 Okay. So I think we can start now. So a quick introduction. My name is Sayuk. I work as a senior software engineer and apart from my professional work, I am also a community evangelist and open source enthusiast. I've been dabbling around multiple open source communities for the past decade. That includes Fedora as well as a few other open source communities out there. And yeah, this is a topic that is very near and dear to me and also one that I've been working with a few other folks in Red Hat in developing. So yeah, I will be talking about leading and growing an open source community. And probably by the end of the session, I would be able to share like maybe this will be really helpful for some people out there what in this. So let's get on to it. So what is an open source project and community leadership in general, right? So this is a question that comes up a lot and surprising are not really clear about this. So as contributors to a project become more familiar with how the project works, they may at times wish to become more active in helping the community grow. And ultimately, this usually means that they'll be taking on more responsibilities in that project. Today, the idea is that we'll be discussing this in more details what it means that is what does it mean to lead an open source project and community. The fact that contributing to an open source project and leading that project are two different modes of engaging with that project is something that we'll be exploring a bit more. And yeah, let me explain why. So as a contributor, when you want to assume increased responsibilities and as a contributor to an open source software project, your duties to the project may be more or less straightforward. Things like fix bugs, answer questions in the project's communication channels and etc. There can be a lot of things that you can do. But when assuming a position of leadership in the project, your role becomes more comprehensive. You may drive technical direction, begin speaking with authority for the project in public venues, such as conferences like this one, initiate programs to recruit or more project members, and even at times change the project's processes and policies. So in short, you are now assuming more responsibilities for a project's success or failures. And that becomes a core part of your role. So the question that comes up next is why do it? Why take on responsibility for a project and community's success? And there are many answers to this reason. There are many answers to this. So the reasons might range from organizational needs to your personal fulfillment. So as you consider taking on a leadership position in the project, maybe take some time to think about your motivations for doing so. Maybe having a good understanding of why you want to lead will help you choose the best places for you to apply your skills and maybe also your interests within the project. It can be anything. It can be like a conflict resolution or better issue triaging processes, which can help you to make sure that users are getting help more quickly. And frankly, it's no secret that leading an open source project has many tangible benefits. Some of these are already listed here, but when it comes to seeking employment and also in your personal careers, it provides a sense of personal fulfillment. Many individuals usually choose a leadership position for the simple reason that they appreciate their social connections in the project's community and want to be of greater service to others in the community. They want to have a higher impact within the community. So this was kind of a round off of where we want to go with the session today. And let's probably look at our goals for today's session. So in this presentation, we will explore leadership in open source projects, the responsibilities leaders have, the transition pathways from a contributor to a leader, and some ways in which excellent leaders can help their projects avoid common social challenges. Broadly, our goals for the day are to understand common challenges associated with expanding, maintaining, and popularizing an open source project, exploring new steps, exploring steps that new community leaders can take to begin addressing those challenges and identifying steps leaders can take to achieve project success. Before we start one additional note here, I cannot guarantee that you will probably leave our time together today equipped with everything that you could possibly need to know about being a project leader or a community leader because every project is different. And I frankly don't know every bit of advice that can help you lead each of these different individual projects. And then it's up to you like you need to translate this advice into your own context. So what we are going to do today is we will be examining the most common avenues for meeting the challenges new leaders face and general pathways for getting started that not just me but a lot of people who have a lot of experience within open source communities in general have found to be the most fruitful for them. So in many cases we have a lot of other components and a lot of other let's say topics that we can talk about but for now for the purposes of this session maybe let's stick to the overview that I just shared. So we will begin by stressing that anyone interested in assuming a leadership role in a community a driven project will need to begin asking three fundamental questions about that project. This include like how will you expand the project, maintain the project and popularize the project. So what do these questions mean? So how can we would be actually exploring how can you expand the project that is add contributors and increase participation in the project, maintain the project that is ensure that your growth is sustainable and that the project stays on course on the pursuit of its mission and vision and how can you popularize the project that is how can you increase the project's visibility make it an appealing destination for your users and contributors and keep it relevant in an ever-growing ecosystem. So the remainder of our session today we will focus on each of these three questions. So let's begin with the challenge of expanding the community that is increasing community participation and contribution. So I would be like throughout the session I'd be highlighting some of the common challenges that we face in with each of these aspects and talking about these challenges they can be social challenges or they can be technical challenges. So coming back to this slide we'll be talking about the social challenges. So one of the biggest factors the one of the biggest challenges that a lot of people face in this aspect is undocumented insider information or maybe folk wisdom. So excessive and undocumented insider information or what we call folk wisdom at times makes newcomers lacking context and feel excluded. You know I think most of us have been in that situation wherein we try to contribute to a new project. We go in there and we find ourselves confused by what a lot of people over there are talking. They are probably using a lot of community jargon that we don't understand and the problem is because we don't have that insider information when we start it becomes difficult to contribute to that. The next thing is unwelcome social dynamics. So and this is a very important point like how welcome do we feel new contributors like how welcome do we make new contributors feel perhaps like the project might not be as inclusive as it could be perhaps there are a lot of places a lot of points which we could focus on to improve the project's social dynamics. Then there comes the issue of undifferentiated contributor base. Communities lacking a diverse contributor base may not seem welcoming to newcomers especially those from underrepresented groups maybe. We mean diversity along all of these accesses when we talk about an undifferentiated contributor base and while we talk about diversity it's not just about diversity in any one particular section but rather diversity in the types of skill sets maybe vendor diversity, number of industries that are represented within this community, gender diversity, racial diversity, geographic diversity like you name it and there are a lot of places where we can talk about diversity and when working to grow on your community if it appears that the community is not only comprised of the it should not look like that the community is comprised of only one type of contributor people who are not like the existing contributor base might feel like they're not comfortable so that becomes a very big factor when it comes to newcomers to the project. Then going along these lines the next big challenge is language barrier so communities that communicating only one language can be really intimidating for those who don't speak that language and a lot of this can be seen in a lot of major communities out there especially regional communities there might be like your project might be based out of a certain country or a certain region where in most of your contributors are accustomed to talking in one particular language but if you want to really globalize your project or expand the reach and if you want to have as many contributors coming into that project as possible you need to make sure that your potential new contributors don't feel left out because they cannot cross that language barrier and this becomes a very important social challenge anyways let's move on to the next section of challenges and these are technical challenges so there are a lot of technical challenges that community members feel like come across when they want to start with a new community and these include a lot of points let me take you through each of these points one by one so lack of clear onboarding and getting started documentation surprisingly this is a very common issue that a lot of newcomers face a lot of communities don't have a proper clear documentation on ways to get started for newcomers and this can be a big deterrent for newcomers next like aligning contributors with project needs again a big problem that a newcomer might face that hey I have certain skills to which I want to contribute but I cannot understand what the appropriate domain would be for me to contribute within the project and that becomes a big challenge so how do we counteract this this is a very common issue and this is something that most community leaders should be aware of and make a conscious effort to mitigate next comes the issue of finding contributors with specific domain knowledge finding additional contributors with specific domain knowledge of specialized use cases at times can be really difficult you might have people who have domain knowledge of a certain technology but how do how do you map those people to those specific use cases that at times again is a very big technical challenge that a lot of community leaders face project code base may be directed at a specialized use case a project may be relatively niche but locating additional contributors who share its typical use case might be really difficult and then there is the challenge of unintended use cases so your users might be applying a project or software to situations that the project's founders had not initially considered so in that case the project's founders might be limiting their outreach for the project how do you tackle that this is another very common technical challenge that the community leaders need to be really aware of and take concrete steps to mitigate so anyways with that let's move on to the next section of the presentation so let's talk about contributor pathways so every project and community will need to address these challenges that we are talking about in ways that that are most effective for them however in general we suggest beginning to address these challenges by examining your project's contributor pathways how we will go through them eventually so opportunities for volunteers begin lending their talent so the opportunities for volunteers to begin lending their talent to an open source project are called that project's contributor pathways so the greater the number of project the contributor pathways your project features the more likely it is to recruit participants with various skills required for that project's success so when you're talking of ways to expand your project focusing on contributor pathways is a great place to begin with so let's let's take a look at some of the contributor some of the most common contributor pathways so before we continue just let's pause for a second and I just wanted to like like am I going too fast I am trying to cover a lot of content over here so I'm trying to I might be going really fast through most of the content of the slides so if anyone feels that I'm going too fast just let me know on the chat I have it open over here oh thank you so okay coming back to the slides again first here are some pathways with a social focus things like documenting software and processes onboarding and mentoring new members localizing content into various languages copywriting managing social media and organizing events does your project offer new and existing contributors opportunities to contribute rewardingly to or maybe even take ownership of work in each of these pathways these these are things that you should be probably taking a look at next let's examine some pathways with a technical focus these include like adding new features and documentation fixing existing bugs and triaging issues refactoring existing work to improve it performing improvements improving user interface and user experience release engineering creating and maintaining project roadmap code and user interface so again ask yourself does your project currently offer new and as well as existing contributors opportunities to contribute rewardingly to or maybe even take ownership of the work in each of these pathways if not well one general way to begin expanding your project is by making a concerted effort to formalize refine document and advertise this contributor pathways so yeah next let's come to the challenges associated with maintaining a project so you have a great open source project how do you make sure that you can sustain its growth as our expansion efforts exceed so again what are the common challenges that you face additional infrastructure and overhead maybe adding additional tooling and infrastructure to your project can create additional work of coordinating participants that is basically the time you spend enhancing your project's code this might be for smaller leaders who may have to take a lot of work responsibilities for deploying and maintaining these systems in addition to also coordinating the volunteer work the next thing comes to preserving community intimacy preserving the intimacy that makes the community so appealing requires more care as the community expands so few people may really know one another and when this happens the community social bonds we can how do you take care of that the next big challenge comes to keeping a growing number of participants informed so as your community grows keeping all participants informed about the project's developments it takes up a lot of more time and effort if the community is really large and that can take up a lot of efforts on the community leaders part as well managing competing visions for the project again like as the community grows competing visions for the project make create a contributor tension so you need to make sure that the vision for the project is always clear and there are no competing visions because that can be a big challenge especially to new contributors it becomes really difficult to understand okay how do I go about this as a new contributor if the visions are not clear architecting and scaling a vision and mission for the project um so a lot of projects begin as personal hobbies and a lot of times they don't have explicitly clear defined community mission and vision statements without this the project just isn't ready to scale well so it's very important that you have a very clear mission and vision statement for your project so let's talk about governance models every project and community will need to have these to address challenges and ways that are the most effective for them however in general we suggest beginning to address these challenges by examining your project's governance models what are these governance models again we'll come to them in a little while so the specific combination of rules and customs that define who gets to do what and also how they're supposed to do it is called a project governance model the better you understand the project's governance model the greater your chances of successfully helping your project evolve so as you're looking for ways to help sustain your projects growth and success it's highly recommended that you begin by examining your project's governance models so every project has a governance model even the ones that say that they don't actually do have a governance model so let's begin by pinning down some specific details of the way the project is running today so as you can see in this slide like this here's a list of six types of open source governance models we don't really have the time now to explore the individual models however it's suffice to say that to say here that you know knowing your project is running and who is making the decisions is a perfect way to begin thinking about making the project more sustainable if the project relies on too few people and if decisions aren't being made in the most effective way then begin by addressing these issues so I just want to clear this on the very onset that the goal of this slide is not to offer thorough description on the models themselves but the point is kind of to you know set the table for would-be community leaders by explaining that a project's governance model should be the first step of the ladder that you need to focus on when playing that plays a very large role in that project so dimensions of governance fundamentally you will need to begin thinking about the various roles that people playing the community and the various policies and procedures that govern and direct people in these roles so roles are specific to functions that contributors perform in and for the project roles have rights responsibilities and expectations associated with them make sure that these are explicitly documented the next thing is policies and procedures these are specific rules and processes that direct people in particular roles and define the limits of acceptable behavior for the project its best practices and other things so make sure that these are also explicitly documented like simply documenting roles policies and procedures will go a long way in helping your project become more sustainable finally let's explore the work of popularizing a project how do you increase the project's visibility making it an appealing destination for your users and contributors and keeping it relevant in an ever-growing ecosystem right so again as before let's go through the common challenges that people face so increased competition for contributors time attention and energy competing contributors time attention and energy is more difficult than ever as the number of open source projects increases globally and this is a trend that has been growing over the years 10 years back there were probably not as many open source projects as we have now so the projects nowadays are actually competing with each other for the the time and efforts of those potential group of people who actually contribute who have a meaningful contribution to that project at times community materials are available in a limited number of languages so as projects become popular when when these projects are they connect with diverse groups of contributors but often project materials are only available in a limited number of languages and if your community is probably not communicating communicating in say English many people may not even be aware that it exists and this is something that I was also talking about a bit earlier so yeah the number of languages that your community's materials are available has a direct impact on your community's number of active contributors a growing threat of maintainer burnout as a project becomes more popular maintainers might experience burnout when they're trying when they're trying to like keep pace with it and again this is also a very real major factor that we see in play with a lot of communities nowadays next we come to the point of mismatched expectations between enterprise users and hobbyists so you know many popular open source projects are relied upon by really large enterprises but they are actually maintained by volunteers who are leading to a mismatch of expectations between users and the developer hobbyists what happens is users who may expect enterprise great support for this project might not always get the same and this is because these projects are at the end being maintained by developer hobbyists who are working in this spare time it's not their full-time job to take care of these projects but still they are spending a considerable amount of their time and efforts in maintaining these projects when people are using the projects for enterprise work but the software is maintained by hobbyists there can be an expectations mismatch and that leads to a friction within the community proliferation of platforms for user engagement finding the best ways to reach your potential users and contributors can be time-consuming given that many people choose to consume information and the users now expect to hear about things on social media and maybe reddit facebook and twitter instagram whatever and maybe the tech branches and so on so figuring out where to meet people where they are and when you are but for a small number of people probably it's it's difficult so how do you like how do you manage these how do you manage how much proliferation of platforms do you have for user engagement how do you engage these people on so many different platforms right so yeah moving on to reward models so as with the other challenges that we talked about so far we could discuss many ways to begin addressing popularization challenges but in general you know we have found that focusing on a project's reward models is a great place to begin so let's talk about reward models for a bit so strategies for acknowledging and honoring various contributions to an open source project are called the project's reward models the more models your project constructs the better it can engage participants with different motivations for contributing to your project so for example here are four common reward models spotlighting community contributors swag meet the community features community awards so each of these models aims to connect with a certain set of motivations that the participants may have for contributing to a project everyone contributes to a project for a reason and the most popular projects are those that make contributors feel rewarded valued and respected for their contributions generating those feelings in contributors is a great way to build your project's reputation and as a rewarding and welcoming place for contributors to put their time and effort in so let's unpack this a bit more spotlighting community contributions so using points badges I think yesterday only we had a lot of sessions on federal badges right leaderboards charts and publicly identifying contribution reward contributions they actually reward your participants by visualizing the magnitude of their contributions it's always a great feeling for a contributor to an open source project to know to be able to see their work being highlighted somewhere in a certain way and this is a great option for connecting with people who tend to value opportunities to show off their technical prowess a bit it always feels nice right for the contributors next meet the contributor features so running blog posts or video series to spotlight contributors reward participants by helping them grow their personal brand and their professional network this is a great option for you know connecting with people who see community participation as an opportunity to gain visibility and at times even find work or employment opportunities for themselves so it's a great platform and it's also a very encouraging platform for newcomers to come and contribute it because they know that at the end of the day if they do some meaningful work their work gets highlighted and that's a very big motivator for new contributors then there comes the point of swag who does not like them right like giving contributors various items that signify their affiliation with the community things like shirts hats key chains like you know things like small tokens like even a mug or something like this they they allow the participants to feel a sense of connection with the project and this is a great option for connecting with people who see community participation as central to their identities as a fundamental part of their identity building work right and also it allows them to show off their connection with the community when interacting with other people and that makes that membership in the community a part of their own identity so yeah then comes the point about community awards like allowing community members to recognize and award others among themselves helps communities to develop shared identities and social bonds and these bonds are really important for any open source or any community in general so this is a great option for connecting with people who see community participation as a way each other allows them to continually identify and also reinforce shared and communal values and identities so yeah coming to the next steps so this there's an overview of the three general kinds of challenges that you're going to face as you assume a leadership role that is expanding the community maintaining the growth systemably and popularizing a project along the way it can see that we are almost out of time but let's take a moment to review what might come next for you things like gathering community feedback and measuring your success right so first let's talk about gathering feedback leading an open source project means that you you're making yourself available to address community ideas concerns and more this feedback it is very critical to your success and it's also a measure of how much success that you have the relative success that you have and you know you're trying to position yourself as the party who is the most likely to act on community feedback so you'll need to come continually collect this feedback so here we have highlighted some of the most common methods for that and this include open feedback forms these are like easily accessible always on forms for collecting written feedback from your users and contributors there are fireside chats I don't know how many people over here are familiar with the concept of fireside chats but these are usually these might be pre-recorded or casual interviews with project maintainers or other important leaders who discuss about the project's mission vision and strategy then there are community calls community calls usually are live audio video gatherings where community members get to speak like firstly they can join and they can speak directly with the project maintainers and this is these go this goes a long way in increasing community's bond as well as clarifying the community's vision and mission strategy uh then there is community q and a so these are usually community driven uh AMA or ask me anything style events in which uh community members submit and vote on questions for the community leaders so yeah and then there is uh the and then you need to be able to measure the success of your work within the community so depending on your situation this could be important for two reasons one is community uh like communicating the success with the community how will you navigate your community's success um in achieving its mission and objectives uh you need to be able to help your community measure its progress chart its accomplishments and stay focused on those achievements how will you do that um then there is the challenge of you know communicating success with your organization's uh stakeholders how will you explain the value of working with your community to others in your organization so if you're leading a community because the project is integral to your organization then you will need to be able to explain the value of the work internally too and that too the organizational stakeholders for your project so here are like I'll be talking about a few potential metrics that you might track pertaining to technical contributions we don't have much time over here so I won't go into the details of this but just to give you a general idea uh you might attract metrics around code commit uh new designs uh contributed uh the number of issues that have been filed or maybe the number of code reviews that you have had uh how many pull requests have been there to your code base and so on uh every project has different uh like metrics that they want to focus on based upon how technical they are or what type of a contributor base they have but in general these you know like these are some of the points that you might want to track uh metrics around your technical contributions uh and again here are some uh potential metrics that you might want to track pertaining to non-technical contributors so you know gathering feedback and measuring success is really important and once you have determined how you are going to begin addressing leadership challenges these will be your next steps so again I won't go into the details of any of these points for now but maybe you can you can explore this with your with other people within your community and based upon that come up with metrics around identifying non-technical contributions and these might include things like you know uh how many you know how many people are contributing to your project where those people are based out of um what is the diversity and inclusion statistics for your for your project um then how many views are there to your to your community's homepage and so on so yeah I think uh we have covered most of the the topics over here maybe we can summarize all of these uh in general so yeah so by you know choosing to lead an open source project you can and assume an increased responsibility for that project's success or failure uh people choose to lead open source projects for various reasons including organizational need a sense of responsibility to the community or personal and professional fulfillment new community leaders face challenges related to expanding maintaining and popularizing their projects and they can begin to address these challenges by examining their project's contributor pathways governance models and reward models and finally they'll also need to determine the best ways to gather feedback from the communities and communicate the value and success of their work to various stakeholders so that so I think I have been able to cover most of the points that I wanted to talk about and so that's mostly it for the content that I wanted to share with you um and but before ending the presentation I also wanted to like have an open Q&A session probably we have I think another 10 minutes so uh if you have any questions about the slides or about what I talked about right now you can probably share them on the chat right now and I can answer them if you have any doubts regarding the projects doing about the presentation summary maybe yeah we can talk about that right now so yeah um that's it for me for this uh session now so I'm keeping an eye out on the on the session chat if anyone has any doubts or any questions that you want to talk about yeah I hope I did not go through the slides too fast uh I was a bit concerned around uh the amount of time we have and the amount of content that I wanted to cover through this okay uh so I think we are done for the day then uh thanks everyone for uh joining in on this session it was great talking to you uh yeah and see you around I'm online if anyone has any uh doubts you can ping me directly from the people section uh so yeah hope it was helpful for you yeah thank you