 Hello and thank you for joining us today. I have the distinct pleasure of introducing three amazing individuals, one who I've known for a few years, and two others that we've just been recently working together. And what we'll bring to you today is essentially a wonderful story woven together. Holly Baysmore from Comcast will talk about establishing a diversity pipeline within a company. We'll then move on to Xing Zeng. And she'll talk about being new to the OpenStack community and what that is like and what her experience has been in integrating into the community. And she'll also include in her talk an experience, a mentor mentee experience. And then we'll move on to Carol Barrett from Dell EMC. And then Carol Barrett from Intel who will talk about diversity as a competitive advantage not for a company but for an individual. So Holly, we will start with you. Thank you. Thank you, Nicole. Thank you for putting this wonderful panel together. So good morning, everybody. My name is Holly Baysmore and I'm the director for strategy and deployments for Comcast cloud offerings. I've been working in the technology sector for a little over, well maybe a little bit more than a little over 20 years. I started out as an engineer, started working through, saw that we had some problems with project managers and didn't really understand technical aspects of projects, hiked my way over there and somewhere along the way kind of did the same thing in the people leader arena. And along the way what I've noticed is that there is a significant problem that a lot of my peers along the way talk about which is how do you hire a diverse team? We never seem to have this pipeline of diversity. We seem to continuously get kind of the same cookie cutter or storage person or DBA along the way. So I want to talk to you today about debunking some of the myths about how you hire for diversity and this whole diversity pipeline issue. So there we go. So how do you put a diverse team together? So I'm just going to kind of break this up into three things for you, right? First thing we're going to do is we're going to talk about this pipeline. What is your pipeline? How do you create a pipeline? And then we're going to go into hiring a little bit. How can you change up some of your existing hiring strategies to make it easier to hire for diverse candidates? And then we're going to talk about maintenance. So this is pretty straightforward. So pipeline, the first thing you have to be aware of when you're talking about a pipeline is a pipeline is really a network. If this is kind of along the same myths of if you're looking for a job and you just put on your LinkedIn profile, you're already a little bit too late, right? Same thing with a pipeline. If you're looking for a candidate for an open position you have and you don't already have a pipeline, you're already a little bit too late. Pipeline is something that you should be working on all the time, right? So how do you find a pipeline? How do you meet diverse candidates? Well, the first thing you have to do is you need to be where the talent is. And what I mean by that is be here, right? Show up. Where is the talent? There are conferences, there are meetup groups, right? They're online and different, you know, in our IRC channels if you're in the open stack community and Slack channels in some of our other communities. And then you need to be, you can't just be here, right? You can't be quiet. You can't just be sitting in the corner in the room. Otherwise the talent isn't going to know you and you're not going to know the talent, right? So you need to be out. You need to meet. You need to speak. You need to speak about things that they're excited about, right? You need to have other folks from your existing company talking about the exciting things going on when you're working. And you should be excited about your work. So when you meet people, they get excited when they talk to you, right? Are you really inspired by what you do every day? It should show when you talk to people. So once you're where the talent's at and you meet the talent, then we're going to kind of follow through with your networking best practices, right? The next thing you're going to want to do is stay connected with the talent. Add them on LinkedIn. Make sure they have your contact information. Follow up with them in a timely manner. And you can just kind of, when you see them at other conferences, make a point, right? Reach out. Hey, you remember I met you in OpenStack Austin? How are you doing? Weren't you working on that project? You don't really have to remember everything they were working on. Everybody was working on a project. Pro tip, right? So just reach out to them. Make them, you know, make that personal connection. And you know, as you build this up over time, when you have a position, you can sit down and start thinking about, okay, so who are the folks I know that might be interested in this? And all of those personal connections you started making, you'll start remembering people's names and ideas or you might go back through your LinkedIn, you know, lists of contacts and, okay, okay, okay, yeah. So let me hit up these three people, send them a quick message, see if they want to come in and talk about what we've got going on. So the other thing you have to do is make yourself available, right? When you come to these conferences, again, so that you can't hide in a corner, right, you need to go out and be at some of the community events, go to different talks, linger a little bit afterwards, don't just be in a rush to go from one room to another, because the meeting people part is what happens in between all of the wonderful talks that you attend. And then make sure you actually have an up-to-date LinkedIn profile. Make it easy for people to find you. If you're up on stage, make sure that you put your contact information out there. If we leave here today and you don't know my Twitter handle and my name and have my email address, I have failed in my approach to try to get to know you and to bring you to work with me someday. And then evangelize your product and company, right? Regardless of what you do, right? People are going to remember you and right now, everybody knows, hey, I'm Holly from Comcast, right? If you knew me a couple years ago, it was, hey, I'm Holly from XYZ startup, you know, that kind of thing. I still have people that reach out to me that I still see in conferences now that I worked with 20 years ago who still remember me as, oh, hey, that's Holly from Fannie Mae, right? I don't do anything like what I used to do 20 years ago, but that connection's there. We can start a conversation. We can catch up and we can keep going. So evangelize your product and company. And again, the product is where you're going to get people excited about what you're doing right now that's relevant to why we're all sitting in the room together at some, you know, conference or event together. So that's the pipeline, right? So as you start reaching out to people, you're building this network. And now when you have a job opening, come up, you can start reaching out to your pipeline. So hiring. So lots of studies. I'm sure everybody reads all the different Harvard business review statistics and all that. But there are so many studies going on about hiring the language we use, not only in our job postings, but when you actually sit down to hire somebody, make sure that the language you're using is inclusive for all sorts of diversity hires, right? There are different keywords. There's different approaches to how you speak. This is a quick Google, right? Anybody can go out and Google all the individual articles. But some of the ones you really want to be aware of is, you know, don't use big sweeping statements, right? There are a lot of different diverse candidates that will believe that they have to have, you know, if you say, we do all the clouds, and I was like, oh, no, if I'm going to come work for you, do I need to know all, what is all the clouds, right? I'm suddenly not qualified. You have now freaked this person out in the interview, and they've already decided that they can't work for you. So be really conscious about what type of language you're using when you're posting your jobs and when you're actually interviewing your folks. You want to make sure that as you're bringing the people in for the interview, I don't know, and I'm not going to ask for a raise of hands, but I can say where everywhere I have ever been in a technology job, we have focused on doing the big group interviews with lots of whiteboard questions and like, you know, 15 people from our company and one job candidate sitting there for hours and hours answering questions and getting on the whiteboard, right? You are going to blow out some of the best talent you have ever met if you keep doing your interviews like this, right? And if you do your research, a lot of the, you know, kind of top companies that we think of of recruiting good talent, they do not do this anymore, right? Google, Amazon, Netflix, Etsy, like everybody who's on the cutting edge of how to be a good director of talent and retainer of talent, they don't do this anymore, right? There are so many different reasons to stop doing these group interviews from subconscious bias and choosing the candidates after they get through the interview through blowing a talent out there, you know, take a step back, try to, you know, kind of get some consistency across your interviewing for all of your candidates and start doing it one-on-one, right? You still want them to meet with your top talent, but you need to also remember while you're interviewing that candidate, they're interviewing you just as much. So make sure that your interviews are representing your company while also, right, the people who are in the room are there and they're excited about bringing on top talent and they want to share, right, all of your products and services as well as find out if this person is good. And then some of my ideas on hiring that that's kind of freaked some of my colleagues out is the skill set that your interviewees are coming in with actually isn't the most important thing. It's not even the first or second most important thing when you're looking at interviewing candidates, right? It's not really about whether or not they have the job, the technology skills to do the job right this second, right? You need to make sure that this person has the aptitude to learn whatever technologies you want them to learn and that they have the attitude to be a good team player on your team and that they're excited about technology. If you have those two things, it doesn't matter if they've touched your technology or not because they're going to be the person that's going to be so excited to join your team. They're going to inject everybody with a bunch of energy and they're going to come and they're going to stay up all night long learning whatever you want them to learn, right? You want me to learn XYZ widget like I just started this, okay? I'm on it, right? This is the type of talent you want to bring in if you're really looking to get a high performing team, right? So look for attitude and aptitude first before skill set. I promise you, I absolutely promise you it will pay off. And then we're going to kind of wrap in a maintenance. So there's this culture inside Comcast, right? We've always had managers and directors and VPs and somewhere along the way we kind of started recognizing that those things when you talk about them are business titles and that's great. I'm not knocking the business. But when you're talking about your talent and building your teams, what we needed to start encouraging was for people to be people leaders, right? I can train anybody on the business side. But being a people leader is kind of like finding that really special person that's going to come in, stay up all night, learn go and Python in the same night and build you something amazing the next morning. Same thing with people later, right? You need people who are about people who want to invest in people. They need to really spend time and talent. When you sit down and you have your one-on-ones with your folks every week, it shouldn't be an update on, hey, what projects are you working on? It should be a, okay, how are we doing? What are your goals, right? Where do you want to be? Are there any classes you need to go to? What are you studying right now? What are you doing outside of work? What do you get excited about? There's some conferences you want to go to. Hey, do you need a mentor? Is there something specific you want to learn and we've got somebody here who knows how to do that, right? Start really investing in folks. This will pay off over time in a big way. So not only is your talent going to be learning new things, but they know that you care about them and you're investing in them. But there's a lot that goes into maintenance, right? If we go back to the whole pipeline thing that we started with, and this is going to be a full circle kind of picture, right? If there's that old song or saying if you love something, set it free. If you have a high-performing team and you've got that top talent and your technology isn't changing all the time, they're not going to stay with you, but that's okay. This isn't actually a bad thing as long as you handle it well. If you've got top talent on your team and you can see that it's time for them to start moving on a new project, do both of you a favor. Talk to them. What do they want to do? Where do they want to be? You should already know if you're doing your one-on-one's the right way, but the next thing you want to do is you want a broker for them. You need to be their sponsor. Go find the team that's doing what they want to do and start talking your person up. Hey, do you guys have job openings? I have this person that you would love. Here's what they've accomplished for my team. They really want to be working on that technology. I have swapped talent inside Comcast and other companies I worked for for years. They come back when you most need them, and they really well. I have people that follow me from company to company or really I kind of go somewhere and then I'm like, come follow me, come on, come on, come on. They will always come back. When you have the right product and technology that they're ready to work on and you need the most, I guarantee for you they'll be back. I kind of wrap all of this up with the, I don't believe when I have peers and colleagues that talk about, oh, Holly, you always have these really diverse teams. I can never find folks. I'm not getting these resumes for recruiters or from our HR talent. I don't know how you always manage to find these diverse teams. Well, because I'm a people leader and I believe in people and I'm not going to rely on whatever resume is going to come in through some automated system or somebody out there, surf and LinkedIn profiles, right? When I have a job opening, I am going to fill it with somebody who gets me excited about working with them and they're excited about working with our teams and we'll figure out the rest in the way. And there are several people here at the OpenStack conference, if you see anybody wearing a Comcast shirt, ask them. Ask them if they're on my team. Ask them if they knew me before they got their job opening and ask them how they feel about working with us now. I guarantee the proof is in the pudding. Thank you very much. I want to thank Holly for really talking about attracting and retaining diverse talent and the mind shift that that often requires. I'd like to introduce now Xing Zhang from Dell EMC and she is going to share her experiences with us in integrating as a newbie into the OpenStack community. Hi, I'm Xing Yang from Dell EMC. In October 2011, I attended my very first OpenStack summit in Boston. I knew nothing about OpenStack at that time because I was not a contributor. I could not even enter the design session area. So I attended a beginner session on what is OpenStack. Towards the end of 2012, I got a task of writing a sender voting driver to support EMC storage and contributing to OpenStack. Making the first contribution is always very tricky. Although I follow documents online, I still run into lots of problems. So after lots of trial and error, I finally submitted my first patch. And the patch had a lot of issues, PAPA issues and unitized problems. The core reviewers from the sender team, they were very helpful. They were very responsive in doing code reviews. My driver was merged in two weeks, making me the first OpenStack contributor from EMC. Around that time, there was a multi-vendor initiative by adding fiber channel support into sender. So I joined the group. We had meetings regularly talking about the design, trying to make sure that the design works for everyone. That was a great experience. The people from different companies tried to help each other, tried to add more drivers into the FC support matrix. I learned that OpenStack is very different from any of the other projects that I worked on before. In OpenStack, people from different companies worked together towards a common goal. This alliance formed by multiple vendors made us stronger than any single vendor. It was this spirit that made OpenStack really special to me. Even though down the road, there were possibilities for me to move away and work on other projects, I always tried to stay and continue working on OpenStack. Fast forward to the Juneau Summit in Atlanta, I attended a session on what is a sender driver. In that session, sender team talked about that everyone should try to make more contributions to the core code and doing bug fixes and doing code reviews. It reminded me of what President John F. Kennedy once said about our responsibilities to our country. Burying his words, the message here was, ask not what the OpenStack community can do for you, ask what you can do for the OpenStack community. I was sitting in that session thinking that I did not do enough for the community. I talked to our core member afterwards telling him that I wanted to contribute more but I just couldn't find time. I thought he's going to tell me that that was okay and he understood but that's not what he said. He said he told me that everyone was busy. He said he told me how busy he and others were with their own jobs. Basically he didn't give me any excuse to maintain the status quo. That was a turning point on my OpenStack journey. It was there in Atlanta that I decided I want to get more involved and I want to be a more active contributor in sender and manila, the two projects that I participated in. I just realized I didn't turn my slides, should be the slide. So around that time I started to transition my driver work to be used and I shifted my focus to making quote contributions. I had my first design session on adding consistency group support into sender. So I gave my presentation on my proposal. After that a heated discussion started. It was very hard to follow while things were heading in my own design session. The good news was at the end my proposal was accepted and I couldn't move forward. So I implemented the proposal and it was eventually merged. In Paris I attended, I had my second design session on oversubscription in team provisioning. I remember before I finished my session somebody else jumped in and answered the question before I got the chance to reply. I thought that was rude. So I jumped in and I made my point clear. Compared to my first design session I did a much better job in leading the session and addressing questions. I think OpenStack gave me opportunities to get out of my comfort zone and be more open to sharing my ideas and opinions. Since the Atlanta summit I stepped up with my upstream work. I did more quote contributions and I did more reviews. I became a core reviewer in sender and manila in the June release. Before coming to Barcelona I told someone that I will be giving a talk on diversity. He said that's great but when you talk about diversity you only talk about women. That reaction made me pause. I think that women are an underrepresented group in OpenStack. That's why we want to grow and support this group. Diversity could mean differences in your ethnicity, gender, religion, geographic location, cultural background and a lot more. Any different experience that plays a role in shaping your viewpoint could be part of a diversity. So in a broader term diversity is really for everyone because everyone is different. In Austin there were two mentoring programs sponsored by Women of OpenStack launched. They are the light weight mentoring and speed mentoring. They are open to all newcomers both women and men. So I signed up as a mentor and I got mentee assigned to me. My mentee was new to OpenStack but he had experience with other open source projects. He wanted to learn how to make contributions in OpenStack so I helped him with his first contribution and I also found a few more things for him to work on. He was also interested in another new project that I was not familiar with so he participated in that project he made some suggestions. However he got verbally insulted multiple times. He was very upset about it and he told me what happened. I know that OpenStack has code of conduct guidelines and I know that this instant was a violation of those guidelines. So I checked the foundation's website and I reported this to the foundation staff and I got the response right away ensuring me that this will be looked into soon. A few days later the issue got resolved. The person who initiated the bullying apologized and my mentee accepted his apology. Having new members is vital to the success of our community. OpenStack should be a more welcoming community. It's already tough for a new member to find his or her footing in an unfamiliar place so any discouragement could turn away a new member. I hope everyone be aware of this and let the foundation staff know if you observed or experienced a bullying incident. A positive experience will help a new member build a bond with the community and be part of the community. From my own experience I know that mentoring could be a mutually beneficial experience. While I taught my mentee on how to make contributions, I also learned from my mentee on how to become a better mentor. As Cheryl Sandberg wrote in her book Lean In, mentorship is often more reciprocal relationship than it may appear. When downright, everybody flashes. So the mentorship of course it can happen without formally designating a mentor and mentee. By welcoming more new members, helping each other and embracing diversity, we can all grow and build a stronger OpenStack community together. Thank you. Thank you very much for sharing your personal experiences and anecdotes. It's often helpful to really learn from personal experiences. I'd now like to invite Carol Barrett to take the stage from Intel and she's going to talk about competitive advantage. Thank you, Nicole. Yeah, I'm going to talk about competitive advantage, but not for your products and not for your companies, but for you as an individual. What I want to share is what I've come to learn, which is the thing that makes you different from the people in the room is a thing that gives you a unique viewpoint and can be the source of your competitive advantage. I first laid my hands on a computer in 1978. I was in high school, as it was a Honeywell mainframe. We had teletypes that we used to create paper tapes that we would run through the computer to program it. It was new. It was really logical and I thought it was really cool. I saw that there were lots of opportunities for how this technology could be applied in the world and I was hooked. A year later I went off to study computer engineering in college and when I graduated in 1983, 15% of the engineering degrees that year were awarded to women. 35% of the computer science degrees that year were awarded to women. Believe it or not, that 35%, that's a record that stands today. There has yet to be a year where more than 35% of the computer science degrees were awarded to women. I could talk more about that, but that's a different conversation than the one I want to have here today. The reason I'm sharing this data is it helps you to understand the environment that I arrived at in September of 1983 when I walked into Techtronics, my first job in Portland, and my first project team. I really was the only woman in the room most of the time and there was no definition around the term diversity. Nobody was talking about it. It had no context in our industry at that point in time. Within a couple of months I found that I was getting frustrated during conversations with my project team whether we're talking about solving a problem or creating a proposal, the things that were being talked about in the room weren't the things that occurred to me as being important around that conversation. Now I was young and naive and I didn't want to appear foolish, so I sat there and I listened. After these meetings I would tend to seek out my manager and other people who had been in the room that I knew and I was comfortable with. I would share my viewpoint and my thoughts and they actually found something interesting that would have helped further the conversation and make it more rich. As we talked about it and they helped me to refine my thinking, they would inevitably ask me why I didn't say anything. I knew. I didn't want to be foolish. I didn't want to let my naivety show. So when they would tell me that they saw value in what I thought, that just continued to feed my ambition to contribute, to make a difference, to change things. I wanted to further my career. I wanted to have more influence but I also realized that I wasn't going to be able to do that unless I made a change. It's not like I hadn't been in conversations and meetings before where somebody would present an idea that was different than the prevailing sentiment in the room and usually what would happen would be a fairly controversial maybe loud conversation about the differences. But that wasn't my style. I needed to find a way to bring my viewpoint to the conversation that was comfortable for me. And so this is what I did. First I proactively planned for the meeting. So I would sit down and write down what the key points were that I wanted to bring up. I would outline what I thought the key objections were that I would meet in the conversation and outline how I was going to address those as well. So I had a plan. Then the next thing I did is I engaged others. I went ahead and sought out a couple of other people who I knew were going to be in the room for the conversation and I shared with them my viewpoint and they gave me some feedback and they helped me to refine it and I was building allies for myself who are going to be in the room and who could help me have a conversation that I wanted to contribute to. Then the day that the meeting would arrive I'd walk into the conference room and I'm sure we've all seen this before. There's a table in the middle and there's chairs around it. There's chairs on the sides and maybe on the back. I took a seat at the table. I took a seat in the center of one of the sides and that was really important because it sent a signal to me as well as to everybody else in the room that I was here to be an active participant. And then the third or the fourth thing that I did is I spoke up and I intentionally did not want to start my point by saying, hey, I'm Carol, you know, for those of you who haven't met before, I'm new to the company and so this might not be right, instead I wanted to go ahead and say, hi, I'm Carol, I might not have met you. I have a different viewpoint and this is the reason I have this viewpoint and this is what it is. And it might be something like, hi, I'm Carol, I have a background in embedded systems and what we found was time and time again, if we didn't set code limit guidelines at the start of a project, it would inevitably result in increased product cost and longer schedules and that was a problem for us. Now I know that this is a different type of a solution. I think that the code size could be more impactful to overall system performance and so therefore I'd like to recommend to the team that we consider setting a code size requirement and talk about what really that should be. You know, after time, I refined my approach and I got more feedback and what do you know? People started to seek me out to go ahead and get my opinion and how I could help them refine their ideas as we were going into meetings and so as I did this time and time again and I built my own confidence, some of the most satisfying times of my career followed. I had the opportunity to work on amazing cutting edge technology platforms. I had the opportunity to lead the world's largest computer OEM co-marketing program and it all happened because of the willingness to speak out. So if you find yourself hesitant to speak out because you come from a different country, you speak a different native language, you look different than the other people in the room or other reasons or some combination of those reasons, I would urge you to look at that and find that uniqueness that gives you a different viewpoint is your competitive advantage and speak up. Thank you to each of these three amazing individuals. I certainly have had a gift in working with each one of you, so thank you. Diversity is essential, a rich and diverse community is essential to furthering the future of OpenStack. As I mentioned, amazing individuals, what we'd like to do is to invite, I'm sure there are many many stories across the community that are equally amazing and that we could benefit from. So we'd like to close this session by inviting you to approach us with your stories. There are many many venues through which to tell your stories, whether it's a summit, an OpenStack day, a meet-up, a user group, but we'd like to invite you to approach us with your stories. We'd like to continue the conversation and continue to talk about and further diversity within the OpenStack community. Thank you for being with us today and thank you again for sharing your stories.