene you're very much still a part of things and thanks to everyone else on the panel as well it's really been a pleasure one of the things that I truly appreciated about the OpenStack community is what a large mentoring community that we have I'm involved in the speed mentoring activities that have become really sort of a mainstay of each of the different summits we have Iri Ko who leads upstream mentoring we have a long term mentoring program I have certainly enjoyed getting involved and helping with these activities because it is my passion and because I'm very dedicated to ensuring the diversity and inclusion within OpenSource communities and I've really really enjoyed getting to know Sonia and Megan it's been fantastic though so thank you all for being here today I have a question I guess this is a question for Sonia and Megan I would like opportunity to bond between all of the interns because I'm from OPNFB and I've noticed that interns develop a great relationship with mentors and they're project teams which is great but I don't think I've personally done a good job of making sure that interns have the opportunity to know each other and bond so I just want to see what your experience has been I will say that I'm based out of Portland I'm based out of Australia so there have been some issues with that in terms of that particular aspect time zones are hard but I did get the opportunity to meet Sonia at the summit and she's awesome and I've been totally glad to meet her along with everybody else here it's been super cool to put names to faces and generally it's been fun getting to know her and I am typically on the other side of the world so that is a difficulty in this particular case yeah thank you for the question just likewise for Megan's awesomeness but also Tom and another person I work with David Flanders they encouraged me to connect with other mentors so I sent Megan a message before the summit and said hey I'm one of the other interns can we chat and that sort of thing so I have been encouraged remotely to speak unfortunately it's the first time we've met but it's been fantastic to get to know her in person as well thank you for the question let's ask her are there any other questions that the audience may have oh this question is for anyone on the panel really but do you see any areas for improvement for the community to lower the barrier of entry for new contributors I'm curious if Megan has any feedback on becoming an upstream contributor recently so I had actually prior to getting this internship looked into getting involved because it's always been something I'm interested in as I said my organization has a history of having some of our really cool alumni having done open staff work so a lot of opportunities for that and why I didn't start sooner was because I didn't know where to start and realistically that's just a thing of getting involved in local community so I think the only real thing that they could be doing better which I mean they're awesome and like there's just not enough people on the ground ever to do this sort of thing is like meetups and we do have a Portland meetup that's my own fault realistically I was just a bit shy so really no areas for improvement I think there's a lot of room for improvement and getting new people involved especially in different areas and certainly contributing upstream I know last year we changed the individual contributor license agreement to DCO but there's still some just kind of infrastructure and process changes we need to make along the way of not necessarily needing a launch pad ID or some other pieces and I do think that that kind of upstream making it much easier for people to contribute upstream is important as the projects maturing as we want more users to be able to contribute that may not have a full time person that can become extremely involved in a project but may have a couple of things they want to submit every once in a while so I know that's been a big conversation and then certainly as we've been growing globally obviously there's been a ton of investment and interest from China we've talked about the time zone issues but how do we really help more people be able to get involved and contribute and a lot of this has to do with just better documentation different communications channels and hand holding through that and that's what we've talked about this week I know I was talking with Mike Perez about he was going to put together like a punch list of where can we really use resources in the community what are kind of the gaps to fill in because we've had a lot of people come this week and they're like I'm excited where do I get involved and we'd love to be able to point them to a place and say look this is the low hanging fruit this is exactly where we would love for you to get involved and then here's kind of the getting started part and I know there also was an effort to do some different lightning talk recordings this week that we can publish online afterwards of kind of how to I think it was along the lines of what are reviewers looking for how to kind of get your code into open stack which hopefully will be helpful as well so those are some of the kind of upstream side things that I'm hearing about but I do think there's a lot of opportunity for growth there and in fact it's probably worth pointing out some of the changes we've made to this event that we're here at the open stack summit so the onboarding rooms for example you can go in there and join your favourite upstream building project and learn how the sausage is made as was famously quoted and in addition we've started well we've worked to remove the artificial barrier between those who are developing upstream and those who are using the software by reimagining the design somewhat to the forum and we've seen this week many many more collaborations across that divide happening in this session so excited to see what we can do in Sydney in six months time. Good question. The onboarding rooms are like super cool and like I was seeing those and thinking that they sound amazing and like I totally wish I'd have access to that. Hi, my question is for Sonya and Megan who are interns and I it's refreshing in a tech conference and you see for the woman up on stage so my question for you is what motivated you to apply for the internship at a really tech organisation foundation like that and what kind of tips you would say for the audience on how to motivate young girls in their community I was really passionate about technology I love the fact that how it can help people because I've been touched by people with disability in my life I've got a sister with disability and technology has been a massive thing in helping her to live an even better life and face life challenges so that's why I'm really passionate about where technology can go and where it can take people and that's why I want to get involved in tech as well, just how to and tinkering and that sort of thing and also the community part getting people involved I really love the idea of connecting people and helping them achieve new goals by getting involved as well that's also been a really big passion of mine so it sort of came together in this internship because it was like community management and then with the tech companies so it's really been like a really nice sort of overlap in two big passions of mine getting involved in tech I guess encouraging them to look at organizations like in Australia we have I think it's called Code Like a Girl and Robo Girls so great organizations that come to schools and show things like the robots that they can program like getting them interested and sparking the interest in doing fun stuff with tech and code then they can put them onto that path of taking STEM and seeing where it could take them that there might be a potential way to get more women involved for me this is a more complicated question because outside of being female I'm a pretty traditional nerd type I always grew up being very interested in math and the sciences and tech in general that said I would say that the best advice I think that would lead to getting more women into tech is breaking that stereotype that you have to be the traditional tech nerd there's room for everybody here tech is for everybody and it's really about finding that niche within the industry that you're really passionate about I'm really into data I'm really into coding and I'm really into databases and that's just who I am and not everyone has to be that person and if we were all that person the tech industry would be kind of flat and boring and it just wouldn't function at all so I'd say that really it's find that thing that likes your imagination on fire and just go after it I will say though that statistically women are more likely to take no for an answer and not persist like after statistical analysis in cases where women were told no and kind of turned down for opportunities so we're more likely to stop and so we have to figure out a way to break past that and make them realize that just keep pushing believe in yourself and pursue your passions and kick down those doors and you can do it it's about really persisting I think well thank you all for being here late on the Thursday afternoon we really appreciate it thanks for joining us