 Welcome to our Mindshare year in review. Just by way of announcement, those who don't know me, my name is Jared Smith. I've been around Fedor a little while. Normally, you wouldn't see me up here unshaven, but due to my second flock in a row, or maybe third flock in a row, I can't remember now. Without my baggage arriving when I arrived, you get me as I am today. So anyway, I want to talk a little bit about Mindshare, talk about what it is, and then what we've accomplished over the last year in a little bit. So how many people have a good, solid understanding of what the Mindshare committee actually is and what they do, and one, phew, good. Oh, two? Yes, I hope you do too. Otherwise, we're both in trouble. So I want to spend a few minutes at the front end of the conversation talking about what is Mindshare, what are kind of our goals with the Mindshare committee, what we try to focus on, and then talk about what we've accomplished, because it doesn't make sense to talk about what we've accomplished if you don't understand what our goals and ambitions are. So the Mindshare committee was formed what's been two years ago now, roughly, almost, but really got kicked off in full swing about a year ago, March, when we had a Fedor activity day. We had a FAD meeting, and we kind of kicked things off, said, what do we want to do? What are we going to try to accomplish? What can we get done in the short term? What are more medium term, long term goals? So to take a step back and explain what the Mindshare committee is, when we're talking about the organizational structure of Fedora, we have a Fedora project leader. Wave your hand, Matthew. And not only is he the Fedora project leader, but he's also the leader of the Fedora council, right? Council makes all the big, heavy decisions and has the long boring meetings that get things done. And then underneath the Fedora council, there are two major committees. The one on the technical side of the house is called FESCO. It's the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee, and they do all the technical stuff. What features are going into this new release of Fedora? How do we deal with this technical problem? Those sorts of things. So it's kind of the umbrella committee, over all the technical things, and all the SIGs and special interest groups, and secondary architectures, and fun things like that all kind of roll up under FESCO. On the other side of the house, we have what we call the Mindshare committee, which is kind of the umbrella organization over things like outreach, events, community, the comm ops team, documentation, websites, design, kind of the more human focused, rather than technical focused side of the house. Does that make sense? And so when this Mindshare committee started up, there were several seats that are appointed to various groups, but there's also a couple that are elected. And I thought, you know, I've been on FESCO for a number of years. I've done the technical side of things. I was in FPL for a little while. Maybe I should, you know, mix things up a little bit and focus on the kind of the human element of this rather than just on the technical. So I ran for the Mindshare committee, somehow got elected, and that's why I'm here today. So really Mindshare focuses, like I said, on the human outreach. Marketing, design, websites, docs, badges, comm ops, the ambassadors program, events, that sort of thing. And more than anything else, I think our first year and a little bit now, counting from last March, is really in getting organized, making sure we have documented processes for how are we going to approve such and such a thing or how do we want to approach these sorts of things. We've tried really hard at increasing communications. Now that's not always easy, especially when the people who serve on the Mindshare committee are already very, very busy doing other things. And there's an old adage that says, if you want to get something done, give it to a busy person because they'll be organized enough to get it done. Now we haven't completely done that, but we have tried very hard to, despite our crazy busy schedules amongst all of us, to increase communication between the teams, whether that's the marketing team or the docs team or the badges or the ambassadors program or these sorts of things, increase communication. And then trying to improve the process, trying to get things moving better. And also, just reduce some of those pain points. I'll talk more about that in a minute when we talk about the ambassadors program, but having been a Fedora project leader, I know where some of the pain points in Fedora are. I know where some of the conversations at the end of every FUDCon or Flock are gonna be. And we're trying on the Mindshare committee to say, hey, what are those pain points? How can we address those? But we'll get into that in a minute. That being said, it's been a very, very fast year or year and three months. It feels, at least to me, like it's just absolutely flown by. And so let's talk about some of the things we've done. But before I do that, I just want to talk about that this is still a work in progress. We still have many things we'd like to do. We still wanna get more community involvement. We wanna get more of you understanding what we're doing and then involved in what we're doing. So it is very much a work in progress. I think the first thing that we've done is taken maybe a slightly different approach than other committees have in Fedora. We've focused on being pragmatic over being perfect. We have focused on process. I will, I'm getting there, Matthew. We've focused on process rather than programs. We've tried to get things done. We've tried to focus on using lazy consensus when we can rather than having to have every committee member vote on every single ticket. We've really, really focused on what we call low friction things, which will explain the slide. Why would you want a banana peel on ice? So for it, just as one example, we like to have release parties and I'll give you a copy of the slides later. Okay, I will go back. I didn't keep believing that. You're welcome. So for example, one of the things we focused on is we want to increase the number of release parties that happen when we release a new version of Fedora. Well, how can we do that? So we come up with what we call our low friction release party process. It used to be that getting a release party approved was a little bit of a headache. You'd go file a ticket, you'd wait a few weeks, you'd hope they voted on it, maybe they did, maybe they didn't. Maybe you hadn't provided all the information upfront that they needed and there was often several weeks so back and forth and back and forth and can I get this money? Okay, we had a release party. Now what do I have to do to get reimbursed? Oh, can I get some swag shipped to that release party? Oh, that's another process I have to go follow and it's a big pain. Anybody been there? I've been there. It's not fun. So what we tried to do is make that as low friction as possible. So what we said is if you want to have a release party, fill out a ticket, it's going to be approved within days not weeks or months but days. I think that if I remember correctly, it has to have either two positive votes from members on the committee and no negative votes within three days and then it's approved. That gets you up to $100 US dollars in reimbursement for the party. It will get you stickers and maybe a little bit of swag shipped directly from Red Hat that you don't have to worry about opening another ticket to get that on its way and that sort of thing. So that was just one of the early wins is being able to focus on how can we make this process simple and easy for people to throw release parties. And then we've done some work around trying to make it easier for maybe larger events, maybe a small event that's a few hundred dollars or maybe a medium size event that's maybe $1,000 or so to throw over or other things to get that approval process shortened down into for those larger events weeks instead of months and for the small events days instead of weeks. So that's one major accomplishment. Another major accomplishment we'd like to take credit for really this is all Red Hat's fault is that shipping swag used to be one of the biggest pains we had in the ambassadors program certainly. Especially in countries where it's hard to get things shipped from one country to another. I see several people nodding their heads. I can't tell you how much of my loss of hair while I was the Fedora project leader was attributed just to trying to get stuff shipped from one country to another or to get somebody to take an extra suitcase when they're flying from country A to country B full of stickers or USB keys and hope they don't get stuck in customs somewhere. So, yes. Yeah, it's not, yeah, yes. It's nice to have an F cake except now you need a new F cake so, so not having to worry about that. So, BEX has gone above and beyond the Call of Duty in this case to get Red Hat to just store that swag centrally and then we'd say, hey, will you ship X, Y, Z to country Z and all that shipping does not go on our budget. So, a big round of applause to Red Hat for stepping up there and being willing to make that easier for us. That saves us a lot. And if I never have to drag a suitcase of stickers, you know, again, I'll be a happy man. Another thing that we've focused on is improving the budget process, both in terms of better process for getting things approved and reimbursed more quickly as well as better transparency. I don't know how many of you know this but we have a budget website where you can go see what's been spent, what's been allocated to different groups and what's still out there remaining that we could spend on an event if it was, you know, we deemed it worthy to be used. There is, let me just put this out there. There is money out there that we can use for events if they're the right kind of events and it's the right kind of thing. I'm not saying that, hey, we've got money, let's go spend it willy-nilly. But if you're thinking about holding an event, come talk to us, we'll evaluate that and we may be able to help you fund an event if that's necessary. So I think that's an improvement. One of the things that's still a work in progress is this right here. Anybody know what car that is? What is it? It's an ambassador, right? Anybody who's been to India knows the Hindustan Motors Ambassador. It's a classic, it's an absolute classic car if you're in India. And so we've, in the Mindshare Committee, we've been working on the ambassador's program, trying to figure out, well, how does that work now? We've made some changes to it. For example, ambassadors used to be on a regional basis. So there was a North American group and there was an European group and there was a Latin American group and there was an Asian group, right? And a lot of the budget decisions, a lot of the approval decisions, a lot of the, hey, what swag are we gonna develop and ship and that sort of thing was done on a regional basis. And to be honest, that led to a lot of flame wars. Yeah, a lot led to a lot of angry conversations. And we found it was easier for us to say, okay, we're gonna get rid of the regions, we're gonna keep the ambassador program as it is for now, basically the same. But we're gonna get rid of the regions, we'll centralize that decision-making process, try to improve the process, try to speed it up because there was nothing more frustrating than having a region where they couldn't get enough people in the room at the same time to have a meeting, to have the debate, to have the decision and approve things. And I think that's gone fairly well. I think some of the ambassadors are like, well, that's what I did was I was in that regional meeting and now the regional meeting's gone away, what do I do? And so we're trying to figure out, does it make sense to keep the ambassador program as it is, do we change it, do we get rid of it? In the meantime, what we've come up with is what we call our advocates program, which you can think of as a very, again, low-friction, light-touch program. It doesn't have all the formal mentoring and everything like the ambassador's program did, but it's an easy way for somebody who's either already in Fedora and wants to start doing outreach or is new to Fedora, wants to do outreach as they learn the ropes to come in and join and do that kind of person-to-person outreach. So more details on that on the docs site if you go into the Mindshare Committee, there's some information on the advocates program. But we're still trying to figure out what to do with the ambassador's program. I know there's been some discussions with the council, there's been a discussion on the ambassador's mailing list and we've got an outstanding ticket in the Mindshare. I'll give you a tracker if you wanna add your comments. We'd love to get your feedback, especially those of you who have been in the ambassador's program for a long time. Kinda know the ins and outs and what works and what doesn't, we would love your feedback as we try to evaluate that over the next several months. So that's Mindshare in a nutshell. Questions, comments, complaints, rotten tomatoes, month and a half ago maybe? Right, and that's, so just for the record in the camera here, Nick was asking about, when we were having this discussion in the Mindshare Committee, one of the questions that come up is what do the ambassadors do that they couldn't already do without that title of ambassador? And so I have some opinions on that. I'll try not to taint your opinion with my opinion on that. I know several of you have come to me with your opinions and we'll have a healthy debate about that. But that's really, again, if there's a friction point there of the only reason I'm becoming an ambassador and going through those hoops is so that I can help plan an event if we can make it easier with less friction then that's something we wanna focus on. But still, there's absolute value in having people who are out there and feel like they're empowered to hold events, to do outreach, to talk to other people, to help bring other people into Fedora. We don't wanna get rid of the work that the ambassador program is doing, but we may change the program such that it's a little less onerous to get involved in three parts. Okay, let me take notes. Thanks, hello. So I was just gonna say, made for people who haven't been looking at the Mindshare Ticket Tracker or have been following at all or looking there closely, could you just briefly summarize that, that ambassador proposal and then maybe direct where to bring any feedback if someone has any and when to do that by. Sure, okay, three things. What, how, and when? Okay, I can do that. Okay, so the basic proposal as it is now is to dissolve the ambassador's program as it is today, but instead use this advocates program that we had started up, as well as the Join SIG to take on those same roles of getting people involved in Fedora, helping them know where to get started, as well as planning events and doing outreach sorts of things. I go back and forth on whether like, hey, yeah, we can do that or I'm not sure that's gonna work. I personally think there's still some value in having people in your region that speak your same native language and not just one SIG to handle that all, but I'm open to ideas. Anyway, that's the basic proposal as I understand it. Is that pretty accurate, Justin? I think you were more involved in the proposal than I was, so. We're summarizing where we wanna go with this program of what makes the most sense for Fedora in 2019, so yeah, you got it. Okay, the second part of the three-part question was where should you give feedback? No, that's part three is when. Part two is where. The best place to give that feedback would be in the Mindshare Committee Pagura ticket. If you need that link, hit me up after the talk or anytime during flock here and I'll send you the link or find me on IRC, I'm Jay Smith, I'm really hard to track down. I'll send you the link straight to that ticket. That's the preferred place to have that discussion. We were also hoping for some discussion on the Ambassador's mailing list. I haven't seen a lot there yet, but we would prefer it in the ticket, so it's easier for us on the committee to go through that and address those concerns. So the third part of the three-part question is when should you give that feedback? Since I would like to say yesterday, we were hoping to have this finalized before flock. We're not there yet. We would love more feedback. Part of the reason we haven't made the decision yet is we don't feel like we've had enough feedback. So please make your feedback in the next week, maybe the next week and a half at the outset because we need your feedback so we can go ahead and make that decision. Our Council hack fast. One of the things we sort of said was this $150, at the Mindshare hack fast, but every year and a half ago, we came up with this $150 low friction thing, which can be used for more than just release parties basically. Anything that seems like a good idea, just go do it. So at the hack fast, we kind of set a metric of we'd like to have two of those a week this year and spend that comes out to $15,000 on these over the course of the whole year. How are we doing on that metric? And if I think we're below it, as I understand, to spoil or answer my own question a little bit, as I understand it, the committee has basically approved all the reasonable requests that come in. So it doesn't seem like a committee level problem exactly, but we're also not at the metric. What can we do to make more of those things happen? So my first opinion is I don't think there's enough people in the Fedora community who know that that's available and two that know that we've made the process that much easier to do. I think it's a communications problem more than anything, at least in my mind. I don't think we've, you know, and that's part of the reason why I wanted to do this talk here is to help people understand, hey, what is this we've done and why is it easier and how can we, how can we do that? I have in my mind the idea of a per week graph that shows this that we could publish. I don't know. You like your graphs, don't you? I do like graphs. Okay, Justin. And maybe this is more appropriate for the hack fest, but maybe just kind of food for thought of this in the greater context of the marketing team right now, which is I think trying to figure out its larger purpose. There's been some really great discussion in their own ticket tracker about where their best use of their time, energy, and focus is. So I think like coming up with these bite sized tasks that are very small and like using social media as a way to do communication and engagement could be a really effective way at trying to get people who are outside of our usual circles of communication to some point, I feel like we can only reach so far within like mailing lists and IRC and these other established places that the Fedora project operates, but I think maybe we could work with the marketing team to get creative on some of these other things that we were already doing to some extent, and we could maybe engage a little bit more, but I think we have to think a little to kind of wrap this up. I guess we have to think about how we engage with the marketing teams. I think they've struggled with these really big, broad things that are very hard to approach, but I think we need to think really small. Like what's one thing we could do in the next two weeks, like the talking points or maybe a social media like strategy for release parties, two weeks before a release party. So let me ask this question. How many people have attended a Fedora release party? Show of hands. Oh, a little over half in the room. How many people have actually done a release party themselves? They've led one, a few less. How many people would be willing to and just didn't know that the funds were available to do that and that's something that we would help sponsor? A few. Great. So I guess we all need to pitch in and help Matthew make his numbers. It's just one idea. It could be other events, whether it's a local meetup, whether it's a hey, we're gonna get together and we're gonna focus on, it's a hack fest for Fedora IoT here. It's a container hack fest or something like that. Yeah, because it's, yeah. Appreciate Justin's implication that the marketing team exists and is functional. Cause that leads into my question is, the marketing team has largely relied on the volunteer effort of a single person with a couple of us pitching in very sporadically. But what is Mindshare doing or considering to help beef up these volunteer efforts where we can't really get sustained momentum because we're relying on people donating their precious spare time? Yeah, that's a really good question. I wish I had a perfect answer for it. I think one, just increasing communication and getting the word out that these things are happening is part of that. I think two, it may be that having a separate marketing team and a design team and a bunch of little teeny tiny teams that are maybe one or two people in the long run may not be as efficient of having some, maybe some consolidation there and maybe design and websites and marketing work together as I don't know what that team would be called, but it doesn't necessarily have to be individual teams. They can share work in a slightly larger team. There is no team of one. Every team should be big enough to feed with two pizzas but small enough that you don't need more than two pizzas to feed, right? All right, any other questions, comments, complaints, rotten tomatoes, funny jokes? All right, I'll don't let me keep you from, I think, is it lunch now or is it 12.30? Let's lunch now. I'm gonna let you out five minutes early. Thanks everybody.