 Guten Morgen OpenStack Berlin. I'm Joseph Sandoval. I am with the Adobe Advertising Cloud. I'm a SRE manager there running a team that has open infrastructure at scale of 100,000 cores. I've also part of the user committee as well as been part of this OpenStack community for over five years now and I've truly enjoyed being part of this community and what it brings. One thing about the OpenStack community that in the foundation that I've really truly appreciated is how they have shown their commitment to diversity and inclusion with various programs. These programs are so important and key to the health of our community as they really help connect people to the technology, especially individuals who you know we find that they are on the you know underrepresented or the marginalized and so by having these programs as candle outlined it really helps to restore kind of really a balance that's needed in our communities. Especially now as we're hearing so much in regards to diversity and inclusion, it's like a topic that is very hot in the tech community and even for myself I'm very passionate about it because in my career and coming from a very non-traditional background from a family of farmers and being able to make this transition in the Silicon Valley into a career in technology I find that I'm very passionate about it, but you know it was recent that I was at an event a couple weeks ago where there was an interesting way that a young woman really contextualized this for me and I really thought about this a bit and that's in regards to when we think about diversity and inclusion and she used the phrase balance and belonging and what I thought was so good about that is because when you think about balance and we just look about our day-to-day life we don't think about gender diversity, we really just think about it's a natural order, there's a balance out there as well as that environment of belonging or creating that and why it's so important with community because often times there's individuals like myself and other minorities or gender minorities that they often struggle with finding their place and feeling like they belong and that's why mentorship is so key and it's been one thing that really had helped me because I wouldn't be standing here today if it wasn't for three individuals who helped shepherd me, guided me and helped strengthen and hone my skills so that I could know that I had a place and that I belonged in communities like this I think about that a bit and here I am 25 years in my career and I didn't realize that there was a common thread that carried through these three individuals were women who really looked after me, they looked at the internal individual and they saw that there was a lot of potential and as well as helped me to realize that I had something to contribute so you know we think about now how do we continually shepherd this, how do we continually grow it and especially in the work that I've been doing with not only within OpenStack because one thing here at the Summit is a great opportunity, you know as an operator I think it's really important to be mentoring and sharing what you learned and I've done that with two different teams, one where we had demos at Tokyo where we were showing what we were doing with Kubernetes with the Crockhunter demo as well as recently as last year about how we're running lean infrastructure at Adobe Advertising Cloud. Similarly mentorship is also key with the programs that have been outlined and for myself I've been using OpenSource as a way to help especially when it comes to individuals who have a non-traditional background. We're seeing a lot of individuals like now wanting to be a part of this and what I've found is that sometimes you kind of reach challenges about how do you get some individuals into these companies or even getting into that door and that's why I started realizing that OpenStack is a strategic platform that I believe is going to enable diversity and how I've been using it is really helping individuals that I've been meeting and mentoring and bringing them along and pointing them in directions of OpenSource projects that I think like hey you should get involved here and they can learn and they can really find a place within those communities and it gives them the technical acumen so that they can be able to succeed and find their ways because the one big challenge that we're still seeing is that there's a leaky pipeline of individuals of trying to find their ways in. So that's why I feel like it's very important for us as the OpenStack community when we get new members we have a lot of great programs that really help support individuals coming in this route and they'll be able to help teach them and help them to grow and when you just think about mentorship the one thing I can honestly say with the mentorship that I've done within OpenStack or even within the work that I've done even outside of it is that oftentimes it comes in various forms and that's really where I really had to come to realize is that not all of us are in a position to fully dedicate ourselves sometimes we're so busy that it could seem challenging but over the years I've realized that you can deliver it in a lot of different ways just recently I had a chance to connect with my hometown and it's a little small farming town in Watsonville, California it's just a community of farmers and I've had a chance to connect with an incubator there where they asked me to participate and what I found was that just having an opportunity to just sit down and just you know having a lunch sharing what I know my experiences and similar to what I had been given I found that if I just can really help them feel like hey you could have a career in this you belong in this community we need your voice how impactful that can be as well as that there's other things that we can do where I had an individual who reached out to me and we connected and I dragged him along to my meetups I had him come to my standups but I really wanted to show him that you know you this is let me take some of the magic away from what this is and help them to see that you know he's so he's getting close to being able to be in that position as well and so with the programs that we're outlined there's many ways that you can participate as well sometimes it may seem like a big commitment but with OpenSat cohorts you could break that down but it's a really one of those chop wood carry water type of things and there's many in this audience I know who are doing this and the one thing I could just say is just show up and support these programs these programs need you thank you