 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of OutSystems Next Step 2020, brought to you by OutSystems. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman. This is theCUBE at OutSystems Next Step course when we gather at the events. One of the big things to talk about is the community and OutSystems show is no exception. Lots of developers, lots of community engagement as they're building and sharing what they have. So to dig into that topic, happy to welcome to the program, Jen Lopez, she is the senior director of community and advocacy with OutSystems. Jen, thank you so much for joining us. Hi, thanks so much for having me. Well, Jen, there's so much discussion in the industry right now is like, okay, what does the current moment in time with the global pandemic mean for events? What does it mean for communities? The term I've heard used so much is, how do we bring ourselves together even while we're apart? But if you could give us, what does the community at OutSystems look like? You've had this event before. If this was 2019, what did the community activity and the community engagement look like? Yeah, we are definitely in a different world right now. So in 2019, gathering the community together, whether it was at Next Step or at other in-person events that we often had, that is such a huge part of building community is getting people together and being able to have those conversations. And sometimes it's just, whether it's meeting at, you're getting some coffee and you meet someone, all of those in-person things are hard to do online, but we're really working hard this year at finding those ways to connect in a bunch of different ways with the community. We have our regular technical talks and that sort of thing that we're doing, but we also have chats where you can comment and chat with other community members. We're gonna have a 24, we have this 24-hour Zoom going on. So you can, we're trying to find as many ways as possible to sort of at least get those conversations and have the ability for the community to connect with each other. Yeah, I'm wondering if you can, people look at communities and especially in the developer community, there's so many different pieces of that. When I talked to Gonzalo, he was talking about, how do we enable the next 10 million developers? When I talk to developer communities, it looks like the app dev is obviously a big piece of what you're addressing, but characterize if you could, and if you have any staff that would love to understand the community, the growth of community, where the engagement and activity is. Yeah, thanks. So the community growth in the OutSystems community has been phenomenal. Last year, we saw, or just for this year, we saw 90% growth since last year. We have 22,000 developers on a monthly basis who are actively doing things in the community. That's anywhere from between building apps and asking questions in the forum and using downloading Forge components, which are reusable apps, attending user groups, there's all these things, right? We have this activity level that we've seen that has just been through the roof, and COVID for the community has actually been, we've seen huge growth, specifically March and April. We saw a great increase in new members coming on. And then what happened is our other members jumped in, answering way more questions than we've ever had in the forums, offering to help in different ways. So between the increase in growth and increase in activity, the community itself has jumped in to really help out other people. Yeah, well, if you look at the developer community and the tools they use and how they engage, they're really, the work from home movement probably hit them a little bit less than the average knowledge worker because they're used to being online. They're used to engaging in these environments. Often it is a distributed community. So it sounds like it makes sense. What else, from a COVID standpoint, I've talked to some of our systems customers and the ability baked into the platform is something that they are taking advantage of. Do you have any interesting stories around how the community is rallying, specifically with COVID going on? Yeah, so actually that was a huge thing for us. We had both internal and external, we were getting a lot of folks coming to us and saying, everybody wanted to help, right? Especially in the beginning of when it hit globally, everybody wanted to help. So what we did is we launched a program that we called the COVID-19 Community Response Program. And we weren't quite sure exactly how people might react, but what ended up happening is we had thousands of people give ideas. And with those ideas, we had teams of people who were working on building these apps and actually launching the apps to help different communities all around the world with various issues, whether it was an Uber-like app that was created to help people in a certain community find somebody who could go to the store for them. There were, these different apps were being created by the community, the ideas were coming from the community and people just really rallied around it because everybody wanted to help and they wanted to participate and be a part of something. And they were able to get these apps out in record time. I would see other folks, everyone was trying to rely on technology at the time. And I would see other folks saying, oh, we had a team of five people spent two weeks building out our first MVP of this app and at OutSystems, we were seeing people in two people in one week having like a fully blown fleshed out app being created. So we were able to not just help with the technology standpoint, but help really quickly when it was needed right away. Yeah, one of the themes I've been hearing a lot at the show is, how do we close that talent and skill gap? I have to imagine with your community engagements, the advocacy, you've got some visibility into, what things is OutSystem engaged with when it comes to educating the next generation, helping people take advantage of some of the new technologies, adoption of the new AI features. It gives a little viewpoint as to those changing dynamics in the community and specifically for developers. Yeah, I think it's really interesting. So we have a number of programs with our, between our education program and low code schools and various programs where we're getting not just new developers coming in and learning OutSystems right away, but actually getting developers who are coming from other programming languages who are ready to learn something new who are like, hey, I'm hearing a lot about these different ways to be innovative and I can build an app quickly and it's still secure and stable and robust and all of this. And so we have a lot of people coming in different ways. We're also really excited about a new partnership that we've just launched with Women Who Code. We're working really hard at going beyond just sort of those regular ways of people coming in. We wanna help bring people from normally who may be underrepresented in tech at the moment because we wanna help bring that new generation in and that generation's coming from all walks of life and coming up with working on lots of different ways to educate and bring them in and keep them in tech. Yeah, no, Jen, such an important topic. I'm so glad that you brought it up. Diversity, one of the things when I think about we're lowering the bar and what necessary skills you have to get started to be a coder. So often it's, I have to have this degree, I need to understand these languages. So do you feel this general movement is making it more accessible? Are we, what are we doing? What can we do more to be able to reach out, find some new pools of talent that can help us close this gap and then as you said, keep them in tech. Yeah, and I think that'll be key is keeping them in tech but there are right now, it's a strange thing to say this is an opportunity, right? But with lots of people and specifically here in the US where I am, obviously we have a lot of folks who have lost jobs, right? People are looking for ways to get into something new. What's great about being able to learn the out systems is that you're going to have a different kind of job, right? You're going to have one of those jobs with an enterprise organization or one of our partnerships and it's going to level up your career in a totally different way. And there are lots of organizations right now who are also looking to find those ways online. They're like, we have all these members in our community who we're trying to get trained and into tech in different ways and they're reaching out to us as well and saying, hey, we're hearing a lot about all of these innovative things that our systems is doing. How do we work together? And so it's been really exciting to see that it's not just us going out and reaching out it's people saying, oh, I see these really cool things that you're doing and we want to help get our members learning and into this as well. All right, let's look a little forward if we could, Jen. Tell us, what do you see in the future? What feedback are you getting from community? What things should we be looking at going forward? Going forward, I think that development is really going to be focused on being able to be creative and innovative and finding new ways to do things. We don't have to do things the same old way anymore, right? We can build a robust application quickly and like we saw with COVID, we had big issues and people were able to figure out a way to use technology to actually help fix these issues or solve a problem really quickly. And I see that very much that people, it lights something in people's minds of, oh, being a developer doesn't have to just mean sitting and coding all day. It means doing really robust things that I can do to help people and use technology in a totally different innovative way. Wonderful, Jen, want to give you the final word when we talk about out systems, bringing the community together, what do you want people to understand and connect with on this community? The community itself is very generous and giving. And one thing that I have really, really loved about being a part of OutSystems is the community itself because they are working really hard to help bring new developers in, help train them, give them mentorship. So there's a big feeling of, it's not just every person out for themselves. They really want to help lift each other up. I think it's really important for feeding that technology, that new generation and that innovation that is coming from it. All right, well, Jen Lopez, thank you so much for helping us dig inside the community, definitely looking at the engagement opportunities this week. And thank you for all of the information that you shared. Thanks, Stu, appreciate it. All right, stay tuned for more coverage. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.