 Okay, they're closing the doors. So we're gonna get going. So you are here to hear me talk about tribes today It's about creating sustainable micro communities in Drupal. So thank you very much for coming If you're not in the right place, please sit down anyway. I'm looking at you. I'm just kidding All right, so who am I and I'll just skip that slide Because who cares? All right, so I am Shannon. Hi, I work at Acquia Before I came to work at Acquia. I did quite a bit of work in the Drupal 8 community starting right after DrupalCon Chicago, I think and I was helping to coordinate some of the initiatives Give them some roadmap advice and just generally be a happy helper in the project management realm And how can I help them organize that and I learned a lot through that experience and I've been involved in community ever since And so I decided to do the session today because I felt like There's a lot there now We've come a really long way when it comes to helping developers get involved We've made leaps and bounds in the past, you know, five six years since I was doing some of that But I'm still seeing a lot of help needed for other areas. How do we bring in more skill sets? How do we bring in different types of people? How do we bring in people more globally into the community and create tribes? And talk about it a little bit more what it is But that's just a little bit of background about me and why I'm here talking to you today. I want to inspire your ideas I want us to have some conversation after I talk about this I want to hear what you think and I want you to take these ideas and bring them into the community and really try and execute on some of these concepts So what are we going to talk about today? First we're going to have a bit of retrospective discussion. What do we know? What have we learned? What takeaways can we sort of draw from and to get that information I talked to a lot of different people in the community and just generally kind of got consensus and my own experiences and just what do we know? We're going to talk a little bit about how to grow tribes and what are tribes What's the difference between it like a tribe and a group or an initiative like I can answer questions about that at the end But I want to tell you kind of what a tribe is and then we want to talk about metrics So if we are doing this right, how do we know we're doing it right? What should we be looking for? What's a success story sound like? What should we be watching to see if we're actually growing these groups in the right way and then finally some takeaways? I've got some Tips and tricks and ideas for you to think about it's gonna be on one slide. So that's our agenda for today and Let's get right into it. So a few thoughts Retrospectively speaking I wanted to do what's called a flap. I know it's fun, fun acronym. It means Future considerations Lessons learned accomplishments and problem areas so Future considerations something I'm hearing a lot is that we are gonna really need to focus on Contribution instead of something like sprint day or Let's go work on this initiative Like dev situation like I want us to really change our verbiage and I've heard this from a few people in the community Other communities are doing it Let's contribute. Let's not focus on a sprint Because sometimes sprint doesn't sound super inviting to people in UX or UI or whatever. They're like, oh, yeah They're gonna go develop. I guess I'll just go over here and go away forever So let's not do that another thing that we can think about is trying to focus on Better onboarding tools. So a lot of communities have documentation They have a lot of other things that we don't yet for these other groups for these more diverse groups And we need to work on that I also think that we need to work on empowering our leadership This is something I've heard a lot just ever since day one in working in D8 I felt like people felt really frustrated the ones who were in leadership roles Couldn't execute because they were kind of stuck. They're like, oh, well, I can do all these things But I can't because now 25 people have just come into my channel and said all these things And now I have to respond to each and every one of them We're gonna iterate forever on this thing Even though we're halfway through development and now we have to stop and discuss again It's a big hurdle for them. So I think future concepts need to really take into account How do we manage leadership and how do we empower leadership to be decision makers or at the very least Decision leaders where they can drive a decision and stop the debate at some point in the process Another thing in terms of lessons learned that we were able to draw was the fact that we had a real diversity problem I already talked about this 99% of you are like developers in this community. That's a problem for us We need to think about that. How is it affecting our development? We shouldn't just be having a group of developers in a room talking about a problem Which is basically what sprint day was and has been historically now We have a few UX people like boy and others who are getting involved and that's great But they are still far too few so I feel like this is something that we need to really own and understand We also have communication problem I'm just gonna call out the elephant in the room Drupal.org is not super friendly for non developers Filing issues that are visual in nature that are interactive in nature that are dependent on other things Issues that need to be discussed as a whole like this is not a great forum So communication is kind of a problem. I think anyway, and I've heard that from other people We need to do more mentorship. I know Kathy you've done a lot in this realm. Thank you very much But we need to do more of it There needs to be a lot more involvement and especially I'm gonna call myself out and people like me who really care about this and Want to see it move forward we can step up and sort of lead this charge It's hard to do but like we need to be having a way to do it. So that's what I hope to talk about in a little bit Let's talk about some accomplishments Scheduled releases that's been going pretty good for us. I think it might be because we plan stuff Crazy idea you plan to release and then it happened. Oh my god So I think that's pretty good. I think we should do more of that by the way that probably involves some project management types We've been raising awareness around the fact that we need to do more of that stuff That whole initiative movement thing that started I know it was really painful at first But I think has been really successful for us in raising awareness that we can't just develop like we have been We need to actually think about building teams and building tribes around these ideas and initiatives that we care about They're supported and I will get into the wine in just a second and finally the security team I think they're doing an awesome job. We all just Shouted that out during the keynote. How great were they? How awesome was that information is because they had many people from many different backgrounds and many different places all caring about a topic And all really staying involved and staying in touch. They had really strong communication. They had really strong leadership They have really strong directive that is a strong tribe So let's talk about some things that are not going so well onboarding and offboarding Really really hard to get started. There are barriers around. What do you know? What should you know? What have you already done? What do you need to learn? Oh my god? This is really hard Not just for developers like for everyone Project managers and UI people and creative people right now and they come to our community. They're like Where do I even go? Like there's nowhere really for me to even look to start to think about Contributing or what is my role in this community as a non developer like that just does not exist We need to think about that Offboarding is also an issue by the way because when someone wants to leave It's like mic drop. I'm done now. I did my thing. I'm done That's a problem for the community We need much better handoff opportunities and means to actually document and follow up on what someone is saying I have to put this down now. Who's gonna pick it up? So offboarding and onboarding both issues Work-life balance this kind of for me goes hand-in-hand with the onboarding offboarding thing You work super hard just to figure all this stuff out and then you get an idea and you work on something You feel really really driven and because it's hard to develop the community to come and help you You're on your own You're killing yourself and then when you do are just finally like oh god. I can't do this anymore There is no way to just hand it off to somebody easily a lot of core developers a lot of core contributors feel this way Not just in development, but other things too. It's like really overwhelming. You're trying to just figure this out and help and you can't And then you can't just walk away your whole life kind of implodes. You're like all right. I have to stop this now So a lot of pressure on those people which could be alleviated by the final thing I think we're not doing so good, which is funding and The slide just advanced. Sorry. So funding needs work And we can also think about how do we fund things so that people can be sustainable and can be long-term and can Have work-life balance Focusing on dribble and core development without having to walk away from their lives or their day job So let's talk about some conclusions When we're talking about this stuff, there's a lot of things that I feel we can learn But I want to focus on a few first one being onboarding and mentorship. I think it's really important that we lower that barrier Let's make it easy for people to understand What they can do? This is not a simple solution, but it is an important one and I think it needs a lot of work right now We also need to think about the on ramps of people what do we have today? We don't really have a lot of these we have some tutorials, but they're getting out of date really fast We need to work on that. We need more mentors more docs. Basically, we need to lower those barriers Another one is scheduling. I really liked Those scheduling examples that I called out. I think that we need to plan more things I think that's working for us and we should try and do more Yeah, there was We even have our roadmap to fall back on Communication wise we need to work on how we coordinate with remote teams. This is just going to be a thing We're living with this. We're bathing in it. Let's and really embrace it figure out. How do we work well with these remote teams? How do we coordinate better? What communication tools can we develop that are going to be accessible for everybody and better for everybody and The work life balance thing I think this is the other core issue if you're going to contribute It kind of becomes like your life after a while if you're maintaining something you are responsible for it And how many people are dependent on you just you? This is not a healthy thing I think we need to work on fixing that and we need to specifically think about When you have an idea you don't just go do it anymore You go find yourself a bunch of friends who all care about that idea and you communicate communicate communicate You build this community around what you're trying to do such you can effectively a Signwork work with people. I think that needs to be a real early phase development for this concept And I think the answer to this is really with tribes. So let's talk about what is a tribe exactly? I don't mean that it's you know Indians and Aborigines and all these things. I'm definitely not talking about that I am talking about a vision that is clearly expressed that the people in your tribe adhere to and understand I am talking about leadership techniques. How do you find those people? How do you nurture their their skills and how do you really get them excited about what you're doing? Keep them having that positive experience and wanting to come back for more and Then church teach them to go out and find other people and How do you communicate? What are the methods that you're using to do those two things? How can you optimize that? How can you improve that so that it grows that tribe? They all know where to go. Oh, I need to do something. I know just where to go Oh, I need to find someone. I know just where to go I know just how to get my message out that I'm looking for people are looking for things to do These communication tools are going to be key to our success in growing these groups So some examples of successful tribes sports for example If you're a sports man, you probably know where to go Music is another good one And I think Drupal needs to be another good one where we're really looking for how do we build these communities up? And how do we teach them how to build themselves? So out of this if this is done well, I think that we're going to see first of all better deliveries Because stop advancing All right, I don't know why it's doing that But we're gonna see better communities come out of it because the teams will have more diverse groups working on this Yep, I know I got to turn off the automatic transition. I don't know why it's doing that. There we go Now it's gonna work So if we get better shipments out of this, I think it's gonna be because the groups are more diverse You'll have UX people advising you you have PM people helping to plan you'll have communicators out there broadcasting your message This is stuff historically that most development teams don't enjoy or want to do But it's immensely helpful in growing your team. So you're not the only one doing it I think we'll also see lots of opportunities to improve onboarding and training and that in turn Will grow your community because it'll be easier for people to get involved if they know how to start They're not so scared to start. I think so you'll have more people and more hands on board After that, we'll see improved coordination Obviously because people will be talking to each other more and they'll be interested in thinking proactively instead of reactively So I think that we'll see a much better coordination and finally I think the the tribal mentality is just a really Positive thing and it's something that culturally Drupal needs and something that we all need when we're working on these projects We need to feel like life is great. I'm excited to see these people. I'm excited to work on this project I think we really need a lot more of that and when people are feeling that way about your project Guess what they stick around? That's a problem too in this community someone starts working on something and get really excited about it for a little bit They work really really hard and they're like oh Stop I have to go away and so this is something that will keep them there that tribal mentality that feeling of we're all in this together We're all excited about this. We're all working on it But I'm not by myself and I can go on vacation without dying and having this drop off the face of the planet Because there's someone to pick up what I'm doing and we're gonna rotate in So that's my theory and we can talk more about that but first I want to really say what am I asking of you the community? mostly, I want you to focus on better culture communication and coaching so Communication wise. I think it means that we should be looking At how do I get my team to say I get it? I'm on board with your vision. They understand that and I can find someone to help me and I know how to get started working on this and then finally. I know what's next I know what's coming so that if I want to try something else I can or I can stop if I need to Communication wise these should be just table stakes. I Think that we should also have the ability to make a sort of kit out of this So what does this kit include? I think it should be an elevator pitch for your thing or your concept or whatever it is We should be able to really describe that in a minute or less That way people can actually jump on you don't have to be like well I'm gonna do this thing and it's gonna be really complex and really neat I'm gonna take 25 minutes to explain it to you and you're not gonna understand 10 words of it until the very end where I'm like Well, basically, it's this thing work on your pitch so people can actually want to get involved You're gonna want to have on and off mentors people to get you started people to help you walk away I think these two things are really key because especially that last one You're on your own in a lot of these cases, but right now. I don't think anybody's talking about off-boarding anyone at all How do you walk away from something? Well, you drop it on the ground and you go away forever. That's not great We need to work on that So the kit should include some guidelines if you want to start if you want to stop Here's the person who helps you or he's the people who help you We should have innovation process That to me is very table stakes if you want to change something There should be some kind of guideline within your tribe to say hey, this is how we want your feedback Maybe there's a feedback section. Maybe there's a person you talk to maybe there's an issue queue Maybe there's whatever. I don't know you guys decide, but you should make that clearer Because for people like me who are non-technical man, it's really hard to give feedback. I want to give feedback I'm like, I don't even know where to go forget it So the community is gonna stall until we figure that out And finally we need better planning tools and I've got a couple of examples and a couple of ideas that we could use to Grow that so this is my concept around communication and what we need After that, I'd like to just call out a couple of examples where this has worked So the first one was with Chris Vanderwater. I was having a chat with him You know, what did you think worked well for you? And he said well, I started out with like this idea and You know, that was great for blocks and layouts and I really wanted to do it And then Emily came along and she had this vision. It wasn't just an idea It wasn't just a proof of concept. She explained how it was valuable She put it in clear terms really simple for people to just hop on and understand where her train of thought was going I'm like, okay, cool. That totally supports my concept. So Basically, it's really key to tribal nature and tribal growth and then Seth Godin's book called tribes He talks about a little bit. He says you want to tell a story? Obviously that people can get easily. What's the problem? How are you solving it? Tell them a nice story. Then you want to create a connection to the people in your tribe How would you solve this problem or how would you like to help me or you know What can you bring to the table? What skillsets have you today make that personal for them? And then finally you want to have a very low barrier to get started. Oh, okay. You're interested in this Hmm. Here's something super easy. It will take you about an hour or a day or whatever time frame is most effective for your group Give them something to work with and make it easy. So that's kind of how this worked for For Chris and that team they found some things that were smaller that people could get started on and they also had some very Very big complex things that not everyone could do but I think this is a really effective way and I think that that Process outlined in tribes is a good one in addition to that. I feel like and I talk about this all the time I don't know if you've heard any of my talks, but this is a recurring theme rocket ships, it's The tool that is used by multi-lingual from from Gabor. I love this tool still it's been around for a couple years I'm still like this is awesome. This is why first thing You have this big thing when you arrive It is the story it talks about why multi-lingual is important And what do you need and you can get more information about how to contact them and whatever But at least this tells you kind of what's going on then. Hey, I'm interested in this. Who do I talk to? Find yourself a mentor. It's right there Meet the team those are your mentors. Those are the people that you can talk to how easy is this and Then finally you have contribute. It doesn't even say developer like issues or whatever. It says contribute. I love it It's so nice. So you can contribute right there. All right. I found somebody blah blah blah blah. He said check out this issue I go right over to that issue. It's got a schmancy thing it pulls from d.o. Issue q. It's really well done By the way, this can be abstracted and used for any project Just ask a bore for the code. He'll probably send it to you Didn't get I assume. Oh Thank you. It's a d.o project now. Let's see. I'm way behind the times. Thank you Kathy So there's stuff that you can use it's already out there very effective tool. He's grown that community super well Thanks to tools like this. This is my vision. This is how you can contact us. This is how you get started It's really simple. This is not rocket science What's that? It's a rocket ship it is Okay, so let's talk a little bit about culture because we all know that we've had some cultural issues in the past So I just want to take a moment and talk about how we want these tribes to feel What should they be thinking? First of all, they should feel welcome in Joe Schindler's Keynote last year in Vienna did a whole spiel on this. It's much better than this So if you want more information check that out, but I like this. I should feel good I should feel welcome. I should have a positive first interaction. He talks a lot about this And I totally agree my first interaction in the community was with Angie and I was like, oh, can I help? She's like, this is great. I love that you want to help. This is awesome. Okay, let's go figure this out I wish everyone had that kind of welcome into their community Contribution like mode because I was like, oh my gosh, she's like happy that I'm here Wouldn't you go back to somebody who was like yay welcome rather than oh crap not find something for you to do That's not the same welcome. It's not the same vision, right? So I think this is really important. They should also feel valued Everyone can bring some knowledge to the table. I don't care how Like untalented you are an experienced or whatever You know stuff you've experienced stuff You should feel like you're making a difference and that you're not the only one working on this if you're working in a tribe That's what I mean by piece of the puzzle You should feel like you are one piece of a big picture So this is really important to me that this feeling demonstrates a strong tribe and a positive tribe So what's in the kit? I think we need ramp up plans a very welcome a very warm welcome Good ways to get started. We need the right Contribution sort of recognition. This is extremely hard to do right now if not developers by the way I Think the the recognition that I got was like a call out from trees and his trees note, which was awesome But still like we should have ways to say our project management team smashed this by doing blah blah Or you know, we're so grateful to our UXers who just designed this brand new thing for blocks and layouts or however It is or whatever it is. We should be able to call them out easily quickly just like we do with development We should have more role clarity. We should be able to say This is your space where you're useful and valuable so we can make those Recognitions where necessary and then finally we should have ramped down plans You should be able to walk away or stop doing something without creating a big hole in that project And thus leave feeling really guilty when you stop doing that It's really hard to feel good about your tribe and good about your contribution If you stop and then all of a sudden everyone's like, oh crap you just screwed us. That's really That's not a good feeling So culturally, I think these are the things that we need to really adopt in order to be successful and driving this sort of positive tribal culture And I mentioned Joe as an example and I'm going to just call it out again So something he said was everyone has something to share this actually echoes trees Dries note from today ironically wasn't playing just happened that way And I think this is absolutely right and this should be sort of the Example that we look to when we say how do we make someone feel special? How do we make some feel valued? recognizing their contribution whatever it is and Recognizing let's open our hearts and minds a bit and say I know this is a really complex technical thing But this UX person or this creative person who ever it is who's really interested in getting involved or even this business Person who just cares about the topic and maybe wants to share an opinion. They can bring me something Let's not be so closed off to that. I feel like right now a Lot of conversations that I had previously were very centered around how do I build this not how well do I build this? And I think that that's a distinction. We need to really think about So that's what I mean by everyone has something to share be open to it And then this happened this morning as well. We need better documentation we need a process for Defining these things and for supporting these things Outside of just development. How do UXers UIRs creatives PMs business owners product owners? How do they approach us today? How do they get involved? What can we bring to them? What can they bring to us? So these are things that I think we also need more docs around and then let's talk a little bit about contribution There's a lot of ways that we can say thank you to our contributors Doesn't just have to be a pat on the back. You could do a blog post you could tell a DA Hey, this person pushed this thing forward so much. Can we do a spotlight on them? You could do get tip if that's their thing or if they have other tools for funding their work Or you could also just help them find more help. What a great. Thank you that is For real. I like your work so much. It means so much to me I'm gonna go rally the troops and get you a whole slew of people That to someone is like I would feel super grateful if someone did that for me If they pushed my concept forward if they pushed the work that I was trying to lead or whatever forward by helping me get help That's a big deal So I think that's my favorite one by the way and finally being able to breathe I think that this is a biggie that we haven't solved You should be able to go away and want to come back I think that this is a transient sort of community in a lot of ways We're all here a lot where we stick around in the community for years and years and years But we don't always contribute in that long-term way. I Think that's an issue. I think we should be able to Step up to the plate Knock it out of the park hand off our bat and then go sit in the dugout Until we're ready to come back It's okay, and people naturally need to do that because not everyone is contributing full-time So how do we make this possible for people to take a breath live life? I Think this is really tough right now Because of the aforementioned barriers. So if we can knock those down, I think that we'll see a lot more of this I think we'll see people coming contributing walking away Coming back walking away again coming back again. That's all right. I think that that's the nature of the beast I think we have to embrace it and we have to prepare for it. So the way that we do that Some ideas we can consider. I think we need to have more teams I think we need to have alternates on teams Maybe you have a PM, but maybe you have an alternate PM who once every two months shows up just to be like what's going on? Maybe the same for other development roles. Maybe you're not always working on something critical But you're rotating out you could be working on something critical one month and then documenting it the next and then working Non-critical the month after that give someone else a critical chance don't always have the same people working all the same critical stuff That's a single point of failure that puts a lot of pressure on them Spread out the love a little bit grow the knowledge base a little bit and Then finally expand those contributions skill sets here. That's that's a really good one because if you are the lone Developer working on something you have to figure out your UI you have to figure out your UX You have to figure out all these other things if you're a team It frees up everyone's mind to focus on their skill sets and where they really shine and what they really care about So I think that's a real big positive. They'll feel better about it, but they'll also not be responsible for all the things Which is a huge positive for our engineers. I think so Let's talk about the third one coaching. I think this is how do we get there? We talked a little bit about what do we need? I think this is a little bit of the way forward If you're being coached effectively in a tribe, you'll feel like that help was constructive This goes back to culture a little bit But it's important to have that sort of coaching mentality and not the you're doing it wrong Mentality, that's really painful for someone to hear We also want to encourage people to feel good about giving feedback This is a community meant to iterate when you're in those issue cues There's tons of comments some of them nice some of them not nice But I think that we can all be constructive and we should shoot for a positive environment for people who are coming in and seeing that And they should also feel like they're empowered to help others if you learn something You should feel okay sharing that knowledge. Maybe it's through documentation or maybe it's through mentorship But I think we shouldn't be of so afraid of assigning mentorship to just anyone who learned a thing But that's just my opinion So what's in this coaching kit? I think that we need. Oh, no It might accidentally paste it over it. So in the coaching realm, we need stronger mentorship tools so a mentorship guide would be really good maybe three key questions that you could ask someone to teach them how to be a good mentor or a Sort of shadowing opportunity when a mentor is working with someone else and they just learned something Here's how I mentored someone else into learning this Let's have you watch me teach someone else what you just learned and then you can go and do that shadowing is really good for that Having constructive tools and I'm going to go through a few of those tools right now that you can use to encourage criticism in a positive way in those groups encourage constructive conversation and debate and Finally you can work on just having the tools to tell someone when they're not doing good coaching So calling out someone in private When they're not doing it right is really good and really important calling them out in public when they are doing things, right? Setting that example for everyone is a really positive thing that I think is really important to have in that toolkit I'll fix this slide later add those little icons, but that's what I think needs to be in there So talking about that. I think some of you have seen this slide from Angie It is her quadrant of awesomeness where she talks about how in the upper right hand corner are people who are super skilled and super Awesome to work with and create really strong tribes And that's what we want and sometimes we get dragons who are super skilled and not very nice to work with and the people in the Bottom right, we just don't want because they're not very good And they're not very nice and then the upper sort of left corner is where we have the mentoring opportunity And this is where I see as Putting the most effort around our tribal growth is right there because it's people who need to have a little bit of work done at Growing their skills, but they're awesome and they have the right mentality. That's who we want to work with new people in the right Top should be working with the people on the left top And that's how we're gonna have strong coaching mentality between the tribal members In the book that I was reading recently called radical candor There's a similar Sort of graph here and what it's author Kim Scott what she suggests is that you should care personally and approach directly I really love this concept because when you care personally about someone you're not going to be a jerk to them usually If you know the people on your tribe and you care about what they're trying to do and you care about them as a person You're much less likely to be a jerk So that's really important also challenging directly When you disagree with someone and you can back up your argument with facts or examples or ideas That are not just oh, well, I don't like your thing That's really helpful So challenging directly and approaching someone in a you know not telling so-and-so their ideas terrible don't work with it If you tell someone I think this is better You can actually have a debate you can have a discussion and that's a really positive tribal community approach Which is really effective in the Drupal open-source community so I Touched on debate and decide a little bit, but I just want to expand on that One problem that we have in this community when we're trying to have these discussions is that we focus a lot of our time on that debate and In the issue cues, I know it's it's a tool where you can kind of see that never-ending I think that we need to really separate those two things. There's debating. There's ideation. There's options. There's discussions on those options and their viability and their pros and cons and all sorts of issues around them and That's very important but Big but leadership needs to be able to say stop The time has come for a decision. We have enough information and there's no formula for knowing when that's going to happen Leadership needs to be empowered to make that decision Maybe they don't make the decision in the end about what is decided, but they need to be able to say stop we decide now and Then the decision process continues. Maybe it's like a vote or maybe it's a committee or however They decide to do it, but I think this is one area where in open-source development We are lacking clear delimiters and clear moments where we're like, okay enough Deciding now and then debate stops and you work on delivering whatever was decided And then if someone wants to raise an issue when I disagree with that We use it and then you're like, okay open an issue or open a forum to discuss and debate Why you think that and make sure it's not the one that we just had and Then we can move forward if you have a different idea or you want to iterate on what we just did Great, let's do that, but let's not reopen the whole debate Let's not rehash this whole thing all the time. That's painful and I think we need to just segregate the two things Are you deciding? Are you debating? Maybe that means that you have submission natives or goals and impacts discussions And you're working on constraints and methods, but they are not the same as Talking about topics or architecture like you need to decide how you're approaching this So debating and deciding an issue A third thing that I think culturally will really help us move in this coaching mentality is by making people really comfortable with feedback Good feedback positive and negative comments delivered in a respectful way So you could have a chart like this which maybe you run through for each iteration or each sprint or whatever you're doing That says that for these people we're going to get from give to and encourage between as leadership within your tribe You're picking out people Who you are trying to get to do these things Give praise to get criticism from now you can start this in your own groups You can have this little chart for who you want to encourage within your tribe to work on these positive aspects of criticism I think that that's an important step and that's really accepting that we need to foster that and not just arguing so Those are a few Coaching things and I think we also need to talk about the elephant in the room We have a lot of people who are remote in this community. How do we deal with that? We have time zone issues. We have language issues of culture issues We have technology issues around the communication that are all going to screw that up for lack of a better word there's no perfect formula for that, but I think that regular check-ins really help if you want to develop a personal relationship with a remote person you check in on a Regular basis because it's only then that you can sort of identify. Oh, they're talking differently this week or how they sound really tired Or oh, they're saying this really negatively and blah blah blah Maybe you pick out some things that you didn't realize before but you will only see those nuances in that person if you really set up the Communication if you're just talking to them once a month It's gonna be really hard to pick up when they're not doing so good. I think so communication often regular in person when you can Video next in phone after that email text whatever last which I think is the opposite of what we're doing today Ironically a lot of us just communicate through issue cues or through IRC or through chat or whatever it is That's the last form the lowest form of Connecting personally with remote people. We should really be focusing much more on telephone Or video chat as much as we can with those groups because it really creates that connection helps you care personally So you can challenge directly in the right way So I think often You should be checking in with your teams. We should also have a lot more focus on Making it a habit and getting insights about the person as a person and not just the project that they're working on get to Know them. Do they have a family? Do they have dog? Whatever? What's their situation? It makes it a lot easier to create that bond and then to keep them involved and to know that you care In addition to that, I think it's good to try and find out more about what they're interested in Just like in career development any good leader wants to focus on where their person that they're focused on in their team wants to go to Because think about if you're working with someone on a project and you know that later They want to do I don't know product management or project management or something like that's their career aspiration And you can help them there. They're gonna come back again and again. They're gonna be like, I'm learning stuff This is pushing my career. I'm gonna put this on my resume or I'm gonna show this result or whatever This is amazing for the community. This is how you grow those other groups It's how you keep them around Stimulate their career growth give them something to shoot for so you have to understand Where do they want to go and to do that? You have to talk to them about it I think we're not doing that at all. I think we're saying, okay, you want to do this thing. All right Here's an issue. Go do it. How does that stimulate someone's mind to say? I'm gonna stay around and do this forever. It doesn't really And then finally you have to be really good at recognizing them for what they are doing and what they are bringing It remote teams. This is super hard to do but I'm gonna give you some examples of how we do it in my team So my bosses have sent us books They've sent us Thank you sort of presence like one last year We all got capes because we were kind of doing some amazing stuff and really short timelines and we pulled it off And they sent us all capes. I thought that was kind of funny You don't have to do that, but I think that sending a card is a great way to tell a remote person Oh my gosh, what you do is so impactful. No one does that anymore. And I think it's super Physical to like have the tangible thing and really how they went to the post office And they just sent me this card when I got a card from Acre on my birthday. I was like, oh my god This is so sweet So I think that stuff like that doesn't have to cost a ton of money or take a lot of time But it does get felt and I think that that's the important thing So that's what I think about remote cultures and there's a lot more that I could say on this Tons and tons, but I'm just keeping it to bare bones. So if you want to know this, there's been previous sessions about it I'm sure there will be future sessions Remote teams is a thing that we really need to do better at managing Okay, now I've given you a bunch of ideas and I want to talk a little bit about how do we know if this is working What are the metrics that I think we should be watching to see if we're doing tribal community the right way? So the first one is tribal stages and this was in the book tribal leadership Shoot, I forgot his name. No I'll try and put it in the slides. So there are different levels of tribal I guess success and the bottom one is called life sucks where the person's just really unhappy Their entire thing about life is just jaded life is terrible. I hate my life That's phase one phase two is my life sucks where maybe everyone else is doing okay But I'm crap because my life is terrible phase three is I'm great and then princess kind of you're not Where someone can see the work that they're doing is really good But they're just not involved in the group in the way they should be they're not appreciating everybody the way they should be and Four and five are where it starts to get really interesting and really successful So stage four you'll hear people saying we are great So a team that's starting to have success as a tribe is gonna start echoing that sentiment look what we did Look how great this turned out. That's awesome. That's what that's when you know you're starting to see tribal success and then finally life's great when you see teams that are not focused on Beating other people or who are getting less competitive with each other Then you can see that they're really trying to focus on it a greater good a greater issue They feel like they can do it. There's optimism abound. That's when you've reached Stage five life's great and if you get people to that stage They're gonna stick around forever because that's where people feel good and useful and valued and like they're really making a difference and I've felt that in the Drupal community before I Felt that level of this could be so valuable for my life to just be involved in this and making difference of pushing it forward Look how many people I'm helping and this is what's great about open source. Anybody can feel this way You just have to really get there through these stages And not everyone starts at phase one by the way most people start in phase three I think it's like 50% of people in their workplace feel like they're in phase three So you usually start somewhere in the middle and you have to build them up and in that book There's a tribal leadership. There's a lot of techniques for doing that. So you could read that book I'm not gonna outline it because we don't have time But there are some metrics that I want to cover here that I think are important for us to watch in addition to Just language and how are we talking about our group and how are we talking about our accomplishments? So I think that we should be talking about people How much do we want to grow at how much did we grow in terms of diversity of roles or the number of people? Actually contributing to this We should talk about releases and the quality of our releases. Are they getting better? Are they getting faster? Are they getting more frequent? These are measurable tangible things and then finally we can talk about morale and that goes back to the language thing How are we talking about this? How are people feeling about this? How are we gauging that? We can see that in language We can see that in the number of people staying in the initiative. How long are they there? They're there for years Obviously, you're doing something right because they're sticking around People are probably pretty happy with that. So those are tangible measurable things. You can talk about these things Here's some ideas for you the number of non dev community Contributors how are you growing that and how are you fostering that to really form that group instead of a set of developers? You can talk about average time on critical path if someone's working on something How long did it take if it's taking years something is very broken in my opinion You can talk about the number of thank-yous that they got or gave how are we communicating and contributing to our recognition? Velocity or time to market of those releases like I said faster or better Team growth year over year and the tribal leadership speech So this is my recommendation for metrics that you should be looking at in these teams to find out if you're actually doing it, right? Those are just ideas You could do more. I'm sure So I'm gonna do some takeaways and then we're gonna do some Q&A takeaways I Stole this from the book how to be a positive leader by Jane Dutton and Gretchen spritzer, which I really liked It's called give First one is growth Find people not just developers. Please. Let's get some diversity in here. Let's really grow this community horizontally and vertically Secondly integrate this goes back to culture make them feel welcome It make them feel like they are really embraced even if they don't know what this thing about Bob is even called You know, they're not dumb. They just haven't been around. They're not in your field They probably have terms you don't know. Oh, you know, let's give them a break Virtuousness they talked about this as being You have this quality when you feel like you are contributing back and making a difference it makes you feel really good like you're Exemplifying a virtue which can foster a lot more things by the way So rewarding the right behaviors is really important to grow that V of virtuousness The E is for esteem. So Thank you. Thank you very much all the time very much very loud when it's good And there's one that I didn't put on here, which is you know No when to sort of quash the bad behavior and do it in private, please There's nothing worse for me than when someone comes up to you in front of a big group of your peers that you really respect and says you did that so terribly and Never touch it again No, this is a mentoring opportunity for you as a leader take them aside or take them in a private channel or whatever it is Explain what happened explain what you needed and then give them a second chance to get it right if you can That's much more effective. So that's give and That's from the book and the second half is more and that's from me. I Think that we need to make a plan. I Think that we need to organize better give people the process that they need I think we need to regulate communication We need to have regular cadences for meetings. We need to have Processes that are in place where we communicate effectively amongst different groups at different times who collaborate together Let's actually make this teamwork We need to also make people excited I don't think that we do enough of that and I think that we think sometimes our idea is good people will just come That's not true You have to give them something to feel excited about that goes back to your elevator pitch Get really good at that get really passionate about it and people will come to you It's just it takes an investment and you have to be excited yourself So those are my takeaways are give more as an acronym I hope that that helps you remember some of them and fostering the right community fostering the right processes and Really giving yourself a chance to grow community outside of just development So that's my session and now we can get some ideas from you guys any questions or comments Okay My question was about the dragons You felt more hopeful for those that were in the top left of the quadrant sure and your quadrant of awesomeness Oh, it's Angie and Dries. It's not or of Angie's excuse me But do you feel that there's a path for it also for the dragons? You know, they've got the skills, but they lack maybe the empathy or You know Yeah, they They are skilled, but they are not good at communicating effectively. I absolutely do feel like there's a path forward for them I would just limit how much we invest in that So you'll know when you're trying to coach the person if they're coachable And that's something that we need to identify early on You can see it in the way that they communicate with other people and the way that they communicate to your feedback So if you for example See someone go into an issue queue and say hey, that's a piece of crap Don't put that in my queue or something really inappropriate like that That would be an opportunity for you to slide into their DMs and say hey there I saw your comment. Do you think that we can take a second to talk about it? Don't just launch right into a response first make sure they're open to getting a response because you don't know What state of mind they're in so with dragons? I feel like Tread lightly and figure out what's actually going on. What's the context that they're in first and then if they say sure Yeah, let's talk about it But next week because I'm going insane right now You already learned something really valuable if I was going to give them this feedback right now They weren't even going to listen so make sure that those ears are wide open call them next week set up the time and then say so Here is the behavior I noticed You told someone their work was crap. This person was pretty new Here's the impact this person now feels like crap because you told them they were crap and the Response so what would have been really good is if you could have maybe said some constructive things about what they needed to work on This is best done over the phone by the way if you can or in video chat. Don't just DM it I need you to be more specific about the things they could have done better and why give them examples contextual in the moment if possible and Please be nicer. We don't need to say words like you're crap or this is crap or whatever say I think you can do better. Give them alternate language options that they can use I think it's really important that we try and help those dragons become better because if they're really really skilled We don't want them to go away. We just want them to be nicer We just want them to do a better job of talking to other people about how they can do better They're actually not on that bad of a path that they're doing that because at least they're giving feedback It's just really poorly executed, right a Worst situation would be someone who comes in and does something and just overwrite someone else's work and just leaves They're like, man, this is terrible. I'm not even gonna tell you why or I'm not even gonna say that it's terrible I'm just gonna overwrite it like that's an insult on an engineering team I think I just worked on that for like two days and you just overwrote it. Okay, and Then maybe there's like a war like I'm gonna put him back and then I'm gonna overwrite it again And that just creates terrible feelings. So I think recognizing what a dragon is someone who's giving feedback Poorly and then giving them an opportunity to be coached if they're willing to be By assessing what is their state when can I talk to them? How are they responding and then giving them behavior impact response sort of approach This is how you can do better You want to coach them and be an example to them of how they can give constructive criticism to somebody in that moment That's a really great way. I think to show the dragons how to become in the upper right Maybe we can pull them both From the upper left and the bottom right that would be great. Good question. Thanks Anyone else have ideas around that too you can share your ideas if you have them Nope, I'm the only one with an idea on that. Okay I mean all the advice you just gave was really good So I couldn't add any more to that other than I particularly like the calling out the behavior tagging the behavior as the bug rather than the person as the bug In those problematic Conversations sure the question I had was all of that is amazing and I couldn't Have said any of it better myself. Oh stop go on I Wonder what you would say to someone who says that sounds great and I could probably learn all those highly Those very specialized skills, but how am I going to do all that and still maintain my project? The truth is I don't think you can I think that it's really hard for someone to code code code code code and foster the community and Maintain all these conversations with dragons and people who need mentoring and all these things Realistically we only have we have a finite amount of time So I think that if you have an idea you're starting an initiative your first order of business is make a team Period just assume. You won't have time to do everything I've seen it a bunch and it's really hard when people try they just end up burning themselves out because They're trying to find people and they're trying to teach people and they're trying to write things And they're trying to deploy things and then they're also like neck deep and issue cue comments and geez Oh So I am I don't think it is possible. Does anyone think it's possible to do that on your own? I'm seeing a lot of heads shaking We're all like oh, I'm seeing actually a lot of like faces of disgust right now Everyone does well Okay, um, so does that answer your question? Okay, good. Okay. I'm asking for a friend. Okay note everyone. This is not his question And of course, I can't Reiterate enough that it what a great presentation and thorough and detailed Although I think I think there's a big assumption and that is that The leader has a team the tribe leader has a team How do you recommend building your team such as a local Drupal user group that has attrition galore or Say you're doing a startup and you're trying to find the right, you know Technical and business leads and you want to build a team. Do you have any go-to resources? There's a lot of things on the Googles about how to how to grow a group of people I think the most effective ones are similar to what Joe Schindler put in his keynote I would just echo kind of what he said Make a space that's safe that people want to go to if you're trying to grow a community or grow a group And you're all sort of in person. That's a great way have a place and a time make it regular and make it recurring Be very welcoming have that little kit that I mentioned around like having a really clear elevator pitch It's what I'm trying to do is how I'm trying to do it This is what I need and this is where I'm meeting to talk about it if you can do that and be really regular and really positive and really Grateful for the people who show up like oh, that's so great that you're here. Let's do this thing Here's what we're doing this week and really bring them in I think that's really positive for them And I think it makes them want to come back and do it again So they feel like they're making a difference and they get that sort of tribal spirit of like we're in this together Look what we can do so that would be my my recommendation Anyone else have ideas? I Feel like no one wants to share their ideas your ideas are welcome Hi So yeah, thanks for your talk. I wanted to clarify one thing. I think in the description you said that There's 30 hours left for the rose model. Yeah, okay. We could talk about that. Yeah, 300 hours to the left. Oh good Thank you for clarifying that Slight nuance was only 10 times more. Yeah, so What I'm trying to do is like I'm I'm trying to To hand stay initiative over or to onboard new people that will help out with initiatives, so I think Resonating well with the I need a team To do that Yeah, so I'm really looking forward to To to to kind of build something new together with new people. I think I get a try some of this very powerful concept Yeah, but like looking back at I think it would have been nice if I applied similar concepts earlier to be able to kind of bounce back and forth in Like like circle the responsibility of running the initiative for distributing tasks better So yeah, I think it will be a good opportunity to To try concepts like this Okay. Well, if you come up with some good ideas You could do a talk on it That would be that's my suggestion to you It's my ask if it works and you get people to come and join your initiative and knock out those last 300 hours not 30 Then I think it would be a really positive thing for you to share with the community And I'm gonna come back to you and ask you how that's going there and with the rules initiative I think that I'm gonna pick on it a little bit because I think it's interesting That's a really important one that we all really really really really care about So when I saw that that actually kind of inspired this I was like How is it possible that this super important thing is not getting attention? Because we all care and we all see the difference that it makes so the vision Shouldn't even be like that tricky to put together seems like we need a Clearer path to to getting involved the onboarding needs I think some work That was just my observation there. Do you agree with that? Maybe you have your own thoughts on it Yeah, I think I agree We can always do better in for example So at some point, I think we ran out of the novice tasks and we had run like 20 sprints and You know like at some point you kind of Only have an initiative stagnates if if you have only the expert tasks left that you don't have the funding for right Okay, interesting. So we didn't see the value anymore in In yeah, in keeping doing as we did because We wrote a lot of blog posts and we were Presenting at the triple camps about it and the triple con Yeah, okay, so that I think was was the struggle that led to To a drop-off This is a really interesting point one you can maybe experiment with and then put in your talk What you're going to do now since I've decided You could for example Say the maturity sort of model for a tribe within the Drupal open-source community Once you hit X number of sprints Then you need to start developing champions who are gonna be stable so they can keep doing the long-term stuff And you start announcing to the world that you are in phase two And now you've got stable people on the team And then maybe you're gonna get into phase three later when you're starting to get mostly expert tasks And that's when you start going fund me fund me fund me because we want to get to the end of our road map We don't want to get stuck halfway through in phase two We need so much funding to get into phase three and that means that we need X Y and Z people to be working on This for X number of hours per week and then you start a funding campaign So that would be an interesting theory that you could prove out is once you grow your teams to a certain level of maturity Starting out stable people and then needing to work only on expert things being funded full-time That would be an interesting model to get feedback or examples on because that is a real challenge Across the board. You're not the only one suffering from that. I think core has a lot of that Okay, I think we're out of time Six o'clock. So thank you everybody for coming at the end of the day I appreciate it Okay