 Good, thanks Adam. So, I'm Neftos for those of you who don't know me. I've been a contributor to KDE for a couple of years now and in the last two years I've been in the KDE board where I mostly handle community and organizational issues. For my day job, part of my day job at least is working and running with innovation programs where I help startups getting their ideas into prototypes and into MVPs and they can then take out in the market and if things go well then they can start fundraising. So, this is part of my inspiration for choosing this topic and also another part of why I chose this topic because I see more and more of our products growing and many potential candidates to burst out of the KDE bubble, burst out of the first Linux tech ecosystem bubble, which is great and I think we have a lot of potential ahead going forward. So, we may be talking about three things in this talk, products, try to define them and figure them out. Bubbles, what they are, how I see them working in KDE in our ecosystem and then trying to figure out ways that we can break out of them moving forward. So, let's get started. So, products first. Depending on where you stand and what perspective you take, there are various definitions of products across the web. I chose the one from the ScamGuide because it's closer to what we do, software development and delivering this kind of products. So, in the ScamGuide, a product that is defined as a vehicle to deliver value. So, you are developing something that intent is useful to someone out there. So, to further define that, a product needs to have clear boundaries. So, it's not something random and that keeps changing. It has non-stakeholders, people working on it, people interested in it and it has a well-defined type of user or customer if you're selling that. Now, on the nature of the product, it could be a software application as we develop. It could be a service that you offer. It could be a physical product, maybe a phone, a laptop in our case or it's something even more abstract. So, it can get various characteristics depending on how you approach it. Trying now to narrow it down a bit in KDE's case, what we say are our products. This is what I came up with. Feel free to share in the chat if something I missed or you thought of something else. For example, we have applications, lots and lots of applications. Some of them, we group them into groups. KDE Gear comes to mind, KDE Gear Mobile also. So, those can be considered to some extent products on their own as groups. We have things like the frameworks. So, development frameworks package of frameworks that help developers and are targeted at them. We have things like the Plasma and Plasma Mobile environments that are a specific niche of their own. We have, of course, hardware devices like phones and laptops that we get to the market through our partnerships with other organizations and companies. We also offer a wide variety of services. We might not be developing these products, but we do offer them to users and they will come to us about issues they have with them or their experience with them, like this big loop at an instance, like we have Kitlap on Invent, we have the Matrix Chat service. So, all these are in some way things we offer to our community. And arguably, you can also include events in these type of products. Academy, LAS, our major flagship events are things that we could be thinking as a product, because we have sponsors for them, we have users for them, we have people that are watching and find value in the participating. So, these are the various products. You can already see that we have a wide range of products and types of products in KDE. And this is very good, but also challenging. Trying to figure out how to approach this, I came across this complete product experience as Brian, they have called it in his book. So, I think it's valuable and you can see here the various sections that are involved in developing a product in a more complete way. We have marketing, we have sales, we have technology behind the product, we have all the supporting systems that help deliver this product to the users, we have all the third-party integrations that our product needs to work with, we have the support for our users, policies, of course, that define how we develop our product and how we deliver our product. We will get into a bit more details into the next section of this presentation to try and figure out what each of these involves. So, let's move into the bubbles. What's a bubble now? A bubble, as you know, might mean a lot of things, but in the way we use it in this presentation, it can be these two definitions that I chose. One is, it can be a situation in which you only experience things that you expect or find easy to deal with. So, let's say a familiar place that you are accustomed to, and it can also be a group of people who have a lot of contact and interact with each other. They have maybe similar views or at least they align on some aspects, but this group of people has limited contact with people outside this group. So, they interact a lot with each other, they do things a lot, a lot of things together, but they don't interact with other groups. So, these are the two definitions of bubbles that I find are relevant to what we do, to what we do in this talk here. So, trying to figure out the bubbles that are involved in what we do as a community and as KDE, I came up with this. If I miss something or you find something else, again, feel free to share it. I'll be happy to discuss more on it. So, I guess most projects start from a single person or that decides to work on something. Then this grows into a team, or they might sometimes start as a team as well, as some people gather together and decide to work on things. Then this team grows into a community for the purpose of this talk. I put KDE here, but this can be any major community around the product. What I mean by a community is that you know, start having multiple teams around the products and working each other, developing products in parallel on various fronts. They need to come together under one umbrella. So, for our purpose, this umbrella is KDE, and depending on your use case, it can be something else. Then outside of KDE, we have the whole open source ecosystem. This can be all of our network that involves the tech community, the Linux community, the open source community in general. Of course, the big bubble that we all want to break out from is to go out and reach the wider world. I guess part of the values of doing open source is about reaching and bringing the advantages of it into the wider community, into the whole world. These are the five bubbles that I would take into consideration for the next slides and for the next part of my presentation. Let's quickly go over a few of these bubbles and see what they look like and what are the major challenges that I at least thought about. When we are working solo, you are most likely scratching your niche and you're developing maybe in a long some way, you are developing by yourself product or application or something that you work on because you want to solve something for yourself. The good thing about this is that it's a major advantage I see is that it's easier and faster to make decisions, implement changes in the whole. The development is just yourself and your product and you grow it the way you like. Of course, there are some challenges here because you're alone. There's always the past factor, if something happens to you, your product is probably dead or if you have public sizes somewhere, maybe somebody picks it up, but it depends on the work we have done to get this product out and more people to learn about it. That's an issue. Your product is still not independent from you. Another issue is quality. If you're working alone, there's not many eyes looking at your code, recommending changes, improvements and things like that. That might be also an issue as your product grows and of course you have limited resources because it's just you. There are so many certain things that you can do within your day, within your time. That's also a limitation. Now as you grow and you manage to attract people around your product and around yourself, maybe if you're the main trainer, you start basically building a team. This brings many positives with it. For example, every new team member will probably bring their own additional skills that might vary from yours or they can be similar to yours but from a different perspective or maybe they can be dropping replacements for you which increases the past factor. You also now have more resources that become available. You can utilize those in order to grow your product. You now need to start thinking about relationships, building a relationship between people, handling relationships between people and you also need to start thinking about communicating between the team and how you set up the proper channels in order to achieve that. Of course, all this brings with it an increased potential for your project to grow even further. The challenges here is that new people, they do bring skills and resources in but they also bring their own ideas and their own demands. So as people contribute more and more to your project, they want to have a say in the decision making. They will be proposing things. They will be demanding things from you. So this changes a bit the balance of the processes. This is why you need to start defining these processes, how you make decisions, how you collaborate on code, how you get things out to users, any public. So all these processes need to start being refined. And of course, as your team grows, you need to start thinking about collaboration to set up proper infrastructure so you can collaborate on various tools. These are usually simple in the beginning but as you grow bigger, they get complicated. So coming now back to the community aspect of it, in the case of KDE, what does it look like? So if you have reached this stage of having, let's say an umbrella community for your products, then you're probably part of an organization like KDE, like KDEV that can support you and your product. When I say organization, it doesn't have to be necessarily a legal organization but it's a structure that has specific processes, specific procedures, rules, and all sorts of things. So for this kind of complexity to work, you need to have this set in place. So at the same time, you'll get lots of support from other team members, from other community members, and especially from other specialized teams that are around would be looking on how KDE through its specialized teams can help your product at the next section of this presentation. Also usually in this kind of communities, there will be infrastructure in place that can help you scale. So other people will be working for you in order to have things in place that will help you grow. And of course, it's a very good opportunity because usually these communities will ship products in a more generic way. It's much easier for you to get your product by default into more distribution channels. Maybe if there are maybe distributions like OSS, they can ship your product together if you choose so. The challenges here are of course, as I mentioned before, the complexity increases a lot. You need to start abiding by community rules. You need to follow the procedures not set by you anymore, but from the wider community, you can of course affect them and work to change them, but still you need to do it in the spirit of the whole community. So you need to be using specific tools as well that the community has already chosen, maybe. This will also expose you to criticism when it's a criticism like evaluation from the other teams. So if you're working with other teams, it means that the other teams might have a say on the way you do things in your own team and they might propose different ways of doing things and might say this is wrong or this is right and things like that. And a major challenge to grow outside of this bubble of let's say the community of the KDE community is like getting users from non-KDE-focused systems or ecosystems, so people outside of our bubble, to use products that are in KDE. So this will get you into the next bubble, where people that are not maybe enthusiasts of KDE products or maybe adopters of a KDE product in general will start using them. So now you have breaking into the open source ecosystem, maybe Linux if you want to call it ecosystem in general. Here you will find a growing community of users and contributors that you can leverage to your advantage. You will have much more increased visibility in the FOS ecosystem. You might have people reaching out to you. You might be featured in tech news sites and things like that. This usually means that your project now starts not being maybe a playground. So this means you need to take it a bit more seriously. When you are under the umbrella of maybe an organization, one community, you could maybe not treat it so seriously or maybe not putting so much effort. Now you are exposed to the whole ecosystem. You have people coming to you with questions, with demands and things like that. Also, this increases the possibility for new sponsors, new fundraising to take place, because now you have all the FOS ecosystem available to you. What are the main challenges here? As we saw earlier, they need for integration. So if you are working with the whole ecosystem, you now need to actually be working with the whole ecosystem and the products. So you need to start thinking about how you can integrate with other products, with our desktop environments, with other distributions, with other platforms. So this is an important thing to take in mind as you will get requests to get your product on this or that platform. Another important challenge is to get your product to ship by default in many of these distribution channels. So get your product included in maybe a distribution or get your product included into a store or things like that where people would be exposed to it without maybe knowing too much about your product, but that would be a great opportunity to learn. And of course, through this, you also need to increase your distribution challenge, as I mentioned, to get your product in more places where people can download it. So if you manage to break out of that bubble, then you now have the world at your feet. What does it mean? It means that you have a leading place in a way potential for growth. You can grow exponentially as users now don't have to be maybe technically oriented, users don't have to be force oriented, they don't have to be open source enthusiasts. For example, they might just be enjoying what you do and don't know anything about the first background behind this. So your opportunity to grow now, it's huge. Your product now is part of the market, it's part of the whole market of applications and other products that are in the wild. So you are in a direct competition with them, which can be a good and a bad thing, but it will definitely help if you approach it that way, you grow and improve. There are increased opportunities here to attract revenue, so you can maybe make your product more sustainable. And by now, if you've reached this stage you need, you have probably reached a stage where you have already set up maybe some sort of organizational structure behind you for your product specifically, because the growth for it and its potential would probably meet this kind of backing and support. What are the challenges here? Well, being part of the whole world means that the market is available, means that the competition is fierce, you have to keep up with everything the competition does, your users will be exposed to what others are doing and there will be a constant demand, maybe for new features, maybe for increased quality in some aspects of your product, increased security and all those topics. So you need to follow the demands of the market, the demands of them, let's say modern user. Something also was considering that as your product grows, you probably need to start thinking that fundraising is maybe inevitable because it looks like it will be a necessity in order to continue growing as your demands are growing and you want to satisfy them and you want your product to grow, you probably need to hide people to work more dedicatedly on your product. And of course, by having all this organizational structure, we discuss about you need to start thinking on things like hiring, the logistics behind all these taxes, legal staff and all that. So these are major challenges, but hopefully they are good challenges because you have reached a stage now that you can grow even further. So just to try and let's say understand a bit better where we place ourselves, I prepared maybe this exercise to try and figure out where in these bubbles you'll probably place some of our products. Since we're already talking about the KD community, doesn't exist talking to the team in the solar projects, but of course we have the KD ecosystem, the FOS ecosystem and the world. So maybe if I can pick some of them, I will not do all of them, I just share some of them here that might fit in these three sections. Feel free to choose your own or if you are a maintainer of an application, do try and start thinking about where you fall into these bubbles and if you want to move into the next bubble and which bubble would be that one. So for example, we have things like plasma that one could argue that it's maybe grown outside of the KD bubble, but maybe most of the users using plasma are KD enthusiasts anyway because they are part of our ecosystem. So I will place it more into KD and listen to the FOS ecosystem, but it's still there and of course people in the FOS ecosystem know about it. Krita as we all know has broken out of the FOS ecosystem and is one of our maybe success stories and into the world they have users from outside of the FOS ecosystem, they have users that don't know much about FOS, they just know it's a good application and they want to use it, which is also good and it can be an introduction to what is the FOS ecosystem, what are its values and what are its benefits for these users. We have things like plasma mobile that okay it's part of the KD community but it's now shifting on hardware which means people from the FOS ecosystem are buying this hardware without necessarily buying it because it has KD product on it, but because they're interested in the hardware itself. So I would say that plasma mobile is starting to be more in the FOS ecosystem and breaking out of the KD bubble as it's progressing, same for the plasma mobile apps around it. Projects maybe like scan light are still limited to the KD ecosystem, things like dolphin, I think there were attempts to grow it a bit further in the past but it's usually used by people in the KD ecosystem. Things like KD in live has, it seems to be having growing momentum around it so it has definitely breaking into the FOS ecosystem bubble and it looks like it's a very good candidate to break into the world bubble or the world market if you want to call it like that. Things like g-compry, we know it's being used in schools in India from children and educators so it has already broken out of the of the FOS ecosystem and into the world. So more and more of this you can maybe think maybe KDP means something that is within KDE but it could make out into the FOS world, Kirigami is already being used by people outside of KDE to develop some apps, the potential there is a much bigger definitely it can grow to the FOS ecosystem. Feel free to choose your own app and do this exercise, I'm just sharing some examples here. So when we're talking about breaking out of our bubble let's think of some ways that can help push our products into this. So one of the like I've shared here are some key aspects of that could help your product grow outside of this bubble and scale into the world. One thing I came up with is like you can start offering a unique solution to an existing problem so if you're breaking through these bubbles it means like there are problems that your application is solving or you're responding to a growing demand in a very specific niche. So your application is now delivering a very good product that people are using and they're interested in using not just because they're enthusiast about KDE or about open source but because they're enthusiast about your specific application. It probably means you're delivering high quality software that corresponds to the modern environment of users so if you're breaking out if you want to break out from FOS into the world maybe you need to start thinking about what others are doing out there see how they design their products, how they deliver their products and see how you can match that and maybe even grow further than that. It usually means that you have already figured out your user interface, you have made it into a friendly one into something that is more modern and people tend to expect where and what to find there. It also means that you are already busy building an also user experience for your users so you have a community growing around you, you are building a community of users, you are building a community of developers maybe around you and you're offering them a great user experience from the time they join you as users and then getting involved in your community, getting support and things like that. These are things that are required to break into other more bigger bubbles. Of course you will need to raise awareness on what you're developing so you can further support it, get people to learn about it, get people to adopt it. This is something I think Paul also mentioned in the talk about how promo can be used on the service in KDE. So getting people to know about what you do is a first step for them adopting it and then growing out of bubbles and of course creating a partner's network as you progress through this ecosystem and through these bubbles it's very very important it will help you to be introduced to the market, it will help you gain extra support and validity of what you do as you find the right partners to push into these bubbles. So going back into the framework I talked about earlier let's try and see how we can maybe match what I mentioned now as what you might be doing right with each of these let's say sections of the complete product experience. So if we are talking about policies then we need to what this involves usually is things like licenses is your community using such a big license is your product part of a community that has a specific code of contact what are you doing with decision making as I mentioned earlier and what are the development processes set in place so all these have policies that in order to break out into these bubbles you should probably have in place as you go forward and as you grow or if you are interested in growing forward in going forward and growing. Another thing about support you need to be offering as I mentioned great user support this can be done with community building through your community of users this can be done with onboarding you need to offer a great experience people when they're joining your product so they can be attracted to it and you can lure them in turn them into contributors and can turn them into regular let's say developers or other types of contributions. Backtaging is also something back support you get people to test your products and support them in figuring out the issues all these are things that need to be put in place for your product to grow. Third-party integrations in our case maybe in KDE case in KDE's case we need to think about integrating with desktop environments so if you are developing an application that you want users outside of maybe plasma or plasma mobile to be using so you need to start thinking how these applications play place and if it plays well with other desktop environments or other types of environments maybe on mobile so you need to figure out these integrations for your app this also means that you need to figure out integrations for other operating systems if you want your application to ship into things like the Windows Store or the Apple Store or Android and things like that then you do need to start thinking on how you can prepare your application in order to reach that audience and even more if your application is shipping or maybe it's not application but your product is shipping on specific hardware you need to make that your software work very well with that hardware so you can reach that market so you have happy users so you can find partners if you are not yourself doing hardware stuff. Talking about supporting systems here we're talking about having release management processes in place taking advantage of system administration resources so you have people managing that you have your code repositories you have you can collaborate on code in the public you do your packaging for all the stores dimension area or all these supporting systems actually things that usually happen behind the scenes that support you to deliver your product to users and users are not usually aware of them but they are there and they are offering a great experience to them and to you for delivering your product. Of course technology is key in what we do for your product to grow it needs to be building in new features it need to be to be introducing new stuff so it can keep momentum going to users get them building you know expect them to expect new stuff wait for your new release see what's new get the word out about it you need to be delivering high quality software as we mentioned earlier so people can appreciate the stability of your application of the short year delivery you need to be innovative try to figure out things that others from a competition are not doing trying to see how you can differentiate your product what are the special unique selling points of your product that you can get out to users to differentiate from them and of course the whole user interface and experience we talked about earlier all fall under this technology section getting into sales in maybe most of our cases in the open source world we are you talk when we talk about sales we are talking about adoption so because we do offer much of our software for free so when we are talking about sales we are thinking about adoption how many users are using our software what kind of users are using our software and all that of course as things grow and as our product grow we get donations so that's part of sales you need if you're doing great products people will come to you and they want to donate to you so that's part of the sales path and app stores that in KD we increasingly want to get more products into more app stores and then into more users so they can also generate revenue and also hardware partnerships can be generated revenue so as we see as open source products grow you need to start thinking about these kind of things that maybe weren't thinking when your product was part of a smaller team or a smaller community this will also allow your team and your project to grow and finally when we talk about marketing is of course about promoting your product raising awareness around it so people in order to adopt your product they first need to learn about it they first need to learn about these advantages how it compares to other stuff so marketing will help you create more content about your product that it will inform users it will get the momentum going on social media it will get people talking about your product discussing about your product and this will definitely if you manage it well and you manage to harness that potential then it will definitely help your product best out of these bubbles so having talks about these bubbles and what did you expect and the characteristics maybe of each of them let's see your various ways that Katie can help you with your product so when I started thinking about what what are the teams that are specialized in the Katie community I didn't actually realize that we have so many types of various specializations and they're all active and they can all help you with your product so we have teams like the promo team that can help you get the work out on your product if you're not using them reach out to the promo team they will be happy to assist you to get give them work give them things to work on to to promote your product in the bubbles that are outside of what you are currently you can reach out to the visual design group to get information and get support and guidelines on how you should be designing your UI your user experience as a total if you haven't reached out to them to reach out to them because you can get help there if you have an old website reach out to the web team maybe they can help you modernize your website make it more efficient make it more having a call to action get people to download your product we have a documentation team that can set up processes so you can get more people involved in your maybe development and things like that so I can get on like I think you get the picture here you have Katie network that can help you it's already doing amazing work in getting Katie products into public institutions universities and things like that if your product can it's interested in reaching that market then do reach out to them things like the bus quad can help you like with your quality control and quality assurance processes reach out to the back squad and get them to look at your box to set into your product into other languages also very very important in order to grow out of your language bubble maybe and if they're language barriers and we have various platform specific groups nowadays we have people that can help you get your product on windows you can people that can help you get your product on andrate we have people that can help you be models for your applications so you can delete them as flatbacks snaps all kinds of things so do some research around reach out to these communities I think there's lots of value there that most kd projects are not harvesting at this point and we should be doing more we also have things like the kdv and the kdv board there people can help you with maybe the logistics maybe with some fundraising staff we have the working groups feel free to reach out for recommendations or maybe more administrative tasks and of course don't forget about all the enthusiasts and the early adopters you have around your project they are a specialized team of their own they can help you get the word out they can help you maybe in all the things I mentioned above based on their skills so make sure you're uh reaching out to them and you're making the most of them so these are the things I could think of but it's very very important here to stress that your bubbles might vary uh they might vary on a personal level they might vary on a professional level they might vary on the bubbles that you want to reach into so um don't take what I said as something that is like definite free free to start thinking about what the bubbles you are facing or you are experiencing are and how you can grow it out of them um in addition to that uh bubbles as I think about them at least can take various forms and meanings so just by spending some time of it I found these four or five different ways of thinking about bubbles they might be like a cozy familiar pace we feel safe and comfortable in so we can stay there and focus and be productive on the product while developing by doing things we enjoy and know well and we don't need to worry about growing complexities and things like that so maybe that's a thing we enjoy but at the same time it might be keeping our product back so maybe we'd start need to start thinking about other things if we are at least interested in growing out of this bubble a bubble can also be a control situation maybe like think of it as like a harbor that allows us to experiment learn take the time to prepare our path for growth so maybe you have entered the kitty community you have been here in a while maybe now you have a safe place around you a community to support you and you have now some time to start teaming and set up the processes of growing so if you reach all these communities there are the teams as I mentioned earlier you cannot start growing even more another way to think of a bubble is like a platform that enables you to validate your product so when you join a community when you join uh an ecosystem and you offer your product you can check there's demand for it as you grow into the larger bubble maybe you find some limitations of what you're doing and you need to adjust or adopt accordingly so you you get to test and validate your product and try again so you can make the next step so this is something a bubble can offer to you a bubble can also be a milestone that you have set up it's a goal that you have set up and you want to achieve and you can use it to need to reach your next target you maybe want to grow out of three bubbles that can make that jump so you need to go through all the bubbles so every bubble is a major milestone for you that will help you to reach your goals and finally bubbles can also be maybe a small prisoner if I can call it that a small body and very healthy that you will have to try and overcome if you are interested to continue growing your products to continue growing team around it and investing into new bubbles so to conclude uh oh I see we got the set of there as an icon change but anyway um I would like to get you to think about uh uh what are your bubbles what are the bubbles that you're growing your product team what are the bubbles for you as a person uh what are the bubbles of the team or the project you are involving um are you thinking about breaking out of them and if yes do you have a plan if not why not uh have you considered that or it is something that you just never thought about and maybe what's the next bubble you want to reach do you have this in your mind are you working toward that what are you doing currently in order to burst out of your bubble and grow that's it for me um I'm happy to see we still have two minutes if somebody has any questions feel free to reach out of me to me to discuss more things about products and growing them and maybe if I can offer some advice or discussion I'll be very very happy to you hi Adam hi thank you very much for the talk no questions so far from the audience here but I I do have one maybe maybe a strange one it's academy in a bubble I've never thought of it but it seems like you thought about it so what are your thoughts about that well academy is kind of meant to be in a bubble right it's like yeah flagship kd event from time to time we do host people from outside the community but it's mostly for our community but maybe last is an opportunity for kd people to expose themselves to the whole force ecosystem which is what I was talking about earlier so the next bubble so maybe that is an opportunity to grow even further so it's great that we have also us for people interested to show of course it's focused on the apps ecosystem but still we have many apps if you are working on that yeah last is a good opportunity and academy of course but I think yeah that's a bubble that we more or less want to keep and it's more conscious as a decision to give it yeah I agree and I think the audience here also is agreeing and and lots of applause for your talk thank you very much thank you I'm happy and I hope people enjoyed it