 Good morning everybody. Can you hear me? Yes, okay. I would like to welcome Justin Mufori. He's going to talk to us about the importance of storytelling. Actually, Harry Potter got my attention. I think more of us are here, as he was talking about, but also about the YouTube and about the focus source. Please, a round of applause for Justin. Thank you. So, my name is Justin Mufori, and I want to do a quick introduction of who I am. So, one of the things that I consider myself as an open source aficionado, I do a few things at various open source communities. I'm also an IT student from Rochester, New York, where I'm involved with a user of Plenitusia Screw and a free and open source software initiative there. And I'm also a Fedora contributor, and some of the things that I do, I'm a Fedora Magazine Editor-in-Chief, a communications team, I'm a marketing team member, a ambassador, and there's a few other things I can go on and talk about, but what I really do in Fedora, take away all the titles, the kind of work that I'm doing is in mostly non-technical fields in a very technical project. And the best way I kind of describe that is I came into the open source community in a very unique way where I didn't really come in doing technical contributions, and I kind of went head first into the community side of Fedora. And I think that the best way I can describe kind of what I do is I'm kind of discovering and contributing to this never ending novel of what is Fedora, and what are the goals of Jethric that we're trying to do. I'll get to that. So was the top title just clickbaiting like what's the connection here? Is there magic in open source? Is that where it is? But it's not exactly so J.K. Rowling has a very unique capability of telling stories. She has a way where she can captivate people with her books where they're always ready for the next chapter, and they're always looking the page because they want to know what's next, what the next part of the story is. And it's a page so Rowling's line of work isn't just unique to literature. It's uncommon, but it's vital for a technical work, and I think especially for open source communities. But how exactly is storytelling a part of open source? So in a world of code and commits to software where does storytelling really fit in? And the objective here is that every piece of software that we work on is being a goal, or in the common phrase it's scratching an edge. When you sat down to either contribute to some kind of software or work on a project or start a project you had a need that you wanted to solve. You had an objective that you knew that something else wasn't quite there or you thought you could do it yourself. So your software is committed to solving a specific need or a specific set of needs. So the idea is that storytelling fits into open source because you have to communicate what kind of unique problems your software is trying to solve with both your users but also your contributor community. So why are stories important? You have two different audiences that you're communicating the story of your open source project. For users it's pretty straightforward. Your users want to know about what your software does, they want to know how it can solve their problems, and you as the project container or community need to help communicate that and persuade this potential set of users about why your software is the best solution or the best one to use for whatever problem you're trying to address. So that one is kind of a little bit intuitive but a contributor why is storytelling important for your contributor community? It's important because it's difficult to know multiple sides of a community without being in all these different places at the same time. That's definitely a little bit true for larger open source projects like Linux distributions. And the important thing is that you can try to communicate with everyone on the same page. So when you have these different teams or different groups working on different tasks at the end of the day they're all working towards the same end objective. They're all reaching here in the same project community working towards the same general goals. But is everyone on the same page about what's happening in these different parts of the community? The best way I'm going to describe it is you have two houses next to each other in a neighborhood. The neighborhood is your open source project and the neighborhood is your neighbors. A really great example I think of this that we've recently done in Fedora is we have the Fedora Loves Python campaign. For the users it's a very kind of an easy way to describe how we're telling a story because we're trying to target the Python community and show them why Fedora is great for developing with Python and why it targets their needs and why it's a great distribution for developing with Python. But for our contributors it's a really unique success story because when we started this the idea started in the marketing and community operations and the idea of how we wanted to proceed with this went forward and then we reached out to the Python team about what they thought would be something that we would want to highlight for promoting Python in Fedora. We're going to ask these questions and get them answered and then we're going to work on this idea more. It was a very constant communication. It was very active. And we were going back and forth with the Python community in Fedora was an active part of this. And then once you have the idea we went to the design team to work on things like a brochure and like the design by t-shirts and stickers. And even for that process we had Python developers and the marketing team that was very active and engaged with the entire process. So it wasn't just like the design team was doing their thing. The marketing team was doing their thing and it was a very active and engaging process of all the different groups. And the reason why that was successful was because communication for the entire process was very open and transparent. When we started the process in marketing we immediately reached out and tried to involve and engage the Python community about this entire campaign and trying to get their input on. It wasn't like we surprised them with like hey we're going to do this and want your input. This is an idea we want to work together on. We want to find the best solution so we can better promote what our project is doing well and how we can share that with our users. So in that way storytelling is very important for your users to know maybe why they want to use your software but also your contributors so they know what's happening in different parts of your community. So how do you tell this open source story in your own communities? The simple way I'm saying it is using the best practices and using certain tools can help better extract the story and improve visibility in various parts of your project community. And fair warning, if you're looking for some kind of like secret tool or underground method that's going to solve all the needs of your project to make your contributor community thrive and do better there's no secret. There's no big secret tool or method. Rather it's using the things you already have to get maximum potential. And just a set of ideas I have a few examples that are ordered from these frequent that you want to use to the most freedoms but it's not a measure of importance. So firstly, to read me a project overview depending on your project size is the front door and the first impression you make on potential users and contributors. And it's the first everything for anyone that comes into your project ever. They want to know about what your project is if it was a smaller project on k-pop they'll go to your read me and they'll try to see what the objective that you're trying to do or what is your software. And for contributors you're also giving them an idea about if there's someone who's like wow I really love this software and I want to try to do something to make it better because I have this idea you need to help provide them a way a stepping like a stepping stone to get to the place that you need to go to contribute to your project. So in regard for users you want to most clearly communicate what your project objective is and how to solve them. You want to make it clear why your project is the best solution for whatever you're doing. So for a smaller project you're reading, just make it clear what is your software, what are you trying to do what makes it effective for the purpose of your goals and also you want to include how to get involved. You have like these big tickets and other things which I'll get to in a minute about ideas for that. But you want to communicate those. And then for larger projects it's like a Wiki page that's an overview of your project like in Fedora we have an overview of the Fedora project and our Wiki that goes into things like what is Fedora, what is Fedora Linux and what is our community what are all the different parts of the Fedora community and what our governance model is like but also how to join the Fedora project which then links you to various other resources that we have in the project community. The key thing you need to remember is you have one shot so make the count and you need to prioritize the information you want to include and you also need to organize it. You don't want to overwhelm them with too much information because then they'll just close the page and you lost it. So you need to prioritize what's the most important things to include in your front door of your project and make sure you organize it in a way that makes sense. So another tool you can use is an announcement mailing list for depending on your project size but it's understandable to worry about sending too many emails to an announcement project list but the thing I also see sometimes that people are afraid to use it because we don't want to send too many emails to the project, to the people who are on the list which is understandable but you also have to keep in mind that these people have actively made the choice to subscribe to your announced mailing list and they want it to be included in communication about what's happening in your project community so it's important for you to if the decision is like well if you want to announce that we're to the email on this thing or that we have this new feature coming or some kind of team project news you shouldn't be afraid to use an announcement mailing list in the fear of sending too many emails because if someone does end up unsubscribing because they say like ah this is too much and I didn't want to read this then they probably weren't that engaged with your project in the first place but they're there and they're following and you're not posting that that's a missed opportunity for you to connect with people who are either active users that you could potentially interest to contribute to your community or just engage with people who might end up telling the story of your project in another place so there's various other platforms like opensource.com but you shouldn't be afraid to use the announced mailing list at all because or less recently because the people who are there want to know about your project so you need to keep them informed and keep them connected include a call to action if you're going to post there if it's something like a project news and you're looking for need a little help with something have a call to action so that way people who are reading who are kind of on the fringe of user and contributor have a way to engage with the project community and they know like, hey, here's a chance I could take a look at it all the next one in order for you to see is writing and blogging and this is something that I've done a fair amount in Fedora. I think for larger projects it's really key to centralize where your contributors are writing there their updates on projects or it's a larger community sometimes you use planets for people like a solid other blog post like in Fedora, we have a Fedora planet one who is a contributor can sync their blog up and then their blog post will be on the planet sometimes there's really awesome posts on there that describe so many amazing things that are happening in just one part of Fedora that you would never have realized unless you read their blog post sometimes this is a story about how someone learned to swim over the summer and it's not really relevant to the project community but the thing that we tried to do in Fedora around November 2015 was to be introduced to the Fedora community blog and this is the time to be the idea behind is if you want to know what's happening in the Fedora project community you can go to the community blog and you can see what's happening in Fedora today what's happening in Fedora this week and you can sort by categories for all the different sub-projects documentation, community operations, design, development the Fedora Council so on and so forth and the benefit of having that is that there's no need to try to navigate through this sea of contributor blogs what's really going on in your project community so people who are active in your project and in the community can go here and see what's going on in different parts of the community and there are people who are users who are just interested in your community they can engage with the project by going here and seeing like oh I was kind of interested in the design team I want to get involved with the design what's going on here for smaller projects so if you just have a single-gain repository you should consolidate and know where you're writing content for if a smaller project might have it and you're in the reading or the project overview about here's where we're writing posts about the project and you can follow here to figure out what's going on and so on and so forth but the key thing here is that it shouldn't become too much mature you want to go short and sweet instead of going long and then you're writing a thousand words and you're like why did I ever think this was a good idea so you need to and it actually is a story a lot better too for people who are actually reading your articles when they're shorter and more to the point and generally the importance of writing and blogging is you're trying to communicate what's happening in the project community at a larger more broad level that you might put in an announcement and you can write it more frequently because it's not like people are really active email or poeple about it so it's a really great way to kind of communicate some of these bigger ideas of what you're working towards and you want to do like a monthly update like here's where this milestone was we've gone through these issues we've got stuff here or we have these really cool things that are coming in the near future we want to promote this better in the next release of software or so on and so forth the idea is that writing and blogging is a really great way to give people a better insight to some of the development behind the project and better understand what's happening in your community for a larger project it makes sense to essentialize and have a single place to offer this kind of information for a smaller project just more clearly communicate where people can go for news or updates instead of your project community and lastly the last way to get down to social media so it's supposed to be short and sweet to the point if you've been doing something this week in your project like you work towards an issue and have a few new comments there you can fit in to 140 characters great, post something so people who are engaged with you on social media accounts to your project if you have one can follow you that way it doesn't have to be something that's like okay when you sit down and write a tweet it's a 140 character if you did something cool this week, put it in there so that way people can see that your project is active there's things happening in your project community you don't have to try to figure out how do I need to make these these really cool things that we're doing more visible just do these smaller things and people who are interested can go there and instead of looking like well I don't know if this project is really active anymore I don't know what they're really up to great, go to your social media and see if anyone's sweet or even for a very larger project they can even date but that's a really great way for people to see that your project is moving and these are happening and they can follow you on one of those platforms and it's a very great way for you to engage with again, either current contributors for a larger project that's happening in two different sides of the project but also for people who are particularly interested in using or contributing to your software so once you do all of these things how do you make efforts how do you make a connection all this work that I've been doing how do I know it's paying off how do we know it's actually having an impact so I want to give a specific example of what we have which is this really cool thing called bed message bed message is kind of it's an event bus that admits a notification of every kind of event that happens in our project the example is being every time you're to commit to attacking a repository every time a new coachee build comes every time a new bus comes a lot of folks on YouTube have a lot of translations and they'll play with runs take a comment ask a dory question that's all on you and it's a really cool way to kind of see what's happening in Fedora this exact second you're in a channel Fedora got fed that message which is just kind of like the spy rows of all these notifications all at once and then if you go there and you're in the channel you'll set it for five minutes and you'll wonder how is any of this supposed to help hundreds of lines coming, coming, coming how do I read or interpret this but the way that makes it really cool is when we more finely whittle down what we're looking at and we filter it into making connections certain things that we're doing in the project and we make that comparison with the data that we have with Fedora so a really cool example that we had for Fosum being relevant there was a really cool case study that an distributor put together about our impact about Fedora at Fosum so the idea was we have to move them our community stands every year and there's a bag that people can claim too and we were curious like so these people who are claiming the batch are we doing anything with Fedora or are we doing anything there what's our impact here are we doing anything that's worth highlighting and one thing that we looked at was who's saying hello to us for the first time who are people who already have a Fedora account and people who just signed up to the weekend or Fosum and this one you can see that we have for the most part are people who already have a Fedora account who are already active contributors to claiming the batch but in 2014 and 2016 we also had a fair number of people who were newcomers to the Fedora project find and engage that way and then so the question I don't think it's worth it for Fedora to come to Fosum it's not worth it for us to pay to travel here and to make that happen the end result of the one of the conclusions of the data was that one out of the 52 people who had attended Fosum 18 of 2014 18 of them had an increase in their long-term activity after Fosum and then they jumped up into a higher activity group in a six-month period of looked at before and after Fosum so 18 of those people started contributing more in a long-term view after Fosum and then it was three that actually did a decrease and FedMessage is a really amazing way for us to kind of better understand our project community to see what are we doing well whether it seems like trying to promote translation days when we write a blog post on the Fedora community blog about hey we're doing a translation spring and want people to help out we can try to fill during the FedMessage data we're seeing for translations in correspondence to the promotion and marketing or what we're doing to try to make this a bit more visible to a wider community so it really is great that we have this and they're saying the full blog post is a really awesome blog post and I really like checking it out because it goes as much cheaper than any other company so how do you show these results if you don't have something like FedMessage not everyone is so lucky to have something like FedMessage but there's still patterns that you can use to understand your success so depending on what kind of resources you have in your project community if you're trying to promote like a specific issue or you've gotten stuff out of something and you're trying to engage more contributors or a wider audience you can try to measure the commitments and issues and more requests that are coming into your repository over a certain time if you have an account registration system and you're trying to promote contributing to your project see if there's been an increase in the number of account registrations on your account system of your project for conference and event engagement have a positive example if there's an increase in the number of issues and more requests after if you have a presence at an event or a conference you can also if you have a localization of your project see if there's an increase in the number of translated streams or a new language just started appearing in your project for an automatic tool like Zanada and things like that as well but the point is that even if you don't have a lot of fancy tools you can still cut it down and it's very simple and it's really kind of universal in any open source project and if you look at it from a more simple way you can try to make these conclusions on your own regardless of what kind of resources or tools you have the way I think to look at it is there is a story in your project community one person saw a world of wizards and witches and magic and she shared that story and she inspired billions in your project you need to find your story and you need to share it any questions? please write your comments this is the last one from the three comments I mean the three comments can be made after the project and if you have thousands of comments they can just be about practicing or aerotiming do you believe that in different projects have different guidelines for how it would go over and that's a very good point so you have a project community and it has a lot of commitment and I added it to the document so it's really simple and it's probably going to be a good data point so maybe if you're doing more like actual destructuring and elaborating in your project and above taking it or in any project it's something you need to provide so it really is dependent on your own needs and what resources you have so a project that's been flying all the time has been a major activity because it wouldn't be a data point because it's like one verse might fit 100 lines and one verse might fit so in that case you'd better look at a different data point because it's not one of the major a significant point of activity that engaged in their set of accounting and work from then Thanks a lot I hope when we see you around somewhere in the event would you be the other part of the people?