 So hi everybody. Thank you for coming today. I really appreciate you all being here. So today we're going to be talking about no code, no problem. Tails are getting involved with the OpenStack community without actually knowing any code. So before I even jump into anything, I just want to start with this puzzle piece. So it's a red puzzle piece and this is a key part of this talk. But we're going to come back to this later and it's all going to tie everything together. So my name is Sonja Ramza and I work with the OpenStack Foundation in the Community Management Division. I work with overseeing user groups, looking at the ambassador program, and just helping generally get feedback on user groups so we can make it a better experience for all. So what we're going to cover today. So we're going to look at how the community is structured and then we're going to see where you can get involved within that structure. We're going to hear from our success story, Lisa Marie Namfi, and then we're going to have a bit of a Q&A time. So firstly let's just have a quick look at the community structure. So firstly at the top we have the OpenStack Foundation, so they advocate for the global development distribution of the OpenStack cloud computing operating system. And then within that they have corporate governance by its members, board of directors and committees. So the OpenStack members breaks down into the individual, platinum and gold members. The platinum and gold members are companies that have significant resources that contribute to OpenStack. We're going to come back to the individual members later. In terms of our committees we have the technical, user and legal affairs committee. The technical committee oversees all OpenStack projects and helps decide on any decisions that need to be made, whether a new project needs to be incubated or whether there's a decision or an issue that needs to be resolved. The user committee looks at all feedback from the users. They also look at deployment statistics and try to take that feedback and make the experience better for the technical users. And finally the legal affairs committee advises on all legal processes and also intellectual property strategy. So now within this structure let's look at where you can join. So basically it's all within the individual member structure but there are many different ways within this that you can participate or someone you know who might want to get involved but doesn't know any code but would love to join and get started. So firstly user groups. We have user groups all over the world. So all the pins there is where we have all our different user groups. And even in Australia there's one in every single state either though we don't have a pin for every single one. This is where users come together and discuss and talk about the technology. But even if you're not a particular user of the technology there are great talks that have been organised by user group organisers at the meet-ups so where people come together to discuss. It's also a great way to network and meet people from different organisations involved with the technology. So you may also want to contribute content. There are many different ways you can contribute content without it actually being code. So firstly UX which also means user experience. So there might be in regards to the interface. How is the user experiencing the open stack interface? Whether they might want to have feedback for a particular thing that doesn't make any sense or whether there's something that's broken that think might be done better. You could do your own user experience survey and say okay I don't like these certain things. You could find some other users who have never used it before but get them to go through it and take their feedback on what the experience is like. Or you could even just talk to the user committee and see what provides some feedback to them about what you think about it. So writing. Writing there's a couple of different areas within writing for open stack that you could be involved in. So firstly there's the blog. The blog is open for contributors. You can write about any topic you like. Whether this is your first summit and maybe you want to write about your experiences here at the summit that might interest you. And also if you just want to have some particular element featured but may not want to write the article you can also submit ideas to the open stack blog and they will take that on and hopefully be able to implement that. Anything within the open stack website is open for your opinion. If you find something that's broken whether a link doesn't lead to where it should or that leads to an error page or if you find there's some particular content that could have some reworking that you think could be better. This is certainly your chance to shine. We're open for contributions or if you think there's some particular content that you wish was on the website that would be useful. Please do come forth and contribute. Any people here speak another language other than English? Yep, we've got a couple. So you could definitely contribute to translating, documentation anything on the user experience of open stack. We're always looking for people to help contribute back to that so we can make it localised and get many more users within different regions participating and using open stack. Finally, the ambassador program. Our ambassadors are people who have become user group leaders and organisers have facilitated one particular user group and then have become leaders within their region in order to continue the process and help other groups through that like even new groups who have come through help mentor them through the process of becoming an even thriving user group. So if you want to get involved with that the best way is to start at the user group and then work your way up. So get involved, start helping out see where you can contribute and you might become a user group leader where you facilitate, you can organise sponsors you make sure you can get a venue happen for where your participants can come and meet and when you're really getting that well that's when you start stepping up to things like the ambassador program but the sky's the limit we're all here to contribute and participate so this is something you could all potentially do. So now that leads me to our success story which is Lisa Marie Namfi. She is an ambassador for open stack in the US region and she's also done many other different projects advocating for open stack within the US as well. So I'll hand over to you. Thank you Sonya. So first of all I want to really thank Sonya for jumping on board so quickly and this is your first summit, right? And she's down in Australia and she's helping facilitate this entire global program from Australia and she's doing a fantastic job. That's why I took a little picture of her for her scrapbook in case you're wondering about that. But anyway so thank you so much. She works at the Time Firefield who many of you know and love and we're so happy to have her on board. So big success story there. You can get involved no matter where you live in the world and even if it's a global role. So I was asked to be the US ambassador at the beginning of the year having run the San Francisco Bay Area open stack user group for over three years. San Francisco Bay Area is a large region and a large tech region and we were also the first open stack group so we have meetup.com slash open stack if you ever want to join us or join one of our meetups. We run two meetups a month usually sometimes three. It's just a very active region. We have a lot of members in our user group who aren't based in the region as well. So one thing I like to do with the user group is send out newsletters. It's a distribution of over 6,000 people because it's the largest user group and you know I just make sure the content is super relevant and regionally I lobby for discount codes for the conferences that come through towns or our user groups get sometimes very significant discounts. There's a lot of things you can do to lobby for your user group. So the foundation was nice enough to recognize that and asked me to be the US ambassador for the whole US and as you saw from Sonya's map with all the blue dots we have a lot of user groups in the US. So it was a little daunting at first. I am looking for help if any of you got two people in mind who would be phenomenal ambassadors who I can see right here but it would be great to break up the region and get more help. And as Sonya said if you've already started to run a user group it's a really easy smooth transition into becoming ambassador. I think the first two things that I did as ambassador was to make the San Diego user group and then the Pasadena LA user group give them official user group status. These were guys that I don't know if you know Jon Studaris or Gary Kavokian doing phenomenal things in their region. I mean what Jon has done with the user group in San Diego is amazing. He has a hackathon or a hands on training class before every meetup that he does. He's gone out and lobbied for funding. He's got servers donated. He borrows cloud compute from the UC San Diego I think. He was very active in the open stack days that we had on the west coast. So there's people out there who are doing amazing things that need to be recognized and they're already doing it. No one comes necessarily to me and says okay I want to now start to give you 90% of my time and to do all these great things but there are people who are doing that and they're just doing it because they have a passion for it and to find those people and to give them some acknowledgement and to give them official status and things like that is really important. We also we don't like to reinvent the wheel all the time so we're lucky in San Francisco Bay Area we've got a lot of great speakers who want to speak and there's a lot of great content so we like to share that with other regions. Every time I run a meetup we record the whole thing and we put the slides and the video up on the meetup calendar so they're archived for pretty much every meetup I've ever run. So other regions have access to that content so when I get asked to help with content my first answer is find a presentation you liked and go and find that speaker and ask them and if they can't travel then maybe you can do a remote hangout or something like that or we can find somebody else who's more locally in your geo but content seems to be something that people struggle with regionally so we're trying to figure out a way to consolidate content so we have a list of people who are willing to travel to help out in the different regions so don't be daunted if you're remote you can still get involved and you can still really help. Another thing that we did one of the things I did when I was still working at HP but it wasn't really part of my HP job is I wrote a book on OpenStack twice actually, two books on OpenStack and I'm not a technical person so I'm technical enough but the thing about community is community and there's always people who are willing to help you Paul Holland is credited in my book he was very helpful from the open source program office some of the foundation metrics and helping with the legal side of things and then I had a bunch of ptls that I sat down with and you know Mati Taylor and some of the big names in OpenStack and they were very willing to help so you can do a lot of things and the community is fantastic and everybody wants to help. Another thing that I found really helpful to further the advancement of OpenStack is make sure you tie in the other technologies that you've been hearing so much about for the last couple of days at this summit in all the keynotes and in all the sessions one of the things I did with our user group is I combined I essentially made it the OpenStack and containers user group and that has been extremely successful this summer I've run 13 meetups on Kubernetes which has now been recognized by the CNCF and I spoke yesterday during the Kubernetes day and we did a session in the big grand ballroom on OpenStack and containers did anyone see that by the way? The Kubernetes track was really good and it was packed it just shows the interest in this other technology I'm sure the NFV track and some of the other tracks have been as popular so tying in this other technologies IoT, AI, machine learning whatever it is that you can combine has been really popular with the user groups the folks have loved it and then the last thing I'll say is this year we consciously decided in the US but particularly in my region to focus on the user just to showcase those user stories and the first meetup that I ran this year and GoDaddy talked about what they built with Docker on OpenStack Josh Harlow presented it and he's the PTL of Oslo but he works with GoDaddy it was packed we had almost 200 people I think 175 people in the room the video is up there on the site if you want to see what he did and it's really cool what they built and Josh is really cool so he's like well I'll try not to make this so complicated I'll try to simplify it and I said no Josh tell them what you built it was easy because then they'll try it and they'll say this isn't easy and they'll give up show them what you did and how you were successful so he did and he presented it and he had almost as many questions at the end as he had presentation material and then a line almost at the door to still talk to him afterwards so people are starved for this content and they want to hear these stories so help tell these stories you don't have to be the one to tell it it's a great way to showcase these stories and people really appreciate that was there anything else specifically you wanted me to cover I just actually got a question for you your first recommendation so people here haven't got started what would be the first thing they should step out and do in your opinion to be an ambassador or to run a user group just to get started go to a meet up become a member of your community and before you can ever run or lead communities you have to participate in communities so if you have a passion for this and if you're interested in it find a local meet up and go and if there isn't a local meet up find one that will do online or join ours we really try to live stream every time but if we can't do that we always have a recording if I don't do a hangout or I don't have a live stream I'm getting pinged the entire time my phone and my meet up feed is going crazy saying can you please turn on a live feed I'm really starved to participate in this community no matter where they are but I think probably most is there anyone here that is from a geography that's so remote that you don't have a meet up near you yeah so if you want to get involved you want to get started just go to the local meet up and meet the local organizer and then ask if you can help and I guarantee you the answer will be oh yes please yes and then you guys can have a lot of fun okay any more to add oh no I didn't know if you had any other questions that was my only question okay sure do they have any questions any questions at this stage is there anyone here who's dying to start a user group I asked that question yesterday and I got zero hands also it's a lot of work but it's a lot of fun it's really rewarding and in the last couple of years we've had so much more support from the foundation you know in the early years there was there was kind of a conscious attempt to keep the user communities and even things like women of open stack separate from the foundation and make sure that they were community run and community led and that worked that worked well but I think and I think one of the goals of the ambassador program was to make sure that we do have that direct contact with the foundation and that we're getting the help and you know you kind of need one vision that everyone has to be on the same page with and make sure we're all tracking to that and they're open to so much feedback they're really listening so this year I called it Jonathan Bryce in January and I said here's how I think I'm going to architect this community this year this is my job as community architect and this is what my thought is what do you think and he was like sounds great and I'm like great spread the word because I think we should all be on the same page and they were really open to that so it's much more rewarding you know it was a lot of work to start but the ball is already rolling and now it's just up to us to push it further and push it into the edge technologies. It's just going to keep growing. I hope so. It's different. We hear a lot about OpenStack and all over the news especially like this is the end of OpenStack and this is the end of OpenStack and this will be the end of OpenStack and you know I think we've heard that every year for seven years now and yet we're about to throw OpenStack a seventh birthday party so I just think but it looks different than it looked a few years ago and it's going to look different a few years from now and we're going to throw out this OpenStack or whatever that commercial went and so you know roll with it so I don't know that it's necessarily growing but it's changing I mean if we can take credit or if we can count all of those other technologies that slide that Lauren had that had all of the other initiatives that we're collaborating with now then yes it's massive the OpenStack and Kubernetes community now is very tight in the San Francisco area so yay we just doubled so there's a lot of opportunity there and you can call it growth or you can just say this is the future of OpenStack all right thank you I just back on that point that Lisa made if you thinking of actually starting a user group I didn't want to put your hand up but if you are actually ever thinking of doing that the best place to come to is an ambassador the best person because the ambassador will help guide you through that process and they'll be there to support you you think like I have no idea what I'm doing but they will be there to guide you and help you and you'll get the goals you want to achieve with the user group through fantastic people like Lisa she's too kind so right now I'm for the US I hope that Sheila I think I know she wants to so I hope we'll have Sheila on board you guys know Sheila from Comcast she's been on main stage at the Summit C4 and she's part of the UC so she's so qualified oh my gosh and I'm so happy to have her helping so she will take over the east coast I think she's based in the Virginia area kind of around the DC region and she's been running that North Virginia meetup for a while so for the US contact either me or Sheila and there's a website it's on OpenStack.org on the community or the ambassador has its own link okay good then please continue thank you Lisa so where did we go from here so we looked at the community structure we looked at you know heard from a success story and we've got you know the gliding reviews that we can definitely get involved and it is possible so first thing is to stay up to date the best way to to get started is to know what's going on join the mailing list follow OpenStack on social media you might hear about a particular event that's happening you might want to attend in your local region such as the OpenStack days it's sort of like a mini version of the Summit but within your region such as we've got one coming up in Australia the OpenStack day Melbourne on the 1st of June so things like that you can get involved with and also insightful articles you know SuperUser has some great articles from people who are user group leaders on particular parts of the technology there are great things to get involved with and understand so the first one I'd recommend is to join the community mailing list that is where a lot of community discussion happens also the user group newsletter goes out on that particular feed so you'd also hear about events that are going on again links to the SuperUser articles that are relevant and also to follow OpenStack on Twitter and Facebook so again another great news feed for information so the next one is check out the user group portal so this is where you'll find all your information regarding whether it's to start the new user group feel free to start I'd love to hear from you if you want to do that and also finding your local user group so there's a gigantic list of all the different ones we have around the world and also just tip pages information to get started people you can contact and also this portal has the link to the ambassadors page where you can find who your local ambassador is also so if you were interested in contributing content whether it was the user experience whether it was the blog the website or the translation please do head to this link or whether you can on Google just search for how to contribute OpenStack and then you'll find all the different information about each of those specific areas and I encourage you to join their mailing lists and they have the right people to contact for you to whether you want to contribute to the blog or to the user experience so if you're still unsure or you have a different idea or there's maybe this like you thought about the women of OpenStack idea and you thought maybe there's something you could do for diversity in your area please head down to the foundation lounge and let's chat I'll be there today after the talk on Thursday from 11.50 to 12.30 so I'd really love to talk if you've got some sort of idea or you've still got more questions or whether it's something you want to get started really would love to have a chat so now we're back to the red puzzle piece this is where we started so if you came in late I just showed this picture of a red puzzle piece and then just kept going with the talk so the point of showing this red puzzle piece was that we went through the community structure how the OpenStack community looks like and then we went through and I said okay you could contribute here and here and here and so the point is you are the piece in the puzzle so together all of you the non-technical side, the technical side and everything in between together makes one picture one big picture of the OpenStack community and you can be one of those pieces because the OpenStack community is open source and it's also open for all to contribute to what your background is so that's the main part of the talk we've got time left over so some Q&A any questions at all? Joseph is asking why we volunteer our time I'll just repeat it for the video recording and yes it is a volunteer unless you know we're going to start putting tip jars out at our meetups I think because we definitely want to upgrade the quality of pizza and beer but it's I think the why we just have a passion for it we're all in open source and we wouldn't be in open source if we didn't believe in FOSS just through and throughout all of our beings and we spend time at these conferences and also at scale and I was at the community leadership summit this last weekend in Austin and you know there's amazing people who build these communities as far as I can tell I've never known anyone that's really got paid to do it so I think we just have a passion for open source is thing number one and a passion for community and for me I joined SF Bay the technology is also for second and third what draws me to it an open stack was the most exciting technology that I'd seen come around in a long time you know maybe six years ago when I first started getting involved and there's just a there was a buzz around it and there was a buzz around the San Francisco Bay and at the time I was in the HP office at in Sunnyvale which is literally across the runway from NASA where open stack started and you know I just wanted to get involved in this and so I got involved in the community and then I was like this needs to be organized a little bit better and I think I could help and then of course once you volunteer you kind of get sucked in and so like Hotel California Syndrome but it was fun and we made it fun and it's a fantastic community and some of my best friends on the planet are the people that I met through this community so it's been really rewarding and I've met people from all over the world so I would say that's why I got into it Sunny might have a different answer but she's also about half my age and has a bright future ahead of her so why don't you say why you got into it part of it was it was just a great opportunity and the passion for the technology and the fact that it is open source that there is that opportunity to be able to be involved because there are a lot of things where there are high barriers to being involved with a particular technology or community and the fact that that is such an easy thing accessibility is just such a huge value for me so that was a really big part of it and the passion for the technology as well it's really cool technology you should get into it Joseph I almost think that was a rhetorical question because you've been involved in this community for a very long time so I could ask you why you're here yeah sure it's a community you're part of it this is very dangerous because I wasn't on the agenda and you have no idea what I'm going to say so buckle up yeah so I'll say the same thing very passionate about what OpenStack I've been fortunate to be part of it since 2010 since the very beginning and I've been able to serve on the board and in addition to all the passion about the technology I think there's two very tangible, very tactical things one there's a lot of problems that exist on the planet that are social and technological that I think OpenStack and open source communities can actually help address we heard some of it in the keynote yesterday things like how you can identify disease before anybody realize symptoms happening, guess what technology like OpenStack helps you do that is there a life anywhere else in the universe guess what, technology like OpenStack can help you do that so participating in something that actually can help us progress as a human race number one to me that's the number one thing that says is there anything that I can do and I used to be an engineer many years ago I'm definitely more on the executive and business side now but I will say I'll reiterate what was said today don't view OpenStack or any open source community as purely a technology only people thing it's not it has to be people that understand marketing it has to be people that understand sales it has to be people that understand partnerships and alliances that is all critical it's like a body if you've got one body part you can't function as a human being you need all these different parts so I will reiterate like our community says that enough I know we say it in some places but we don't say it enough every function that is represented in this room is needed in the community and so for us to be able to do these challenging things I would say that your skill set your experience, your background is needed so there's definitely a benefit there and my second one would be there is benefit for you as well very professionally right speaking right there is a host of companies a host of other communities a host of other projects that getting involved even as a volunteer and serving as a meetup coordinator as a marketing representative as part of the user community as part of the working group product group there are tons of volunteer opportunities where you get exposure it helps your career significantly so one very nice one very nice and sweet reason why you can advance everything but in a very tactical way it's good for you it's good for your career, it broadens your horizons you see other perspectives and in your career there's definitely an opportunity for advancement as well so I'll put those two very tactical things out of there thank you Joseph he's absolutely right the reason I wrote the book that I wrote is because I got 100 questions on just what is open stock, why are you so passionate about it why should companies care why should companies invest so much a lot of in the weeds technical stuff written about open stock and a lot of docs up on open stock Oregon lots of other places but nobody had written that book cloud for dummies kind of thing so I was approached to do it and I said well I answer that question all the time in the meetups and I answer that question all the time when I'm talking to people so I guess I'll answer that question in a little booklet and it was extremely popular 13,000 copies of it were downloaded and a lot of people were starved for this and we translated it into three Asian languages and when I went to the summit in Tokyo in Japan I had a team from NEC running up to me and they were like thank you for translating your book into Japanese I made my whole team read the book I was like wow but people just really wanted to know that kind of bigger picture higher level why was the foundation created why why all of this how can we all get together in Boston on Tuesday and Wednesday and talk about infrastructure you know talk about the open infrastructure I mean this is a movement and people wanted to get involved and they wanted to understand it so there's lots of ways to contribute and your skills are very much needed and very appreciated anyone else want to talk about why they're here I'm impressed that you came to this talk so clearly you have a passion for it too and if you want to share your story you're welcome too I say as I take over Sony's presentation that's the last time we made her I just wanted to build on what you both said about meeting people even just coming to these events like open stack days and even the user groups the user group is in the day job they've got somewhere else that they're also contributing to even just being here I've met someone from the Linux foundation I met someone from AT&T I met someone from Verizon you just meet people from everywhere and every place and it's just such a great way to network even and just to get your face out there like pivotal to get sourcing that next opportunity or sourcing that next big thing that will propel you to the next big thing after that so highly recommend it so was there any other questions cool I'm going to get coffee I skipped all that this morning so thank you sincerely all of you for coming and I hope you can all get involved and start making a mark on the open stack community thank you guys thank you