 Hi everybody, everyone, I'm mixing up everybody and everyone. Anyway, welcome to our talk on scaling new heights with the Ansible community in 2023. We are Don Nero, who's off camera right now, but he'll be coming on shortly, and I'm Carol Chan. And I think next time we team up, we'll say Nero and Carol. All right, so instead of a self-introduction, which actually I did in my talk yesterday, so if you didn't see that, please watch the recording. I thought I would do a group introduction because we are really working as a team, Ansible community team to enable and help and support the Ansible community. So as you see here, these are listed in alphabetical order, not in any kind of preference. This is only half the team, so the other half is here. So you might have seen some of us during DEF CONF at the booth, in some talks, in the hallways, and I hope you had a chance to talk to us. If not, take a look at some of these matrix IDs and GitHub handles and ping us online at your convenience. We're going to share these slides after the talk. We'll upload them so you can get this information. If you can see, we are quite a diverse team, and I actually just came from a talk by Jim Adriaga about DEI, it's a really great talk, so again, please watch it if you get a chance. And she talked about having a team that's diverse and in terms of demographics, expertise, location status and so on, and I think our team has a lot of that. And of course it's not just check boxes to take to say oh, we have diversity and so on, we have people from Asia, Pacific and Europe and US, but it's also having a diverse team helps to serve the diverse Ansible community that we have. So one of the main goals that we have is to really kind of make sure that we are being inclusive with the Ansible community, because Ansible community is very varied, not just in terms of the different parts of the project, but also people's different background and location and experiences and so on and so forth. So hopefully as a pretty diverse team, we are able to also achieve that goal of being able to support different challenges that you may have, be able to just kind of bring everybody together and hopefully make everyone feel included. Speaking of this, being some of the things that we've been doing this year in 2023 and making great strides in, yesterday we covered a little bit about, the talk yesterday is how to contribute to the Ansible community and I mentioned about the new website, the new forum. Part of it we are also hoping to get a better sense and understanding of what you think about the Ansible community, Ansible project has been around for more than 10 years. A lot has changed, it has grown in many ways. So we've had different mission statements through the years, but we would like to something that we'll be able to kind of combine everybody's thoughts and ideas and feelings together. So if you get a chance, take the survey, you can scan the QR code, I'll get the link and again, like I said, I'll share these slides so you can check the survey out later on. Tell us what does Ansible mean to you and what does Ansible community mean to you? Automation is kind of central, but what else do you think? Is it about the people? Is it about the different projects? We'd just like to hear from you, so please take the survey. I already mentioned about the website and actually Don will also talk a bit about the whole journey thing in his part of the talk but I just wanted to share some URLs. It's a web working progress and there's a repo you can check out. We are using Nicola as the study site generator and we are working with the community. It's a completely community effort and public and you can join the working group on Matrix. We have been working asynchronously, oops. So instead of a weekly meeting, we just have the discussions in the working group on Matrix and as for the forum, we have been running an internal test instance in the beginning of the year, I think. Yeah, so we wanted to make sure that it is, it will do what we planned to have it for and we think that at least for me has helped me a lot in working together with my team so we hope that this will extend to the whole community and be a strong tool for the community to feel as together and come together and collaborate together. And everybody's, hopefully we'll be able to welcome you soon to the forum at this URL. Speaking of events, I just wanted to touch on that we recently have Community Day in Boston as part of Rehab Summit and Ansible Fest but we do want to again be more accessible. So we will have, since Community Day happened in US in the first half of the year, we'll have one in Europe in the second half, stay tuned for details. Similarly for Contributor Summit, which is more contributor focused, we had one in Belgium in February and we'll probably have one in the US in the second half of the year. And especially for the Contributor Summit because we have contributors from all over the world and we know that a lot of times people can't attend events in person for various reasons so we'll make sure that the hybrid option is available and accessible to everyone to participate from online from anywhere. The time difference will be difficult to adjust. We can't have one time that works for everyone but hopefully we'll be able to still reduce the, sorry, increase the accessibility by providing also recordings after the event. Meetups are kind of more focused regional events, more like local city and regions. So if you're interested in organizing meetups, come talk to me. Anwesha, my colleague, she's not here right now. But she's also working on this organizers toolkit which helps people get started to organize a meetup especially if you don't have much experience. Otherwise you can also help to share your experience and expertise to the toolkit to help us organize meetups from around the world. And this list is just the meetups in June, some that just has already happened and some are upcoming. So it's getting active again after the pandemic times and we love to see more meetups happening around the world. So how do you stay on top of all this news, what's happening, the website, the meetup, and what's going on? Please subscribe to the Bullhorn newsletter if you haven't already. So again QR code, you can scan of the or the bit.ly short link. And the newsletter is not just something that you consume and read and get information from but also you can contribute. If you have something you're working on that you think the community can benefit from, like a lot of collections are community supported and maintained. Every time they have updates they will share the news on the Bullhorn. If you have a blog post or a video or something that you created and you want to share that, we're happy to have your contributions. So again, there's a new spot on the Matrix channel in the social channel where you can mention the new spot and then you can get your news item saved for publication in the next issue. And it's a weekly issue. So I'm supposed to do the weekly issue yesterday but I think I'll do it tonight or tomorrow. Lastly, this is my last slide. We've been using Matrix for the past two years now but I think a lot of people are still kind of starting to get used to Matrix. It's okay because if you're used to using IRC you are a bridge to that but if you're new to Matrix, we recommend using Element as the client and there's information on the communications page. Some of you watching perhaps you're already on Matrix because you're watching that through the DEF CON matrix space. So you can use the same login. You don't need a separate one for Ansible. You can join our Ansible space and connect to the Ansible rooms in that space. Mastodon is another social network that we have started to be more active in. So if you use Mastodon, again, it's not tied to one server or one instance. Whichever instance you're using, you can connect to us or follow us and we happen to be on the Phocidon instance and you can follow us there and we can share information on Mastodon. And with that, I'll hand it over to Don who will give you a more interesting talk for the rest of the personal based content journey. Thanks Carol. It's Mike okay? Everything good to go? So as Carol said, my name's Don. Hey everybody. I'm part of the Ansible community team and today we're gonna talk about quickly some of the work that we've been doing to strengthen the community really and support the users and make things better because that's something we've identified a real need for. Also, we're touched briefly on the central web presence that we're building. So to dive right into my slides, I wanna start by disambiguating. You probably hear me say the word dock site like 20 times. So it's a good idea to say specifically what that means. The dock site, when I say it's going to just be a set of bunch of HTML files that are statically generated and it's kind of a top level landing page for the Ansible community docs. And that's the dock site. And here we are. This is a snapshot a little over a year ago but it's about the time that I started with Ansible. I'm still quite new. I'm learning stuff all the time about Ansible. But when I started, this was my entry point like most community users. I went right in, let's go with the docs. Help me understand what Ansible is. I've talked to a few people at DevConf over the past couple of days that they're like, hey, what is Ansible? And it seems to be a common question. But when I got into the dock site, it was, there was a real mix of things. It was hard to find the answers. And I was looking for a quick start for a hello world. I came over from middleware where I've spent most of my career and like working with like different Jboss teams. I always looked for like that hello world, get in, get started, like few easy steps. I want to get up and running and doing something. Let's go. But when I was looking for something similar for Ansible, I got in this like weird loop. I just had the question like, how do I automate something with Ansible? How does this work? Show me, you know? And I found a page in the community docs that took me to like a red hat site where there's a video that didn't load. And there was a link then that took me back to the community docs where it already been. And it's just like in this weird loop. And I spent like 10 minutes just like, what even is this? You know, like, why am I doing? So that was just this barrier for entry. You know, a lot of people are just like, okay, I can figure out, I'm just gonna give up and like maybe go to Reddit or, you know, who knows? Another thing that I noticed while like navigating through all of the community docs and trying to like, you know, I knew there was a lot to Ansible. And I was like trying to like navigate through all the different projects and like looking at their documentation, there was this lack of cohesion. You know, like marked down docs that were just in GitHub over here. There was stuff on like Netlify over there. There were like a bunch of stuff on Read the Docs, but they were all in like different namespaces. So I didn't know what was officially an Ansible project. You know, I also found like what is doing this were like these third party mayors of the entire community docs. So there was a lack of trust. I didn't know where I was. I didn't know is this like an official Ansible thing or is it just like a project out there that somebody's doing? And you know, there was things were just like spread all over the place and yeah, different looks and feel completely inconsistent. So why does that matter? You know, why does documentation? Why is that important? Why should we do anything about that? Like why should the community team even care? You know, community documentation, kind of reading the slide to you here, but you know, it enables users to succeed, right? Like when like, I think like for an open source project like Ansible, like what made Ansible really successful is great documentation. You know, like when I started, like I was writing a playbook to do something and I, you know, once you can find your way into like you get to the documentation, the underlying documentation is great. You know, and everything was there. All my questions were answered. When you do go to, you know, places like Reddit and you see people have questions you often see like the responses in the comments. There's a link to the docs. So once you know where you are and you're in, you know, it's great. And like that success increases adoption and you know, that expands the project and you know, you get adjacent to like all these different things and you know, it's a real vital part of any project. So documentation absolutely matters as a force multiplier. So fixing all of these things, where do we start? You know, like where was kind of the point that like, okay, we've identified like these kind of problems. Like how do we go about fixing them? So I think we all are pretty familiar with the idea of personas and you know, it's kind of a UI UX thing. And like some of them can be a little, almost have like too much detail. You know, this is like George and you know, he's a Sagittarius and his favorite color is brown and like all this kind of crazy detail. But the thing that really matters with personas, you know, you identify the user, the people who are, it's your audience. And the thing to kind of hone in on are the needs, the attitude and the knowledge. I think those are the things with personas that really matter. Hey, there's Anne-Racia. So you know, the needs for a persona are important because that kind of explains the goals, right? You know, like what the user's trying to do and you want to help the user succeed. So you need to understand, you know, what do they need from this? And the attitude is important because the attitude kind of gives you the level of verbosity. Like say it's a developer and you know, you're coding against an API or something. You want to know all the programmatic options and their expected behaviors so you can play around and tweak and tune and see what works and what doesn't. But if you're an SRE, you don't want to be playing around. You know, if there's like a flashing red light on a dashboard somewhere and the service is down, show me how to remediate that as quickly as possible so I can restore things and we're back to being fully operational. Knowledge, I guess that's kind of an obvious one. You know, that if it's a hobbyist, someone who's like maybe automating, you know, every time they like install like a boon to a distro, you know, and you got a playbook for that or you know, whatever you're doing. That would be a very different sort of like knowledge to say like a solutions architect who you know, goes into enterprise. So, you know, knowing the needs, the attitude and the knowledge of the different personas really helps you understand your users and the different types. So, you got to bear with me. I'm kind of the king of protracted pauses and it's Sunday, it's also Father's Day. I got to talk to my kids later on and there's a weird phone call so. I'm a little bit of a... But it's okay, let's go. It's good stuff. So again, like once we had those user jar, the personas in place, we were kind of like, so what do we do with that? You know, that's great. But how do we map out like the, you know, what the user is trying to do and like, you know. So again, like coming from middleware, I was, you know, I've been working on like this operator and for Kubernetes and that's why I became, that's why I learned about these milestones. This is actually the kind of the base Kubernetes journey. You know, when you become aware of something, maybe you read about it or you're just curious and then you evaluate and you start to learn and then you adopt and you know, you're using it and you scale up and out. So I think these kind of milestones, that's pretty much applicable for most IT projects, right? It's a very generic one. So, you know, we needed kind of a framework to have that progression, the evolution of the adoption of an IT project. So, you know, using those milestones. So once we had those two things together, like, you know, we'll have these milestones, each one starts with some kind of human motivation and then, you know, you describe that and then like there are the specific tasks underneath that you need to complete that milestone along your, you know, they're the milestones along your journeys. So we started mapping these things out, interviewing people, talking to the community, you know, identifying what these are and we, you know, we needed a way to, the idea is like, you know, meet the community where they work. I think that's something that is one of the, actually, before she left, Robin, kind of imparted that bit of knowledge. I was like, yeah, that's a great thing. You know, don't, don't, don't put the, like, we started like, you know, while I was talking to people, we started putting things in like this browser-based tool and have like these really fancy, really beautiful kind of like graphical representations of, you know, the user journeys and like, oh, there's this task and they go on to do, and it's kind of like a tree thing, you know? It looked great, but you couldn't check it in the GitHub. You needed to log in and you had to like register and there's a limit of, you know, it was a free tier that, so it just didn't work. You couldn't give it to the community, you know? You didn't want to be behind a login. So we turned to, you know, mark down because it's ubiquitous and then, you know, putting things in YAML and then, you know, in GitHub. So, you know, plain text, of course, makes it easy to, you know, do PRs and all that kind of stuff. So we started mapping out persona journeys, making things available to community by putting them in the repo, you know, everyone works in GitHub. So we created a repo, as I think we all know, naming is one of the hardest things in tech and I still kind of hate the name of this repo and I think that's okay, it's gonna, but, you know, we, so I created a really simple, like, bunch of ginger templates and, you know, some styles and, you know, we deployed things on to GitHub pages and there was an action, so people could look at it and we could start getting things out to the community and they could see what we were building. And that's when things started to get really fun, you know, I think like when you talk about personas and journeys to the community, sometimes they don't really get quite that engaged, okay, that's great, but, you know, maybe it's a little bit abstract or something, you know, I just, but when you show them something and you say, hey, we're thinking about this new doc site, look at this, then the feedback starts rolling in, you know, and we went a little bold at first, you know, when we put out the, you know, we decided to be like, hey, let's really mix things up. How you doing? And the feedback at first, you know, it ranged from like, oh, this is great, you know, we can like change these things and we can actually like build this new doc site and then like some other people like, yeah, no, that looks awful, you know, we went through a few iterations, but, you know, as we found like Cunningham's Law was kind of our thing and so let's not try and get it right from the beginning, let's just get it out there, let's be bold and let's get the community get their hands on it. And as we went, you know, we gathered feedback through the bullhorn, you know, send and shouts out like we hit Matrix, IRC, we even like went through the folks on Reddit and just asking, hey, what do you think, you know, we're working on this new doc site and the feedback started getting, you know, we got a lot of great things from the community that we didn't think of, oh, you know, we need links to this and, you know, that doesn't make sense and, you know, so feedback started to roll in and eventually it started to get a lot more positive and when we got away from those boxes and people stopped paying attention so much to the colors that we were using and the look and feel and things started to come together and I think people actually started like noticing those journeys and like, oh, hey, you're actually telling me this is the complete step, this is the progression for like, you know, I'm a maintainer and here's the path that I can follow and that's literally what we were doing, you know, like the guys in the airport with the glowing sticks are like, yeah, this way on the runway, we're literally signaling to users, this is the path you should follow. So we got to, if you go to docs.ansible.com you'll see this and, you know, we've got a journey-based doc site and again, the whole idea is like, here are these paths, like these are the, if you're, you know, you want to get started, you can do these things, if you're a user, you know, you start here and then you build and, you know, we kind of define those journeys and of course it's still a work in progress and we're continuing to try and get feedback, measuring with analytics, we've got a quick links, you know, there's a toggle so you can like, flip between the old site that was there with the cards, if you still want to do that but we've also been able to see how many of the users that go to docs.ansible are doing that. Some of the things that are to come, it's using the DIA taxes framework which divides content types and like there's tutorials, concepts, reference and then like how-to guides where like tutorials, you know, it's task-based stuff that helps you acquire skills where how-tos are larger, kind of more overarching sets of procedures that help you apply the skills that you've learned. Also we're working on revamping one of my first contributions to Ansible was the getting started and we're working on revamping this so it can lead to different places and build out and make that path a lot easier. Also with the ecosystem, we've moved everything under the same Ansible namespace, all the projects that are on Read the Docs, we've moved stuff that was over on Netlify, as Galaxy and G, they're now in the same namespace so everything's kind of organized and you've got that trust and there's, you know, the deterministic URLs and everything's kind of in the one place. We're also working on themes. There's MK docs for projects that want to use Markdown, great, use the MK docs theme and that's brought to us by Soren who's on the DevTools team who's been working on that one. There's also a Sphinx theme and we're building a community website as well that will tie in all of this and here's a screen grab of that that there's still a lot more work to come on that but that's gonna give that central place where the community can come and find the docs and then find the forum that my Carol was talking about in her segment and so there'll be that as well. Finally, I'll leave you with the call if you wanna get involved with this, one of the best places to do that would be on Matrix and the docs channel, there's a, we call it the dogs, it's a documentation working group, it meets every Tuesday, everyone's welcome and if you're curious to know more about this, if you wanna contribute or find out more, please come and join us. We're a friendly bunch, love to hear feedback, love to hear criticisms. And just, you know, come join us. Thank you. How are we for time? Do we have no questions from the chat? You guys wanna hear me talk for five minutes to? I'm sure I could, oh, it is Father's Day, so maybe I got a dead joke in there somewhere, yeah. Yeah, I'm on the spot though on my mind, it's just going blank, so I would, yeah, I don't wanna be record, yeah, please, yeah. Well, I know we're working on, oh, yeah, okay, sorry, yeah. So let me make sure I got the question right, like the documentation that's on Automation Hub or Galaxy is not also on Dockstar and Ansible or, yeah. Do you wanna, I'm... Not Ansible.com, it's only community, mainly community docks. Yeah, it's... Automation Hub stuff will... Sorry, yeah. So the DockstarAndSible.com has mainly community docks, so the Automation Hub stuff probably won't be there, you have to anyway log in separately to the Automation Hub and access those certified collections and things like that. And even on Galaxy, I think the community Galaxy, the docks also are also rendered on the website, as far as I know. But there are links from the Dock site to Galaxy, but no, are there like collection docks? Are they rendered to DockstarAndSible.com? Yeah, I'm not sure, so they are. So they're the package docks are, so. Should we like show them or something? Let's see if I can find... It's a good question anyway, if you've got us a little bit stumped with the answer, but. Well, yeah, here we go. Yeah, I think those Galaxy user guys are a little bit stale. Yeah, yeah, what's the source to... Yeah, I do think they're both pulled from the same source. Any other questions out there? No more questions. Okay, well, thank you, yeah, thank you very much.