 Hello, and I want to say welcome to everyone who is here in the room and to everybody who is watching either live or watching the recording of this afterwards. I am Monica Ahens-Madden, I'm the Ubuntu community representative at Canonical, and this presentation actually started one year and six months ago. This was a talk, this was a live stream run by Martin Wimpress, which I'm sorry I can't monitor Slack if you're in there, hi. It was a live stream on Ubuntu Mate development and development tools. We had all just recently gone into lockdown, whether it was because of rules and regulations or worries about our own health. It was late March, it was March 26, but of course beyond the stress of a global pandemic, we had this other concern that we had a LTS release to ship out the next month. And so this was when a lot of the with me streams started, people knitting, singing, reading books to children. And so Martin decided, well I'm at home alone doing these things, why not stream them. And so a group of people both in the Ubuntu Mate community and around it began to join. And this stream, which if you go on to his YouTube and find, it is a two hour and 45 minute stream. Over half of that is social commiseration, as we were all getting ready to enter this pandemic, not knowing what was going to go on with people worried for their health, worried about how they were going to be teachers to their parents, people worried about balancing their open source commitments and their mental health. And I went through and rewatched that stream and found this quote, like we're glad it's not a typo, I was typing fast like we're glad you here would offer you a virtual cup of tea if I could. And I actually had a chat with Martin last week and just I wanted to be sure my impressions were right about how the streams were doing a lot of different roles at once. And I asked him, was there a stream that you knew that this was kind of bigger than what you thought it was, and he's like it was this stream. And that had been my impression and so it was really neat to see that we both had came to the same realization at the same place. So there are three benefits. So this talk is going to go over three benefits that live streaming either we, I'm thinking about primarily YouTube and Twitch. That's the context of this can benefit your open source community with two ways that are going to be fairly intuitive and you're going to be like, oh yeah, that makes sense. And one way that might not be as obvious there. And then we're going to go over the problems and then hopefully problems less challenges and hopefully have time for Q&A. So one of the primary benefits that you have is you have this disruptive collaboration. And it is I think a lot of us are used to disruption equals everything stops. Like we're working and then all of a sudden our kid or our partner or something goes on in the world and it's just like we can't do anything. It's a dam to basically our flow state. In these live streams, it's really creating a communal shared flow state and the dynamics are absolutely fascinating. I've started live streaming kind of being in Martin's orbit. A lot of us started, which is another benefit there. And I was doing actually a crowd source data transcription and entry thing called HMS NHS. You can Google it. It's fascinating. And it's transcribing the records from HMS dreadnought, which was actually a maritime hospital on what's now the University of Greenwich. And it's taking hospital logbooks from decades and transcribing the various entry fields. And that night I was, you know, I decided this is a great thing to do online with friends in my Twitch stream. And most of the, and I was doing the column for where the sailors were from. And most of the things were pretty easy. London, all right, can type that in. But some of the place names, the handwriting was a little off, or it was maybe a place name that had changed in the intervening 150 years. And so the viewers on my stream started to pop in and say, oh, I think that this letter looks similar to that one. And we know what that word is. So I think it's this place. Or we would see is like that this was probably a city in the Philippines. So people would get on there and say, maybe it's this city now that underwent a place name change like in the 1900s. And so there are three main ways that this disruptive collaboration happens. The first one is that your stream can correct you. And especially how many, I don't know how many programmers, developers do I have in the audience here? Anyone who's been plagued by typos in their code? Yeah, so get a Twitch stream. Somebody needs to make a bot that's just like exclamation mark typo. And when you put that in, it will ping you on your computer and say there's something wrong with your code. And this was an easy way for people to see what's on the stream there and be like, oh, this is why it's not working. And you get multiple eyes on this. And especially when people are sharing things like their GitHub repository, then people are interacting with the code in different ways. And this is probably a very common way for people to collaborate with you on these streams. The second way is that they can volunteer tools. I've become very involved with a group of our streamers who are the nicest people you could possibly meet. And one of my friends was working on a shiny calendar app. And I don't know the first thing about our I would like to. And he was trying to find something to do specifically with how to handle some aspect of time. And I'm like, well, I don't know the packages, but I can research. And so he's on the stream and I'm kind of duck duck going trying to find something. And I found a package with great documentation. I sent him the link in the chat. I think I'll have to check with him, but it actually made it into the final version. And so people can with either who have extensive experience or maybe different experience from you can suggest tools that you might not have otherwise thought of. And you can try them right there. It's great. And the third way is a little bit more interesting, but you can also find people will share different ways to think about it. Maybe you're having you're doing a very involved stream and you just come up against a roadblock and you're just like, I don't know how to deal with this. And somebody in your audience might go, well, maybe you're coming at this the wrong way or maybe there's a different way to think about this. Maybe it's a very complex problem and you're thinking about it a bit too small or rather maybe it's a very small problem and you're actually over complicating it. And so you can kind of start getting into that almost metacognitive work in your community, which is really fun. And also these streams and also this is a very kind of odd thing, but they provide socializing and social support. And how many of you either stream games or watch people stream games? Yeah, pretty good crowd there. And so out of these kind of technical streams, our project lead started streaming himself playing racing games. Who here likes to play racing games? Who here is actually good at them? Yeah, I am not good at them at all. They're so fun to play, though. And so he kind of was doing demos and showing us, oh, I like this game. I like that game. And then he's like, it would be way more fun to play these with people. And he got into this game called hot sharp racing, which if you're a child of the 90s and grew up going to arcades like with the Daytona games. Oh my gosh, it just hits all those fields. And unfortunately, while it did have a multiplayer function that worked on Linux fantastically, it didn't have a nice multiplayer camera like for something like Mario Kart has. So Martin took that as a challenge. Like, okay, let's use a BS and make this a multiplayer multi-camera stream. And so it became the social event set on Sundays. That was just especially during the summer and the fall of 2020. That was just what we did. And it became this social ritual that we created entirely online. And especially as we've kind of had to do that for our communities, that having game nights, having tea parties, having knit alongs, having things that your community can do online together is extraordinarily powerful. And also because we're a bunch of geeks, these fun and game streams can lead to more disruptive collaboration. So we started doing this racing game and we wanted to over engineer the hack out of this thing. So at first, we were starting to do, it's like, okay, let's enter. We had to manually enter who won the race. And we're just like, okay, that takes way too much time. So somebody went and made a script that would take a screenshot, read all of the things and automatically enter it into something that propagated a web app. So we could just concentrate more on gaming and of course kind of grow all of our skills. And then my friend the R podcaster was like, well, we should really data science this up. And so he went and made a random car, a random car picker, made it into a shiny app. And so we use this every time that we race. And he has now made this dashboard that shows margins of victory. It's all visualized. It's gorgeous. And so it can again tie into that community of play and a community of learning and practice. But also it's important to remember that this was born, that a lot of these streams were born out of this incredibly frightening, frustrating, uncertain time that we're still not completely out of. And I think that it's powerful to recognize that if there are people in your chat who seem like they're struggling, that seem like maybe what they need at that moment isn't to learn skills. It is just to talk about how hard things are and how overwhelmed they are or how isolated they might feel. Just like in that first stream that I opened the presentation with, it's good to just pivot to that because our people are our most important resource that we have above anything else. And this is a powerful way to let the people in your community just feel safe to be honest. But also know that they trust you enough and they trust the people in that stream to know that they're going to get basically psychological backup there. And it's a really, really powerful thing. And that's why now that we're starting to meet each other in public, some of us for the first time, it feels like that these relationships we made over the past year and a half are very much real. And I think that it goes back onto the Heather's keynote this morning, that this is a good way to navigate those really challenging times. So those are the two obvious benefits of community. But there's one more, as if the first two weren't awesome enough. And that is they are windows into the inner worlds of your communities. And I picked the phrase, it's like being an anthropologist with emoji or emotes or gifts or all those wonderful things for a reason. The Ubuntu community has been around nearly 20 years. And so when I started at Canonical this February, my then boss gave me a task that I loved. He said, I want you to research the state of the community where it started, where it's been, where it's at now. And I'm like, research, because I came from a history background. It was great. And I found an anthropology thesis on the early Ubuntu community because an anthropology master student for his project worked with our community to find out that basically he embedded himself in it. He literally went to community developers' homes. And as they worked at their computers, and this is back before any of this, we're all using IRC and mailing lists. Okay, we're all still using IRC and mailing lists. But that was all that we had. And he would literally sit there and watch them program. And we get to do this with music and emotes. And so you get to see, well, how are people using... You get to find out a few things. One is you get to find out how are people working with your project? How do the individual contributors see themselves as a part of it? You get to see the tools that they use. And so if you've ever been in a coding stream, and soon as somebody opens up their text editor, instant comments is like, if somebody opens it with Nano, it's just like you can predict that people are going to be like, why don't you use Vi? Why don't you use Vim? Why don't you use Emacs? Et cetera. We have a whole group of people who, because Martin uses fish shell, who now use fish instead of bash. We have people... We have our streamers who have hacked visual studio code, especially for app development. And these are things that you can see once streamer starts it. And you can see it work its way down. You also get to see kind of how do people, and I think this is really powerful, how do people work through problems? Especially you have people that they kind of narrate their streams. And so especially how many of you have people in your communities who have been there forever, who have all this experience, but it's mostly just in their heads? Yeah, a couple of you. Yeah, because we had a lot that I was talking to. And these are great ways to get people who have this valuable experience. And like you really love how they work through problems, but you aren't quite sure how. Get them onto a stream and have them work through their process. And it's a powerful way to see how people relate to the system that they're then developing. Now the second way that you kind of get to be the little anthropologist and analyze your communities to understand them and better support them and help them and grow them is you can start analyzing how are people connected to each other. And this is something that I'm hoping that this could be great for the talk for next year, because I want to talk to those friends in data science and be like, let's use some APIs. Let's find out how do follower networks interact with each other. And there's a thing that the R streamers have done that on Sundays they have this continuous hot potato R stream, that one streamer starts in the morning about 10 o'clock eastern time and they go all the way till the evening. It's great. And so but there's ways, especially with open APIs like the one Twitch has, you can see how do followers interact? What are the categories people are coming from? How do people from different communities, like let's say the Linux streaming community on Twitch and the music streaming community on Twitch, how do they interact? And I think that there's some powerful data to be analyzed and I'm hoping data scientists, if you're listening to this stream, please do this. It would be awesome. But however, there are, it's not all, you know, it's basically not all unshining roses and in Martin's words, it's like juggling with knives and every now and then the knives are on fire. So A, there's a huge technical barrier. You might have people who have never streamed before in their lives and so what you can do is get your mentors, your people who are streaming experts to come up with tutorials, to come up with more content, to introduce people. If you're at a company that is supporting a volunteer community, see if you can get for people who want to make content or who have been making it, send them better webcams, send them better audio equipment, send them green screens and if there's people who are doing that and maybe they have that equipment, then just give them a stipend and say, hey, is there something you've been really wanting? You can do that. There's also, you also want to know what content to stream. Don't stream something that needs, that really does need that disruption-free work because then you just get two hours of frustration which really drives down your engagement and might end up working at cross purposes. So don't do that. And also kind of know about what your community needs. You might have a very high engagement community in which case they're going to love Twitch probably, but you might have a community that's using this more for resources and information so YouTube might be where they're at. Ask your communities, ask some kind of what they need and they will be more than happy to tell you. But yes, and this is just really important to support and grow your streams because it's a power, I mean, it's community advocacy and evangelism and it's such a, it is a very kind of low-cost way to further your community's goals. And it's been something that I've been streaming out for a year and participating in this world and it's something that I'm excited to not only be a part of but to help our community do. I horrified my manager and one of the marketing people at Canonical when I was like, let's get on Twitch and they're like, what? And it's like, no, no, no, there's a purpose really because we had been on YouTube. But we get people like we had one of our Colonel's team streams by a Lynne plane and so when we had him on as a guest on the Twitch stream he could tell his followers who then all of a sudden all of them are on the Ubuntu on air stream and it was fantastic and again you get your immunities together. So I do have some, if you go to my, if you go to the slides which are on the schedule then I do have these resources here. There's a lot of other people taking this seriously. There's great things to come. So thank you all for coming and have a wonderful conference and we do have time for maybe one question. Matt, partner up with them for the first few. So I think if you have someone who is kind of an extroverted introvert like I am because I do play one well but exactly that you have them, you know, have something like a Q&A format and just kind of ease them into it but it might be that they want to do just a recording. Also what we do is that if somebody is not comfortable being on camera we do voice only. We had somebody who didn't want to be on voice or on camera so they just did chat. So it might be that streaming is not for them but make them as comfortable as they possibly can.