 Today I'm going to talk about the F5 open-source ambassador program and why you may want to start a similar program of your own. By Showcans, how many folks already have a program or plans to start one in the near term? Awesome. So this is really a story about internal communities as a catalyst for collaboration and innovation implementing an open-source strategy in an open-source way. So I'll begin with some context on how it started, my analysis and findings, some details about the program and my vision for the future. So overall, the F5 open-source program office is fairly new to the company, and it all started with Christine, who just spoke right before me, joining F5 in fall of 2021, and fast forward to December 2021, the open-source program office was formally launched. Not too long later, Michael and I joined the company and expanded the team from a team of one to a mighty, mighty team of three. So my name is Ananya Malakio and I'm a program manager in the F5 open-source program office. I've been working in OSPOS, which is the acronym for open-source program office for the past five years or so, beginning with Comcast, where I was licensed compliance lead for Comcast Cable, and that's the legal side of open-source. My focus there was on automating solutions for open-source license compliance. I also consulted on mergers, acquisitions and investments. I was then recruited to F5 to help build the foundation of their brand new OSPO. And in the beginning of this year, I am serving a two-year term on the to-do group steering committee. If you're not familiar, to-do stands for talk openly, develop openly, and that is a community of practice housed under the Linux Foundation for open-source program offices or like roles to collaborate, share best practices, tools, processes, programs, et cetera. So I joined F5 with the objective of helping to build up the foundation of the OSPO. And in doing that, you need to be aware of the company and the industry, what the company's needs are, the environment, to be able to make the decisions of what responsibilities and activities you're going to do. And this is a resource by the to-do group. This is the OSPO mind map. And you can see there's several categories anywhere where there's a solid dot, I don't have it expanded. But this is to show that there's many, many responsibilities and activities that you can infer from the responsibilities that an OSPO might do. And an OSPO might toggle in one direction or the other based off what company and industry that they're working in. And with that long list of responsibilities, there's an equally long list of stakeholders. So we have corporate comms, marketing and branding. I've actually been working very closely with marketing and branding recently to get our open source at f5.com public facing website launch. And that was just launched this week. We also finance, legal, learning and development, engineering and product and security. Security's been a hot topic for the past couple of years. And even at this conference with securing the software supply chain. And so that brings us back to that big question. What are f5's needs? Let's explore this further. And reframing this into the value proposition. Well, what's our value proposition? What's our product? Our product is open source, right? We have an open source strategy. I even got an open source logo done by our marketing team really on. We have, you know, we spread awareness, build community, do education. We have an internal website, an external website. So we think about open source as a product. And who's our customer? Well, first and foremost, our customer is f5. You know, we're the f5 Ospa. We own the strategy for the company. So we are there because we need to figure out the strategy and implement it for f5. Now, of course, we still have developers, our internal communities, external communities as customers. But our primary customer is first, the company itself. What does, what value does open source bring to the company? What's the consequence of the status quo? What are the missed opportunities if there's absolutely no intervention from an Ospo? Why was the Ospo even created? As I mentioned, we're all new to the company. So what conversations were happening early on or before 2021, before any of us joined the company? And what was our environment? So looking at the company history, the highlights through an open source lens, we can see that f5 was founded in 1996 as a hardware company. And our flagship product was Big IP, which is a load balancer. Fast forward, f5 began a digital transformation with a desire to shift from being a hardware led company to a SaaS led company. And that triggered several recent acquisitions to get that done. Beginning in 2019 with Nginx. Nginx is a suite of commercial products based off Nginx open source. That includes a load balancer, a web server, an API gateway, and all of them on content cache. And then in the following year, we acquired Shape Security. So Shape Security added AI, anti-bot and anti-fraud capabilities. Then the following year after that, we acquired Valterra and ThreatStack. So that is, Valterra was a multi-cloud networking platform and ThreatStack added threat detection. Then at the very end of the year, the OSPO was formally launched. Last year, I joined the company. F5 launched, F5 distributed cloud services with capabilities from several of the recent acquisitions. The OSPO helped to facilitate the launch of two open source projects, OPI, which is Open Programmable Infrastructure. And Univiz, which is a data visualization library. And then we also joined OpenSSF. Many more things happened, but here's some of the highlights. And then in the beginning of this year, I launched the open source ambassador program. So it's a very quick timeline of all of these things with software and our digital transformation, our open source activity, etc. But another facet of this is the macro environment. And as we all know, we've all been on a roller coaster the past couple of years beginning with COVID. And most recently, the economic environment with all the layoffs and freezes all across the industry. So I'll also share another resource from to-do. This is the OSPO maturity model. And so I'm joining from another OSPO, I'm joining from Comcast, and Christine is joining from the MetaOSPO. So we flew through these stages in our minds and we're at stage four, right? Like we've been here, done that. We know what needs to happen. Where our mindset is there. But with all of those recent acquisitions, there's pockets of the company that are spread across all the stages. We have the hardware side, which is newer to open source. We have NGINX, whose whole business model is based off open source. So we're all spread out. But the bottom line is open source is core to that digital transformation story, and it's undeniable. So this is a representation of our open source strategy. It's essentially a 20-page document that Christine drafted. And it's great, it describes our mission, our vision, risks and opportunities. It describes a lot of the what's, like what we need to happen, what we want to see, but not a lot of the house. And an excerpt from that strategy is that open source software is everywhere, across all business verticals, and plays a big part in how F5 builds products and services. Our open source vision for F5 is to be open at the core and innovative at the edge. This means we want to think open source first, to use open source whenever possible, so we can focus on areas where we can truly innovate, to drive customer experiences, and deliver faster on our business objectives. We strive to share our own open source projects, to strategically drive adoption of our offerings, drive down competition, provide industry influence, and among other things, show up as a good open source citizen. Taking calculated bets on one and how to open source. And I really appreciate Christine drafting that document, because I refer back to it throughout, trying to figure out what I need to do to realize this vision. And so, we're on this quest for value, and we have this value in the distance, and we can picture it. We know what it looks like, but we don't have all the paths defined on our map, where we know every decision, every obstacle, everything that needs to happen for us to get from where we are to where we need to be. And so, that's where our roadmap comes in. To implement this strategy, and to fill in all of those missing pieces, build the foundation, the programs, the policies, the practices, the tools, to get to that point. And we need to do that swiftly, because there's an urgency in the company that digital transformation has been happening really fast, and it happened before we joined. And so, folks have been wanting things to happen. Folks have been active in open source, and so they've been dying for us to come in and help them do things that they've been wanting to do in a more effective way. But they're in my challenge. With the macro environment, further OSPA expansion has been put on hold, but that doesn't change the fact that our capacity is larger than our roadmap. And that's where the program comes in. So I'll break the program down into several phases, beginning with design. And in designing the program, the first thing I did was to seek out similar internal communities that are cross-functional to see what worked and what wouldn't for something that I wanted to do. So I saw the security. They had a similar program. It's not called Ambassadors, but it's a similar type of community of practice internally. And I saw that it was volunteer-based. Most of the folks are individual contributors, but it was a really heavy lift. They have a lot of live meetings. There is extensive documentation, really extensive training, and they do have some deliverables as the main focus and purpose of that program. I also looked to the Innovation Group because they had several different communities involved in their program. They had a board, and their board is more higher level with senior directors, VPs, and distinguished engineers. They meet quarterly and they act as a review board to review, advise, and invest in the innovation project submissions. So you can think of them kind of like Shark Tank. And Christine is actually on that board. And then they also have an ambassador program, but that program's in its infancy. I don't believe they've had any live meetings yet. There's not much documentation on it, but they are more on the people manager side, so I did see that. And their main goal is to be a buddy to those project teams to help them for the submissions to the review board. So looking at these two internal examples, my main motivator was to solve that capacity problem. So I was more on the key deliverable side. So my target was more individual contributors, but I didn't want it to be such a heavy lift. I wanted to do it more in an open source way, more async. And so I have a live meeting monthly so we can get FaceTime, and build those relationships. There's two optional times to accommodate different time zones. But most of our communications has been async thus far. And to create the program, I started off writing the program definition, which I published on our internal website. I created a mechanism to sign up, a private Slack channel so that we can collaborate and speak freely to each other. Several different file storage spaces, including a stream channel, where I prerecorded the kickoff meeting. And that actually worked out because I did have a few ambassadors to trickle in after my official kickoff date. So I was able to send them to the prerecorded video and also documentation that I already have. So that helped with that async collaboration. I put a big emphasis on recognition. And there's going to be a common theme you may notice towards the end of this talk about how important the recognition aspect is for a program like this. People already have their main role. They have what they need to do day to day. Everyone is facing that capacity problem throughout the industry in general. And so it's more obvious why an open source program office would want an ambassador program, but we need to figure out how we can provide value back to them. I also created a GitLab space internally, so that's what we use internally. And I created a very long list of also defined projects pulled from our roadmap. And my mindset was like they're all going to sign up for a project and they're just going to take it and run with it. And I don't want to project manage everything because I'm one person and there's a lot of projects. And I have to implement stuff on my own as well. So that was my expectation in the beginning. I also added program tiers. So I had the first tier was advocate, and that was to amplify our voice. Second is champion, and that's to contribute back to those OSPO projects. And the third was more of a leadership role to pointed, and that's to help drive our strategy and also potentially a role on the open source council. And I told everyone in this first cohort that they would all be start off as an advocate with the intention of at least becoming a champion if not ambassador. And going into the first tier, I asked everyone to help grow our internal community, which happens to be on Slack, to engage with that community, and to help spread awareness throughout the company, leverage their networks, share that the OSPO exists because we're a new team, that the open source council exists, that we have an internal website, that we have policies and resources for them to leverage. Next was recruit. So I had a KR to recruit 10 open source ambassadors. And in doing this, I didn't broadcast the program. I wanted the first group to be the early adopters, to be active already in the community. And so most of the folks were directly recruited by us. And in discovering who to recruit, the first several months, Christine encouraged me to do a meet and greet tour with several folks internally. So I got to know people, keep people that way. And also through the work that I was doing, my own projects, I would cross paths with people who were already engaged in spaces of things that I was working on. And whenever I crossed paths with someone, I would recruit them to join me and join the effort in my projects that I was working on. And then launch. So I kicked off the program in January of this year. And to date, we have 16 open source ambassadors that includes product managers, program managers, architects, developers. And if you recall back to that stakeholder side, I would have accepted anyone in any field. Because I just launched a website. So if you are in marketing, you can be an ambassador. If you are in comms, I'm planning on writing a newsletter. And I have corporate-wide emails that I have to send out. So if you're in comms, come help me, because writing is not my favorite. If you're a developer, of course you can help. If you're in any role, you can help. I have work for you to do. And so those 16 ambassadors are across 11 different product areas, seven time zones, five countries, and three continents. So it's nice to see so much reach throughout the company. But this first cohort, they're mostly from product and engineering and pivot. So it's important to recognize, with any new program or experience, there's going to be a gap between your expectations and reality. And I pivoted very quickly. So if you recall, I had a long list of projects. I was like, everyone sign up for one and just run with it and do it and have at it, come back to me with them. That didn't work out. And so I learned that very quickly. And I extended that project list to include all forms of contribution, not just the OSPO-defined projects. So if you're contributing to open source, that counts. If you're involved in a foundation, that counts. If you're involved in inner source, that counts. If you're involved in open standards, that counts. Before that, I also already had blog posts and content. So it wasn't just developer-centric to begin with, but I expanded it beyond just the OSPO-related work that I had to do. And since then, our ambassadors have been rock stars. I see them as our navigators. They have insights that we don't. And that's partially because the OSPO, we are located under the office of the CTO. And in our company, the office of the CTO is separate from product and engineering. And we're also new to the company, too. So they've been very insightful. They review our work, they give us feedback. They help drive the direction and tell us the truth of if our work is actually beneficial to them. So they've been our review board in that way. And they've also contributed to our working groups. If you were hearing the last talk, Christine was talking about GitHub management and she's been running a working group trying to improve our GitHub and secure our GitHub accounts. So a lot of the ambassadors have been working with her on that, Async and her GitHub working group. They've also presented internally and externally. We have several different presentation platforms with open source content. And they have spoken, they've written blog posts. They're also externally in foundations and contributing to open source projects. And they've just been great. So 10 out of 10 recommend ambassador program. We wouldn't have been as effective in implementing our open source strategy if it wasn't for them. And we also need to provide value back. So since starting this program, I had an idea of what recognition would look like. And I also learned additional motivators of what would be helpful for them. And I naturally just did things that actually turned out to be helpful. So in communities that folks were already involved in regardless of our involvement, I've reviewed some of their contributions and gave them feedback of what best practices are so that they can implement best practices in their communities. And lead by example, because I noticed some of those open source communities, none of the projects I saw were implementing those better practices. So they're leading by example in the communities they want to be involved in. We're identifying opportunities for them additionally. We're helping, we're acting as mentors and helping them navigate the spaces that they're interested in. And I also offered them conference tickets so this conference too. There are some existing challenges. Two top of mind are mostly scalability. And right now, contribution tracking is basically through my relationships with them. I talk to them all the time. We have Slack messages. We have our Slack channel. We have our live meetings. So I have a good sense of what they're interested in and what they're working on. But if the program were to scale to even 10 more people, that method of awareness for me would not scale. I asked them if they would self-report and there was some pushback of having to take up that additional step and having to go to get another tool just to write some stuff down. So I need to make this tracking system so lightweight that it's not that much of a nuisance for them to do it and also add in a motivator strong enough for them to want to take in that extra step. The other challenge is a variation in how we work and from all of the recent acquisitions comes a whole array of platforms and tools and preferences and even account access for folks to join my Slack channel. Several of them had to get Slack access because that's not their main tool for their org. Some of them are on different VPNs throughout the day and they're stuff they have to switch to my VPN to get to my good lab hips in. So it's been a struggle navigating that and I've also found myself leading that whole cross-functional collaboration in the company too and leading that charge and figuring that out. So in the near term, I have a few things on my to-do list. The first is to edit that program definition and add in minimum expectations of activity to stay in the program and that's so I can better recognize folks who have been super active. Second is to market it more and because this is a new program, I follow the start small and then expand mindset and I didn't really market this program but since we're getting into the group, I'm gonna start marketing it more so that there's more visibility from leadership into this program and then I also would like an additional executive sponsor because we're in the office of the CTO. We do have support from our CTO but I would like a sponsor from engineering or product to get more visibility and to get more buy-in from them. And then the longer term, I would like to expand this program to an overall contribution program that's more gamified where some of those contributions can be more automated and again, it's that full array of contributions inner source, open source standards, et cetera. But I feel like the ambassador program can be kind of limiting where folks may feel like you have to be in the program to contribute to things that I have defined on our website when you don't. So if we expand this program, there will be more immediate recognition, everyone will feel welcome and we'll be able to build that culture of collaboration internally in general. So it's been four months since I launched this program so we're still on this journey, walking towards that value in the distance. So thank you all for listening and a PS announcement, our website is live this week. So come check us out. Thank you all. You have a question? Okay. That's a good question. It was asked if the strategy was open source or if there's plans for it to be. And I'll defer to the writer. It's a good suggestion. I think we can at least if we don't open source the full document, we can at least do a talk on what it says. Because I think it's pretty general to what corporations would do. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry, I can't really say anything. Yeah, definitely. And I will put a plug in that we are writing a book. So we are through the to-do group but it's kind of outside of the to-do group but it's more of like all OSPO groups are coming together to write a book and we're writing it on GitHub in an open source way. And so that will include a lot of like these topics of like strategy and value and like just different ways of thinking. But again, it's just challenging because every company's strategy will be custom to the company. And so, you know, in previous companies when you work in a company that, oh, let me just take this back, we have some revenue streams around some of our open source projects. So that was new to me coming to F5. And some companies don't have any. And some companies, you know, release products and distribute open source so that they have higher license compliance concerns. And some companies are more on the security side. So those motivators vary. And if we release our strategy, I think it will be helpful as a case study but it might not be directly applicable to every single company. But it's definitely something we should look at. Yeah, great. Jump it off. I do have a few points. Yeah, go ahead. So you run, you know, when we're trying to level up the promotion category, like, you know, so we're trying to level that up for incentivization and things like that. Recognition is incredible. And it is very hard to do it consistently. So kudos to you for that. But have you thought about potentially partnering with HR to try to get it into like a career track, right? Yeah. That's just my first question. Yeah, we're very early in those stages but we have been talking to folks on adding it to be considered for DE, like Distinguished Engineer, sorry, it's acronyms, Distinguished Engineer and Fellow. And also Justin, like that, a lot of the tracks as a consideration for, you know, work that people are doing day to day. And the other challenge with that is that like first in line managers aren't necessarily aware of things happening outside of their team. So we need that mechanism so that they can be reminded that there's additional things that people can do. And then also adding in like the culture of the company accepting and supporting like folks working outside of their team part-time. And as not something that they need to do like at night or outside of their like, you know, normal work hours but something that should be included in their time. Yeah, so I'm not, I would love to brainstorm with you because it's not fully there but I really liked, I was looking at Hectoberfest and I know you know Hectoberfest because you're able to identify like issues and folks can do it and then you have to like, they have to figure out that you actually did it and then you get the swag that they said you can get when you complete their tasks. So something like that and it's easier to do with development but then when you add in like, if you host a meeting or attend a meeting in a foundation, you know, like those things count if you write a blog post that counts. So there's probably gonna be a combination of automation and manual self-reporting and other things because like there's such an array of contribution that there's no way that you can automate those other tasks fully. Chan. So GitLab is our internal repository tools. So one, I took inspiration from to-do group to-do has their charter and their whole governance and like program definition in GitHub. And so I was thinking about moving that, a lot of that definition into GitLab. I created an org for ambassadors and I'd like them to collaborate and as being on the steering committee, some of the work that we're doing is editing the charter for to-do. So letting them contribute to like defining the program itself and you know, if they have projects through Osmo projects or other types of projects they can, they have the ability to create a repo within that org. So it'd be like a collaboration space like if we were like all on the same actual team. Any other questions? Oh, Sheila. So with that file storage, and this is early on, and it's also navigating that challenge of having different tooling preferences, different GitLab instances and also not everyone's a developer. So I didn't wanna like outcast the non-developers who didn't have the training yet and without providing a training program to like force them onto a space. So I have a OneNote and I'm using OneNote for all of our meeting notes that we have and I also have like a context list of all the ambassadors and different product groups so they know who's who and who's doing what and I created that project list. So it was basically like a spreadsheet that I put in OneNote and I asked them to like put their name down but I don't really use that anymore for tracking. It's more right now on that like awareness where I'm not asking them to lead their own projects unless they want to, of course they can but a lot of the collaboration has been like, hey, we just launched a ticketing system. Check it out, test it, see if it's something that actually would work for you and give us feedback or, hey, we have this working group, come join us if this interests you and if you'd like to input and collaborate with us or like, hey, I'm launching a new website. Do you have content or like, are we involved in these things? Like correct me if I have any like wrong information, tell me what I should put on here. So it's been very easy to get them to give feedback and to help review those things and they've been very active in the first ask of amplifying and that community engagement so I see them constantly posting on our Slack channel and talking to other people. So it's still on that like, like let me mind my expectations. I don't need them to like write everything but it's let's at least be in communications by whatever means they prefer because I'm open and like just let me know what you're doing. If you want to be fully like contributing on an open source project, then you know, that's fine. Just like, let me know what you're working on. Well, thank you all.