 Hi everyone, and thanks for joining this session. So my name is Krem Monverna. I've been in the Fedora community for a bit more, like around five years now, mostly into the infrastructure side. I also maintain the Fedora base image, the container base image, and also been involved in the Fedora Core OS working group. But today I wanted to chat about something that is a little bit related to the Fedora community, but not so much into day-to-day things that we're doing. And this thing is like, I'd like at the end of this session for you all to be a little bit more curious about curiosity and try to answer this question, like can we learn to be more curious? So let's get started. So the first step, I think, is to try to find the definition. And it's quite funny, because we actually don't know very much about curiosity. If you look at the research that we do in the neuroscience field, or to try to understand how our body or brain works when we trigger those feelings of curiosity, and we are eager to learn new things, there are not that many. And this is mostly due because curiosity is a very wide concept. And when scientists or researchers want to study something, they will narrow it down to some specific aspect of curiosity. So for example, how we play, how we explore, like where the desire for information comes from. So the whole concept of curiosity as a global thing is not very well known or not something that we know a lot about. In terms of etymology, we can just look at where the word comes from. And it's very related to cure or caring, and this idea of trying to find a way to solve problems, or trying to cure people, or trying to be careful to care about some situations. There is a definition that I personally very like. I find very powerful from the Global Curiosity Institute. And they defined the curiosity as the intentional mindset to challenge the status quo, explore, discover, and learn. And what I really enjoy about this definition is particularly the challenge the status quo and really this idea of not accepting what is the current norm or trying to go beyond and understanding why we're doing certain things and why not changing those things. In terms of trying to look at the opposite of curiosity, so following this definition, I think we really can define it by conformity and this acceptance of the status quo, like OK, this thing is like that. We've done this forever the same way. I just accept it, and I'm not going to be curious about why we've done those things and trying to generate new ideas. We can look also at maybe trying to find the different types of curiosity. And in Ian Leslie, the book Curious comes up with three main categories or three main types. The epistemic curiosity, which is really about going deeper, trying really to understand something into depth and knowledge. So that's more like something related with specialization. And a good question for this is like, how does it work? There's the diversity of curiosity and that's maybe the one that we are the most familiar with. That is everything that is new, really related to exploration. And like a good question is like, what is this? Like what is something new, like very interested into learning about it? And finally, something maybe we are a bit less familiar with, the empathic curiosity, which is more to understanding the feelings and thoughts, something more related with inspection. And like a good question would be, why do I feel that way? Like really trying to understand like our feelings or other people's feelings. All right, so now we got a better idea of like curiosity. But why should we care now? Like why is that something that we should be interested in and like spend some time? And really it's related to the environment we are living now and the world in this current state. There is like this acronym VOCA for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous that defines like today's world. Like where things move really fast, everything is very complex, very connected. So a small change somewhere will trigger like big things. And in that environment, answers don't last. So the value of an answer is not very, very long. And in the opposite, the value of questions and questionings are all we are doing things is rising because we are looking for new ideas, new ways of doing. A good example of this, if we look at answers from the past that don't really work well now in today's world, it's to look into like the startups innovation world. And there is a very good example in the hospitality industry. If we look at Marriott from the 95 years ago, like very well-established hotel chain, it's actually the largest hotel chain in the world by the numbers of rooms available. It's got 8,000 properties in 131 countries and territories and over a million and 400,000 rooms available. So 95 years to build up this like empire. And here arrived new ideas, new ways of thinking and challenging the status quo. Airbnb, found in 14 years ago, and in those 13 years, they achieved to be present in 220 countries, over 100,000 cities with active listing, 7 million listing and I think something that every hotel chain or every hotel empire would have dreamed to achieve. It's like hosted over 100,000 guests during the real world cup in 2014. So we can see that really challenging those status quo and trying to come up with new answers to maybe problems that were from the past are quite interesting in today's world. So, OK, curiosity is important. It's something we want to be more aware about, but it's like why we are not more curious as adults mostly. And this really like when we start our journey on this world, as young children, we are very curious. We ask a lot of questions. There was like these cities in the United Kingdom that came up with those numbers. On average, children ask 40,000 questions from age two to five. And with a picker on four-year-old, we have up to 300 questions a day. So really just very eager to learn a lot of questions. And by the time we reach adulthood, we are on average less than 10 questions a day. So yeah, there is something that is happening between that time. One big thing is the curiosity can have a negative connotation. I saw in the chat that curiosity killed the cat. But it's also not something like this notion of challenging the status quo or challenging teachings or things like that. It's not something we are encouraged to do. So schools place an important role there. We learn that teachers have the knowledge and that we should not really challenge them. We are there to learn from them. And also, there is not really the time to develop curiosity at school. The goal of school is really to get you to learn some concepts, learn some things. And the goal is for you to pass the exam. It's not really to be more curious or to be challenging what you've learned or things like that. It's very focused on, OK, we want you to learn those things, but apply them in your exam and move on. Yeah, by the way, do you know why the sky is blue? It's one of the most asked questions by a three-year-old child. And when I was preparing this, I was like, oh, yeah. By the way, why does sky is blue? So if you're interested, there is a great video on the spaceplace.nasa.gov. So if you're curious about it, go and check it out. So can we learn to be more curious? Is it like something that we should be easy and that we can learn to do? I would say yes, but there is always a bet. On the positive side, curiosity is like a muscle that we can improve. And like every muscle, if we exercise, we practice. We're just building that muscle. But also if we don't practice and we don't exercise, we don't think about it, it's something that will deteriorate. There's a big part about the environment and the cultural aspect of the environment we live in. The more this culture, this environment will be open, will be sensible to vulnerability. Pretty much a lot of the psychological safety field. The more you have this in the environment, the more people will feel welcome to challenge the status quo, ask questions, maybe feel like, OK, I don't know about this, it's OK. I'm just going to ask questions. And also, I think we are in the societies that don't necessarily reward questions. We tend to shut them down. And there is this famous quote, don't bring me problems, bring me solutions. Usually, if people come with questions that bring problems, we don't really welcome them with open arms. They say, no, I don't have time for that. Come back when you have a solution for it. There are also enemies of curiosity. Weirdly, knowledge is one of the big enemy of curiosity. The more knowledge you have about something, the less curious you're going to be. And it's something to be mindful of. The more deep you're going to be in a subject, maybe the less eager you're going to be willing to learn. Or you will assume that you already know everything about it. The fear aspect is really related to this vulnerability, psychological safety. It's always scary to go and ask questions even more if you've started to challenge things that have been done the same way for a long time. And time, time is also a very big factor. It takes time to get curious to go and look at things that you're not necessarily familiar with. At the time, there is this great quote from George Carlin. Some people see things that are and ask why. Some people dream of things that never were and ask why not. And some people have to go to work and don't have time for all of that. I think that's a good summary of why it's so difficult sometimes also to be more curious. All right, so if we look into how we can try to put this in practice, and I would say start with a question. But question can be a bit tricky. You can quickly be seen as someone like a questioner or like try to bully people with question. I think the key to that is really ask questions that are where you are authentic. You ask questions because you are really interested in the answer and really trying to understand like trying to challenge this status quo, explore, discover, learn. Don't ask questions to prove your point or try to make the person wrong or something like this. I think it really needs to come from a good place. Direct framework that Warren Bergett proposed in his book, More Beautiful Question that I think is quite interesting is to start with why. Really why to try to understand the problem, to come back to this idea of challenging the status quo. Like why are we doing this thing that way? Then generate ideas. What if in the case of Airbnb, the two founders, they walk up one day and say, oh, what if we put some mattress in our flat and rent them for people to come? So we get a bit of extra money to pay our rent and it helps also folks to find a place to sleep for the night. And then how? So once you've defined your problem, you generated some idea. How are you going to start solving the problem? Unfortunately, and I think it's even more true in like our field that sometimes is very technical and we tend to go too much into like start with solving the problem. Like jump into the how when we don't really have a good idea of the why or generated enough idea on that. So I think this framework is quite useful on this and having trying to do those into phases. All right, so how to practice also? Like I think asking question is great, but if nothing's happened after that, it's not going to be super useful. So I think there's a big importance about experiment and actions. And in a sense, it's like trying to make your curiosity productive, like trying to get some outputs out of it. This also relates a lot to like the environment you are and like can you easily make experiments is like is it easy to test things even if it's going to fail or not? I think this plays a great factors but it's a very important part of like cultivating this curiosity mindset and like being more productive about it. And yeah, like one of the first steps also is just being aware, but like what is curiosity and being curious and being intentional about it. Because I think it's not necessarily something, you know, you don't wake up in the morning and the first thing you think about it just after eating your breakfast also is like, oh yeah, I'm going to be curious today. It's not something we are like very intentional about it. So starting to switch the mindset about that and maybe, you know, start of the week or start of the day say, okay, what I'm going to be curious about today or what are the opportunities in my day to find something to get interested about. And also I think we each have a part in creating that environment where it is safe to challenge things or safe to challenge ideas or ask questions. So we are also, we can also be very much active into that aspect. And yeah, some tips to get started you can really get started today. Start reading some blog posts, book articles about things that you're really not familiar about. There's this idea of trying to be a constant novice, you know, forget what you know and try to start in things that you really don't know about. In terms of introspection and maybe being a bit more curious about yourself, ask how did you feel today and maybe why. And something like really practical that you can start to do, you know, in the next following day during this conference, you know, go and have a chat with someone you don't know and try to learn as much as you can about them. Or go to a talk where you are a complete novice, you don't really know about the subject and it's not necessarily a talk you would have gone. All right, finally, you know, all of those great things about curiosity, but what about Fedora, what can it do for Fedora? And I think it comes back to our four foundations, freedom, friends, features and first. And I can see how curiosity will play a role in all of this. Freedom, you know, this idea of like challenging status quo, really like the open source community has been built on this, like really trying to challenge how we make software and how we make software available. Friendships, you know, by being curious, going to meet new people, you're going to make friends and you're going to be interested in other subjects. Features and first, really, like I put like this sentence I like it in the size, like yeah, we are committed also to innovation and trying to find the good questions that are going to lead to the answers of tomorrow and not necessarily relying on those answers from the past. So maybe investing more into questioning what we're doing, questioning some of our status quo and generating new ideas, trying to think big, you know, try to really think out of the box. And yeah, I've got like one question. I didn't really want to come up with solution for like how we should use curiosity in Fedora, but more with a question. So how can we make the Fedora community, a community where we challenge status quo, discover, explore and learn, right? And now, like what question do you have for me? Okay, so how do you convince others, your questions are coming from a place of genuine curiosity and friendly rather than have an agenda? I don't, I think if you start to think that you need to convince someone, it's probably that it doesn't come from the right place. I think this is really, it's what I meant like being authentic. You know, if it's really something that you are going to be curious and interesting, I think the other person will feel it. This is probably much easier in like, you know, like face-to-face or like even virtual contact then, I think like we do use a lot return communication and this is probably much harder to convey there. So maybe adding some clues in the question if it's over an email chat or something like that. I think in face-to-face, we tend to feel those type of things like, is the person going to try to trap me or is it really just a question because the person is really wanting to learn more and be curious about it? I think it's probably the, there is also a big pattern on listening and how you, like once you ask the question, how you listen to the answer, like do you listen to reply or do you really listen to get the information and to understand the other person's point of view? All right, how did you get interested in this topic? What inspired you? Yeah, that's a good question. So I listened to a podcast about curiosity and I was like, whoa, you know, actually I don't know much about curiosity. I like, let's start by being curious about it. And this is something that is really, so the more I've been curious about it, the more I've discovered that this is something that is quite big into the learning and development area. So like the people that work in that space are really invested into that. But I think it's really in our field, like the technology side, it's really something that we should spend more time thinking about. And when we see all the innovations that you can drive from, like the curiosity, creativity, all those things are very linked together. And I strongly believe that this is how we're going to solve a lot of the problems that we have in the future. Matthew, like to hear more actionable things for FEDA. Yeah, actually there is like, there is something that is quite interesting. So at schools, some schools have started to do things that are called question storming where you come up with a problem and you just ask the kids to spend 10, 15 minutes just asking questions. So as many questions as you can ask in 10, 15 minutes, you don't think about answers or anything, just really focusing on questions. And that's to kind of practice these muscles of asking questions and asking good questions. But yeah, that's maybe something, next time we have a problem or we have like something we want to generate ideas about in Fedora, let's maybe just really focus on asking as many questions as we can for a certain period of time and go from there instead of trying to jump straight away into the solution and how are we going to fix it? Yeah, so this would be more of a comment, but I think it would be great to see mentors in Fedora foster curiosity in mentees how they can do that as well. Yeah, in my opinion, like I think in the Fedora space, like it would be nice to see maybe this as a community how we want to try to foster this like curiosity and be more curious about different things or like you know. I think what applies to the individual can also apply as a community, maybe try to go and see how other communities are doing things, maybe like things that are completely unrelated to Fedora, even to IT, I'm sure there are other communities that we could learn from or just like see how they do things. I think that could be like something quite interesting to explore how as a community we're becoming more curious. Thanks everyone and I hope that you're a bit more curious about curiosity and that you're going to start ask some questions and that was very nice to present this.