 All right everybody, welcome back to yet another OpenShift Commons briefing, and as we like to do on Fridays is talk about transformation as in transformation Fridays, which is our hashtag. And today we have Sasha Rosenbaum, otherwise known as divine ops, which I didn't think about that one. But yes, and we're going to talk today about something that's a bit near and dear to my heart. And I know Sasha and Jay Bloom is with us and Chris Short is with us. So we're going to have a conversation today, but around creating allies and allyship and how to do that and how to create healthy, engage relationships in all of these technology communities and elsewhere in the universe. And so I'm going to let Sasha introduce herself, talk for a little while, and then we're going to all jump in. Well, take it away, Sasha. Thank you for coming today. Thank you. Okay. Technology stuff seems like I'm on air. So this is good. All right. Good. So I'm Sasha Rosenbaum. I work for GitHub. I worked for Microsoft before that for about five years. So I started my career as a developer, and then kind of got involved in Opsie stuff and then became a part of the DevOps community. There's also kind of a big road there, and I'm right now a product manager, and I do a lot of things that are related to DevRel. So basically held every possible job, I think. I was also in technical sales for a while. So basically, I think I held every possible job in the industry. I don't know, maybe there's a couple more I'll add to the list over time. I also, so I was born in Ukraine back when it was Soviet Union, and then I made a journey to Israel where I lived for a little over a decade, and now I'm about a decade in the United States. So, and that's relevant to the whole conversation, I think, because basically having the experience in different cultures kind of expends your horizons on how you talk to people and how you appreciate where they're coming from. I think I want this to be a conversation. So I don't want to, you know, preach. I love being on a soapbox, but I don't want to preach about this because I think this in particular is a thing that we are trying to solve as a community, right? Like creating allyship and especially in the current political climate kind of, you know, bringing people together rather than pushing them apart. And so I would prefer us to have a conversation about this right now than me just be on a stage. I don't know how you all feel about that. Totally okay with it. And I think it's really, it's interesting communities come in so many different layers. I mean, you've just described moving from from Russia and Ukraine to Israel to this and the things that we learn as children. And as teenagers and through school and through the different communities that we engage in, that help us adapt and bring in other people into, you know, make new friends when we go to new schools and other things. So there's some, it's almost like those lessons that people talk about things you knew in kindergarten, but you forgot. Right. So the elementary school, the very basic things that make us human and want to connect with each other. And we learn the skills to connect from our peers and from our parents and from our communities. And maybe if we could talk about it a little bit from from that perspective, what you learned because you moved so many times. And so you had to go into different communities. Yeah, so I think a lot of times we forget and like it sounds like a common like knowledge that cultures change throughout time and throughout base, right, but we don't really appreciate the power of that. So a lot of times I would see people say, oh, how person X could say the such and such words. And then they have to step back and be like, well, they're from a different country with a very different background, and they don't have the same cultural norms. But we forget that and we kind of expect everyone to be on the same page about everything. Right. So it's like a perpetual playing catch up. Now, that doesn't mean that you can sort of let people get away with bad behavior just because of where they're coming from. Right. But I do think that a lot of times, sometimes it's like the lack of education. No one ever told someone about, I don't know, toxic masculinity, right, in certain cultures. It's a normal thing. People express themselves that way. And they maybe if you had a conversation about this and explained it in a non sort of argumentative non alienating way, we could get on onto the common ground. But we kind of cut it off from the beginning. It's especially, I think on social media and on the internet in general, we can take out the stability out of the conversation, right, and become immediately sort of take sides. And take out all the shades of gray, which we can rant about this, but it's an impossible to solve. Right. And like the shades of gray are never going to be there in online conversation. So I will say, like, I definitely censor myself in some ways because I know that certain things will be misconstrued in certain ways. Right. So I can't say, even though like opinions have like more, you know, shades of gray student. Yeah. Yeah. So part of it, and, you know, the toxic masculinity, even those two words together, the language and having the common language to discuss topics of allyship and creating connections across it. People don't realize, you know, some of its cultural some of its education. A lot of its language and having these concepts, key core concepts that we share and can communicate without offending people, really, and it taking on the responsibility of educating and we talk a lot about trolls and other things. There are people who, especially in online conversations, you talk a little bit about censorship and I know that I sell center like self censor, like crazy through my Python DJ one, because it's a work one. Right. So it's, there's two levels of censorship there's censorship because I know people who are watching and listening to it for work stuff. They have a policy of not being nasty, and not, you know, not trashing your enemies, or your competitors rather. They're not enemies. They're just collaborators, future ones. But there's a lot of education that we have that we have to do in some ways. I'm LGBTQ, or a woman, or Black Lives Matters, different communities that we're in, that we have to teach each other the language that we, and have a mutual language to discuss these topics in. And I know, Jabe, had you've been on here before with Dimeje, and there's a lot of conversations around social justice, and not just that some of it flows as well in technology, but the work that Dimeje and Jabe have been doing really has helped give us, give me some insights into the languages that we need to be sharing beyond just, just the basics, you know, and I think that's that's been really key. Like, you know, when I listen to some of what Sasha's saying, you know, there's an idea that's called cosmopolitan localism, and cosmopolitanism is like roughly global culture, like the fact that you're part of the human race, the fact that you exist on the planet with other humans, the fact that you are part of a cosmos or a universe, right. And localism is more about like I live in Pittsburgh, and therefore Pittsburgh influences who I am and the language and culture that I express because that's my like my local loop, right. And so there's this idea of like existing on multiple different levels of granularity as an individual. And of course, to some extent, the cosmopolitan levels end up forcing kind of more universal conversations right like they, they force conversations, and they, like, it's hard to have a fight about whether or Pittsburgh is better than Chicago, I mean, we can, but it's not not going to not going to nobody's going to win that fight right like I mean, and not just up but it tends to be kind of, I think in at least in culture arguments about like Pittsburgh versus Philadelphia or San Francisco versus New York. These tend to be like by us versus Russia, right, like, they're kind of like long standing, like, you know, comparisons, they're not they don't tend to be completely overblown. Now, talk about what universally good things are, things get really wacky, right, like, you should you should never be able to do this you should never be able to do that all sorts of different variations on it right. So we get these kind of multiple levels. And part of what ends up happening I think to kind of relate it to what Diane was just talking about is that those those big stories those cosmological stories. They don't have language or pointers in those stories to allow certain ways of being in the world to be seen. Yeah, now that changes over time. But for instance, like LGBTQ peoples have frequently been not part of the cosmological story, they've been hidden, they've been erased, they've been, you know, removed from that women in the world for the last 30 years, their contributions to the not only the technology itself but the culture of technology erased, right. And so part of like becoming an ally part of working with others to become allies is to say it's important to reveal certain other ways of being in the world and that there's not we don't need to all be the same we need to be accepting of other ways of being in the world. But we also need to reveal them so that they can be seen. And you know this is this is the kind of I think one of the really interesting observations of something called epistemic justice and and in epistemic justice theory there's a concept called hermeneutical justice and it basically says it's not when you're when you are allying with young African American black women to be capable or be seen in technology. You're not just like opening a space for them, you're you're helping them to make sense of themselves in relation to other stories by actually showing them where they where they are in the story that they that they can be part of the story. And I think one of the ways to kind of think through that really quickly is just sexual sexual assault sexual violence sexual harassment in particular. Those terms did not exist before the 70s. The term sexual harassment came up because a woman was sexually harassed by her boss at work at a university, and she felt uncomfortable by that although she couldn't describe what was happening she just was like this doesn't make me feel good. So she left, and she tried to get unemployment and unemployment people said well why did you leave your job and she said personal reasons. And because I was the best she could do to describe it. And they said you don't get you don't get any unemployment you can't just leave. And she went back to the university and talked to a bunch of women, particularly lawyers, about this problem can I get help is going to lawyer help with this. And all the lawyers were like that. Whoa, that happens to everybody that happens to me but we've never been able to talk about it before, because there's no handle there's no story to pass around that what were so sexual harassment not only became a concept in legal terminology, but it actually became a cultural concept that allowed women to say and make sense of their experiences. I'm being harassed. This isn't okay. And if prior to having that terminology you could feel uncomfortable but you couldn't express it and more particularly it's hard to make sense of what's happening to you. So, again, I think allyship and the development of these languages and stories and narratives and the unerasure of people is partially about helping them to make sense of what who they are in the world, what they'd like to be in the world, and how they want to change the stories. How now they are a character in the story that can change the story, as opposed to like, I can see there's a story happening over there that I'm nothing I'm not part of that. Okay, you had said so many things that I want to dive into and like there's like so many layers. So, I'll just pick on a couple. So, in terms of being cosmopolitan. So, we can see if we look at history we can see like this populist movement right and then it kind of goes up and down. Right. And actually, the worst the situation in the country is the more like economic unrest or something like that. It's happening. The more populist autocratic goes up right and then it kind of comes and goes in waves. But we also like if we take the tide all together we can see that we're moving progressively towards globalization right that the cultures become bigger the countries become bigger we used to be, you know, really small tribes and then we became the king ships and like, you know, night ships and then it became countries and it keeps expanding. And so a lot of people right now are saying like well we couldn't, you know, make the world work globally right there's no global law there's no global ethics standards and stuff like that. But I think we can right because again if we look through history we can see that it's progressively becoming more cosmopolitan. But the problem with humans is it's really hard to exist on these multiple levels and it's really hard to make sense of all of it. And it was really easy to say my tribe is right and my God is the right God and my way of living is the right way of living. And when I have to hold in my head the all the multiple ways in which people function and all the multiple beliefs that don't agree with one another. And how do I not offend anybody. It becomes really difficult right and that kind of creates this like pushback right I now want to close up I want to be, you know, loyal to just my small tight tightly knit groups group because it makes sense to me. I think, and when we can't you know all move through 15 different countries to experience the world right. I think it's about basically psychological safety. Right and so it kind of becomes this thing where people on all sides of this conversation are not feeling enough psychological safety to express themselves and go ahead. You bring up a great point in the sense that we can't move like most people can't move about countries like freely like maybe you have or you know other people have but you can move about your own country pretty freely no matter what and what I've seen here in the United States across my journeys across the country back and forth is that there's all these microcosms there's all these bubbles right and they all exist in their own little way and even between my community here and the city of Detroit 40 minutes away those bubbles are vastly different. Right and it's it as a crow flies it's only a few miles and the the the the cosmopolitan nature or you know kind of underlying thinking and feeling of the community is completely different. So just getting out and experiencing things that are outside your bubble is vitally important on your journey in life in my opinion. But I really actually really like the psychological safety concept here because I think you've hit on something Sasha that's that's really important is that when people feel threatened or people feel scared or their economic viability or their physical safety isn't there and psychological safety is a big part of it and what I'd like to tease out a little bit is this how how can we come from obviously we come from places of privilege and we use our power to elevate our folks and create these bubbles are not bubbles but these psychological safety for people and maybe from some of your experience in DevRel world and other places if you can talk a little bit about how you actually can go about helping people and creating those spaces. So I'm going to do a politicians move and not answer the question but I hope I hopefully will come back to this because this is a very interesting question. So there's a book that I wanted to bring up that was recommended by our mutual friend actually Katzwell to me and it's called The Righteous Mind and it has some useful ideas for this conversation so I just want to kind of point them out first. So one is that it's essentially been proven by research that we don't actually reason about moral issues right we make a snap judgment based on our emotions and then we move on from that and backtrack assign reasoning to why this is actually the right thing right so if I see someone hidden a child I'm not thinking about whether hidden a child is the right thing to do right I have a snap judgment this is bad right and if I lived in Biblical times and you know there was the whatever Don was hold a rod from your child type of mentality around me maybe my snap judgment would be different and I would react to it differently and again this exemplifies the fact that people coming from different cultures and you can definitely like different countries on this globe right now are in different stages of this journey right so like this whole big thing to you know address here but so the second very useful idea that comes from this book and that maybe can provide a way for us to talk about this is that people have so essentially the assumption is that we have moral foundations and we get we essentially have like five different moral foundations and they're like taste buds so like we're born with predisposition to relate to these ideas right so it's care harm right fairness shooting loyalty betrayal authority subversion and sanctity then degradation so I said a lot of words big words but so the idea in the book that is underscored is that the more liberal leading people are relying on the care and fairness right so we want to take care of as many people as possible we want to create justice for all we want to pay people who are being harmed and give more ice to the LGBTQ community or whatever it is right we want to create more justice more fairness and then the people on the right side of the spectrum they tend to lean on the loyalty and authority and sanctity more right and loyalty and authority we just talked about it right we just talk about loyalty I'm from Pittsburgh Pittsburgh is the best is the best right I my red head is the best like whatever whatever it is like my small group is a group that wins and you're all wrong right and then in terms of authority so we have a system that society works in and it's a right hierarchical system right and someone in that hierarchy is on a bottom and someone's on a top right and so this whole conversation like it it always comes to this when when you hear people being radicalized by this argument it's always about one person is arguing about fairness so we shouldn't hurt the people on the bottom of the hierarchy and the other person is arguing about loyalty so the system worked for us for 2000 years why we're trying to disrupt it right and so the argument doesn't even agree because both sides kind of decide based on emotions and then I can start bringing up so if I'm on the conservative side of this I will start bringing up arguments like well people who are hurt or deserving of that hurt we're actually having meritocracy this is how the world of whatever right I actually find ways to dismiss the fairness arguments because I'm coming from a completely different thing right so I want to hear what you all think about this before we can see me I mean Diane if you want to weigh in go ahead but I mean I can talk about it if you want the the the idea that like we have to be beholden to the things we've done in the past is something that I've literally spent the past like two decades trying to destroy like in my mind in my own self so I know it is hard to do but it is possible right like if you look at DevOps look at how many organizations have changed and just digitally transformed the way they do work right the way they release code they've changed the way they thought about safety in general and sped things up right so I know that this change is possible in the mind of a human is just how do we get it outside of these small little things like tech or like how to do something right and get it into a larger kind of global globalization kind of mindset. What so for one. Hold on. I'm going to find it. So for when there's obviously like if you're on the top of the hierarchy is going to be really hard for me to convince you that you should change the system right but it's not just that you can find people on every level being very loyal to the system. That again that also comes from that book. There's a study on how people vote and they don't vote in their best interest people vote with their community. I belong to the community. I align myself to the ideas. So if I'm in the devops community and I know that my community has my back. I'm now defending the devops ideas because I feel that psychological safety and I feel that people are behind me. Right. If I went ahead and said something that differs from that community. Right. And I tried to define an opposite idea and I just lost my kinship. I lost my community. I lost my tribe. I'm alone in the darkness and I'm upset. Right. And maybe the idea that I had had merit but it doesn't really matter if I die alone in the darkness of hunger. Right. So incentives. Right. It's always about incentives. And I go ahead. I was going to that point. It's interesting because we're all in the tech communities too. So like I've been doing platform as a service and clouds infrastructure stuff for almost 10 years now. And so back in the dark ages I actually worked on a distribution of cloud foundry. And so there was the whole cloud foundry versus open shift versus every other platform in the service in the beginning days. And we watched as the whole. And there was a lot of loyalty. Trust me. There was a like cloud foundry is better. Pivotal is great. Right. That's wonderful. Open shift and I actually switched teams which was really interesting. I've done that a few times in my life. But there's a there's a thing that's happening now. I think in tech and part of it it comes from and I was just giving a talk a few hours ago about cross community collaboration and how we've had to change our whole mind with the whole. And I think I give a lot of credit to the cloud foundry, not the cloud, the cloud native foundation for creating the space and to do this cross community collaboration to have the innovations from different projects. And the interrelatedness of all of the projects and the, what I would call the in between this, the centrality of the different people who are in the different projects and the people who are the connector personas. And those people are the ones that I think I have learned the most from like identifying people who maybe have loyalty to a project that is a competing project, but also are able to connect me to that technology to understand their roadmap, their vision. So, you know, we often see that and I think it plays out in the real world as not the tech isn't the real world, but in the real world as well as finding people like yourself Sasha and jade and Chris, who connect us through these different projects and help us understand the, the world views, the loyalties, the, you know, you know, what the layers are and that's really I think one of the things that is changing now. I think before we were in our, I come from open source community development so we were in our individual project camps. Shall we say, so to apply this or if we're even within red hat we were in our individual silos are you in middle where are you in open ship, and what we're, what we're seeing, and how some of this allyship, we see play out in tech. And now in the greater communities outside of in the world in the politics today that we see between in the US between Republicans and Democrats is that's the missing thing is who are those connector people who can make it and help create those spaces for us to hear the other people side, and that I think is the thing that we have to work on more before. So, I think, like, what if we're talking about like organizational transformation stuff like that. I like to look at incentives, and I like to look at the common goals right. So the whole like dough of movement the reason it made sense was because we said, Oh, we're not like one one person is working to keep the lights on and the other person's looking to do the most changes and break the most things. Surprise we're working to deliver software to people to deliver value to them right and we are all incentivized to do that and keeping the lights on or pushing new changes is just part of it. It helps that speed and quality turns out actually go together and they work together and that's awesome and now we have these numbers and we don't even have to appeal to the higher nature but we can just show people data. But it's it's about it now in terms of incentives. So, back in the day we when we came in and we said, you know, we can automate all of your deployment or whatever people said like I'm going to lose my job. My job is going to go away you automated me out of a job. And so I, I didn't, you know, I didn't say like, Oh, I'm meeting you out of a job is a good thing. Right. I said, Oh, instead of doing these, you know, checklists every day, every single time, or spending your week weekend trying to fix bugs or whatever, you're going to do more interesting things. Right. Like, your job is going to be better. Now, this doesn't always work like this. This doesn't always apply to all levels in society but it definitely applies to our jobs and technology right whenever we automate someone out of a job it usually gives them a better job to do. So, if you dress up the things that you want to accomplish. As in, they're good for you that usually works usually gain L a ship in that way. Now, I just want to say, basically one more thing and that is, in terms of creating allies in general, like in a company in a community in the world. There's two things that I like the most personally it's one is helping people. So that sounds obvious right but helping people really helps you build trust and relationships and as people help you back. But the other thing that is interesting is asking for people help actually works just the same maybe even better. And I think, especially in the beginning of your career is kind of hard to go and ask people for help you kind of like, oh, well, they will think I don't know things and they will doubt me and whatever. But actually asking questions is has been one of the best things that you like I could do for my career, because it helps you because you get answers. And so, you know, I can Google how to solve a problem for three hours or I can ask Chris who's done this before and he will tell me, and he will he has already experienced all the pain that goes into, you know, trying a bunch of different solutions and he will point me to the right one right at the gate and that's both of us all at a time, especially me. The other thing that happens is that Chris is going to feel really good about himself and that's a great thing to happen right both for Chris and for me because now Chris likes me. So, you know, I know it maybe sounds manipulative to an extent but it really works like if you wanted to build an allyship with a person and they were kind of immune to everything that you were doing like ask them for a favor. Oh, yeah, that's a great one. I think, you know, the other thing, just to kind of like reflect a little bit on like DevOps and some of the previous parts of the conversation. There's two big ideas in my head. One's called universalism and one's called pluralism and so universalism is the idea that we all live in the same universe. The same story, same dominant story exists and we all have to figure out how we fit into that universal story. Pluriversalism says that's not actually true. There's no way that the entire world kind of actually comes together on the same timeline. There's multiple experiences that people are having and you shouldn't actually try to optimize the world for universalism. You should try to optimize it for pluralism. So, why do I say that? Why do I talk about DevOps? I think there's two ways to look at DevOps. One is that you want to develop a universalist version of DevOps, which is roughly like DevOps culture inside of an organization is that the developers and operators share a complete understanding of the universe that they share that understanding. And therefore, like the developers understand the operators and the operators understand the developers and you might end up in those arguments leaning towards conversations like noOps because if we all are the same, then why do we need others? We just need more developers, right? On the other hand, you look at DevOps as a pluriversal system and then there's a different kind of question. And that is like, is there a developer culture and an operator culture and then this third shared set of values and that the goal isn't to actually smash everything into one way of thinking about the world. It's to have enough shared common ground understanding of what's happening in our organizations so that we reduce the friction that occurs because I literally don't have a clue what's happening across the wall of confusion, right? And that's different. And why I think it's important to notice the difference between these two things is to point back to Chris's comments about traveling. The value of traveling is experiencing other ways of being and the value of experiencing other ways of being is to understand your own way of being better. Like to understand your own existence a little bit better by having contrasts and frictions that are interesting. And so I, you know, one of the things I try to say about DevOps all the time is DevOps isn't about making developers into operators and it's not about making operators into developers. Although by the way, it's probably more about making operators slightly more developer-ish. But anyway, we've created the job title. We can just give up and admit that it's fine. But the idea here is that I think if you do DevOps well, the point of the developers interacting with the operators isn't to become better operators. It's to become better developers and vice versa. The point of the operators interacting with the developers is to become better operators. And it's the friction between the two cultures and the way in which it reveals difference and the fact that operators do different things than developers do and developers do different things than operators do. And those are, that's not what we're trying to eliminate. We're not trying to homogenize organizations. We're trying to make multiple simultaneous cultures exist inside the organization without causing tribal wars to occur. That's the challenge to me. And that's why I think about allyship and things like that and bridging and things like that. It's not to integrate the two cultures. It's to make them productive in relationship to each other. So bridging. And that goes back to the original bits that we were talking about. I think I mentioned creating a common language and sharing and educating across the silos, across the community walls, across cultural walls and community walls. I think that's the thing that asking the question, Sasha, asking for favor, asking for things that are bridging tools that open up conversations that create these spaces for people to get a better understanding of what's going on on the other side of the wall. It's not always about breaking down the wall. It's about giving a language so people know what's going on in the other room. And I think those are the things. Go ahead. There's a great Ursula Le Guin book called The Dispossessed. And in the book, there is two different worlds, right? And they're closely aligned and one is basically a highly authoritarian world and one is an anarchistic world, right? And one of the most important kind of symbols in the book is that the highly authoritarian world sends a rocket occasionally over to the anarchistic world. And the rocket lands and there is a stone wall around where the rocket lands that is the boundary. And in it she kind of describes how it's not a thin line. It's actually like a space where they can meet together. And that is what a boundary is. It's not a wall that separates them. It's a place of negotiation. It's a boundary in a way. But that doesn't unify them. It's like a cell wall. It allows the right kind of nutrients to move back and forth between the sub-systems while still maintaining the sub-systems. It's just such an interesting book and everybody should read it and that's one of my favorites. I do absolutely love the author. So I wanted to come back to something that Diane said and Jade said about language and visibility. So I think this is really important and part of the reason I'm probably the biggest reason I'm on stage ever is representation, right? I want to be there so people see me so people know it can be like me so people who look like me can be like me in the future. And I think, I thought about this a lot in terms of role models and how, I'll take the example of sexism because it's something in personal experience, right? I spent a couple of decades not noticing that sexism existed. So I was literally like, I didn't know that it was there, right? And then I spent another, I don't know, five years being like, well, I guess half of my life basically being like, I'm not like them other girls, right? And that was my tagline, right? I'm just not like them. Like, I like computers because I'm not like other girls. Like it just made sense. And then I have experiences where I go back to like books I read as a kid and I'm like, this is so sexist like it's incredibly awful. Like how did I not notice this? And I will tell you how I didn't notice this. I didn't associate myself with the princes, right? I associate myself with the prince because like that was the only role model I could have. I could not associate myself with an invisible woman in the script. It just, because it just, her, her, her existence was to be a painting on the wall. And this is about visibility, right? Like visibility in language to describe your experiences and representation in terms of having people know that it's safe to be themselves, right? And that they can accomplish certain things while still being themselves. Now, the thing is the thing that like, and I don't know if I want to go and do this because it's dangerous territory, but we're not actually so all the groupings that we have are absolutely arbitrary. Like gender is a social construct. And I don't think we talk about this enough. We keep assigning new labels and saying like people are like, people like this are called that and whatever. But in reality, each one of us has different traits and different, you know, desires and different understanding of the world. And we just can't get that granular so we keep grouping people together. But in my idealistic world, like that pluralism would be at the individual level, like I can be whatever I want and you don't have to assign me a tag and, you know, but yeah, I think like we're kind of far from there, but we're making strides towards it and I think it's a good thing. And again, like just, there's another idea that I want to quote because it's a really nice idea. It comes from Tapien's by Yvonne O'Hurari and it kind of explains some things to me. Because I was thinking about the fact that like men have like as much requirements of how to be a man as women have of how to be a woman, right? But we are talking about sexism, you know, as impression of women and at the opposite side. The reason for that is like he says in a book is like, if you conform to being a man, if you 100% execute on what a man should be, you win the game. If you conform to being a woman and execute 100% on what a woman should look like, you lose again. You're at a loss, you're at a down in the hierarchy and you have a problem. And that is true in like racism as well, right? It's true of the hierarchical systems and positions. The problem isn't that like there's no toxic masculinity and men are not told that they're not allowed to cry or whatever and not experience certain levels of personal oppression. And they do, but they have an option to opt out and like opt in into the game and win it whereas like some other people do not, right? Okay. So this is really good book by a guy named Herbert Dreyfus called All the Things Shining. And the point of the book is roughly this, one of the things that the Greeks had was a polytheistic system. And therefore, like if you wanted to explain yourself, you could say like I'm under the thrall of the God of love right now. Therefore I'm passionate and I want to, you know, meet with people. But now I'm all of a sudden under the God of war and I want to kill people. And I can switch my personalities and it's totally rational to switch my personality because all I'm doing is saying the God that I used to be in thrall to... I'm not paying attention to him anymore. I'm paying attention to her now, right? And one of the things that happens in Western culture is we move to a monotheistic God, a universal system with one concept of what goodness is. And therefore your idea of being able to switch personalities is challenged because I still have to serve this primary set of ethical standards. Even if I claim that I've changed what was not, I can't radically change what was not like I could in the Greek times. It's a good book. You guys shall read it quickly. You'd like it. We're going to end up with a bibliography at the end of this talk. I know, right. I keep having to hunt for like book titles and dropping links in the live stream chats and it's like, oh my gosh, there's so many books in there. But I want to go back a little bit to what Sasha said because it's been my experience too. When I read books as a kid, I probably never picked the princess as the person that I envisioned when you project yourself into a book. And I think there's another thing that I think it's a little saying somewhere about if you don't see yourself in the room, then you don't... If you don't see someone who looks like yourself in the room, you can't visually visualize yourself being in that room. So Sasha and other folks is getting other people on the podium so that others can see them on the podium and see themselves reflected back in the conversations that we're having. It has been really one of the things that I've been keen to do with all these new tools that we have for virtual worlds. We've democratized the access to all of this stuff. So now we should actually leverage that to bring more people and make people more visible where they want to be and empower them. Go ahead, Sasha. Yeah. So I just wanted to add to the via presentation matters. And in addition to that is we stereotype by default, right? Our mind's stereotyped. Like there's nothing we can do about this because like we must generalize and can't treat every sort of circumstance on its own. And that's why representation matters because if I don't see anyone who looks like me on that stage, I can't visualize, you know, me being on that stage. And then if I thought roughly 50% of women in tech, then I wouldn't be, you know, arguing that women are biologically disqualified to work with computers or not what the hell people argue. So it's just normalizing people of certain that look a certain way, but like a better description being in certain spaces, right? Exactly. Absolutely. I think that's for me, because the whole topic here today and welcome, Andrew. Hello. Creating allies and allyship and, you know, we, we've wandered into a PhD territory and other other places. And it's great. This is exactly should allow James to join. So we went up, we went to that higher level too. But I also think that one of the things that we really what I want to tease out a little bit more to is how we with the dev ops and the dev. Yeah, maybe dev rel and other things. We've, we've had a lot of tools and a lot of the capability to help bring other people to the farm. We still have so much more to do. And just would love to hear Sasha and Andrew of where, where we can do more in terms of raising up visibility, creating more spaces and what the because I know you've had a lot of success in the dev op days and other places. And what else you would, would share with people to do to help to create that visibility in that space. It's one thing to say we need to do it. But how are you, how would you do that. Go about that. So, so from personal experience, I think I was thinking about this because like I belong to different, like, I, like I said, I held a lot of different jobs in tech, right. But I'm part of only one community for real and that's the dev ops community, right. And I was questioning, like, why did I blend there and not say dot net community or whatever the hell it was. And the reason is because they had people who were allies to me. Like, I came there and people hug me and, and I stayed because like that was a welcoming place where I had psychological safety and all that stuff. And so what I think I want to do is hug people back like hug new people. Right. I think so, like, if I say Twitter, you know, lots of people on Twitter have this like, oh, I want to be followed by cool kids like I want to be able to have conversation with cool kids. I think what matters to me is when I have a conversation with someone who's less privileged than me, and I can see that I've gained their trust. Like I, they can talk to me and not be scared that I'm going to dismiss their feelings or, you know, just imply that they don't belong in some way. And like, that's what, like me personally, I'm trying to create a situation in which people with less privilege than me can feel safe to express themselves. Which goes back to that psychological safety conversation earlier. And I think one of the things that I think we need to do as parents is creating those places where we can connect and create these spaces and listen for them and, and reach out that and use the privileges that we have and the technologies that we have to connect with people. And I think that's even more so now with COVID and everything else that's going on. It's really important to do that and to reach out. This is a bit of a counterpoint maybe, or I don't think it is. It's actually just kind of thinking about a different part of the system or a different level of the system. I, I love events. I love, you know, communities, you know, I'll hug people, this kind of stuff. I think that you have to look at the dynamics of the power that these things all rested, right. And I really believe in representation and putting people on the stage and I've done as much of that as I as I could, or as I was conscious and capable of. But when you look at the systems that create these dynamics, the power is actually above that. And these kind of representations of putting someone on the stage is somewhat superficial when you don't have representation at the board level at the C suite at the management level. Like, so there's there's all this other work that I think that we have to do and we're all kind of different levels of access to that and being able to facilitate that. But I think that's the work that needs to be done over the like, do we change the dynamics of the system and everything. And I don't know if this was brought up earlier. You know, I had internet problems all morning. I'm late, but I think sometimes there's this there's this weird conversation that is hard to hard to have about the what what actually ends up happening in a lot of cases when you look at the the rings of power and privilege is that the people that are representative that are most like the people that already have the power and privilege sort of come next so it's like sort of expanding out in rings so it's like you have, you know, power. And he is having internet connection issues. Yeah, he go. And there he goes. And he'll probably be back in a second or two. So we'll we'll do that. There he comes. Hello, finish that thought and I'm going to blame. I'm going to blame the internet again. I think that we just have a lot of work to do about all the systems all the power dynamics and be careful not to just make the privilege go to the people that are the most like the people that have the power but also slightly different to to really look at diversity at the basic level of what that means and try try to expand it more holistically than just oh that person sort of talks and sounds like this, but they have a different skin color or different gender. So we'll invite them to the to the party. There's there's one like you touched on DevOps. Sasha and how you know you were welcomed into the community and they hugged you and then like for me I'm a little bit older and so for me that was the Python community and the Django community they were just, you know, amazing. And they did a lot of work, you know, a long time ago around diversity and inclusivity. But then there's another conference that that I go to now lesbians who tech LWT he can find them, and they have done some really amazing work that I think one of the things that you touch on is that there. We, we tend to sometimes think that what we're doing is putting a representative person, like we pick the one LGBTQ person put them on the one person of couple color and put them on the stage or whatever it is and we think we're doing the work. But this, excuse me this other conference that I go to and I love, they have a thing. They don't put it that way they put it the way I'm trying to get the I'm sure they have a better phrase for it. That we're out there there, you know, we're actually we do exist in the tech community, you can put 50, you can, if you actually actively work, you can find 50% women of color to put on stage to have as your keynotes and you can find trans people and you can find people from disadvantaged there. We actually are here in your communities. We just the it's doing getting the organizers or the folks to actually recognize us and see us is really I think one of things go for it Sasha. I think so I want to. So for one for the spending in rings, I think the gradual changes okay and that we can come back to that I don't like revolution so we can come back to that topic it's a whole other topic. But in terms of putting people on stage. This is inspired by recent experiences that make me really mad, but people who get on stage get attacked. Putting themselves in danger. And I recently had an experience of putting someone an amazing person on stage, who got attacked pretty much for what they look like. And that person is at a level in their career and their journey where they could just shrug it off and be like, you know, this is absolutely fine. I'm not in danger. Someone that person like the person was attacking them went as far as emailing their employer with some absolute bullshit things to say but I'm. That's what I want to say in terms of putting 50 LGBT Q people on stage like I can't put it like I was just thinking about like I invited a junior engineer. You know, before a stage and like, and like what if that happened to that junior engineer, what if that happened to that person who didn't have the sense who didn't feel comfortable with their, you know, where they are, like, I would literally be responsible for putting them in danger. And so this is very, very sad and very horrible, but I have to think about that and so I think lifting people up is not as obvious and easy to do as we think it is. Correct. Absolutely. And I think that's where creating healthy safe spaces to do that and doing that. And in a way that engages the community that you're representing or you want to be represented is really important. And I keep going back to this LW, lesbians who tech LWT conference, because they do it so well. And they have managed to bring in senior people from all walks of tech communities that represent. They're out there, you know, it's and they, you know, if you ask them and bring them together. And you mix them with the junior folks, you can create these and they've managed to create a very nice safe space and a nice model for doing this. But that there's the huge risk as well and of being out or being on stage and getting trolled, which I think we were trolled a little earlier and I think Christian somebody done. So it's, it happens every day and creating the systems and the spaces is really what I'm interested in doing and doing it with thoughtfulness as well. So, I think, I think there's a way of doing it. And, and that that that there's a way of doing it that allows everyone to participate in a safe, healthy, engaged way and trying to create those spaces, whether it's in tech or outside of tech in our communities and in different cultural spaces. Maybe let you guys have the last words here as we're running towards the end of the hour. Sasha. One of the things I think about when I think about what Sasha's talking about is kind of one of the ally skills that that I try to talk about when I talk to people about allyship is that one of the most important questions to ask. As as the privileged side of the of the conversation is what do you what do you want, what do you want to have happen? What is it that you would like to have happen and how can I help you have that happen. And so in the case of like, I am responsible if I put a junior person on stage. Maybe the conversation has to be more like, I want to put you on stage. Here's the risks that you would take if you went on stage. Here are the things that I can do. If you if those things happen. What would you like to have happen. I'm not going to make the decision now whether or not you need to be on stage. You need to be responsible for it. And I will do everything I can to minimize the harm to you. But I think that that it's important that one of the things that we recognize is that trolling is an attempt to remove agency from people who don't have agency already. And we need to intercede and put ourselves in the middle of those conversations and say, I can't protect you from a Twitter mob. But I can do these things if you decide you want to go on stage. And I think it's important that you're here in your scene. I want to just like, sorry, I'm a little bit dismissive of this argument because like, you know, there's, there's really bad things that happen to people like getting attacked by a mob on the internet or getting death threats to their address and stuff. Like, I this is not and it can happen to anybody. Right. We have this like, just world fallacy. Right. We're like, Oh, she was dressed a certain way or she looked a certain way or she's not a real developer. I'm saying she whatever. I'm, you know, that person deserved this in some way. They did something. There were two spicy on the internet. I don't know. Right. But no, it just happens. Someone just picked you because you looked a certain way and they're now in your life and destroy you. And there's nothing you jade can do to protect that person, literally nothing. So if we go into like very bad scenarios, like, I, I don't. I don't think I can do enough to protect. I can protect someone from a violation of code of conduct inside my conference space. Yes. But I can't do much more than that. And I don't know that there's, I don't have a solution to this. I just, I think it's a big problem. I guess my argument is that I think that I used to have this argument with a boss of mine who he'd come by and say, you need to do X, Y, and Z. And if you don't do it, I'll be responsible. I'm responsible for everything around here. And I was like, that's a weird idea that you're responsible for everything, including my, my failures. Like, you're not responsible for everything. I, if you don't want to share the responsibility, then you're that just it's. So I get frustrated. Because I think the argument that I was trying to make was not that you could protect them, but that you can be clear about what you're able to do. And what you're not able to do and what the actual risks are and then help them make a decision. Because I don't understand, I don't under, I don't know how to go from, I feel like I am putting people at risk and therefore I think the conclusion to that sentence is therefore I don't want to put people on stage. That doesn't seem like that that seems like the trolls are winning that argument. I think the point james also making is that you're giving them the agency instead of holding the agency for yourself. Right. So that that no one can protect anyone. That's the reality. That's the reality. No one can protect anyone. I understand on the agency point and I understand that I'm taking responsibility for saying, you know, that I, you know, I can also offer it. Obviously, no one has to be on stage or in the board room or wherever, right. Like everybody has an agency and decides to take this risk, but I'm also saying that people don't always understand what comes with that risk, right. And I do feel responsible if I am trying to lift someone up and they get abused because of that, I do feel responsible, right. If I invited someone to an MVP community and now they're getting death threats because I did that. It's a little bit on me. Now, my answer to that in the not letting the trolls win is exactly the gradual change. Right. Like, because I can make sure that I have this gradual influx of people who look differently into the community up to the point where it becomes normal. And so it doesn't get attacked because they're Chinese or whatever. Right. So let me frame it just slightly differently. So knowing what you know now in the next opportunity to put someone like that on the stage. Will you not do it. I will absolutely do it, but I just, I don't want to be dismissive of, like, yes, I don't want to say that if I create a conference and I put 50 LGBTQ people on stage that would automatically solve their presentation problem. Like, I just, yeah, I don't think that. Yeah. No, I don't think anyone thinks that. Yeah. I think this, what I would, the point that I was trying to make with a LWT folks is that they have had no problem once they committed to putting that many people on stage to finding that many people on stage because they, we are out there. They are out there and so I have a little bit of a problem just a little bit with the gradualness because it's I'm older probably than all of you on the here right now. And so when I started in computer science back in the dark ages, there were more women in tech and in those programs than there are now. So they're the, so, and we went from being there to disappearing for a while to coming back now. And so for me, and, and, and this is I keep saying this to people is that they're out there, you know, there's, there's a lot of people who are in senior positions at that are quite willing to speak. We just have to ask. This isn't even deeper topic than we have time for. Yeah, but one more thing, and we're talking about the stage here, and I what the stage is just where we see ourselves Sasha, right, when we go to conference and stuff, but the work of the harder work is getting it into the organizations to getting more people into positions in companies and in tech and visible to so I want to make sure that we we keep saying I keep saying yeah, they stage, but I want that. And I actually think that that we just don't do a good enough job looking and asking people for to be visible and but do it in a safe way and responsible way so I mean I'm there are people out there who are quite willing to talk and it's just finding them and making the effort. I will absolutely agree with you that stage was a metaphor for being visible and being leadership right it's it's not about, you know, being at a conference. I have so many things to say I'm just going to, you know, we can save on for some other time because like there's literally too much to dig into. I do appreciate the way this conversation that like I think we don't have enough of these conversations say like we said no shades of gray usually so like I appreciate this. So, we have every Friday so go for it Andrew have a, have another. I made a point that I think is very interesting and I thought a little bit about and I think some people understand but you know and you sort of alluded to this at some point, computing was considered women's work. Right, so like this whole idea that that's like Dominion some of these conversations and some of these spaces about what what people are capable of or not capable of is literally unfounded and it's literally it's like fashion and tribalism drives drives the dynamic more than any sort of evidence, but that dynamic change at some point when, you know, the power, the money, the rest, and they pushed out they pushed out the women essentially. Yeah, and the rest right so it's like you, the hidden figures movie kind of puts a nice historical framing and lens where like we literally kind of have done things with with space flight without the calculations and capabilities of one black woman that's just it's absurd to see some of these conversations that we have to have. Genevieve bell does this great talk where she talks about the fact that England when it was first wired was wired with two wires no ground, so they needed to basically rewire all of England to a three grand to a three wire grounded system. And so they didn't have enough electricians. And so what they did was they printed up the instructions on how to rewire your house on teen napkins and they sent it to every house in England. And the idea was that they were going to convince women homeowner women who stayed at home to rewire their own houses and they did. And the thing about it is that the moment the tipping line tipped to there were more houses with grounded wiring than not grounded wiring. It made being an electrician a highly profitable thing all of a sudden you need to go rewire all the rest of the houses and all those. And guess what the women who did the original work to rewire most of England were prevented from becoming professional electricians they were not allowed to they weren't allowed to be paid for the knowledge that they had. And you see the same types of things happening computing early computing it wasn't particularly profitable to be a programmer when it suddenly you can get six figures the first year out of school. Well maybe we don't want the girls to play over here we like to we kind of like making all the money. Let's just we'll just diminish their contributions and ignore them so that we can keep all the profits for ourselves. And you know only only recently now when we have a talent gap do do all sudden there's a concern for how we get as many people back in the system as possible. I just think you know the economics behind this stuff is really gross and and and you know, pretty clear. Anyway, yeah. So maybe Sasha will let you have the last word in here. Yeah, I could just keep going right so I'm just not going to. I think you know that we kind of maybe didn't go Dan where where you wanted to go with this, but I think it was useful. And I don't know I think I would appreciate if we. I personally would appreciate if we tried to find common ground rather than sort of radicalizing, because I think, like I said, I don't think good things come out of revolutions. Every revolution in history was a shit show so I don't I would rather we found ways to come together and agree on things. Then we sort of blew up the entire system to redistribute power because in the end of it usually the power doesn't land very well anyway so. No, I think I think we're going to have this conversation again. And, and I think that it's, it doesn't matter that we didn't maybe adhere to the topic of creating allies because I think in having this conversation we're doing some of that work. So, and I really appreciate you coming Sasha and helping us spur this conversation a little bit further, because there's so many more layers to this onion. We can peel back. I just, you know, tons of things we could we could talk about like, but I'm going to let you go because I want to respect everybody's time today. And thank you. And we'll, you know, if you have questions for Sasha or Andrew or jade or myself or Chris, hit us up on the internet and Twitter land wherever you live divine ops on python DJ there's little idea and you're, I don't know how to pronounce your site and is that is that site and find us. We're happy to all happy to talk about this. And we will be talking about this more in the future so thanks Sasha for taking the time today. Back to the revolution. I think we're going to change the theme music for this or something. So, it's all good. Thank you very much guys.