 Okay, let's do it. So, welcome everyone. Fun fact, the slides you're about to see are largely the same as we use in our internal onboarding and for our internal training on how to interact with communities. That's no mistake. We do believe in transparency and we do believe in sharing knowledge. So, this is quite deliberately us externalizing things which we do, how we do them, and not only talking some random things and making nice noise about stuff. It's very much us externalizing what we do and live internally. So, just out of interest, because I always do this when I'm in little bit adjacent communities, who knows what Rafauna is? Okay, that's maybe 30%, which is great, because I always like having audiences where people don't really know it. So, I probably don't have to ask you if you know what's profound in lapses, but do you know what Prometheus is? Anyone? Kubernetes? Okay, no surprise. If you're using Kubernetes and you're not using Prometheus, you might want to reconsider. I mean, they're literally made for each other and two founding projects of CNCF anyway. So, I'm going to start with a few theoretical bits and then we go into the application part. So, what is a community? A community is usually a group of people who have a certain commonality. This commonality might be in various shapes or forms if you are into fishing or skateboarding or whatever, like you have some reason why you feel the need to meet with other people of that certain group. Like, for example, open source. There are a few, also in the source files, you can also click to things. We're going to download them. So, if you want to read more on any of this, there's also source links. So, there's a few, when you come from German, and I am German, there is a few nice translations. Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Gemeinschaft is this community and you are based largely on roles and values and shared interactions and a lot of this is intrinsically motivated. Like, people can't force you to go to this one bicycling club. You come there and you go there and you keep coming there because you want to do this out of your own desire. Contrary to a society where a lot of interactions are not very direct, a lot of things like you send a letter or something is very indirect. You have a lot of impersonal roles and a lot of formalized values and a lot is driven by external or extrinsic motivation. For example, you don't want to be fined. I mean, there's a good example while here in Singapore or you don't want other people to look down on you or something. So, a lot of this is extrinsically motivated, not intrinsic. There's a little translation of Gesellschaft of where people come together and that's corporation and this is very much based on formalized roles and it always has an inherent structure. The others also have inherent structures but not as as raw as easily seen as corporations. And part of why you are at a company and if you're here for work is literally called compensation. So, you are being paid for using your time for not being, I don't know, at beach with your family or whatever to do the thing you're doing at work. So, this is very, very much an extrinsic motivation and yes, any healthy company has a healthy internal culture. So, what is community not? And again, this is what all the people joining Refinal Labs see including marketing and including sales. We take this seriously. Communities are not a sales channel, they're not a marketing target group. They do tend to reject outside commercial interests quite strongly as most people in this room will probably attest to. And communication with and within communities often has its own rules. It's not that you can just like go from one to the other and everything is the same. Over time they develop certain patterns of communication, certain memes, certain in jokes, certain ways of how to interact with each other and it's important to take this into account and honor this kind of thing because it's really, really easy to get this kind of thing wrong. So, why do we care? And again, this is from the perspective of internal. A large, large, arguably the largest part of the success of Grafana Labs and oh, maybe I should explain this because if you don't know what Grafana and Grafana Labs is. Grafana is a visualization tool which visualizes data for basically all, all databases you can think of and people use this primarily for operations of IT, of cloud, of cloud native microservices, whatever. But also you can use this at industry. I literally know someone who runs a port and they have a way, a waiting thing in the conveyor belt and when they take on coal, they can see how heavy the coal is. From this they reduce how much moisture is in the coal and they can stop the conveyor belt when it's too moist because it would spoil the rest of the batch. So, that's all of the things that you can do with this and Grafana Labs is the company which provides this open source but also sells services based on this. So, and this again is something we teach the people internally and also which is coming directly from the founders. That Grafana Labs honestly tries to teach the community well and the communities, as you can see, are also repaying with engagement, are also repaying with like attending conferences or speaking positively about a thing. So, there is also some, quite some, some egoistic motives in this from the company perspective. But the good thing is we found a way to align those incentives so we don't do open core or anything. It's true actual open source. So, the thing is that as a company which actually is built on open source, we actually do believe that this is a strategic requirement for the continued growth of the company. And if done right, and this is also part of being honest for anyone who invests in community, like I'm director of community, Grafana Labs pays me to do this. Yes, there is something we get back and that is, that this is an integral part of the sales motion if done right. Another really nice survey, they did one again last year, but the results are basically the same. Stack Overflow asks how developers choose software. And if you look at the first three, starting for your free trial, asking other developers and visiting developer communities, those are things which are done really well within open source. Open source enables all of the three of those. Of course, you can just use it yourself. You can try it. You can talk to others who are using it. You can find people at conferences who are excited about this. So, leveraging this dynamic where software, yes, software is eating the world and as such, developers are eating the corporations or defining the corporations and more and more power is given to developers. You can actually shape as a company what people, way before they ever have a potential commercial conversation with you, use or do not use by you. And that is honestly making the open source absolutely stellar and supporting the open source user as if they were paying users. There's also a personal example in this. I've been in open source for 25 years by now, which is a long time. And there was something within Permitis. Again, Permitis is a monitoring tool. It's a database for metrics and it is used to monitor the data. So, the type of monitoring or observability data which Permitis emits is precisely in the format which Permitis ingests, ingests precisely cause Permitis access. So, they are super, super tightly coupled. Anyone who is using Permitis in any way or form is using some way of Permitis or Permitis compatible software. And in late 2015, early 2016, it was me as a member of the Permitis team not working at Grafana or anything recommending within Permitis, hey, can we deprecate our own visualization solution? Of course, Grafana is so much better. Is this something we would be willing to do? And yes, we were willing to do. And this has had an outsized impact on the trajectory and on the growth of Grafana Labs, the company. That was years and years before I ever, me personally, ever even thought about joining Grafana Labs or I didn't think I would ever do this. And still from a purely community perspective, I just trusted the people who did this. So what makes a healthy community? Well, again, every community forms a rather common cause, for example, ethics and such in open source where we believe in carrying stuff forward. And they tend to coexist and work together. And they, the causes tend to remain long term. So if you have someone who is KDE and you have someone who is genome or VI and EMEX or whatever or Gen 2 and Debian, yes, they might, they might interact and they might even, you might have people who are a part of more than one community. But those communities tend to really carry whatever their causes forward long term. They tend to not merge like even with VI and NeoVim. You see that there's different groups who the one, you really use VI or VIM and the others really use NeoVim and there's not huge overlap. Like some people migrate but the actual communities, the mailing list and everything are relatively, relatively static. And you have to just accept this into both as a company or as a community manager or as someone who works with the communities, honor this kind of thing and not just enter something and just try and shove everyone to a different direction. So on, on respect and on trust, humans are hurt animals. We are optimized for social interaction. Being an introvert myself, some of us are optimized for social interaction to varying degrees but as a species, one of the reasons why we have survived and thrived is of course we have social interaction and as such we can do more than the individual can do. And this means that a lot of those, a lot of the things which you do while interacting with other humans or with any other system made of humans, a lot of this is built into deep into your psych, coming from your DNA, coming from thousands and thousands and thousands of years of, of basically people dying or not dying cause they starved cause they didn't work or work together with a group. So a lot of this is automatic in the background. So if you don't feel respected in a certain group, you will not want to interact and if you can't trust that you are safe within your environment, you will either just leave or you have significant overhead in your interactions with this community cause you just don't feel safe. Which means you might retract from the community or just like not be as open cause you are always thinking about protecting yourself and not about actually engaging within the community. On the flip side, if you are accepted as you are and if, if everything is, is, is positive then yes social interactions will actually feel positive and energize you. If you're not, they will feel draining. So yes, we, we need to safeguard communities. That's why we have code of conducts. That's why we have diversity drives. That's why post Asia and foster and others are, are working so much on, on those kind of things. And there's a few caveats. We really as a species hardwired for fight of light and it is fully automatic in the background. You can influence this to some extent, but you cannot fully do it away. So automatically when you're exposed to negatives, all of the starts running in your, in your head. So if you don't feel secure, you will act more insecurely. You will act more defensively. You will also act more aggressively and others also fall into this pattern. So if you, if you come to this inflection point of a vicious cycle where things just devolve, it's really, really easy to basically lose whole communities and just have them go down the drain. Of course, of course a few people were, were initially maybe not very nice, which is with my, for example, my Fostum head on or many, many moons ago with my Free Note head on or so. We were extremely quick and vigilant about, about stopping things early. Of course, once they devolve to a certain point, it's almost impossible to, to get things back. Okay, I'm going to, yeah. And also iron law of institutions. Anything, anyone who's, who's in a position of power within any organization is much more likely to, to defend their position and see this organization wither and die than to just give up whatever position of power they have and, and be like, okay, it's someone else's time. By extension, communities tend to, to fade away over time. I mentioned a few Linux distributions, some of them maybe, but they are very, very unlikely to actually change. So it's much more of the case that communities simply go away and fade than that they really change trajectory or change what they're about. And speaking from a company level, this is really important to, to take into account because if you have, I don't know, a big migration or something, doing this in a consistent and, and respectful manner, which actually pulls people with you is exceedingly important to your, to your success. So yeah, safeguarding. As we are social animals, we are really good at detecting situations which just don't feel right and all of us will have had those situations where we just don't feel safe, just don't feel it's weird. Children are really good at externalizing this. Then we are taught to, to not externalize as much because it leads to less fighting, but it also leads to people being less honest. But the thing is community, communities really depend on open and honest and transparent communication. Like for example, literally putting internal slides out into the open as something of, hey, this is how we think about it. And you can really only safeguard communities from within. Like it's, it's literally impossible to, to just swoop from the outside and be like, okay, I'm going to fix whatever. No, you won't. Unless you have respected members within the community, you have good standing and some position of, of power or influence or whatever, you can't put them in a code of conduct enforcement or, or safeguarding situation. Of course, they will just be rejected. Like if it's really bad, yes, get police and everything, but then we're not in community, then we are in society. Or get your bosses boss, then we are in, in cooperation. But within community, you can only do it from within. For anyone who interacts within communities, and this will be hopefully 100% of the attendees here, I highly recommend creating culture canneries for yourself. There, you find certain things about a culture or about social interactions which you like, which you do not like. And you deliberately think about them and you deliberately write them down and every X amount of time, six months, two years, whatever, you actually go through them and check yourself, am I still honest with myself? Is this still the same community? Did certain things go in a direction I don't want to? Can I change it? Should I pull back? Can I ignore it? Of course, my, my own outlook on things changed, but having this and doing this on a somewhat regular basis is really, really, really powerful. And the best examples are usually the ones where things go wrong. Like someone does something bad, says something bad, whatever, how is enforcement being handled? Is this a super painful process for everyone or is it as okay as it can be made? And in the end there's a public and transparent summary and, and everyone moves on and is able to move on, except for people who might be kicked out or whatever. Things like these tell you much more about how people, how communities actually behave and interact than just randomized words on a, on a mission statement. The summaries basically to avoid changing your own definition of what you accept within community interaction, write it down, keep, keep yourself honest about it and never, ever talk about it. If I tell you what my culture canaries are about, for example, interactions within giving talks, they become more or less useless. Of course, people can start optimizing for them if they want to push me in a certain direction or whatever. So, yes, you can make suggestions to others if they don't come up with their own, but don't just tell them your own. Because, as Guthard said, when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. So, formalizing all of this. Most communities have at least informal roles. It's a person who, who always shows up and does a certain thing over years and years. We have to sit for them. I'm certain we have to sit for Asia where people don't even like have real formalized roles. They just show up and they do the thing and then they go away and they just keep doing it. There's also obviously formalized roles. In particular, as you grow, as you, for example, need a legal entity, once you need to start handling money and such, you need to have some structure and you need to have people within the structure who have formalized roles, because that's how you interact outside of the communities. But they always have informal ones. Visible and transparent structures. So, how can I actually interact with this, like if I have a complaint or if I want to help with, I don't know, shepherding speakers or whatever. How can I interact with this? How can I get started? Which, by extension, means writing good documentation about your, about the communities you care about, about the communities you run, to enable people to actually come and start helping out if they so choose. Some structures are a signal as much as a tool. Prime example is code of conduct, because the best code of conduct is well written and everything. Yes, but the best code of conduct would be, in theory, the one which would never ever need to be enforced, because everyone already acts in a positive way. And that's not a function of the code of conduct being written well. That would be a function of that community being perfect, to some extent. So, this is both. It is a signal that yes, by having a code of conduct, you signal that yes, you do take things seriously and that you actually formalize and write down and expose and externalize how you think about things, how you will treat things if certain things happen, what you find acceptable, what you don't find acceptable, what you list, what you don't list in those lists, but also as the tool for actual enforcement. And obviously then as the, as the run through and as the person who, who always gets pulled in when we have anything code of conduct within Grafana Labs, which is thankfully very, very, very little. The point about enforcement is quick early transparent. If you just pull it in, oh we're going to form a committee and we're going to talk about 10 years for like that thing and maybe you'll get a reply, maybe you want to get that, that doesn't build trust. It's not, it's not a soap opera, so you don't have to do all the details in, in public. You absolutely shouldn't, but at least at the end you should post a summary or a once yearly report or whatever where you just say, okay this is, this is what we, what we did in the end. So there's also limits. Committees exist within the context, within the society. If here, I don't know, the fire protection brigade comes and tells us we are not allowed to have this course, random example, I don't know. We can't just continue having this talk. We have to actually follow whatever the rules of the society are we, we are within. You, you're fishing community can't overthrow the government, I hope. And also if, if someone who's external to the community or in the community decides to just unilaterally change a thing which, which the leadership of the community or of the project decided differently, it won't work. So there are still limits to this. So yes, they have limits in the impact and it's really important to be aware of them, applying all of this. So most, and again, this is the internal slides on purpose, no changes. So the hour here is Grafana Labs. At least for how Grafana Labs chose to interact with, with open source is that the products are actually based on open source projects. And the vast majority of what you have in open source is what makes up the product. It's maybe 98% of the code base that we have a very thin veneer of, of differentiation on top of the projects on purpose. Of course we want to have healthy long-term projects and healthy long-term communities. And the thing is the, the communities themselves usually don't really care about, about the products. They mainly care about the projects and that's fine and that's something where as a company you have to be really, really careful to, to not overstep the boundaries. Again, open core is a good example where you basically put all the really important bits and the really useful bits behind the pay gate and people stop using your product as much and your project as much. We've seen this with several competitors to Prometheus, to Mimir and others which, which tried this and, and failed and that's part of why Grafana grew so much. It's important to have an open governance. Speaking with my Grafana Labs head on, we have a lot of projects which are under the umbrella, under the legal umbrella of Grafana Labs. But the governance is not completely tied to Grafana Labs. So you can join the project, you can have votes about stuff without Grafana Labs deciding every, every single thing. In my specific case, all of the governance is within the Grafana Labs projects are, are based on the Prometheus governance. Of course I'm part of Prometheus and I liked it. All the communication happens on GitHub on mailing lists like obviously you have some work stuff in such internally on Slack or whatever, but the vast majority is on issues in, in tickets and things like these. It's important to have the membership truly open to everyone, even competitors. We have people working like with formalized roles as full maintainers with full voting rights on Grafana Labs projects who are not employed by Grafana Labs and never plan to be. And no matter if you sponsor as a company, someone else being a, a, a member of some project or if it's people who, who join your projects, membership is always personal. It's not the case that, oh, they pay X amount of money or we have this and that partnership and now we make this and that person this and that role. No, it's a person who does the work. They might be sponsored by their company or they might not, whatever, but the point is them as a person are the one who actually are part of the project and also are, if they move companies, they still retain the membership, they're not kicked out. There are other projects who do it differently and I strongly, strongly disagree and I strongly implore you to never ever do this because it kills the community over, over a relatively short amount of time. So what does it mean to be project first? Every project which you nurture should have a community lead. That doesn't need to be a full-time role. Ideally it's not a full-time role. Ideally it's someone who's driving the tech or the people or whatever within the project for what anyway. And it's important to identify the people who like doing this work as opposed to just assigning someone and then they don't, they don't find a lot of fun and, and, and positive sentiment in this and that they basically don't do it. There are a few mechanisms which you like to apply, for example community calls. For us this means a monthly call, always the same day of the week, always the same time. Yes, time zones and, and yes, UTC. Sorry. Still jetlagged. Summer winter time. Things like these but still like keep the same time slot. Make sure everyone can join. Don't gate on like subscription or you need to register anything. Just let people join. Make certain that everyone can actually bring topics. So it's not just you talking to people, it's an actual change of idea and actually talking with each other. Make certain that everyone can, can edit those notes. It's not the case of you writing and defining what the reality of that meeting was. No, everyone should be able to, to put stuff on the agenda or to help write your notes and make the, make the recordings public. Other things which we like to apply is we have a meetup series called Grafana and Friends which is in various cities around the world. It's always in cities where we have one, two, three dedicated people who actually are con committed to running this thing long-term and then we help them with like finding venues or getting, getting pizza money or getting speakers maybe paying for a speaker to travel to, to a place to, to speak at the meetup. Things like these keep local communities healthy and that's why we as Grafana Labs do this to keep our communities healthy. Healthy. Public speaking. Yes, like Grafana Labs is paying for me to stay, to, to be here and not to talk about this and that product which you must buy. I'm literally just, I'm literally giving you the internal presentation from the onboarding. Grafana Labs does this because we do believe in open and transparent communication and just by externalizing what we do that we find other like-minded people who either like this thing and want to use this stuff or maybe want to work for us or maybe want to support it and buy from us. Like all of those are fine and all of those are intended obviously but we are not, we are not forcing anyone. We are actually like paying for people to speak about completely irrelevant stuff at conferences big and small. Blog posts at Grafana Labs are written mainly by engineers. Not mainly anymore but at least for the tech topics they are written by the engineers. We have a lot of non-tech topics these days or non-grafana tech topics which is sometimes hard because upper management is like okay there's an engineer, that engineer is really expensive. Why should they be spending half a day or so to write the blog post? I can have them implement the feature in this time. So this is an actual investment into making certain that yes the people who build the thing are also having a public voice and speak to the wider community and show that yes there are humans where they had issues how they went through. And obviously a ton of webinars where you just explain your stuff and do this again and again and again and again because one of the truisms of the fundamentals of tech like for example this talk is the actual content doesn't change, the audience changes. Like your math teacher at school they will probably start their career and end their career teaching the same math and that's fine. It's not that the content really changes it's that the audience changes. So yes webinars and just repeating what you've been saying forever is also good. As I said engineers are expensive, travel is expensive and if you only send marketing people or if you only send field engineers at some point you will lose authenticity within the wider communities. You have to actually send the people who do those things. So one of the reasons why Grafana projects are so successful and one of the reasons why Grafana as a company is so successful is because we actively invest engineering time into public speaking writing blog posts interacting with the community and basically just doing good stuff and people take notice and they appreciate it. Yep, final words of warning again this is internal and every sales and marketing person being onboarded sees those things. Keep marketing and sales mechanisms away from community mechanisms. You will mess up interacting with your community you will also mess up in other ways and forms in life in your work in wherever because that's part of being human. When you mess up be honest about it be transparent about it learn from it documented whatever it was and move on and everyone else does the same and again this builds towards this psychological safety. We are social animals you don't want to put someone into this fight or flight or just think that you like to them because if you're dishonest or treat communities just like a random sales or marketing initiative they will absolutely turn away that community will die and your project will also weather. Thank you. I think we have time for some questions. I was just curious where can we see which cities have Grafana and Friends meetups? Meetup.com Just go to meetup.com and search for Grafana and Friends. With the code of conduct some conferences do transparency reports they anonymize it everyone knows can lead to like deformation cases. What's your thought on transparency reports for code of conduct? I think they're good. I also disagree that everyone knows what they're about like depending on the size of the community if you have a group of 50 people yes everyone will know everything and of course but like for example just yesterday or today Linux Foundation put out a report a transparency report on code of conduct enforcement and I knew about one single of the cases out of maybe half a dozen or so or maybe a dozen. I strongly believe we need to have them because the thing is again any investigation into a code of conduct issue is not a public soap opera. Part of protecting the victim or potential victim or at that time alleged victim and everyone else is to not make everything public and to actually take everything private have actual deep conversations talk to the people have interviews blah blah blah so by definition you pull everything very very private. The one way to validate this kind of thing is only by being transparent after to the extent that you can that you actually prove that you did something so you can talk about okay as a result of this complaint one person was told to not interact with this community anymore or they will not be invited to the events anymore or they knew to have a cool down period of X amount of time. Linux Foundation also had someone apparently go to counseling and provide proof that they did go to counseling like whatever but you have a paper trail of yes we did engage with this and yes this is the rough thing which happened and this is the rough outcome so people who are thinking of should I be considering to join this community actually see proof positive that this is what you're doing. Anyone else? Anyone else? More questions? If that's a question I feel honored. Richard, I'm just curious your title is Director of Community. What do you do exactly? Do you write any code? I don't write any code. So what do you do? Your daily? It's a very good question. The answer changes more or less daily and I'm not joking. So at a very basic level I care about the continued strategic success of the projects we care about which is primarily all the projects which we have ourselves plus in particular premises and open telemetry because they're highly relevant to us as a company which means for example organizing the deaf summits for for prometheus until last year running prom con is the first year I'm not running it, yes things like these writing the governance making certain that a code of conduct is applied everywhere all of this but way way more like giving public talks helping internal people give public talks polish their CFP submittals a lot of license work it's endless All right, one more question anyone? I have one I mean a bit going on with the maybe with the people like the structures of communities like the the governance and how they work do you see like different communities have different governance methods do you see certain methods being more effective than others and would you advocate for some of them? That's a very very very deep question so I know of I know of at least one legal umbrella which had to actually break their own bylaws because there were in such a stalemate because people didn't vote anymore like they had too many members who became inactive and with a little bit of wing-wink not not notch notch and a lot of closed eyes they basically did one move to to get back into an operating state again as a member of that thing I fully agree of like yes this was the right move so one of the one of the things is be careful that you stay operational with your with your community with your governance which means you need to prune people who become inactive every x amount of time either by asking them nicely or by kicking them out or maybe they realize it themselves but most people don't leave they just stick around and stay so that's one of the things the other thing is try and prevent hostile takeover because there are so many examples where a company is paying directly or indirectly and then just have enough people in positions of power and then they flip the switch and they own the thing that's also not great as a general rule I would say if you are still small full democracy is good don't require a vote for everything put in consensus mechanisms where like for example similar to ITF you have a rough consensus and once rough consensus is achieved you just move on you don't have to wait for every last person to voice their opinion you just move on and everyone can progress and keep pushing the project forward for important things like changing governance adding people have votes have formalized votes with a very rigid structure and time boundaries of you can only run it for X amount of time for example two weeks have different limits of acceptance rate like it's a different thing to add a person to a project than to kick one out or to change the governance like have different levels for this and once you are above a certain above a certain size it usually is most efficient just of how humans and communication works because n squared growth rate blah blah blah to have a inner core of sort of trusted people like governance committee or or steering committee or something usually it should be an uneven number three five seven is good