 from theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston. It's theCUBE, covering IBM Think. Brought to you by IBM. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2020. It is the digital experience online. So rather than all gathering together in San Francisco, we're getting to talk to everybody where they are and we're happy to bring back one of our CUBE alums. It's actually been a little while since we've had them on the program. Willie Tejada, who is the general manager and chief developer advocate with IBM. Willie, so great to see you, thanks for joining us. Hey, Stu, thanks for having me. It's good to be back, it's been too long. So, you know, first thing, you know, obviously we're all together while we're apart because of the global pandemic. You know, developers, I've had so many interviews I've done over the years talking about dispersed development, you know, around the clock development. I had a great interview with, you know, head of remote work in the developer community at the beginning of the year before everything happened. So, you know, how's the community doing overall? And, you know, how are you seeing them react to what's happening? You know, in the developer community, I think one of the interesting parts is, one, developers feel oftentimes that they can actually make a difference to their work, oftentimes happens remotely. And so, one of the things that we've seen is a lot of the interaction that we have when we're doing our developer advocacy work has just converted to digital. And there's some interesting dynamics that kind of come about just even in that, where, you know, if you were doing something like a meetup in New York that was attracting something like 50 people to maybe a hundred, maybe the venue was limiting the number of people that you would actually have there if you had a popular topic or speaker. You know, we've had meetups basically be as large as 500 plus people when we went to digital. So, definitely some different dynamics as we actually talk about this new normal that we're in and everybody utilizing digital vehicles to reach the people that they want to talk to. All right, so I know last time we talked with you, a big topic we talked about is call for code and something that IBM has done different initiatives there and you've got a very relevant one. So, bring your audience up to speed, you know, this year's call for code, you know, what's involved. Yeah, Stu, thanks very much. You know, the call for code initiative inside of IBM is now in its third year. We did it in 2018. The concept was fairly simple. Developers always love to solve problems. And we said, what if we challenge the 24 million developers to come and take a crack at society's most pressing issues? And in the first two years, we focused on natural disasters. You know, all you have to do is take a look at the coverage prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. And you had wildfires in Australia and in Northern California, where my home actually is based and you had tsunamis and hurricanes and floodings. And so the ability for us to actually bring the developer community to bear on some of these size most pressing issues was really kind of the concept up front. And IBM would help by bringing subject matter experts together, making available tools. Because, you know, we were thinking, let's solve the problem, exactly how we solve it when we apply business. You get a expert on supply chain. You get a user of supply chain. You bring them together, developer builds these things. Well, not all the time can you get an expert in disaster, a first responder. So we actually created a lot of that fusion actually from there. Then over the first course of the first two years, we've had over 210,000 developers participate across 168 nations with over 8,000 applications submitted. So wildly successful. Now, this year, let's do to your point, we had something that we could really bear down on very heavily. We announced it that we were taking on climate change, kind of laddering up natural disasters was, let's look at the route, climate change. And then the COVID pandemic came about. You know, we said, let's tilt people towards that. And it's been a tremendous, tremendous outcoming for it. We've asked the developers to focus on three areas, crisis communications. You know, you may have been one of those folks that's on a conference call or emails and haven't been responded to on wait times forever. So those communication systems, how do we fortify them, get them to scale. The second area is remote learning. Really look at where all the students are actually these days and what they're doing there. Not just teaching, but basically, how do you give them entertainment? How do you actually provide them some little social interaction? And then the third area with the COVID focus is community collaboration. You know, we really want to try to get people, make sure people's spirits are up. And that really does require everybody leaning in. And again, you look at the news and tremendous examples of community collaboration and where technology can help scale or broaden that. That's really where call for code actually comes into play. Yeah, maybe it would be helpful. Tell us a little bit about some of the previous winners. You know, what would have been somebody outcomes, you know, more than just rallying the community, you know, what resources is IBM putting into this? So one of the things that makes it different is rather than it just being a regular hack, this is really a process inside of IBM that we developed over the course of the last three years where the challenge is one piece, the call for code challenge. We also developed and rolled out and committed another 25 million. With call for code, we committed 30 million over that five years. And then the following year, we recognized the need to see the solutions actually get deployed. And so we committed another 25 million for the fortification, testing, scaling and deployment. So when you win a call for code global challenge, you also get IBM support around deployment, fortification, some counseling and relation basically from development to architecture to even the business side of it. In our first year, we had a team called Project Al actually come out and win. And you know, one of the first things that happens, especially in hurricanes or these natural disasters, communication grids go down. So they developed a solution that could quickly establish an ad hoc communication grid. And anybody that had a typical cell phone could connect up to that wifi grid or that grid very similar to the way they actually connected to a Starbucks wifi system. And it would allow both the first responders to understand where folks were at and then establish communications. So that was in the first year. The second year was a team called Prometale. And in October, we selected them as the global challenge winner. And they were a solution that was built by a firefighter, a nurse and a developer. With this concept roughly of how do they monitor essentially a firefighters situation when they're actually in the heat of battle to best allocate the resources to the people who need the most. Understanding a little bit about their environment, understanding a little bit about the health that's actually happening with the firefighter. And again, it's one of those scenarios where you couldn't just build it from the firefighter side. You couldn't just build it from the nurses side and a developer would have a difficult time building it just by themselves. So bringing those people together, a nurse, a firefighter and a developer and creating a system like this is really, really what we're aspiring to do. Now, they won in October and in February, they're in a field deployment actually doing real testing in the field in some of the fields of Catalonia, Spain. So we've seen at firsthand exactly what happens when they win the Project AL team actually did some hurricane deployment testing in Puerto Rico that of course, IBM helped fortify and build connections between the Puerto Rico government so that we're really seeing essentially the challenge winners see this type of deployment. Well, I love it, you know, it's even better than a punch lot I could do. What do you get when you combine a firefighter, a nurse and a developer? The answer is, is you can positively impact the world. So, you know, phenomenal there. I'm curious, you know, where does open source play into this activity? We were just covering Red Hat Summit last week, of course, you know, lots of open source, lots of community engagement and hearing how they are helping, you know, communities engage and of course, open source has been a big rallying point, everything from, you know, 3D printing to, you know, other projects in the community. So, you know, where does open source fit in? 100%, you know, the amazing part about activating developers these days is just the broad availability of the technologies. And it's certainly stimulated by the community aspect of open source, this idea that they democratize access to technology and it's really community centric and folks can start building very quickly on open source technologies that are material. So, number one, all the things that is part of call for code and what we actually deployed are based on open source technologies. Now, one of, again, one of the thing, the differences is, how do we actually make those winners and those technology sets become real? And becoming real requires this idea of how do you actually build durable, sustainable solutions? So, each five of the winners every year have the opportunity essentially to go through the Linux Foundation and have their solutions established as a project with the idea roughly that people can download and fork it, people can actually fortify it, but it's available to the whole globe, that everybody in the world, to help build upon and fortify and continue to innovate on. So, open source is right at the root of it, not just from the technology side, but from the ecosystem and community side that open source was for. And so, we've seen as an example, the formal establishment of Project Al's software being open source by the Linux Foundation. And it's been fantastic to see both the participation actually there and see how people are basically are deriving it and using it, exactly what we intended to see in the vision of call for code and code response. Well, that's phenomenal. We're huge fans of the community activity. Of course, open source is a great driver of everything you were talking about. So, I'm curious, one of the things we're all looking at is where people are spending their time, how this global pandemic is impacting what people are doing. There's plenty of memes out there on social media. It doesn't mean that you all of a sudden are going to learn a new language or learn to play an instrument because you have a lot of time at home. But I'm curious from what you've seen so far, compared to previous years, how is the engagement, what's the numbers, what can you share of, is there a significant difference or change from previous years? You know, there's so much goodwill, I would say that's been brought about around the world in what we're seeing around the COVID-19 pandemic that probably the rate, the way I've described it is the rate of submissions and interest that we've seen is three X's above what we've seen in the prior years. Now, keep in mind, we're not even actually at the area where we see the most. So keep in mind, like right now, we tried to accelerate the time to highlight some of these solutions. So on April 27th, we'll be kind of the first deadline for COVID-19 challenge and highlight some of the solutions on May 5th, of course. Now, when we think about it, basically from that standpoint, you have, we typically actually see people waiting until that submission timeframe. And so when you think of it from that standpoint, you really oftentimes see this acceleration right at that submission deadline. But we're already at seeing three X's what we've seen in the past in terms of participation, just because of the amount of goodwill that's actually out there and what people are trying to do in solving these problems. And you developers, they're just, they're problem solvers overall in putting out those three areas, crisis communications, remote learning and community collaboration. They'll see examples of what they see on the news and think they can actually do something better and then express that in software. That's excellent. So Willie, one of the things, we've been talking to leaders across the industry and one of the things we don't know is how much of what we are going through is temporary and how much will actually be long-term. I'm curious if there's any patterns you're seeing out there, discussions you're having with developers, you talk about remote work, you talk about communication. Are there anything that you've seen so far that you think that this will fundamentally just alter the way things might have been in the past going forward? You know, developers are was actually looking for this idea of how they actually sharpen their skills or craft new languages that they actually know, new platforms, whatever it actually might be. And I think in the past, it was probably even from our perspective, this balance of face to face versus digital and a mix of both. But I think what we'll find going forward is a more robust mix of that because there's, you can't deny the power of reach that actually happens when you actually move something digital. And then I would say that, you know, think about how you at theCUBE have refined your studios and dealing with an interview like mine, it gets better and better, you refine it. You know, how you do an online workshop and how you do a workshop on Istio Service Mesh, you get better and better about how you engage from a real-time hands-on keyboard experience in what information, what chat, what community pieces do you put on the screen to stimulate these pieces. I think in general the industry and our company and our teams have gotten better even in the short amount of time. I think those things will be long lasting. I think we're all humans. So I think they still want the physical face to face and community interaction and camaraderie that comes from being in that physical energy. But I do think it'll be complimented by the things that we refined through the digital delivery that's been refined during this situation. All right, so Willie, final thing, of course, you know, this week you said that, think the winners are all being announced. How about, you know, people that are watching this and say, this sounds phenomenal. How do I learn more if I, you know, didn't get to participate in some of the initial pieces? What should I be looking for? And how can I, how can I contribute and participate even after, think? Well, number one, keep in mind that the challenge for the year will still actually go all the way to October and submissions for that poll challenger will actually go to the 31st. So that's number one. But number two, going to developer.ibm.com, call for code, you'll find all the resources. We have these things called starter kits that help developers actually get up and going very quickly, finding out more information about both the competition structure and really how you become part of the movement. Go there basically and answer the call. Awesome, love it Willie. Thanks so much, pleasure to catch up with you and definitely looking forward to seeing all the outcome that the community is putting forth the focus on this really important challenge. Hey Stu, thanks for having me, I really appreciate it. All right, be sure to check out thecube.net for all the coverage from IBM Think, all the backlog we had to see Willie a couple of years ago when he was on the program and check out where we will be later in the year. I'm Stu Miniman and as always, thanks for watching.