Hi friends, welcome back to my channel and welcome if you are new here. It is almost the new year, a new decade of 2020. There are gonna be so many new people joining the WW community and I can't wait to have you all come over to YouTube and get some great ideas on how you can be successful on the WW plans. As you may or may not know, there are now three plans that WW offers. It's a little more customized to make your weight loss experience better for you. There is the blue plan, the green plan and the purple plan. If you are new to WW, I have a video that talks in depth about the different plans and I also have a video on my channel that helps you choose the right plan for you. So I would recommend that you check both of those out. I will link them both down in the description box below. But today's video is going to be 20 tips for 2020 on how to be successful on WW. No matter what plan you select, these tips will help you start your journey successfully, continue to be successful, lose weight and see the results that you want from WW. So if you wanna hear my top 20 tips for 2020 on how to be successful on WW, just keep watching. All right, so let's get started. My number one tip to be successful on WW starts with the basics. And that is choosing the right plan for you. That's where it all begins. That's where your weight loss journey is going to start. If you're currently on WW, maybe it's time with the new year to look at the plan that you've chosen, reevaluate and see if that is the right plan for you. So number one tip, make sure you pick the right plan. And again, my video is linked down in the description box where I talk about the different plans and how to select the best plan for you. Make sure that you read all about the plan, the zero point foods, the points of the foods that you can eat that aren't zero points and make sure that they fit into your lifestyle. This is a lifelong journey. So you wanna make sure that whatever plan you select is one that you're going to be satisfied with and you're going to be able to stick to. Number two, learn the app. This is so incredibly important. If you don't have the app, then make sure that you're getting on the Weight Watchers website and learn that site. Join the Connect community so that you can ask questions and get some great ideas, some inspiration. Make sure you check out the recipes tab where you can see some already created, pointed recipes for the different plans. You can also create your own recipes under the recipe tab. Make sure you learn the app. Figure out how to calculate foods that don't scan. Learn the scanner. You can go around the grocery store and scan to your little heart's content and get the smart points for things. But you can also use the nutritional calculator if all you have on hand is the nutritional information. I do wanna say that sometimes, and it's not very often, but sometimes the scanner isn't the most accurate. So if you are questioning what you scanned, is that real? It seems a little too good to be true. It's always smart to go ahead and input the nutritional information into the calculator and see if that gives you the same smart points value. But these are all pieces of the app that you need to learn.  And also take a look at the activity tab. We're gonna talk a little bit about activity a little later, but learn your app, learn the website, learn all of the resources available to you on the app. It is such a comprehensive app.  It's really everything that you need to be successful. So take some time and get very, very familiar with the app and the Weight Watchers website. Number three is learn your zero point foods. So once you've selected your plan, you've peaked around on the app a little bit. And I will tell you guys with the app, there are some of us seasoned Weight Watchers that still don't know all of the features that the app has to offer. So whether you're new or not, take a good hard look at the app. And once you've learned that, take a look at the zero point foods that are offered on each of the different colors of plans. So the most zero point foods come as part of the purple plan. You have over 300 zero point foods on that plan, but you are given less daily smart points because the majority of your meals should be built around the zero point foods. And that's the same with whatever plan that you choose. So if you decide to go with the blue plan, you have over 200 zero point foods. And if you decide to go with the green plan, you have 100 zero point foods. And again, that's the plan that's going to give you the most daily smart points. So take a look at the zero point food list, make sure that you like a lot of the items on that list or you're interested in trying the items on that list because that is where you're going to build the majority of your meals and snacks around. So it's important that you're extremely familiar with what is on the zero point food list. Number four, pay attention to those emails that come from WW. Sometimes weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, they send out emails with tips and tricks. Oftentimes there's recipes included in those emails. Any changes that are coming up in the near future are also in the emails. So pay attention to those. Read them thoroughly and take them in because there's a lot of valuable information that comes out in those emails generated from WW. There are several times that I've read the email and learned something new. So instead of just putting it into your trashcan, make sure that you're actually reading through the email and seeing if it's something that's going to help benefit you on your journey. Number five, and this is such an important piece of WW and that is to think about your why. Why did you join WW? Why do you wanna lose weight? Why are you doing all of the things necessary to make your life healthier? Is it your kids? Is it your mobility, your health? What is your why? First, think about what that why is and be prepared that this why is going to change throughout your journey. It may start as one particular why and it may change once, twice, 10 times. Your why is going to change throughout your journey because we change as people, as time goes on, things in our life change and sometimes our why's will change right along with those things. But start out with a solid why as to why you are doing WW. And just be aware that that will change over time or could potentially change over time and that's okay. But get a solid foundation with a solid why when you start the program. Number six, join the community. Here on YouTube, on Facebook, there are several, several fantastic WW related YouTube channels out there for you to join. I am going to list a few of my favorites here on the screen for you. These are all WW channels that put out recipes, grocery hauls, all WW related content that will help you along your journey. These are my favorite channels, the ones that I watch, the ones that I recommend people to watch. They really truly are the heart of the WW community. So check out YouTube. And of course, if you haven't already, make sure you're subscribed to my channel. Hit that little bell so you're notified whenever I upload and that way you're not missing out on any WW content. My channel is all WW. I throw a few fun things in here and there, but 95% of my channel is WW related. And I always seem to go back to WW even in those fun videos. So definitely be part of the YouTube community. Also, there are several Facebook groups that are amazing for your WW journey. I highly recommend that you join my Facebook group, Gens WW tribe. We have almost 12,000 members. It is very supportive, engaging, knowledgeable. People share ideas, share successes, share struggles. It's a great place to go for support, but it's also a great place to go for ideas. So definitely join my Facebook group.  There are several other WW Facebook groups out there. A lot of them are attached to those YouTubers that I put on the screen. So check out Facebook, also go to Instagram. There's a lot of Instagram accounts that are WW related. You can also follow me here on Instagram. So there's a lot of resources out there. Just join in the WW community.  Number seven kind of ties in with number six, and that is get inspiration from others. There are several places that you can do this. In your personal life, if you have a friend that's part of WW with you or a workout buddy, get inspiration from other people around you. Again, this ties back with Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and connect on the WW app. I do wanna caution you on this topic. Inspiration is very different than comparison. So get inspiration from others. Use it as your driving force for your journey, but do not ever compare your journey to someone else's. We are all different. Our bodies are different. Our ages, our body types, our lifestyles, everything is so different that you should never be comparing yourself to another weight watcher and wondering why your journey isn't going the same as their journey. This is our journey. We make the decisions in our journey and it's going to go the way that our body essentially wants it to go.  So just be cautionary not to compare your journey to someone else's, but yet use their successes as inspiration in your journey. Number eight, scan your heart out.  And I promise you, you may be shocked and amazed at the points value of some of those staple go-to foods that you had prior to joining WW. I remember when I joined and I scanned some of the cereals I ate, holy moly, I was totally taken aback. So use that scanner and the nutrition calculator and first off, scan the foods that you love and see if you're able to work them into your plan. Remember, with WW, we can eat whatever we want to eat as long as it works into our points. We have to watch our portions and sometimes we have to eat a little less of our favorite foods to have the points value work into our day, but we can still have those things. Nothing is off limits and that is one reason why I love WW and why WW is a lifestyle because you never have to not have something that you really want, you just work it into your day. So get to know your scanner, get to know the foods you used to eat's point value, but then also find some healthier options, some lower point options with your scanner in the grocery store so that those can become your staples and things that you're putting in your cart every time you grocery shop. So you can still eat your favorite foods but also I encourage you to find some other items that are a little bit more point friendly that work into your day maybe a little bit better. You can have a little more, be a little more satiated so use your scanner and get to know your foods at the grocery store. Number nine, make sure that you have your favorite snacks on hand. So when you're scanning things and you're finding your favorite chip or your favorite cracker or maybe your favorite sweet treat at the grocery store that works into your points, make sure you have it available. That way you're not tempted to eat things that aren't as great for your plan and things that are higher in points.  This is huge. You have to plan ahead, you have to be prepared. What is that saying? Fail to plan, plan to fail. And that is exactly what's going to happen with you when it comes to snacking and food choices on WW. Make sure you plan ahead and you're prepared. And again, on YouTube, I do grocery hauls every week. There are several other YouTubers that do grocery hauls. That's where you're gonna find inspiration and find maybe some foods that you didn't know or WW-friendly that are. And maybe some new ideas and some things that could potentially become your new favorites. But make sure you plan ahead and you're prepared with the food that you have in your house and on hand. Number 10, kind of goes hand in hand with number nine. And that is try new things. Try new WW foods. And a lot of these foods that you've never heard of, you can buy online. Things such as built bars, western bagels, certain types of protein powders. There's a lot of foods that you can purchase online that are new and different and absolutely WW-friendly. One of my other favorites is the fiber gourmet pasta. This pasta is amazing. You can have two ounces of this pasta for only three smart points. And traditional pasta is five to six smart points. So try new things. Order some different foods online that maybe you've never tried. Pick up some foods at your local grocery store that look appetizing and delicious that you've never tried before. Try new things because that's how you find favorites. And of course, you'll see a lot of new things in those grocery hauls here on YouTube that you can add to your next grocery list as well. I do wanna let you know that a lot of the online purchase foods are my favorites. And you'll see on my channel, I eat them a lot. In the description box of this video, there are links and several discount codes for these online foods. So check them out, order them. They're my favorites. I promise they're delicious. And it's just a good way to try some new foods that maybe you never even knew existed that are WW friendly. Number 11, and this is a huge, huge one. And this is way and measure everything, everything.  Now, the exception to this rule would be the zero point foods. WW says that you do not have to weigh and measure your zero point foods. However, I highly recommend that you are aware of your portion control of the zero point foods. Because as you know, zero points does not equal zero calories. So make sure that you're at least cognizant of the portion size that you're eating. And maybe for you, you have to weigh and measure those zero point foods in order to make sure that you're not overeating them. You can stunt your weight loss with zero point foods. Although they are healthy options, they still contain calories. So make sure that you are mindful of your portion. But everything else that goes into your mouth, any pointed food, make sure that you are weighing and measuring it. And I highly recommend you invest in a food scale, a good food scale, one that is going to give you accurate measurements that does ounces and grams and even milliliters. So definitely weigh and measure your food so incredibly important. Again, nothing should go into your mouth unless it's tracked and weighed and measured. Number 12, once you've weighed your food, measured your food, gotten your serving size, track. Track, track, track it like it's hot. Track everything. Track everything that goes into your mouth. I even encourage you to track the zero point foods. They are not going to have points, but it's nice to put those items into your tracker so you can see what you're eating. And maybe on a week that you didn't have the weight loss that you were expecting, maybe going back and reviewing your tracker, if that includes those zero point foods, may shed some light on why you didn't lose what you thought that you were going to lose. I even track my fruit. If I have a cup of grapes, I track it. If I have a medium banana, I track it. It is zero points, but everything that goes into my mouth goes into my tracker. And I even track on my splurge day or the day that I use my weeklies. So track it, track everything. It not only is going to help you lose weight, I promise. If you track your food and you track honestly, that's the key, honestly track, you'll see success on the scale. And again, you can go back and use those trackers as guidance on maybe why you didn't lose as much one week or maybe you had a stellar weight loss one week. You can go back and see what you ate that week to have that stellar weight loss. So track, track and track some more.  And each week I use my weeklies. So I encourage you to use your weeklies. Some people will spread them out throughout the week and add a few points every day. Some people like myself take one day a week where we get to go out to dinner or enjoy our favorite adult beverage and that's what we use our weeklies for. But I think using your weeklies is important. WW would not give them to us if they stunted our weight loss. They would not encourage us to have these extra points every week if it meant that we weren't losing weight. If we're not losing weight, their program isn't successful and we won't stick with the program, which means that they're losing money. They're a business so they want us to be successful just as much as we want to be successful. And I don't think using your weeklies hurts anything. Now, do you have to use all your weeklies? No. Do you even have to use them at all? No. I just think that it helps keep you from feeling deprived. It allows you to have your favorite foods once a week or twice a week or however you decide to distribute at your weeklies. Now, here's where I'll caution you. If you are not seeing a loss on the scale or you're not getting the loss that you'd like to see on the scale, do a trial run and don't use your weeklies for one week or only use a part of your weeklies for one week and see if that makes a difference. Maybe for you, using your weeklies every week doesn't work for your weight loss. But I know that myself and several other YouTubers, other people on WWW, people in my workshop use their weeklies every week and still see success on the scale. So you have to do what's right for your journey. Again, do not compare your journey to someone else's. Do trial and error and see what works for you. But I encourage you to use your weeklies. They're there for us to use them. Number 14, activity, move more. Can you lose weight on WWW without exercise or activity? Absolutely. All you have to do to lose weight is have a calorie deficit. And with the points that were given from WWW, it puts us in a calorie deficit. Now, if you wanna tone up, lose weight a little bit faster, be a little stronger, feel a little better. I highly recommend having some activity. This can be as simple as going on a walk. There are people that just walk their house to get some steps in. Whatever you have to do to move just a little bit more. Maybe if you have a sedentary job, get up on your breaks and lunches and just walk around.  For me, I found an activity that I love and that's Jazzercise. Before I discovered Jazzercise, I hated the gym. It was so boring. I'd be on the treadmill for five minutes and it felt like 10 hours and I dreaded going and had to literally drag myself there. I enjoy walking, but I have winter. It's cold, it's 20 degrees, it's snowy. So walking outside is out of the question for me. So I discovered Jazzercise, I love it. It is an incredible workout. It's something that I enjoy. So for me, I look forward to doing that activity rather than dreading that activity. So move a little bit more and find an activity that you enjoy because not only are you going to do it, but you're going to enjoy it and you're going to do it long-term and best you'll see further results from that activity on the scale. Number 15 goes right along with activity and moving more and that sets a mini activity goals. So if you're just starting out with activity, your first goal may be to walk half a mile a day or maybe you'll walk to the mailbox and back, set a mini activity goal that works for you at your current weight and your current activity level and your current condition, set a mini goal. And as you go along your journey, change those goals. Set a little bit loftier goal as you get a little bit in better shape. Do things and set goals that will help you stick with activity. Also, if you can have an activity partner or somebody that you depend on for activity, that helps a lot as well. I know for me, my friend and I go to Jazzercise together. So there have been times, I will be honest, that I didn't wanna go, but I knew that she was gonna be there and I didn't wanna let her down, so I went. And honestly, once you start your activity, I enjoy my Jazzercise. It's just sometimes I have to drag myself there. Definitely not as often as when I was doing activity I didn't enjoy, but there are still times. But once I start, I feel good. And that's general, that's typical for activity. Once you get moving, you feel better and when you're finished, you have a sense of accomplishment and you feel really good about it. So set some mini goals and then work your way up as far as activity is concerned from there. Don't overdo it so that you don't injure yourself, take it slow, any extra bit of movement is going to help. Number 16, try at least one new recipe every week. Don't eat the same thing over and over, day after day, week after week. You're going to get bored and you're not going to stick to your plan. You're going to seek out foods that aren't on your plan because you're bored of the foods that you're eating. And in order to combat that, trying a new recipe every week is a fabulous idea. I meal prep every single week. It is posted here on my YouTube channel on Mondays. I meal prep my breakfast, my lunch and a snack. So every week I am having a different breakfast, a different lunch and different snacks. And that really helps me stay on track. Also, I do a lot of different things for dinners. I have a low carb series, an instant pot, air fryer, slow cooker, you name it. I have recipes that come out here on my channel all the time. So definitely make sure that you're subscribed and take my recipes and feel free to use them for yourself. Now, when I do a recipe, I only give the points for the plan that I am on, which is the green plan. But if you're part of my Facebook group, it's right there on the screen for you guys. And there's a link down in the description box. My admins will take my recipes and convert them into points for blue and purple as well. So every recipe that I show has all of the different plan. Points on it on my Facebook group. So definitely join the Facebook group. That's where you're gonna get all the information. But just try something new every single week to keep it exciting and fresh. And you'll never get bored on program because again, you can eat whatever you want as long as you work it into your points. You can take your favorite dishes and make them WW friendly and enjoy them and have something new and delicious all the time. Number 17, meal prep. Whether it's just one meal a day or a week, meal prep you guys, it helps you stay on track.  It definitely helps you stay on track. Your food is always ready. All you have to do is warm it up and you have a point friendly lunch, dinner, whatever the case may be. Again, I meal prep every week. It is posted on Mondays here on my channel. And that has been my saving grace on my journey. I never have to hit up a fast food restaurant because I always have food meal prepped and ready to go.  I have no shame, no shame.  They never blink an eye. So I just ask if they don't mind if I use their microwave and I throw my food in and I have my meal prep ready with me at all times whether I'm on the road or not.  So meal prepping is essential for me because again, I take it with me, I warm it up at the gas station and I have my point friendly breakfast, lunch, whatever it may be. Also for snacks, it's nice to meal prep a snack. That's portable, but you can take with you to work, to your kid's soccer game, whatever the case may be. And hand in hand with meal prep is I highly recommend that you invest in a meal planner. This way you can plan your meals, do your grocery list, have everything at a glance for you to use to do your meal prep or to plan your dinners for the week, whatever you need to do for your journey. There's a fabulous meal planner out there called the Carrie L. Meal Planner. It is the one that I have, I love it. It's comprehensive, it's gorgeous. It's absolutely amazing. It has weekly plan, menu plan, monthly menu plan.  You can plan your gathering, there's notes, pages. It's really everything that you need to help plan your meals and stay on track. Carrie L is my go-to. I have it, I actually just ordered the brand new cover. I'm so excited for 2020. If you're interested in checking out Carrie L, the link is in the description box and I do have a 10% off discount code that's here on the screen for you and that will give you 10% off a Carrie L Meal Planner and that works for the large, the small and even the digital version. Highly recommend a meal planner. It's a great way to at a glance see what's on your menu and also a way to plan your meals so that you can continue to stay on track. So meal prep and utilize a meal planner. Number 18, recreate those not so healthy recipes into healthy recipes. You can take virtually any recipe, actually any recipe out there and do a few tweaks and modifications and make it WW friendly. I do that every single day. Every time I plan a meal prep, every time I make a dinner, I just find a recipe that looks good to me and I make the appropriate changes to make it WW friendly. This can be a daunting task for people. So let me and other YouTubers who share their recipes with you, do the work for you. Make sure you're on my Facebook group. Make sure you check the description box for all of the recipes. I've already tweaked them to make them WW friendly but in the event that you find a recipe that you're really interested in making, it's very easy to convert it into a WW friendly recipe.  So what you're going to do is plug in all of the ingredients and serving size of your recipe and it's going to pop out a point value for you. You can adjust the servings to adjust this point. You can adjust the amount of ingredients, the type of ingredients. For example, maybe the recipe calls for a full fat cheese. You may sub a light or fat free cheese and see that point value drop. I also have a video that walks you through how to use the recipe builder. I will link that down below as well. Check that out. It's going to give you a step-by-step tutorial on the recipe builder. But again, you guys, you can eat whatever you want. Just tweak a few ingredients and maybe the portion size and it'll automatically become WW friendly but still absolutely delicious. Number 19, stick with it. Through the good, through the bad, stick with the program. Don't give up, you guys. There are weeks where we're going to do everything right and we are not going to see the results that we very much deserve on the scale. Our bodies, they have a mind of their own. And sometimes when we do everything right, we might see a gain. It's just the way it's going to be. Everybody has ups and downs in their journey. There may be weeks that you completely screw up all week and you have a loss on the scale. Again, our bodies, they have a mind of their own, unfortunately. But as long as in your daily life, you are doing what's right, eventually you're going to see that result creep up on the scale. You're definitely going to see the scale go in the right direction if you're following the program. So many people will say, this or that program doesn't work. It's not gonna work if you don't follow it. And the same goes with WW. Follow the program and you're bound to see results on the scale. Add a little activity and you're going to see some additional results on the scale. It's science, calorie deficit, moving more is going to equal a result on the scale and weight loss. So just stick with it. Through the good, the bad, use the Facebook groups, the community to express your concerns, ask your questions. Sometimes maybe you just even want to vent. That's what we are here for, is to be your support and listen to you when you just want to vent. It's totally okay. Just remember our journey is not going to be just a steady line. It is going to be peaks and valleys and that's okay. That's life. That's this journey. Just stick with it and I promise you'll see the results that you want on the scale. Any last item and probably one of the most important items, number 20 is be patient with yourself and give yourself some grace. Like I said, your journey isn't going to be smooth sailing the entire way. It's going to throw some curveballs your way. It's going to be frustrating.  It's gonna put you in tears. It's gonna make you overjoyed. Your journey is going to be a lot of ups and downs. So be patient with yourself. Do what you know is right and give yourself grace. You guys, this is life. Life happens. Things happen in our life events. Come up, birthday parties, weddings, anniversaries where we can't stay on track. That is okay. Give yourself some grace. 90% of the time you're on track. 10% of the time you live your life and you're still going to see results on the scale. So be patient with yourself. Give yourself the grace that you need. Stick with it. And WW is going to be a complete game changer for you. Your life is only going to get better. You're gonna see loss on the scale. You're gonna become a healthier, stronger individual and you're gonna get some great friends from the community in the process. So it's a huge win. So that's it, my friends. 20 tips for 2020 as far as WW is concerned. I also wanna let you guys know that if you're new and you haven't joined WW, you're kind of on the fence and you're just out here getting all the information on the program before you take the plunge, make sure you're checking out my two videos down below about the new plans and how to choose the right plan for you and also in my description box is a link for a free month of WW. So if you wanna just check it out whether you're choosing to go online, digital or you wanna attend the workshops, take the link for a free month, check it out, see if it's the right program for you and in that return, I also get a free month so it's a win-win for both of us. So if you're on the fence, go ahead and use the link down in the description box for a free month, see if WW's for you, I have a feeling it will be. And of course, if you guys have any questions as well, leave those down in the comment section for me and I'm happy to walk you through the process. I am here to support you, give you ideas and of course become your new friend. So thank you so much for watching. I hope that I helped give you a little bit of guidance, made your decision a little bit easier on whether or not you wanna be on WW if you're on there already, what plan you wanna choose. I hope that you enjoyed hearing my 20 tips for 2020. If you're new, welcome to my channel. I'd love it if you would join my YouTube friends and family. Hit that little subscribe button and the bell. That way you'll just be notified whenever I upload a new video. Please feel free to leave your comments and questions down below. I would love it if you would thumbs up this video. It helps out my channel tremendously and it shows that you like these kind of tips and tricks videos as well. Again, thank you so much for watching. I can't wait to have you join the WW community. It's the best place to be and I'll see you guys all in my next video. Bye.


Thank you very much. Mike, sounds good. So I'm a senior community evangelist, and what that really means is I'm a hybrid between a project manager and a community manager, and I do whatever else that needs me to do. So that's always been fun. In about two weeks I'll be there for 13 years, so it's been a great ride, and I love what I do. Before we get too much into it, we mentioned, I did write a book called The Foundation, Fort of a Source City. So I'm really passionate about open government and open data. I will not be talking about that today, but if you want to talk to me afterwards about it, we can talk all night. So a little bit of housekeeping. I've got our Twitter handles on the top, so I'm at jhibits. Opensource.com is open source way. So if you're not following us and you want a good steady stream of open source deliciousness, I highly recommend following our feed. We highlight not only our content, but other open source news and things happening out in the world. And then if you have a question during the presentation, I'll have some time for that. But if you want to tweet some questions or some thoughts during the presentation, feel free to do that as well. And then I will, I prefer to take most of my questions at the end, but if we get to a point and we have some questions in the interim, I'll stop for a few places to do that so we can get those steered away. So what I'm going to talk about today is really how we've built a community around a publishing platform, Opensource.com. And for us, I often describe Opensource.com as a publication and a community, because we can publish all day long, but if nobody is reading it and no one is contributing to it, then what do we really have? And what I'm hoping to accomplish today is to really share some of the insights that my team has learned, some of the methodologies that we use, some of the programs we put together, and some of the strategy we use, and finally some of the tools that we use to actually accomplish what we do every day. I'm hoping by sharing that that you can take that back to your day jobs and improve that and make your teams better every day, what you do every day. So again, Opensource.com is an online publication and community, and we started this six years ago to basically create some thought leadership in open source. And this is a community project. So if you've been there before, or if you're going to visit soon, you'll find out very fast that we don't talk a lot about Red Hat products. In fact, we don't talk about Red Hat products at all. We can talk about Red Hat communities and Red Hat upstream projects, but this is an open source community. And so our preference is to highlight open source and be the good community steward that we should. We've been doing that since 2010. So in fact next week we actually will celebrate our 6th year anniversary. It's like kind of a tattoo that I don't have. On January 25th, 2010 is when we launched it. I was there that morning. We removed the HD access and the rest of the history. So we'll again share a lot of the tools and techniques we've used to get from there to here. How we approach that, bless you, the way we approach it is by publishing content. And we have kind of two streams of content. I'll get to that in a moment. But we're publishing about 20 articles a week. And the majority of those articles are original content. So I'd say I'd estimate about 96% of the content that we publish is original. We do tend to find some articles out there that we would syndicate in and republish. But our preference is to have unique content. We're averaging about 800,000 pages a month. So I don't know how people can grok at the page view thing because I kind of live in that world. But if you have your own little personal WordPress blog and you're getting 80 hits a month, which is awesome, we're getting 800,000 which is a lot of eyeballs and a lot of people interested in open source. So our mission is really to build the world's premier open source storytelling platform. And we do that through a number of ways. So we kind of see ourselves as a catalyst for open source communities and to help them tell their story and to help them elevate their project and drive some awareness to their project. So we do that by collecting stories and I'll get a little bit more of the details of how we do that. But one of the things I find that a lot of people don't know about particularly our team is that we provide editorial services for people. So if you have a story to tell, I have editors on staff that can help you take your idea from an outline to an article. If English isn't your first language, we can help you improve your writing. So we just got a whole team of people, a whole team of five people that can help you refine your story to help you get your article ready to maximize it for search engine optimization, to give it a good title. So we've got a bunch of people that have been doing this for a number of years and we want to help tell your story. So we do that by two main ways. One, we kind of have our daily feed, right? So we have three or four new articles a day, again 20 a week. And we're not doing breaking news. We're not some news organization that's, hey, this thing just happened. We're going to do that. That's not what we do. We tend to focus more on the story side of things. And then the other part that we do is we call them resources. I'll also interchangeably call them evergreen content. So we're creating pages like What is Linux? Or What is Open Source? What is OpenStack? Something that we can have some source matter expertise in or find someone in the community that can help us write that. Top five open source project management tools out there. So we know that people are out there looking for this type of content. So we're producing that kind of content with our source matter experts. So a quick story I want to tell here is about a project called, I think it's pronounced B code, B-I-I code. It's a dependency management project. So they came to us. It was literally about this time last year. They pitched us a story. They said, hey, we've got this. We have this project called B code. And our investors, they're planning us to release the source code and make our project open source once we hit 10,000 users. And so they pitched it to us and we said, hey, that sounds like a really good story. And then so we ran that story last January. And then in April of that year, they sent us this chart, this graph. And they said, hey, look, you can kind of see the arrow indicates when we published the story. And you can see that their user adoption rate definitely had a steady increase. So while we can't guarantee the same result for every open source project, we can see that for this community, by publishing and sharing their story, they increase their user adoption rate. Their investors saw this as an opportunity and they actually open sourced the project before they hit 10,000 users. So this was a really great kind of success story for not only us, but more so for them. I'll take a step back really quick and talk about kind of the open source development model and what we tend to focus on. And so there's kind of six tenets of the open source development model that we like a lot. And we talk about transparency, collaboration, participation, rapid prototyping, meritocracy, and passion. And we kind of bundle all this terminology into something we call the open source way. So how we view it is we've taken the core components that have made developing software in an open fashion and applied that to a philosophy which we call the open source way. And so the original intention of opensource.com was to highlight how open source is being used beyond technology, but we still talk about technology because that's what we all know and love about open source and that's usually why most of us are involved. And if we kind of go through, I won't go through each of these, but we know that by being transparent with our open source communities that creates a level of accountability. We know that with participation we can get more eyes on the projects and generate more ideas. And if you were on the keynote yesterday with Corey Dockrow, he said no one ever argued that with less eyes all bugs were shallow. So we've got that piece of it going. And then I talk a lot about passion because I think this is why most people are involved in open source in the first place. A lot of us are familiar with the terminology of scotching your own itch. So why do we even get involved in the first place? We have a problem we want to solve. And we think that there are other people out there that have a similar problem. So why don't we work on it together? And why don't we work on it in an open fashion? And we know that in an open fashion by having our source code available and being transparent that allows us to be more collaborative. It allows more people to participate. And of course we've got governance with meritocracy. And in the coding world that's the best code wins in the kind of philosophical sense that's the best ideas rise to the top. And we try to foster those best ideas. So I want to briefly introduce you to my team, all five of us. So on the main picture here you've got myself. You've got Jen White-Huger. She's our content manager. She basically touches every piece of content that gets published. She manages our publishing calendar and does a lot of coordination with our writers. Then we have Alex Sanchez. Alex runs all of our social media and also does a lot of our content distribution. I'll talk a little bit about how we do that. Then we've got Ricky Envally. Ricky usually attends Scale Hub where she was not able to come this year so she'll be back next year better and stronger than ever. She's a community manager along with myself and also helps manage a lot of our columnist who are repeat writers for us. We have Jason Baker. He does a lot of our SEO work and a lot of the resource pages that I told you about earlier. And then we have Brian in here in the tan visor in one of the pictures. He's helping us build some community around the open organization which is a book that our CEO of Red Hat, Jim White-Hurst wrote last year about his leadership transition from being the CEO of Delta Airlines to being the CEO of Red Hat. And we took that as an opportunity to talk about open leadership and expand our publication efforts here. So overall I tend to think that we operate like a very well oiled machine within Red Hat. And we actually operate kind of like a startup within Red Hat. So we're very nimble. We're very quick. We're able to make our own decisions. And we have the comfort of being a startup within a company so we've got that link back to the mothership so we don't have to worry about some of the other startup things that normal companies would have to worry about like getting funding and stuff. So I want to talk a little bit about the methodology of how I built the team here. So first of all when I hire people I'm looking for a couple things. First I'm making sure that they have the right skill set that they can do the job. Of course we can train people and do that sort of thing, but I want to make sure they have a base level of knowledge in order to get the job done. If I'm hiring a social media person I want to make sure that they have some social media experience. The first thing I'm going to do is see if you're on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, and make sure you're actually active there. I'm also looking for people that have life experiences. So in HR role that's probably not the best thing to do but I want to make sure that people have some experience in what they're doing and make sure they have a good kind of diverse view of life and so forth. Probably one of the most important things is to make sure they're a culture fit. Red Hat has a very unique culture and we're a very fast-paced driven company and mission-based company. And I also had referred to it as a kind of a sink or swim.  And it's just kind of like part of being in the tech industry. We could be working on one thing today and that would change tomorrow. And if you don't survive in that kind of environment then you're not going to be a very good part of the team. And the last thing I look for is to make sure they have an entrepreneurial spirit. So one of my favorite interview questions is if you had unlimited resources and you could start a business today what would you do? And I get some really interesting answers. But what I'm really looking for is to make sure that they have some sort of passion that if they didn't have their day job getting paid for that they would want to do something else and have the passion in order to do that. So one of the favorite books that I like to talk about is The Lean Startup. It's a book by Eric Rees. And he talks basically kind of, I've highlighted the things that I like about the book, the decision making part of it and creating feedback loops. And he has this concept called minimum viable product that he calls the MVP. And I'm going to give you a few examples, but in concept you want to get something, whether it's code, project, or whatever it is, you want to get something in front of your potential customers or potential clients so that they can react to it. And you can gather feedback and then build that into the next version of the product. This is totally like a rip off the open source model rapid prototyping or we're pointing out code on a daily basis, whether that's raw hide or whatever your release cycle is, so that you can get immediate feedback and get immediate reaction to it. So think that but apply to maybe a startup model. And the other thing that I'm really keen on is that we measure everything we do on my team. So if we're going to try something new, we want to have a concept of like what does success look like? Because if we get to a point and we've done something and it's not successful, we have to be able to kill it. And we have to be able to move on to the next thing because I've got a list of like 50 things that we could be doing, but I don't have enough time or resources or people to actually execute on it. So we've got to make some really smart decisions about that. So I'll walk you through a few examples. The first one is our community calendar that we have on the site. This started out as a static HTML page that we were populating by hand with different events. And our initial goal was could we get 30 different events contributed from the community within a month? We got 50 events that first month and we decided to actually invest some development resources into making this more than just a static HTML page. We actually have a submission form and it's a little bit more automated and it kind of looks like this. We're actually looking to revamp this now because it is so popular and there are so many different open source events happening that we want to make this even better for our community. So we've seen a lot of usage here. But the point is we tried something out, we got a good reaction, and then we decided to invest more time and resources into it. Another example is our weekly top 5. So the problem we were trying to solve was, hey, we've got some great content, but how do we deliver it in a different fashion? So we thought about how do we tell people on YouTube that we've got really good content? So we decided to try this thing out called the weekly top 5. So every Friday we publish a 2-3 minute video that talks about our top 5 articles from the week. Our initial goal was could we get 100 page views for 3 weeks in a row? And so 100 pages on a YouTube video is actually pretty good. If you look like most YouTube videos have somewhere between 15 and 100, so we kind of put ourselves on the upper side of that stat. And we actually average about 200-300 pages a week on our videos. We went from this taking us probably about an hour and a half to produce, so prepping the content, getting the script ready, editing. And I think we got it now down to about 30 to 40 minutes. So we've got some efficiency in it and it's just become part of our daily routine. So this was us willing to try something new, being able to measure what success looks like, and now it's part of our weekly thing. So it's basically the reader's digest version of opensource.com every Friday you can tune in and see what the top 5 is. The other part of methodology that's really interesting is this concept called row, which is result only work environment. So this is really popular a few years ago. I think Best Buy made it really popular, a corporate Best Buy to be clear, where on the very extreme of this concept of results only work environment is we don't care what you're doing, how you do it, or when you get it done, but as long as you're meeting your objective, that's all we really care about. So we use a modified version of this and we add some other things into it. So we have a flexible work environment, meaning like I don't expect my team to clock in at 9 and clock out at 5. We're very flexible. I don't usually show up to work until like 10 in the morning in the office. Now I'm not saying that I'm usually working from home before that, but my kind of core hours are 10 to 6 where someone else's might be 9, 30 to 5, 30. So we kind of know each other's schedules. And then the other thing that's really important is our 30, 60, 90 goal setting. So we sit down as a team and we map out our goals every 30, 60, 90 days. We are a corporate company so we kind of live in quarters. Our quarters actually don't match up to the calendar quarters so that makes it really confusing. But every week on Tuesday we have a meeting at 3.30 and we sit down and we review our 30, 60, 90. We look at our current goals. We make any modifications and we add new goals that we need to. So this is an opportunity for our entire team to kind of get together and see what's going on, and also for us to hold each other accountable on what we're working on. So a couple examples of this. This is really helpful when you have like larger projects that you need to get done, because we can all get caught up in what we call the whirlwind, email, social media, things that take up time, unplanned work, that's not going to get your three big things that you need to get done that week. So as an example, last year I had a project to migrate opensource.com from a single instance on AWS to Acquia Cloud, which is our service provider for our Drupal system. And so that was a pretty big project. If I didn't have that on 30, 60, 90, I was like, oh, I'm just going to do that next month. Oh, and then I'm just going to do that next month. And it would have never gotten done unless we had our check-in points and unless we had things going. So that was a really helpful mechanism for us to kind of go through and say, hey look, we've got this migration. Here's the plan. Here's how we're going to do it. And then to give a brief example of our flexible work schedule, we have a dedicated work from home day every week. So every Wednesday my team does work from home. And so it gives us a really great opportunity to have a day full, a day with no meetings, a day where we can work on some of those larger projects that we actually can get done. All right, so I'm going to talk a little bit about the strategy. And I use this term called GSD, Get Stuff Done. And we are really big fans of getting stuff done because we have a lot of things to do on the site. We have a lot of little things that need to happen every day. So before I get to down the strategy road, I just want to take a pause here for questions to see if there's anything that I can address right now before we get into the weeds. So the question was, we have a work from home day, and are we actively looking for ways to reduce meetings? For me personally, yes. I think my team probably isn't in many meetings as I am. Because I've been at Red Hat for so long I get involved with other little side projects and pulled into other things. So I am constantly looking for ways to get out of meetings that I don't need to be in. So this is really interesting. My manager has enacted any meeting that he has as voluntary. But I've yet to see anyone execute on that. So in concept it's really good. And I think in theory, actually we have done that. I had something where I just can't make it today. I'm not going to show up. And it wasn't a big problem. So that might be something to consider as having voluntary meetings, which is a really interesting concept. Yes, Skylar? Yes, so the question was around how we maintain evergreen content. I'll actually get a little bit more into that soon. But it really depends on how we classify it on the site. So for example, our Top 5 open source project management, the way we published that was Top 5 open source project management tools for 2014. So for something like that we would tend to just publish a new one for 2015. Now we have other ones that we didn't publish in that fashion that we have a cadence that we go in, whether it's every 6 or 9 months and go in and kind of look at it again and refresh it. So it's not a public cadence, but we have a cadence on the back end that we do that. Cool. So this is like how we GSD. This is how we get stuff done. This is an example of our daily heartbeat. So we get an email every day that tells us how the site performed the previous day. So Alex, who does our social media, works on this every day. So you can see in this example, these are the articles that published the previous day. These are the pages they got. This is the traffic sources that we have and where our referral traffic is coming. And then some other statistics around social media, kind of like follower growth and then a running total of our monthly page views. This is really important because if we saw like a dip in something or saw some sort of anomaly, we could actually go in and maybe do some additional digging to see, hey, search traffic was down. Why was search traffic down? And it's really just kind of like a way for us to be like, maybe the overall site traffic was down. Why was that? Oh, it was Thanksgiving yesterday. Well, you know, that kind of thing. And we are big fans and we know that content is king. And so we gather content in a lot of different ways. And so I'm going to walk you through a little bit of our content strategy. So we kind of have weekly topics that we tend to focus on. And we feel like we have a pretty good pulse on what's happening in the open source community. So we know that anything from Linux to Docker would usually do really well on the site and you've just got to make a column like what kind of spin we want to have on that. We have columns. So we have people that blogged for us once a month and they have a recurring column and we work with them and we have a schedule and we have polite reminders and we have unpolite reminders that say, hey, your stuff is due last week or it's going on. And we're really usually friendly about it but we've got kind of a sequence going there. So we have kind of weekly kind of column content. We have weekly news. So every Friday we have a weekly news roundup that we publish that goes out and, hey, here's all the kind of what we think the best open source news that happened this week and kind of give you a digest of that. And then another big thing we do is theme content. So every month we pick a different theme and we put out a call for writers and we ask people to contribute to that theme. I've been traveling a lot so I don't even know what the theme is this month but I believe it's Beginners in Open Source, like how did you get started in Open Source? And that one usually does really well. We get usually a lot of new writers for that because a lot of people have a story about how they got started with Open Source and they have tips and tricks on how to make it better for the next round. And then we have our resource content or our evergreen content that we do. We were doing this once a month and now we're trying to do it once a week. And it really just kind of depends on the topic but we're trying to figure out things like top 5 open source alternatives to Gmail. And so things of that nature that we think would do really well in the open source community. So here's an example of us, I would say over the last year and a half to two years our team has gotten a lot better at this. Two years ago we did not have a very robust content pipeline. I didn't even know what we were going to publish the next day. We were just kind of like, hey can you write something right now? We need something written. Now we're taking the time. We have some columns here that are some examples of some columns that people write and then a screenshot from late last year with our editorial calendar. So we actually publish our editorial calendar on the site and we have everything mapped out for the rest of 2016. I think the only open slot we have is November and we'll fill that up before we even get there. But we put those out there so that if there are companies or projects or people that want to contribute to that theme they can kind of see what our editorial calendar is for the rest of the year. The other big thing that drives a lot of content is when we partner with conferences. So hopefully some of you read some of our amazing interviews with the scale speakers. I think there's maybe a couple of folks in the room that might have been interviewed or contributed to this. So we basically look for some of the major and up and coming open source conferences that are out there. We work with the organizers. Our team basically looks at the speaker, the agenda. We select speakers and topics that we think our audience would be interested in and then we kind of play matchmaker. So we have a great set of community moderators that will help us with interviews. But then we'll just get general folks in the open source community to say, I want to interview Joe Nobakin for the community management stuff. So we kind of play matchmaker, put them together, and we help them come up with questions. They come up with their own questions and we review their questions to make sure that we're getting in the right direction. And then our team helps manage that entire process. So I think we have 18 interviews for scale. And then the URL at the bottom is where you can find all of that together. And then the other thing that is important is that we do this weeks ahead of the conference. So the whole goal is to create a win-win situation, actually a triple win. We want to help promote the conference. So we want to make sure people know about scale and know about some of the topics that will be there. We want to promote the speaker and their talk so that if they have an opportunity to kind of say, hey look, come to my talk and here's why you should be at scale. And then we get good content. And we help kind of grow people, help people with the interviews that are happening, connect those with new people that may not have been a network with before. And then there's SEO. So I'm kind of a SEO search engine optimization. I'm kind of an SEO geek. This stuff changes all the time. And we have a really fun story that got us interested in this. So May 2012, does anybody remember what happened in May 2012 in regards to Google? Panda update, close, yeah. So we were, we opensource.com was negatively impacted by the Panda update. And I can tell you exactly on April 24th at 4 a.m. in the morning when our search traffic was slashed from about 1200 hits a day to about 300 hits a day. And so we actually had no idea what was going on. We knew the Panda update went out but we actually didn't think that's what happened until like a couple of weeks later we started digging into our stats and figured out that it was in fact Panda. So this caused us to do an SEO audit which was really fun. And unfortunately for us it was a really easy fix. So Drupal out of the box is just not really SEO friendly or Drupal 6 out of the box was not SEO friendly so this was three years ago. So we were able to come in and make some really simple changes from the structure of our pages like really common stuff like H1, H2 title tags, and just kind of how the page was organized. So we were able to make those corrections and then finally we rebounded from that. But it was a pretty bad couple of months where we were just like search traffic just drives so much of what we do. So lesson learned, if you're going to launch a website make sure you're SEO friendly so just let us take the hit for it. And then from an SEO perspective our whole mantra has been right naturally we're not doing any keyword stuffing at all. But we do our conscious of when we create titles like if we're going after a certain keyword you want to put your keyword on the right hand side of the title and not on the left hand side of the title because SEO will pick up those little nuances like that. So we've just kind of like learned little tips and tricks that have helped us be more efficient at creating good content that is searchable and findable. And then I mentioned earlier our friend Alex does a lot of social media but he also does a lot of content distribution. So we know that we spend about half of our time preparing and planning for content. We spend the other half of our time distributing the content. So we're not the New York Times so we can just publish something and then everyone will read it. So we actually have to take time and put it down on social media and go to other websites like flash dot and Hacker News and post things. Now we don't take the shotgun approach. We're not like hey put everything everywhere. We are very conscious of we think this article would do well on flash dot. We're going to take the time to write it up and submit it and hopefully it will get picked up. And we've gotten really good at that. The other thing that we do is we have a weekly email newsletter that goes out to about 200,000 subscribers. And our strategy there is we like to give our readers what we think they want. So we have a pretty good idea of our email audience. And in fact every Tuesday and at 3069 I mean the first thing we do is we go over the email that we sent out. And we look at the order that we put things in and we look at the stats coming back and we take time to learn iteratively every week how our email performed and what we could have done better. And we don't put every piece of content in there. I think we've got only 10 articles that we put in each newsletter. And if we're publishing 20 a week that means 10 of them aren't getting in. So we're big fans of give our audience what we think they want so that they keep coming back and keep reading. The other thing I'll mention, oh we'll get to here, social media. Again it's not a shotgun approach. I remember when we first started we would just like get an article, publish it, and then send it everywhere. And then we're like wipe our hands. We're like yes, we got it out there. We're done. That's not how it works, right? And we have different strategies for each kind of different piece of social media, right? So we have a different strategy for Twitter, different strategy for Facebook, in fact our Facebook and Google Plus strategy is very similar just because of how they work. So just to give you an example for Twitter, we will tweet an article twice a day. When it first comes out our strategy is we have kind of a window of time between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. Eastern time, we will send out all the new content. So we'll leave some space open for that. And then we'll redo, maybe not the same exact tweet, but a very similar tweet later on between 9 and 11 p.m. So we're trying to kind of play the time zone game. And then what we'll do since that content is fresh, we will take the time and create tweets and then schedule those out for the next three, four, five weeks. So we schedule a lot of our content. So if you were to, so we'll just take a new article that just published today, it'll go out at 9.07 a.m. and then it'll go out at 10.11 p.m. and then we'll create additional four to five tweets over the next few weeks to do that. So it's not just a one and done. We are trying to figure out how we can, the lifespan of an article is probably two to three weeks. So we're trying to figure out how we can maximize the lifespan of an article with social media. So the question is, are the tweets identical? And they are not. We'll reuse some of them, but for the most part we're writing different versions of them. Exactly. So we're highlighting different aspects of the article. We're doing maybe a poll quote from the article. We're doing things like tagging the person. So this isn't like a social media tutorial. I have a lot of experience and I'm happy to talk about it. We will take the time to look up the author. We will take the time to look up the organization that they work for and include those type of things in the tweet because we know from experience that you have a higher chance of getting retweeted and like if you include other handles like that. And then imagery is really great. So if you include images and tweets you have like a 30% higher chance of getting it shared more. So the reason why we make things unique is because, and we'll just make it unique by a few words, right? Or we'll just kind of do hey, this sentence in the article is really good. We'll pull that out. We tend to do that all up front so that we don't have to go back and then reread the article and then figure out, oh, what was the really good thing about that? So because we have it right then and there we're just kind of taking care of it all up front. You have another question? Yeah, so the question is about syndication. Yeah, so our preferred license is Creative Commons BYSA 4.0. So anyone that publishes on Opusource.com is free to repurpose and republish their content elsewhere. The question is around do many authors do that? And so I guess it really just depends on who it is. Some people, for example, my buddy Chris who used to work at Twitter actually came to us a few weeks ago and said, hey, I've got this great article. And he was really eager to publish it on his blog first. But he knew that he could probably get a bigger splash by having it on Opusource.com first because of our reach in our audience. So he was patient and he waited and we were able to accelerate the process for him. So if you're friendly with us we can maybe pull some strings. So we published it on our site first and then he published it on his site later on that day. But it was more about kind of creating the splash and getting the ripple effect of our audience and our distribution. A lot of folks will actually take, if they're publishing on Opusource.com, they'll take that now to their personal WordPress or whatever to kind of keep their portfolio up to date. Yeah, no, I think that's interesting. However, the big piece is Google or your favorite search engine will typically know the original source. So we're kind of more designed for, because you'll see later over half our traffic comes from search. So we're more concerned with that than people's preferred, should I go to Joe's blog or should I go to Opusource.com? So I think it's just really personal preference. Okay, well let's keep going and then we can get to some more questions later. Where was I at? Cool. So I want to talk about some of the programs that we've done that have really helped do some community building on the site and really helped us establish some where we are today. And so this is a view of kind of like my view of how we look at our community. So at the baseline we've got a great group of readers and people who share and people who comment and people who have some like minor to no interactions. It's really hard for us to tell if they're reading other than a page view.  And that's great. We like having new stories. We like having new people on the site. But from a management perspective, and again we're managing volunteers here so we can't tell someone they have to do something. It's kind of just being there with open arms and being very welcoming and helping them get through the process. Just like if you are in sales, it's easier to sell to an existing customer than it is to go get a new customer. So my team tends to spend a lot of time on the upper part of this triangle where we tend to work more with people who are repeat writers or columnists or our community moderators which I'll talk about in a moment. And so anyone who writes for us, we invite them to our writer's list. So I think we've got that to about 250 subscribers. So it's just a mailman email list. And we send out an update probably once every one to two weeks or so with just different writing opportunities. Hey, February is coming up. Our theme is this. We're partnered with X-Event and we are looking for people to help us interview, blah, blah, blah. So we just kind of provide that nudge and that reminder. It's always nice to be reminded of things that are happening that there are opportunities to write. And then the thing that we spend a lot of our time with is our community moderators. So we launched this program about three years ago with four people and we've grown it to I think we're at 18. Yeah, 18. And so this right here, this is the foundation of our community. These are folks from all over the world. They're all volunteers. They've all basically committed to being a community moderator for a year. And then we have some other parameters around that. I'm not going to go through the full details because we've got that all listed on the website. Our community moderators contribute anywhere between 20% and 30% of our content each month which is a pretty significant amount. A lot of these folks are helping us with the weekly news. They have different expertise that they're working on. In fact, I think two of our moderators are here at the conference. We've got Jono and the upper left, and then Deb Nicholson is here as well. So these are folks that are involved in open source and help us. They're kind of our eyes and ears around the world on what's going on. And they give us a lot of feedback and they give us a lot of direction. And they're a really great group of folks to work with. The other thing I'll mention here from a community perspective is that we have a points and badge system on the site. So we have a mechanism for people to kind of show and earn reputation. And I'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment. And then every year during our anniversary we decided that we didn't want to pat ourselves on the back and say, hey, we made it a year. And the story I like to tell here is when my son turned a year old we had a birthday party for him. Except it really wasn't for him because he's one and he's like a lot of friends. It was really for my wife and I, hey, we made it a year. It was a milestone. We had burgers and stuff on the grill and they had a keg and it was awesome. So we were celebrating the fact that we made it as parents. It wasn't about the fact that my son was a year old. So we did the same kind of same thing at Obasource.com. I was like, hey, we made it a year. Let's celebrate. But let's celebrate our community. And let's take a moment to thank our community because they're the ones that have really made this happen. And so we give out community awards every year. In fact right now we have Voting for Our People's Choice Award open until I think mid next week. So we go through and we look for some of the top folks that are contributing to Obasource. And we allow our community to vote on the folks that they think are deserving of that award. And really with this, the Community Moderator Program, we are trying to create a win-win. So I asked a lot of our community moderators why are you doing this? Why are you contributing? And a lot of it is because they get to meet really amazing people in Obasource and they get to build their own reputation. So we've created a platform for them to help them become a better writer and they're making a name for themselves. And so it's a win-win. We get good content and they're building their portfolio and they're building their brand. The other thing that's a little bit important is that we actually bring all of our moderators to Raleigh where we're based out of Raleigh, North Carolina every October. We have an in-person meeting with them. So we Red Hat picks up their airfare in their hotel and we take care of most of their food and transportation. And we have a full day together and nothing beats an in-person meeting with your community. I mean it's just absolutely amazing to get everyone together who some people have never met before in real life and just kind of see that magic happen when they meet each other for the first time or they're seeing each other again because they came last year. And we sit down and we call it an open source agenda. We create an agenda and we say, hey, this is what we think we should talk about. But if you want to talk about something else just let us know. We can modify it on the fly. And we have some great conversations. We have some great ideas that they bring. And then we get them a pass to the All Things Open Conference which happens in October. And then we let them go to the conference and network and do whatever they want. And so we kind of just say, hey, we'd love for you to come. We're going to pick up all your travel, hang out with us for a day, and then you get two days at the conference. And it really is amazing when that happens every year. It's one of the highlights of the year for me. I kind of mentioned a little earlier about this but just to kind of give you some examples, these are some past winners of our People's Choice Award. Again, voting goes out to the, we kind of, my team makes a short list and we put it out to community for final voting. And then this is actually an example of our point level system on the site. We actually had to add star because we had so many people, I didn't think people would hit 5,000. So we had to kind of, we had to modify that to make sure that everyone was getting more points. And we actually have another level after this. So question. Yes, there is a level called Superstar right now that is 25,000 plus. And if we have to go beyond that, then we have to come up with some more constellation as space names. I thought open sorcerer was going to be it. I really like that one. We came up with that name and I thought it was the top achievement. So the question is where are the moderators? Are we targeting anywhere specific? So because they are volunteers, we kind of take what we can get. But they are all over the world. We have folks in, I don't know where everyone is, I'll tell my head, but Netherlands, New Zealand, India, Canada, all over North America. So right now we are kind of trying to expand our efforts to some of the other parts of the world outside of North America. So looking at the statistics, over half of our traffic comes from North America. But then we are seeing other emerging places like I'd love to get a moderator in South America because there is, I mean we know, you may not know, Brazil is a great hotbed of open source and there is a lot of activity happening in Brazil. And if we could get someone from Brazil to be a moderator, that would be amazing. So we are looking for those people, but we also, it is a commitment. It's a year on commitment and we ask people to write one to two times a month for us. So there is a slight commitment there. So the question is if we are targeting more international, what language are we using? So right now we are English only. There are just, for us, because we are a small team, challenges with translation. So if we do get, we do have volunteers that will translate articles randomly. And if that does happen we do link to that translation once we verify that it looks good. So that's just kind of a kind of time, money resources thing that we decided English only. That's what we can do now. All right, well let's go down the path and I'm going to share some of the tools that we are using every day. Again, hopefully that you can take some of these ideas and take it back to your teams or see a tool that you haven't used before. And this is going to be really fun because this is like how we actually GSD. So this is a list of the majority of the tools that we use. I'm going to go in depth on most of the ones on the left, but to kind of quickly walk through Sprout Social and Hootsuite, our social media tools that we use for our scheduling and reporting. We use a combination of both. Right now we use Sprout Social a little bit more because you can do scheduling down to the minute where Hootsuite restricts you to schedule an increments of every five minutes. So you can only do on the hour, 5, 10, 15, etc. Sprout has some really good reporting mechanisms that we use. And there's something else about Sprout I want to mention. And it actually has a really good robust multi-scheduling interface. So you ask if we do the same tweet. When we schedule things we do the same tweet, but then we go in and modify. They have a system that goes in and you can pick multiple days and multiple times and it makes it really easy to schedule. We do a lot, a lot, a lot of email. I have a lot of email and that's just kind of how we interact with our moderators and how we communicate with a lot of folks. We have a special mailing list set up just for our moderators and that's one of the main ways that we communicate with them. And then we have an IRC channel and of course we use a lot of different social media components. The only thing I won't talk about in the other column is Eloqua just because it's not really sexy. Eloqua is just our email newsletter system. So it's kind of like MailChimp. You have a template. We drop our content in. It sends it out at the time we want to send it out. We actually have a whole team at Red Hat that manages that for us. So we basically just kind of create the HTML, hand it off to them, and then they send the rest of it. So it's really kind of cool to have those types of resources for us. I kind of mentioned this before, but just to kind of walk through, we use Drupal as our content management system. We've partnered with Acvia to do our hosting. So they know a lot about Drupal trees, who created Drupal, worked with them, created the company. So we use that for all of our kind of backend stuff. This is a tool called Adobe Analytics also known as Omniture. So this is basically our Google Analytics. The only reason we really use Adobe Analytics is because that's what Red Hat uses. So we kind of are using the existing resources that we have at the company. Again, it does all your standard page use, unique visits, and it probably has a lot of other features that I haven't even drilled down to yet. So I have a lot of other people that are really smart about this, so I don't have to worry about it too much. We use a lot of EtherPads. So EtherPads I like to describe as kind of a lightweight Google Doc. The benefits here is that you can have multiple people collaborating in the document one time. So our primary uses for this are meeting notes. So if we're in a meeting, we usually have a weekly, any of our weekly meetings we have, we start with an EtherPad. Any documentation that we're starting, we start in EtherPad and then we move it to another system because we want to have a way for multiple people to contribute to that document when it's kind of in that incubation stage. Speaking of that, it's internally called Mojo, but it's a tool from Jive Software. I'm blanking on the actual name of it right now because it's had like five different names. But anyway, it's kind of this wiki blog kind of combination of things that we use internally at Red Hat. So what we'll usually do, is we'll document something in the EtherPad and once we get it to a good place, we'll move it to Mojo where we kind of harden it and that's kind of where our content repository is. And the biggest thing I'll preach here is that we document everything on my team. And I know a lot of people kind of maybe feel some pain around that, but you can kind of just see through some of the examples like our 30, 60, 90 isn't here, but we document how you send out the weekly newsletter because if Alex is sick one day, I don't want to go figure out and contact five people to figure out how to do newsletter. I've got a 12-step process written down where I know exactly what we need to do. So it's not really about, for me and my team, it's not really about what you know how to do. We're going to write that down. It's really about what your creativeness is and what you can do to help us build and do new things. We do not document how we document. It is me going, you should put that on Mojo. Actually, we kind of do, in our 30, 60, 90 we actually add that as part of our goal. So we say document this process. It usually starts off with if it's something new, like hey we got to figure it out, but within two to three weeks I'm a big fan of like, we need to write that down and we need to be in Mojo and we need to make sure that we have a very clear way of doing this. I would say we probably have about 80 to 85% of all the things that we do in a daily basis documented. So we're not perfect, but I'm a big sticker for it and my team actually really appreciates it even though it is a grind to get it done. They're like, man, I'm glad we did that. As a great example, when we sat down in December to start planning for our community awards, Jen had taken the time last year and documented the entire process. And we're like, man, we got to figure this thing out. And we pulled up this document and we're like, dude, you already did all the work. We had dates planned out. We had links to all the old stuff and it was just like, it was such a time saver. And we had a two hour meeting plan and it took us 30 minutes. So it was amazing. So documents really saved us and it's really saved us a couple other instances too. All right, I've got to finish up here. So we also use Google Docs. EtherCalc just really doesn't cut it for us. So our preference is to use open source tools when we can. But we have a lot of kind of complicated spreadsheets that we use. This is an example of our statistics spreadsheet. So Omniture is great, or Adobe Analytics is great when we need to go in and get real-time stuff and do it on the fly. But going in and looking at what happened in the previous month and what happened the month before that, we just kind of put this here so we can have a really kind of a dashboard view of our traffic and what's happening and search traffic, referral traffic. You can see this is, we actually don't have a great way to track like the number of unique contributors to the site. So it's a manual count. Hey, we go through every month and we figure out, hey, we had 90 articles out of that 90, 60 of them were repeat and 20 of them were for community moderation. We calculate it all right here. So that's really fun. For SEO, we use a tool called Moz. Moz is a third-party tool that comes in and crawls our site once a week and gives us feedback on keyword rankings. It's $99 a month for their subscription. But it's really great because it is a third-party tool. So if you go to your favorite open source search engine or Google, a lot of stuff is customized based on your previous visits and your profile. So we need this third-party tool to tell us what kind of our base ranking is for all of these keywords. I had a new slide in there that didn't show up. Okay, maybe I didn't put it in there. Sorry about that. We also used Trello. We just started doing this about three weeks ago. I have a screenshot somewhere that didn't make it into the presentation. But for our publication process and our publication pipeline, we were using the Google Doc, and we were kind of cutting and pasting rows and moving them around, and that was getting tedious because our volume is increasing. So we set up a Trello board and we have a whole workflow of what it looks like. Actually, you know what? Let me exit the presentation momentarily and dangerously show you on the fly what this might look like. Except it's not on the screen. Exactly. Where did that go? Let's see. Is that it? Is that like a Trello board? Nope, that's a waffle board. This is my personal waffle board. This is how I get stuff done every day. So if I have something in email and I want to get out of my inbox, I make a card and waffle and I drop it in here and this is all tied back on GitHub. So that's always nice. That's going to fail. So I'll try to do that later. Is that my terminal window? I can't see what's on the screen. Okay, that's my GitHub commit. Okay, great. Okay, let's talk about some results really quick and then I don't want to stand between you, dinner, and the weakest thing. So I mentioned earlier when we do our GSD stuff like we measure everything. So actually when we do our 3060-90 I forgot to mention we use Smart Goals and I cannot remember what the acronym stands for right now, so you can Google that. But basically what it means for us is that we have a specific goal that we're trying to accomplish. Somebody is assigned to it as a specific date, right? So we want to make sure that we're going to do a goal. We know that it's two weeks away, three weeks away, a month away, and that somebody owns it. So that's really important to us. Other things that we really care about, we care about how many contributions are coming from the community. And so 60% of all the content we publish on AbelSource.com comes from someone who doesn't work at Red Hat. And I'm actually really proud of that. I'd like it to be closer to 70, but I'm happy with 60% because we're over the halfway mark. And it just shows that we are a community blog and we are a collection of the community. I alluded to this earlier, but this is kind of a capture of last quarter's incoming traffic. So you can see over half of our traffic is coming from Search, which is why we are so attuned to that. And then you see that we have about 10-15% of our traffic is coming from social media. So the time that we're spending on social media is actually paying off, so we're actually really happy with that number. So this is a breakdown of our traffic. Here's an example of our keywords from Moz. So this is a really interesting story. A couple of years ago, when you could actually see some of the keywords coming in before Google blocked it on you, we saw that people were typing in the words open source. They were coming to opensource.com and then they were leaving in marketing web term statistics. We call it a bounce rate. So we're like, man, we have a ton of open source content. Why are they leaving? So we figured out, I don't know how we figured out, but we figured out eventually that they were looking for a definition of open source. And so once we actually wrote that page, we wrote a what is open source page, we saw our bounce rate decrease. Yeah, we went down. And then we started seeing traffic to go to that. So again, Scott asked us earlier, how often do we update it? We update it in the beginning. We try to update things every six months and then we kind of have a normal checking point. So we took another iteration of that six months later and made some improvements to it based on some other things that we were seeing through our statistics. And we saw even more traffic coming to it. So we created this what is open source page and we're getting a baseline of 25,000 pages a month to that. So that's just people typing in open source seeing that we actually beat out Wikipedia for that. So if you type in what is open source, your results may vary, but we have the number one spot for that for the last two years. So don't go try to take that page away from me because we're really proud of that. But again, that's just, we provided a definition that we think I like to describe as a plain English version of what open source is. We try to avoid some of the legal jargon. I used to describe open source, there's this great thing called the GPL and I'd get all these deer in the headlight looks at me. So we try to really make it really simple and really plain English and it's paid off for us. And I also mentioned our SEO audit paid off. So we eventually rebounded from the Panda update and we're seeing some great results from search. And basically our strategy now is to figure out is there some keywords that we can go after? Is there a topic that we have some source matter expertise in and write some content for and watch it if we get any reaction, if we get any results from it? We typically, in our experience, there's a three to six month delay from when you start publishing a piece of content around a certain topic before you actually start seeing your ranks climb up. So we could do something or not even in the top 50. Three months later we might crack the top 50. Six months later we're lucky we've cracked the top 10. It really depends on the content that people are searching for, the search volume and all those things. I can geek out about SEO for a while but I'm going to stop there. This is our traffic for the last, what I did, 2012, so the last four years. A lot of people already have like charts that are up to the right, particularly our CFO. It was a bad financial joke. But you can see, true, yeah. So you can see our traffic has been growing over the last couple of years here. We don't quite have that hockey stick curve here quite yet, but it could be getting in there soon. We had a record in December of 820,000 page use which we were kind of surprised with because usually December is kind of a down month because a lot of people are distracted with holidays. Why would people be distracted with holidays? But what we found out is people were not distracted with holidays and they actually were tuning in because maybe they were frustrated with the holidays. I don't know the reason. We had a fabulous month. We continued to publish throughout December and we had a great reaction to that. There you go. Well, fingers crossed. So just to wrap up really quick and then we'll take some more questions. So for me, that slide with the community moderator is like that for us is really where it's at. Our community is everything to us and we do not want to do anything that's going to hinder or violate or kind of have any sort of mistrust with the community that we're working with. We know that the person that we're working with now, maybe it's their first article, they could be our next moderator. So creating a good experience for them is really important, making sure that they feel welcome, that they feel like they've got the resources they need to get their article published and making sure that we're making it as easy as possible is great. And to speak to that, we don't have the restrictions of like if you want to get something published on the site, you have to put it in this format and you have to do this and you have to do that. You could put it in Markdown, you could write a Google Doc, you could write a LibreOffice document, like we accept all forms of content because we want to make it as easy as possible for our contributors. And really, the other thing that I like to talk about here is to invest in programs that will invest in your community. So we made a conscious decision to invest in our community moderator program. We made a conscious decision to save some budget to fly them all in, whether they're from the Netherlands and India which are really expensive flights to get to the U.S., to the $200 flight to get someone from Maryland. We've taken some time and saved that budget to bring our community together because we know how important it is. So again, investing in programs like that that will invest in our community and we're seeing some amazing results with that. So I think we are fulfilling our mission of creating the world's premier open-source storytelling platform. We've got executive support at Red Hat, so Jim Whitehurst is a big fan. We take that daily report, and I didn't mention this earlier. We roll it up to a weekly report, and then we roll it up to a monthly report, and we publish that monthly report on the site. So we're very open-source about that. We send the monthly report to our CEO Jim Whitehurst, and every month his response for the last few months has been, when are we hitting a million-page views? So he's paying attention which is awesome. And then what I'll do here is just kind of wrap up with some lessons learned from the past two to three years that we've been doing this. So again, your content is king. We've developed our content strategy. We have some really interesting ways that we're getting content and getting new users and getting repeat writers for us. I told you the whole SEO story, but again, make sure any sort of publication or website that you're doing has some good SEO and that your structures are correct. With our Community Moderator Program, it's really kind of identifying the stars in your community. I don't like to use the term rock star. So identifying the achievers in your community and pointing in the right direction and making sure that they have the stuff that they need to be successful. So again, they're volunteers. I work for them, and I try to help them out. We've gotten a lot of feedback that our site is really simple. We're ad-free because Red Hat supports the site, and so we don't have to worry about, even though we're measured by page use, we don't have to worry about banner click-throughs and some of those other kind of statistics, a lot of other publications are really driven on. So keeping things really simple. We actually are in the process of doing a redesign, so hopefully you'll see the fruition of that here in the next few weeks. And then again, practice lean, like having feedback loops, measuring what success looks like, and being able to kind of make that quick, iterative process move along. I will end with one of the things that I really like to say is that if you, again, I hope this improves your everyday work, but for the community stuff, I think it's really important to define your community so that you can build your community so that you can nurture it. And that nurturing is with programs and investment and different tools. And then I've got this really fun quote that I like to use from a lady called Margaret Mead. And she says, never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. And so we've got a great community. Again, we only have 18 community moderators and they are amazing to work with and do some amazing things. And so I'll end there and thank you for your time. And I hope that you can take what you learned today and change the world even better with open source. So thank you. I'm really hard to find on the Internet. So there's all the places you can find me. My slides are on GitHub. You saw the commit on that earlier. And if you're interested in the book, there's a link to the book on there as well. So questions? Yeah. So the question is, who is our biggest competitor? It's really interesting because when we started this project six years ago, we were looking for people who did this and nobody does it. And to my knowledge, nobody does this currently. There's a couple other blogs that kind of do some of this. Blackduck was running a blog called Open Source Matters. And they were kind of similar, but I don't think they had the community piece of it. And that's not a bad thing. It's just not what they were working for. And I wouldn't say that they're competition, but the Linux Foundation does some very similar stuff. So I really don't view them as competition. I view them as more of a partner. So we can share content and we can work with them to do some cool stuff. So Blackduck, their blog, if it's still going is Open Source Matters. But yeah, we couldn't find anything that's like, oh man, that's our rival. We don't have a rival. We're just kind of nice. I like to be friendly with everyone that we can be. Other questions? Yeah, no, we go into December thinking that it's going to be a down month because of the holidays. But actually you can see I think from the last two years, December, maybe three years, December has been really good for us. So it was just way better than we expected last month. Oh, and then I don't know if I can do this. You can see May 2012 is when we started recovering. So I guess August. No, May 2012 is when we got hit. And February 2013 is when we started recovering from the Google Panda update. And then there's a couple other things that happened in that kind of sequence. So we also launched our community moderator program. And that's when a lot of our fixes went out for the Google Panda. And we had accepted the Google News, which was kind of a triple good whammy for us of like, all right, now we're ready to kind of take this to the next level. So you can see that dark period there of losing search traffic. And some of that was actually covered up by some really good syndication efforts. So like in May or in April when it happened, we got flashed out of it. So we got a little bit of a boost there. So we kind of covered up some of the wrong numbers once we dug out until we figured out what happened. Here's another question. So the question is about how many articles we reject and then do we reject anything from competition, red hat competition. So I'm not kind of in the weeds on that right now, but I would say we get a lot of spammy stuff like content farm that we usually don't even respond to because we're getting pretty savvy about like that's just a content farm with no interest. I would say over the last year we have definitely increased the quality of the content. So we probably are rejecting a little bit more than we would have before. But we don't just reject with a no, we're not going to publish this. We reject with a no, we're not going to publish this. But if you want to go in this direction, we're happy to work with you on that. So it's not just a hey talk to the hand kind of rejection. We want to be friendly with folks and we want to make sure that if there's a good story we can get out of it.


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