 Hello everybody. Welcome to the next session of DevConf 2022. My name is Andrey Veselov, and me and Richard Philo are moderating this session. This session goes live, and feel free to use chat and Q&A section for your questions. I think the speakers will be able to answer them in the end of the session or during the session. And next up, we have Maria Nubala, Maria Lordin, and Sumatra Mukherjee, speaking about federal community outreach revamped. And from this moment, I'm giving one to our speakers, and see you soon. Awesome. Thank you, Andrey. Appreciate it. So very quickly, we'll do an introduction for the folks who don't know us. I'm Maria Nordin. I am Fedora's Community Action and Impact Coordinator. I've been a part of Fedora since 2013, doing Fedora badges and graphic design on the design team. And I've stepped into the F-cake role at, like I was saying, the very end of 2019. And I've been doing this for about two years. Mariana, do you want to go next? Sure. Hi, everybody. My name is Mariana. I am a Fedora contributor since 2016. I have been mostly helping with community and outreach matters. I am not a redheader. So, yeah. Sumatra. So, I am Shumanthra. I work for the Q&A team, specifically the Fedora Q&A team. And my work is to organize test days. And other than that stuff, I help Maria and Mariana, you know, write the docs, push things to, you know, this awesome thing that we call revamp of the community, which will be talking more about it. So, Mariana, what's your day job? Sorry, I am a product owner. Yes. Yeah. And I'm sure you kick butt at that. Okay, cool. Thank you. So, let's get into this. A lot of people who are here, who might have kind of seen our story all along, we've presented at plenty of conferences, but there's some who haven't. So, we're going to try to give the background part kind of quickly. Feel free to drop questions into the chat, into the Q&A. The Q&A would be preferred. And we'll try to leave some time for questions. And we have something cool and new to show off today. So, we want to make sure there's plenty of time for that. So, I'm going to get into it first with how did we get to the community outreach revamp? So, you've heard us talking about this for almost a year and a half now. So, how did we get here? The Ambassador program in Fedora is a long-term program. It's been around for 15-plus years. And it's had a lot of ups and downs over the years. It just steadily grew at the beginning and was this really amazing thing. But as it continued to grow, it didn't necessarily scale. And it was not sustainable in the structure and format that it was. With that, tied with some changes with how money was distributed and how those decisions were being made, caused kind of a rift. And people ended up kind of leaving the Ambassador program, not being as excited about it. There was some unclear communication about changes. People were burnt out and we didn't have new folks to step into their shoes. People were feeling a bit unrecognized. There was a shortage of mentors, as I mentioned. So, I came in end of 2019, as I mentioned. And one of the first things that happened was somebody started the Ambassador conversation again. And I had had some inspiration about how to make some change happen from a book club that I'm a part of. And so, I came up with a proposal to the community. So, this was going to be an objective that would revamp several of the outreach teams. So, we have kind of a cluster of them that have merged and grown out of these different changes in our community. So, we wanted to bring together ambassadors, join-sig, advocates, commops, all these teams that were kind of half-functioning and bring them together in a streamlined way. So, the desired outcome is for all of these teams to function successfully. I would say we're three quarters of the way there. And at the end, the team should be feeling reinvigorated. And the title of the book was Switch, How to Change When Change is Hard. That was a really, really good read. I would suggest it. And another desired outcome is to rebuild contributor fulfillment. We want people to be happy about it and feel a sense of pride in Fedora and not feel negatively about their ambassadorship experience. So, that's kind of how we got here and these outcomes that we were trying to shape. Over to you, Mariana. Thanks, Marie. So, when our team of three was formed in the beginning, we gathered together all the resources that we had and we came up with a plan on what we wanted to do in the upcoming months. I will briefly mention what we have done so far. We have conducted some mind-share team interviews from different mind-share representatives. We have conducted the community outreach survey, which is my favorite thing that we have worked on because... So, this is a survey. But the results reveal something very interesting. We realized that people do a lot of Fedora stuff and they do not let the community or mind-share know, which means that there is quite some Fedora activity out there and we're not aware of. Because we also had the experience from this survey, we helped with the community engagement survey that the council published. We have worked on the old handbooks, which I will explain a little later. We had an outreach design intern over the summer. We had Daria that helped us create some amazing graphics and logos for the different mind-share teams. We have been tracking our progress so far with public meeting notes. We have a public hack and D file. You're more than welcome to check what we've been working on. We meet every week and we keep notes. And we have been trying, not achieved, to publish monthly posts on the community blog. I cannot remember when was our last update on the community blog, but I hope our next one will be with some pretty big updates. I think it might have been December. I think we've done... We have a better track record than you remember. Okay. I'm happy I'm wrong. All right, this one's for Samantha. So, yeah, like Mariana said and like Marie exactly mentioned, we just don't write a lot of blogs or rather try to communicate back. We actually go reach out to contributors, run polls and stuff like that over a lot of events. And we have been doing that primarily for the calendar events for Fedora, which are the release parties and the Nest. But other than that, we have also been trying to reach out to other open source conferences such as DevConCZ, open source account community central, which is a web show that my friend had specifically from projects and initiatives. Other than that, we have been actually doing a doc stream or what we call as kind of hackfest. We bring in a lot of contributors from across open source projects that help us, you know, write out some of those docs and look at some of these docs and give us some suggestions how they're going, so on and so forth. So, we have been pretty much establishing our presence of this revamp in every other way we can. Next slide, Marie. And as a result of which we have some of the stuff which are completed exactly like Marie mentioned, we are almost there and the whole idea of this being this thing being in progress is some of the stuff requires updating every month, every more frequently as we get more feedback from the community as more people join. So, we can never call it complete, but the fundamentals of the structure and the docs is complete. We're going to have something to show off by the end of this presentation. Stuff that are complete right now includes the documented process of how, you know, our mind share reps perform or rather what are their job roles as a matter of mind share, how they perform, what they do, how you can reach out to them, how they can help you inside for our community, so on and so forth. We have been trying to go out there and write these role handbooks which describe how, if you're a part of a specific team, how you would do or participate in community outreach as a part of that team and we have tried to run that down as a part of role handbook which is going to be shown off again. We have tried to go out there and done two health surveys by which we kind of gather the sentiment around how the community is thinking about ambassadors, programs, so on and so forth. We have, we are trying to repeat this process of informal polls which is basically like we would go out there, go certain amount of questions and try to garden responses around how the community is doing what we can do to meet, you know, if there are some feedbacks around this is not going in the right direction, how can we do something in that area. Moving on, something that's in progress is we do look at all the pages of role handbooks as not yet so much complete but we look at it in progress. It always needs to be translated into multiple, you know, languages and we propose five to eight key languages. So yeah, we are trying to go there. We are going to have, you know, a monthly ambassador call from here onwards in some days which would be again talking to, releasing with ambassadors and trying to figure out how we can make a better marketing plan or a much better way to make sure this can be executed and sustained in the coming days. Back to you. Cool. I think this one's actually Marianne. Yes. So our latest thing that we worked on was to update documentation. So our goal was to bring together all the pieces of documentation in one place. The Fedora project is a huge project which means that there are resources and documentation and information about the project in so many different places. So we wanted to create a place where we will be able to bring everything together. We have been working in two-hour, three-hour sprints to complete our documentation. What we did was basically to go through old, wiki pages that had not been updated. We took some pieces that still apply to the way the Fedora community is to this day and we also created new documentation for new processes because we also realized that now with COVID, even community meetups and conferences and everything will not be the same as it was before it was very local and people had local communities but now we see people gathering together online from all over the world. So this is something we didn't have or it was not that common before the COVID era. So we have collected in one place text documentation. We have brought together all these amazing graphics and logos and different media types that we had and also created new. We have the new slide deck that we're also using for this presentation. This is I would say 90 plus percent done. I still need some work for us to make sure that it is complete and ready to publish. I mean it is published. It is there. Just we need to check one last time that everything is as we want it to be. At this moment we would love to hear your thoughts on it and if you would like to help and or suggest something, we'll be more than happy to hear your feedback about this. You can check the QR code. It leads you to the page that Marie is browsing. Yeah Marie. So Vickal is asking where do we request that? So a great place to bring that up would be the MindShare IRC channel or chat channel wherever you access that because we're all in there and MindShare kind of oversees this. So we'll make sure that it gets incorporated. MindShare is a great place to bring any suggestions. If you have a more detailed thought or idea you want to bring you could open a ticket on MindShare or you could open a thread on discussion under ambassadors slash MindCo. I think MindCo is the tag there. So that was the really cool thing we wanted to show off which was our updated documentation. Super excited about that. Love seeing all of the work, the different pieces of work that we've done over the last year and a half finally coming together into one place that's very cohesive and ultimately like as Marianne was saying and Asimantra was saying when we start this call we're going to need feedback from ambassadors on these documentation. Like is it useful? Is it working? What can we add here? How can we do this better? Because we're just three people. We've gotten as much community input as we possibly can but once again we're just three people and we only have our own perspectives. So we're looking forward to that moment when we get to talk to ambassadors more in a monthly way so we can kind of all get on the same page. So what are the next steps? We're wrapping up that documentation that we were showing off and we want to work with translations team to get that into more languages. I think we want to refine it a little bit before we get that work done so that we're not overworking translators for no reason but we will continue to develop a rollout plan. So that's kind of that marketing plan. We want the ambassadors and the thorough community to be able to embrace this and start feeling like we're ambassadors again. So we have done all of this work and hopefully set up a great foundation for success. How can we bring people back and get people excited about it? As I mentioned, we want to start to test the process in the docs and make refinements. Work on scheduling some of the informal polls that we have developed. Wrap up loose ends document our process and of course we're going to continue focusing on the things we've kind of been looking at all along which is sustainability, empowering individuals to do this stuff with as little much little oversight as possible and providing those resources for those people who prefer to work independently, building in more recognition and listening to feedback, letting the community know that we're hearing them, trying to make changes based on that. So that concludes the newest updates that we have to share with you. Okay so there's some Q and A here so let's go with the first one. Okay congrats on your work. It's amazing what you've done but it looks to me that Comops is covering part of MindShare responsibilities. Are there common ground between both? So my understanding is that MindShare is gathering representatives from all across Fedora to help make the best plan and make choices for these outreach teams, right? So they're looking at budget, they're looking at all these different things but they see the entire picture of what we're trying to do with our outreach, right? So ambassadors can go to MindShare for help, right? MindShare is there to help ambassadors get done what they want to get done. So if you look at the documentation, we're looking at resources for ambassadors to go out and do the stuff that they're already doing but do it better. You have like slide templates, you have cheek cubes, you have pronouns to bring to wherever you want to go, you have logos to stick on posters and all these things, right? But MindShare is still going to be the entity that's making decisions about things like funding and about sponsoring events, etc, etc. So there is that division between what they do but they are both looking at outreach, right? But MindShare is looking at it from here and ambassadors are looking at it in their local regions. So does that help answer the question? And, okay, and also Sumantro, Mariana, do you have anything you might add to that? Um, I don't have something. Yeah, okay. Pretty much. Cool. So then let's look to the next question. Does this effort end at some point and leverage the work on the actual teams? Yes. So absolutely. And the three of us have been really pushing to get this done, right? So we had a timeline in mind. We've gone longer than that but we're three people in a pandemic. So we're just giving ourselves the grace and knowledge that we're also volunteering in other places and spaces and just being persistent with it, patient with it. But in the last three months, we have ramped up and we have done probably two sprint sessions a month looking at trying to complete this, right? So the next step is establishing that ambassador monthly call. Me as Fcake will probably be involved in that indefinitely. But for Sumantro and Mariana, I envisioned something more like three to six months. Staying at those meetings, answering questions, helping to do like changes with the documentation and provide like the historical work context that we've done with this. And then hopefully that means that Sumantro and Mariana can pull back from the revamp and myself too when we could just start participating and making things happen, right? And hopefully, hopefully, ambassadors will begin to be able to do in-person events again, right? And have some of the, some of our old standbys and what people are comfortable with and missing back again. Yeah. So if I can add something here, the whole revamp. So our job in the beginning was to analyze what was the problem, why ambassadors were feeling the way that they were feeling, why we stopped seeing events, et cetera, et cetera. So basically we saw what was happening. I'm happy that the revamp happened or started with the pandemic because we basically see now new practices that if we had done this two years ago, probably the pandemic would have wiped everything because some of this process applied only for online events, et cetera. So our job was to create documentation and processes and structure and call it however you would like to. So the different teams would continue their work later on. I am sure that in a few years from now, maybe things will change again, but the project is so big and there are so many people and every time somebody comes, they bring new ideas. So I am very happy to see that the ambassadors program will also change in a few years from now because it makes sense, right? Yeah. That's awesome. So one last thing I want to add to both Marie and Marianna's answer and to this question is when we started this thing, the only thing that concerned us the most was can we make a process which is very sustainable, is very lightweight and each of these teams, maybe the outreach teams would be able to take that along with them every time. The idea was not to create a bunch of processes and make it tougher and tougher for people to get in. It was easier, it was made in such a fashion that every single team can take to the minimum bit of work and still sustain all the contributors across releases. And that has been kind of put to the test with a lot of polls, a lot of matrices, a lot of data. And we can kind of right now say that we have somewhat of a sustainable mechanism or figured out a way that if every team follows set of practices, they would be able to actually sustain some of these contributors or at least know where they'll be going forward. Awesome. And totally, Edward, I hear you and I'm so glad that this has inspired you to bring back marketing. Honestly, it's perfect timing and we're going to love having you at the Ambassador call, I hope. Yeah. We're almost out of time. Are there any more questions, comments, feedback for us? Yeah. Hi, Andrei. Hello. Thank you. I'm just checking if there are any more questions and Awesome. Discussions. Thank you very much. Thank you to all the speakers and thank you to the thanks to the audience. It was really interesting presentation. Thank you. Thanks for having us. So we, yeah, and we will announce the next speech during the break. See you in a few minutes. Bye.