Welcome. Come in. Don't be shy. Come sit in front. Excellent. So let's get started. Welcome. And We're presenting today about being a better mentor. So next to me is Erik. So Erik, why don't you tell us about yourself? Yes, my name is Erik Stielstra online, also known as Soutarsan. I'm currently a senior developer with Limon Grun, a triple shop based in Amsterdam.  I have contributed to the Triple 8 core Triple contract modules and doing that for many years, over 11 years currently. I've been mentoring also at Friday the first time I've been to workshops at Drupal.com and at local events too. Marc, tell us about you. Thanks. So my name is Marc van Gent, also known as Marc van Gent on Drupal.org, also working for Limon Grun. I'm an all-around Drupalista from front-end to back-end and teaching to clients. In general, I just like to help people. I do it on as a mentor on various code sprints, on events, but it also got me in the top 1% on Drupal answers, for instance. So just if there's a question I can answer, I like to answer that. So that brings us to really why do we mentor Erik and I? We like to see people grow. That's basically the gist of it all. We like that when you help someone you make a better developer or a better, maybe a better person even. Say that after seeing Joe do the keynote. Yeah, we we can help each other become better persons and it starts a snowball effect. It can start a snowball effect. You know when we help people being a better developer or better whatever, they can pay it forward and that starts a snowball effect, which is great if that happens. So Like this? Okay, cool. Hi, come in. So today we are going to tell you about a couple of people. They're not real people. They're personas. They're not our real mentees, but they're based on our experiences in mentoring people. So these are Suzanne, Fabio and Tobias. And we're going into a couple of subjects that will be touched upon. We'll talk about learning plans. So what plans can you build and how can you create a plan for someone to to learn things? What learning materials can you use in mentoring people? How can you give feedback and we'll also touch upon a couple of psychological modules, so models. So what are the three theory behind it and just some some ideas that can help you decide on how to create your learning materials and how to set up a learning plan. So Eric, why don't you tell us about Suzanne? Yes. Let's assume Suzanne. She's a colleague of you. She is an excellent site builder. She has experience with Drupal 7 and she can write a little bit of Drupal 7 code, but she wants to get better and she wants to work more on Drupal 8 and get better in coding Drupal 8. But for herself, just learning Drupal 8 is a big step and and she wants to be she wants to be helped with that. As a way of helping her, as a way of structuring I think it doesn't work too bad. As a way of structuring her learning path we decide to make a learning plan for her to break her goals down into concrete steps to make it more explicit. What do you mean with getting better in Drupal 8 code? What do you want to learn? And what time? And to help her keep a focus of that. You know, the daily routine may distract you from your ideas. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I had a plan to be better in Drupal 8, but so many Drupal 7 projects now make it concrete and keep focus on that. That can be things in which a learning plan can help. Keep realistic goals, keep a realistic time period. For example, three months, but if two or six suits you better, it's okay. And try to be concrete, try to include milestones in that plan. In the months from now you have watched a number of videos, you learn more, and then you can define what things she might know at that time. And she can target on that. If it doesn't make it no problem, it all depends on the available time and motivation. And also if the mentor needs to be supportive, if the mentor needs to provide her or help her finding videos or help her find books, select a book, or maybe even a course that can also be tasked for the mentor, you can include those things as well in a learning plan. So sit down with Suzanne, your mentee, and discuss what she wants. It's all about her, ideas not what you or the company wants. Okay, those are important to remember too, but if she is not motivated, if she doesn't want to go there, there's no chance that she will actually get anywhere at all. So for example, she wants to learn Drupal A basics and she wants to improve her skills in getting clearer specs from the customer. It doesn't always have to be technical skills, it can also be social skills, communication skills that she wants to learn to, and you can focus a learning plan on that. But as a positive, and positive things, Suzanne is very eager to learn, and that's what you can learn during a meeting like that, that she really wants it and also had a desire to be a real good coder. But on the contrary, a limitation, she has no private time to invest. That's important if you want to make a realistic plan. So breaking the plan down, learning Drupal A basics, for example, getting a course or watching videos, doing code review is another way of learning. She likes to do that too, because that's what she thinks learns best, by reading existing code and working with existing stuff instead of making it from the ground up. Everyone has different ways of learning things to improve her skills in working with customers. We made a plan that she analyzes an event where it didn't work out exactly and she analyzes what can be improved. She can be observed by the mentor, for example, or she can observe others in discussing these things with the customer. Important to remember that Suzanne is the owner of the plan. It's her plan, her idea, her ambition. The mentor facilitates in her getting there. Make sure you regularly check if she's, what her progress is, whether she needs help or just asking her how her progress is, might also be sufficient, sufficient support. And evaluate the plan and acknowledge that she learned. Maybe it's for people, it is often, yes, of course I've learned that, but it's an achievement. It didn't come from, it didn't come easily in most cases. So acknowledge that it is good that she has reached any goal. Something, another aspect of being a mentor is giving feedback. How do you give feedback? What is a good feedback and what works, what doesn't work? From our experience, for example, Suzanne has written code. She had started working with Drupal H who written pieces of code. You already had given her feedback before, for example, about code style and she has written new code. Well, what kind of feedback could you give her or how could you give feedback on her writing the code? How would it be if you told her, thank you for writing the code, but your code style is still not good. It's not performant. You've made too many complicated actions. It's not safe and you have written duplicate code. If you would tell that to someone who has struggled and did her very best to write her first code, that's not really motivating. Acknowledge that she tell her, well, I see that you have already improved on code style, but you can also please note next time this and this. Don't overwhelm her with all the feedback. There are plenty of things to learn, but choose your battle. Select the most important. For example, if the code is not safe, start with that as feedback. Ask her to explain what the problem is. Tell her why it is a problem and then ask her to go back to the code and rework it. If once is that, you can give more feedback because there's always things to improve, but don't overwhelm her. Limit the number of items you give feedback on. Do identify not only the problem, but also the options. Maybe security is too black might, but if there are always several options to choose between and it is not about the options, it's about how you choose it. From your own experience, you may know, well, if you do this, then you run into this problem and that you have the other options. Tell those options and tell the consequences of choices that will make her better in making the choice herself later. It doesn't have to be perfect. For myself, yes, I strive for very good code, but you have to stop at some point. Also, in giving feedback, stop at some certain point. There's enough to learn in the future as well. About different learning styles, Mark will tell us a bit more about some theories. I want to talk a bit about learning styles. I think that learning styles, the way that people learn, it's not the same for everyone. If you can adjust to the person you're mentoring, it will help him or her go through the learning process much easier. So, there's a couple of theories by scientists. One is David Kolb and the other is Honey and Mumford. They have been working on improving the same model. Let's see what they taught us. One thing you can distinguish between people is how people perceive things. Some people are more what you would call the feel people. People who like to have a concrete experience and don't really think about what it means, but are more like feeling and what is it, how did I experience this as a whole. On the other side, they're to think people. We're more about the abstract concepts and thinking about, okay, so I've seen something, but what does it actually mean and how does it work and what are the concepts behind it. And then there's also a difference in how we process things. Some people like to watch. They're on a distance and say, okay, I'll see what happens and then draw conclusions from that. And there are other people who like to do and they're active and experimenting and they like to dive right in. So what if we put those on two axes? So you get a feel on the top and think on the bottom, do on the left, watch on the right. And this is what David Kolb calls the learning cycle. So there are four types of learners in each quadrant. On the top left, we've got the activist, someone who likes to do stuff and is interested in how it feels in the experience. On the right side, we've got someone who likes to observe and reflect a bit more. If you're taking photos, just wait a couple of slides, it'll get better even. On the bottom right, you've got the theorist, someone who's watching, but not that interested in the overall experience, but much more in, okay, so what's the theory behind this? And on bottom left, we've got a practice. Someone who likes to understand and think about, okay, so how can I apply this knowledge? So it's a more active way of working with the understanding that you gained. So this is called the learning cycle. And if it's a cycle, whether it should be arrows like this. And basically, this is a process that we go through when we learn each and every time. There is always an action to start with. And then you can't reflect on it. So did it work? Did it not work? And then you can gain understanding from it. So why did it work or why didn't it work? And once you understand it, you can plan and make plans for doing it even better next time. So when you look at learning styles, most people have a tendency to, well, I don't want to say get stuck, but they have a comfort zone in one of these quadrants or maybe two. So that means that if you are one of the learning styles, and then when you arrive at a certain point in that learning cycle, there is like, people tend to stop there and say, okay, so this is comfortable. Let's stop and reflect on this for a bit more. And so when we're looking at Suzanne, when talking to her, we found her to be in the top right corner. She's a reflector. She likes to, of course, she starts doing something, but then take a step back and see what it did, which is great, because it makes her someone who is willing to look at, did it work or did it not work? And when you know something or see something in your mentee, that helps you and you can give someone assignments or tasks that fit her learning style. So for instance, if you're a reflector, it could be, yeah, you ask someone to read and edit working codes because it's pretty concrete and you don't have to actually go and do everything by yourself right away. You can just start and watch and say, okay, so this works and let's see if a client can edit a bit and hack and see what changes if I turn this around. For instance, we could ask her, okay, so this module has a couple of blog plugins. Can you add another blog plugin to this module? That would be a really concrete assignment for someone who is more reflector type. And then the next step would be to help her move to the next step in this circle. So from reflecting we go to understanding. So we could ask her, look up documentation. So read about the plugin pattern and see what's actually happened when you created this blog plugin. So by thinking about it this way, it helps us to get someone moving in this cycle and eventually to understand, plan and do it the next time a bit better than the first time. So let's talk about Fabio. Fabio is also a colleague of the mentor. Fabio is a new colleague. Fabio is, for example, a 52-year-old. He has plenty of experience, yes, but he has experience as a flash and action script programmer. So no PHP and no Drupal experience at all. But he does want to be a developer, a Drupal developer. That's what he is hired for. But Fabio doesn't have any Drupal knowledge. So there's a large chunk of information that he has to take before he can actually start working and start being productive on projects. And the learning path for everyone varies much on the situation, where you come from, what your starting knowledge is, where you want to go and what your skills are in learning and absorbing the information. What the software needed in this first period is structure. If you're working on projects, you have very concrete things to work on, but if you cannot be productive on projects yet, you do need some structure to learn from, to learn with. You can need to learn maybe both technical and soft skills. For example, you have to learn to work in an agile team. If you're used to other project management systems, you do need to know and understand what agile projects are about. And if you are working on projects with limited skills, make sure the tasks are limited too. Don't throw someone in the deep on a project, just give them a simple task that matches their skills. For Fabio, we decided to make learning materials to give him the structure in his first learning month. And I developed, from various experience, I developed materials with these four steps for each exercise. For example, you have an exercise about making a content type and adding fields to it. Then this exercise, which might take someone a few hours, let's say four hours, to work on. And if it's first time, maybe even eight hours, if you're doing it very first time and don't know what content types and fields are. We've broken this task down in four things in the introduction in which you tell them, this is what it's about. You're going to make a news section on the side and you have to have content, which pages, which contain the news, et cetera. And also what you'll learn, you will learn about content types, you will learn about fields and view modes, for example. Then the tasks, break down the work into several tasks. Someone doesn't know how to approach it, maybe. What choices do you make? What steps do you take to get there to a content type with fields? Give them sources of knowledge. List, for example, a number of videos on the internet. Maybe there's a book, et cetera. Or if it's more specialized knowledge, or if it's in company knowledge, like how you approach a project, how you work with Git within the company, those sources can be internal sources like a wiki page. And with the exercise includes questions for people to answer themselves. But also if you hand over this exercise to another colleague, a media side builder who can help Fabio here, they have a number of questions they can ask. Oh, yes, yes, of course. I have to ask them and check and tell them about naming fields. How do we name, what naming conventions do we use for fields? All those kinds of things can be as notes or questions included in this exercise. In making this exercise, I've been trying to balance time to invest in an exercise and time it takes for someone to carry out the exercise. If you make a full course, you might take up to 20 times as much time it takes to carry out. If it takes a day to carry out, it might take you 20 days to make a full blown course materials. But with making this exercise, it's about making it in this way with limited instructions and external sources. It might take you up about one day to make this exercise and correct it later with his experience. It takes about one day to make it. If it takes him one day to do it, or maybe even less, maybe the initial one takes you only an hour or two. Other possible learning materials are simpler and maybe more dedicated tasks like exercises working with Drupal 8 entities if you write in code. It's a task that as a developer you have to do very often and the material on the internet is fairly scattered and then it helps if you write down a number of exercises like creating a node or loading an entity or loading all entities or querying etc. Simple exercises writing down them and will give structure for someone learning to code in this case Drupal 8 entities. Another way of giving them exercises is go out. Go to your colleagues and ask them for example the favorite Drush commands or ask them how they name fields. Those kind of exercises are fairly simple to come up with and it helps them to go out to their colleagues. It might be difficult for them at first and an exercise might be a good excuse. Well I've been asked I got this exercise here can you tell me etc. That helps them to go out, that helps them to move away from the desk at times and brings them into contact and at the same time learns them and gives them structure for learning. A thing to keep in mind when making these exercises and also learning in general is a few things to help I said to help your brain. Your brain is our brain and your brain is an associative thing it remembers things by its relations and by connecting to existing knowledge even connecting to non-existing knowledge you can ask yourself what is a content type what can I do with the content type how do I make a content type where can it be used for how do etc. Those questions is already a way starting to learn writing down your questions about things you don't know is already a way to start learning and it is connects to the last one to be curious yeah content types let's google it content types triple and then you find some things and then you you you start building a knowledge tree and on a tree you can connect more knowledge to it. Remember that in technical terms in in internet terms upload is the bottleneck getting things in your memory is is hard it helps them to reduce its to its essence making models making a graphical structures like you just saw from the from the psychological module those kinds of things reduce its to its essence you probably still remember that one with the the arrows going around that's because it was a simple model not all the words you remember but just a simple thing that's now in your memory you remember that because you reduced it's it's was reduced to its essence repetition practice practice over time as well and use motivation I getting more and more convinced how your their personal motivation in this case for Fabio how important if he is motivated if he really does want to learn something he will get there one way or another to make it a bit more concrete with Fabio for example he wants to add images to the content he now knows about the content type he knows about an image field but he didn't do it before and he asked your help how would you start helping him well for example you can say our images don't use image field you should use responsive images that's much better because responsive images blah blah blah blah you didn't answer his question he still doesn't know how you might be right but he still doesn't know how to add images another way of helping him would be oh yeah let me do it click click click click now you have your image see how easy it is yeah but I still don't know how to do it myself I I can't remember it it went so fast when giving answers be careful with giving complete complete solutions it's about helping someone to learn not helping to fix the task at hand maybe sometimes it is but if it's about learning hold yourself back explain them give them the information to do the next step let them do it themselves for example think out loud do explain him about images and responsive images and if you're deciding if you're wondering which of the two fits best in the situation explain them why you think and what consequences you thought of in this process of deciding between them and summarize your concept once it's done that's great good now you have your image but think back and talk out loud which steps you took okay we had this field and we selected it blah blah blah blah etc all those steps repeat the steps again or summarize a concept those kinds of things help someone to learn remember don't give them the fish teaching the fish to look back at Fabio and to see how that fits in the learning circle Mike explained yeah so when you're mentoring someone it's it's really important to observe the person and and get him to know because your relation with the mentee is growing as well and while we were helping Fabio and mentoring him it turned out that he's really in the bottom quadrant the theorist likes to read and keep reading until he feels like he knows everything which in one way is great i mean good understanding of what you're actually doing and can be really helpful but also means that we sometimes have to help him say okay let's let's get out the reading mode and get into the the doing mode stop watching start doing um so for instance Fabio would start watching a video um for instance about entities and entity reference now the next step will be to apply it in a concrete plan work out a content model so suppose we have this site we're building um which entities would you choose and and and how would you set up those entity references those exercises can help um move him from one quadrant to the other and and get the whole learning cycle going so let's have a look in more detail about how learning works um learning is usually a pattern of action and reaction you do something and there is a result coming from that so um this is sometimes described as uh three types of learning they're single double and triple loop learning um and also has to do with the way the fact that uh your mentees may have short-term tasks things they want to accomplish um medium term goals things they want to achieve in in a slightly longer time period and eventually there are the long-term beliefs the the things that we think are right the the person we are um in single loop learning it's basically about actions having a result in a really simple example um you pick up something that's really hot um you burn your fingers and you get feedback it's really immediate feedback okay you know I shouldn't do this that is single loop learning the result influences the rules so to speak the rules that you have in your head about what you should do and what you should not do so okay I should not pick up this glass because it's really hot there you have you've learned something in single loop learning the feedback changes what we do but there's something behind that and that's what we call the mental model that's like our dear of how the world works um and when you go and and try to influence that um that's what we call double loop learning it's not about well you shouldn't do that okay I will do something else next time no it's about understanding what's happening okay so there are cold things and hot things and hot things in general might burn my fingers so um you know there's it changes the mental model so when while single loop learning is really about those short-term tasks we're talking about double loop learning is much more about so why are we doing things it's it's about the medium term goals short-term tasks are probably pretty easy to do so okay you click here click there okay you learn something um the double loop learning is also okay you can teach people about okay so why do we click here so why does triple work the way triple works and sometimes but not always you get into the triple loop learning um so you can actually take a step back even further and okay so so triple works the way it does and what does it mean that it's open source for instance why do we believe that it's better to do this as a community instead of all writing our own cms things like that are really about the beliefs and um in triple loop learning so the feedback really changes who we are now when you give feedback or when you start mentoring someone um think about this and choose the right level um so for instance do explain to susanne why we submit patches so not just okay you click here and make it get different you submit it no explain why and it will change our mental model on the other hand i once made a mistake about teaching content editors um why hacking core is bad and they really weren't interested so i was aiming at the the triple loop and it just didn't work and of course it didn't work i mean it was not something they needed and something they wanted so um yeah choose and and think about the right level um to make this uh as effective as you can be we have a third persona for you and that's tobias tobias attends the first time sprinter workshop tomorrow here in triple confiana and some of you may be planning to mentor their uh too tobias is um you estimate him somewhere in his early 20s um you want to get to know him that helps if being a mentor on the friday sprint um so you have a short you have a chat with him you ask him where he comes from what he's done uh how he came to triple con uh how you heard about it etc you introduced yourself and you introduced tobias to the other people on the table being part of a group is part of being in a community helping each other helps them to um to stay motivated or perhaps they don't they can't do it themselves and you're not available other people can help him too so introduce the people around um tobias and do ask questions about what they can and what i like motivation was one of the things that we are aiming for what does he like to do does he have any special interests in what he's going to work on for what he's going to work on working on tasks remember that the easy tasks they have we give them to do are very hard they have a lot more than reviewing a patch they have a lot more than making us to do they're making a screenshot maybe one of the simple things perhaps but even those are hard they have a lot of things to do they know need to know about the tools need to know about the procedures uh how to what to do on in the issue queue is it okay if i are to be see it or when i don't know anything about this am i the right person to do it those kinds of things are hard for people and that's okay but um so easy tasks might seem an easy screenshot that's too easy for me i want to do coding tell them explain them why they still why it's a good idea to do this easy the so-called easy task and core is intimidating i did do years of work in contrip before i dare to do something in core core is the big thing core is very complex and very large and i don't cannot touch something and then it might fall all fall break down break down and yes that's true but also in core there are plenty of tasks which are overseaable which do match their skills and on the other hand it is quite a big thing to if you are able to contribute the core and be there as a mentor to help those people through the process and give them the assurance that you will be there to help them if you are helping tobias again that's what i said with fabio try to be try to do it hands off try to watch what he's doing hear what he's telling to the people around her or ask him what's with your ears your eyes but also with your heart they're human beings you're too they're scared they are nervous they i don't know what they are but learn them learn from them and do give compliments every achievement can be worth a compliment there's always positive things to to do and it gives a good feeling and that's also a important thing about mentoring giving someone a good feeling giving the comfort which gives them the confidence to carry on and acknowledge that you don't know everything of course there are so many things to know you can't know everything and if you can admit that you don't know all the answers and maybe that gives him okay he's only human and he's not not a superhero and you might use it as an excuse okay i don't know the answer but i do know the person who announced it let's go and get someone out in the group of people and find that that one person who they interacted with in the suq and meet them in life in real person that's also very very positive scared at first perhaps but you are there to help them so a way you find ways to introduce them to people in the greater community and be the swimming instructor for this person let him swim it's okay to go under once in a while but keep an eye on him so that he doesn't drown so be us is one of the people who likes to start coding immediately he skips reading and he makes assumptions about the problem the suq it doesn't read all the stories just scans over it i i think i i know the problem i know the solution as well that's good he's enthusiastic that's a positive thing he has to keep that enthusiasm but making him aware of his behavior so reflect he is doing things reflect on what he's doing you have made this this code very good thanks for working on it however did you really read it because i got the idea that it might not be the suitable solution here make him aware of the problem make him aware of the problem first and then make him aware of the consequences if you read something you don't read something that you might fix a problem problem that doesn't exist and then explain him next as leading into a new action explain him how you would approach it that you admit maybe that you also don't read the full suq but you do read a bit more and what do you read yes you read the suq summary and then tell him the steps you go through and then he's ready to go full circle and go back to his code and start working and rework his issue right so like eric said um we're observing tobias in the sprint and so that he likes to start coding immediately well that that clearly puts him into the top left corner he's an activist he likes to go in and and do an experience and see how it works i see you checking your watch are we going okay so um i mean that's cool and especially in a code sprint situation where you only have one day um you really want to help tobias to have the whole cycle from starting to do something and reflecting understanding and and celebrating success at the end you want to wrap it in a whole day that's really different than for instance susanne where we can um span three months with our colleague so given that tobias is this activist uh learning type um there's plenty to do for him um can be fixing a bug coding um it could also be other things like testing a patch in the queue or um uh well for instance like a test that was added um there's enough to do um that's like really actionable right away and then after that you might want to help him uh take the next step and get moving in the learning cycle so um ask him do you understand the solution um what would you do next um do you think this is the best solution or um uh could we make it more generic so we fix many things all at once those reflection kind of questions um can help him moving and uh start understanding what's happening and why certain choices and certain decisions are made so wrapping up if you look at susanne fabio and tobias um we can really see that no two mentorships are the same no two mentees are the same and um we've experienced that this is one of the most important things to acknowledge right away and um look at the person in front of you and um when you have uh created exercises or or once you have been successful in mentoring someone once don't assume that it's going to work every time so keep observing um you have to adapt to the skills of someone um you have to adapt to the time available to to the learning style as we've shown um and all those things um it's it's it's much easier to do that when you really get to know the mentee um and finally so yeah used our motivation when you hook into the thing that drives people to the things that make someone happy um it's so much easier to to get going so if someone likes music um don't ask them to build a recipe site ask them to build a catalog for their music collection just a simple change in the exercise can make a whole lot of difference right so that about wraps it up i hope you um are enthusiastic about being a mentor about being a better mentor maybe even mentoring yourself tomorrow there are contributions sprints um and whether you're either going there as a developer or going there as a mentor or um maybe even both um yeah we hope that this um uh helped you uh help other people even better than you're perhaps already doing so finally um we'd like to know are there any questions or maybe there are experiences about mentoring yourself because you've been all watching so maybe it's time to start doing something thank you hey thanks for talk but i just want to give you some feedback at the moment and then share my experience and ask a question uh during the talk i had a thought and the feeling that this presentation not about how to be a better mentor but how to be just a mentor because uh it was about planning mentorship how to work with the people which are going to be main team but what to do with the people which uh perceive mentorship as a personal offense because probably you can be in a situation when the other human don't feel a full 100 percent respect for you but you need to be a mentor for these people because not anyone will respect you not everyone will respect you in 100 percent of cases how to work with these people good question um i've personally haven't had that experience maybe okay so okay so no personal experience here um what i think is is um you would probably have to take a step back because um if in such a situation um the person doesn't want to be a man a mentee he doesn't want to be mentors um then i would ask so so who decided that the mentoring is needed in the first place um because obviously it wasn't the mentee uh himself um so and you would probably look at um so so what is actually the the need here so if someone else feels the need for that person to be mentored and to to learn more then um yeah you would have to try and convince the person that there is something to learn first before you even can can start mentoring because otherwise it's it's going to be a clash i guess i'm just thinking and usually the easiest way is just to fire people and to hire new ones which will respect you and will be a good mantis and you will just teach them and everything will be okay but currently i'm facing a lot of cases when people feeling some scare when you're trying to teach them some something you're giving the your knowledge to them but they are just don't want to take this knowledge they are thinking just that they are already a good developers and just they don't want to perceive anything and i'm trying to find a path to this sort of people how to teach them and currently i don't have the answer for this question that's why i'm asking it probably you have it um it is very hard if someone is not motivated yeah to learn something new um and if they are maybe they have the first experience that um how it how it can be if they do know more um i would i would going to search for their motivation do they is is this all in life they want and maybe maybe they come to the conclusion that they don't want to be a developer or whatever they are doing at the moment um there is apparently something something blocking them from from following you because they don't want to go there i would i would certainly do in some way do a step back and and see what what is behind this this this blocking thing what is keeping them from from accepting that they that yeah then it's good and and yeah from accepting that it's good to to to learn and to improve and as for me i think being a better mentor i i can say that i will be a better mentor when i will overcome this and will give some i don't know so there's there's one thing i would like to add um when i one thought um that might help um you know when when someone's really um offended by the fact that you're trying to mentor him or or or teaching something that's um i'm assuming uh has something to do with with status as well like you feel like you're you're a good developer and if someone can teach me something that tells me something about how good i am so it makes you better than me all right if if you're my mentor that must must say something about me so that's that's like maybe the the thing you want to to turn around and um if you can make someone on your same level uh mentoring might be easier for that person so one thing you could do to achieve that is um to introduce a peer reviews code reviews in your company so um let him review your code and you review his code and you might learn something from each other and um it will be much more on the same level which would make it might make it easier for such a person to um accept something um that you're telling him because uh he's not below you but you're on the same same level yeah understand what you're talking about and i'm trying to bring the circular code review when even juniors reviews your code you of course if you review the code of juniors and that's uh how you can teach them and when they are reviewing your code i mean junior developers or mentees they can learn something new from your code yeah they can learn the style you are writing it they can learn some patterns ask a question and etc anyway thank you okay welcome i saw another question over there yeah please come to the microphone please i just uh wanted to add on this matter we discuss that maybe the generic culture of the company that uh tries to motivate people to become even better helps on the situations like that and just don't fire people who doesn't know something yeah true yeah company company culture is is really important in this sometimes you see companies where um people are really um judged on what they do so they have to or at least feel like they have to keep up the appearance of being a flawless coder because otherwise it might influence their their rating their bonus their whatever um so yeah i think if you can create a company culture where learning and admitting that you don't know everything is is part of of how you work that works my previous employer we had to stand up every day before lunch so instead of sitting down um we had to stand up and everyone had like two half a minute to say okay i'm stuck at this uh did anyone ever see this bug um i can't figure this out um and it was a great way to share knowledge and we all saw that that no one knows everything yeah i just want to add uh i think there's you can get below the line between you there's coaching there's mentoring there's teaching and um at our company we we have a program as well it's called the unleash program where before i joined before i started i was also a bit apprehensive i was like you know what um you know i don't really want to be taught things i had the same sort of attitude perhaps uh but what we do and what's helped me is that yeah we really set our own goals so it sounds like perhaps the company is forcing these people to to join this program and they might not want to learn particular things uh but what we've done and what i've enjoyed is you know we set our own goals we set our own things that we want to learn um so the mentoring is not really necessarily giving us a path and saying okay do this course do that but what do you want to learn what do you want to improve set your own um your own goals and find your own way to achieve them um so maybe that's something that can help in your situation great dip okay thanks so which company is it uh x x team yeah thanks um was one my question right okay almost out of time yeah yeah uh simon from back of smith um i i wanted to um to add a thing um you had these personas and the learning cycle and um you placed the personas uh in the learning cycle but and i wanted to add that as a mentor you two are a persona in this learning cycle and there's always a way from one persona to talk to another to to to know their motivation and it's very important for a mentor to keep in mind uh what type of persona you are to to to reach the the other personas uh in the um in the learning cycle absolutely if you know yourself you can help with a way to to solve such problems like uh if there is motivation so yeah absolutely completely right yeah so thanks um thank you very much um don't forget to uh to evaluate this session and um i wish you a good stay here at triple con and tomorrow of course during the sprint on friday sure


we will talk about family business. Family business is a very common case of entrepreneurial firm. Globally as well as in India, family business contributes to over 70 percent of the GDP. In case of India, this could be even more because if you go deeper into economy, almost every small enterprise is family run. According to the survey conducted by Price Waterhouse Coopers in 2019, family businesses have grown in last two years and all the respondents expected to grow in next two years. I am saying expected because today we are sitting when the global pandemic of COVID-19 has engulfed the economy. So, probably this finding about expecting to grow may not be valid, but when the survey was conducted in 2019, large number of corporations more than 80 percent were expecting the business growth in next two years. 49 percent of the surveyed companies which were the family owned entrepreneurial firm have fully costed, formalized and communicated mid-term strategic plan. Out of remaining 51, 43 percent did not have the fully costed, but still they had a formalized and well communicated strategic plan. So, strategic planning is very much there in most of the business firms in India as per the survey conducted by PWC. In 2016, similar survey in 2016, 75 percent of those interviewed said that business had grown over the last 12 months, that trend is largely unchanged and 2019, 76 percent of the family business surveyed in 2019 mentioned that business have grown. Significantly, while 16 in 2016, 16 percent of the business experienced a reduction in sales, only 9 percent reported reduction in sales in 2019. It is also heartening to note that 58 percent of the family businesses had achieved double digit growth compared to 34 percent globally. PWC also conducts the global survey of the family family owned businesses. So, there is also a comparison given in the global survey findings and the India specific findings. Another 18 percent of the Indian businesses grew between 3 percent and 9 percent, while 15 percent of the Indian businesses experienced stability in business operations. You can look at the importance of the family businesses and the health of family businesses based on this survey. What are the values and approach to social responsibility of the family business funds? PWC found that 89 percent of the family businesses feel that they have a clear sense of the agreed values and purpose as a company compared to 79 percent globally. Further, 85 percent says that family which owns the business has a clear set of values as against 75 percent globally. Higher ranking of business leaders and family owned businesses on both aspects can be attributed to the Indian social and family structure and a belief that ingrained values are the foundations on which businesses have been built. 70 percent of the family business leaders in India have in fact set up a foundation individually or jointly with other families. So, this is this data is about the social responsibility. Most of the CSR activities by the corporations for whom this is a mandatory requirement according to the new amendments in the Companies Act, 75 percent of the family owned businesses they carry out the CSR activities through a foundation. Investing in the philanthropic ventures is however not enough and 58 percent of the business even try to measure the success or impact of these CSR activities which is significantly higher than the global average of 28 percent. So, this survey indicates that family businesses are important. They are aware of this importance of clarifying the values. They have clarity about the values. They also have clarity about their strategic orientation and the path of strategic success. They also mostly are responsible towards society and most of them are genuinely engaged in the CSR activities. Some of the unique challenges of the family owned businesses or family owned entrepreneurial firms are institutional overlap, pressure to hire family members, compensation, succession planning and lack of formal systems and processes. Institutional overlap as we discussed in the previous part of this session is about overlap of the roles in family and firm. As a chairman or the MD of the firm, father might has to take a stern action against the son or daughter or other relatives and that kind of situation can create a dilemma and that is what is called the institutional overlap. Pressure to hire family members when firm is family owned, family member think of themselves as entitled to have job or position in that firm. Many a time it may not be easy, it may not be feasible according to the competency requirement in a particular role. So, that may create a challenge and pressure on the owner of the firm. Compensation is another challenging issue. If family owned business has mostly employees coming from the same family, then how do you decide the compensation? If everybody is coming from the same family, can we have differential in the compensation? If son and son-in-law both are employed in a family firm, can we differentiate the salary even if their roles are different? That might those might be a tricky issue and that is why it becomes a challenge at times. Succession planning as I mentioned before can be one of the trickiest issue in the family owned entrepreneurial firm. When family owned entrepreneurial firm grows and if grows based on the personal ties and the social ties, they may lack in the formal systems and processes. At times family owned firm from the micro to become small to become medium-sized corporation even without strong and explicit formal systems. But if the family owned firm has to survive as a medium-sized corporation or has to grow as a big corporation, they have to establish formal systems and processes and that becomes challenging because in that process they have to many time prune the roles of the family members. At times they have to restructure the compensation, they have to restructure the organization, authority, organization design. Many time they have to give more authority to the professional managers and curtail down the authorities of the people coming through the family ties or the social ties. These things become very difficult and very challenging for a family owned firm and that has to be taken care of in a very sensitive and professional way. These are some of the major challenges of the family owned entrepreneurial firm. Some of the prominent OD interventions are role and goal clarity, explicit contracting and family therapy. Role and goal clarity related interventions are important in the birth stage, survival stage and even the growth and succession stage in an organization. It is always good to calibrate the expectations of the different members of the family involved in the business and to demark the role of different people involved from the same family in the entrepreneurial firm. Similarly, goal clarity is also important because without goal clarity we cannot assess the performance of the different members. Without assessing the performance other decisions like compensation, giving authority, their further role, their position in the organization design all such decisions cannot be made without the goal clarity of the different members of the family owned firms. Explicit contracting can be part of the previous OD intervention or can be done independently in a family owned enterprise. That means, writing down, documenting the different aspects of running a business and making decisions about it. PWC survey which I mentioned just now also has one question about value clarity and documentation of the values. PWC found that companies which have documented their values have more clarity in their performance and they have little better performance record in comparison to those companies which might have the clarity about the values but values are not documented. Family therapy is one of the most popular OD interventions in issues related to family and it is also relevant for the family owned entrepreneurial firm if they face an issue. Family therapy can be of the three types which can be relevant for the entrepreneurial firm, bovenian types, structural type and strategic type. Bovenian form of family therapy is best suited for the situation in which individuals cannot do or do not want to involve the family members in the treatment. This is built on two core concepts triangulation and differentiation. Triangulation means our natural tendency to vent or distress by talking to a third party. By talking to a third party they are able to look at their own behavior and disposition in the family situation. Differenciation meaning distinguishing the emotional aspect of an issue and factual aspect of the issue. So, differentiation is useful to become less emotionally reactive in the family relationship even when the matter is related to business. Second form of family therapy is structural. Structural therapy focuses on adjusting and strengthening the family system to ensure that the parents are in control and that both children and adults set appropriate boundaries. It is very similar to the role and goal clarity. In this form of therapy the therapist joins the family in order to observe, learn and enhance their ability to help the family strengthen their relationship. In this kind of therapy, consultant may sit through the family meetings or the business meetings. Consultant can also talk to the senior managers or the out of the family employees working in the entrepreneurial firm and get the data about the dispositions and the general temperament of the different family members. Identify the enabling patterns or the dysfunctional patterns of the family members interactions. Make the family members aware about that and ask for some explicit contracting about change in the behavior or adopting new behavior. Strategic intervention related to the family therapy is the form of a therapy which is more brief and direct in which the therapist assigns homeworks to the family. This homework is intended to change the way family members interact by assessing and adjusting the way family communicates and makes decisions. The therapist takes the position of power in this type of therapy which allows other family members who may not usually hold as much power to communicate more effectively. This is particularly relevant about the questions related to succession planning. Even if there is a one one probable successor or there can be couple of probable successor this therapy can be used. Specific assignments can be given as a part of the family therapy to the prospective successors of the company coming from the family. The family members performance in those assignments make them aware about their special competencies and temperament that will also make aware of the family members about their competency and temperament about solving or addressing some issues. And that process can give a more objective data about making a decision about succession. Succession as we know is a very important part perhaps the trickiest part of managing the family owned businesses. Now, we will discuss about the succession planning. This exhaustive model proposed by Wetley can be useful to understand the best practices about the succession planning in a family owned form. Again like many other models it may look overwhelming, but I will invite you to look at this model and understand this model in a step by step manner and then you will see it is a fairly simple but very useful model. What it says that succession planning first be started taking into account of the industry context as well as the family context. What is the family context? Family context is family dynamics, family influence on the business decision and how the family council or how the family has been functioning till now. Naturally the family context come from the social context. If we take the example of India there are a lot of communities where large number of people own the family businesses. So, society or community also provides a very strong context to the business and that must be accounted in the succession planning related issues like who is the probable successor, who can follow the family tradition, who has the better rapport within the community and society, who has a ambitions which are aligned to the ambitions of other family members. These questions must be taken into account. We also need to take into account of the industry context. Industry context meaning how the business is growing, how the industry is looking like, what are the challenges in the industry. Incumbent and successor have to negotiate, have to develop a common understanding about the industry context. They need to look at what are the issues, what are the challenges and how they would like to take forward the company in the near future. And they must come to agreement. Some of the elements might be very different from the way business was managed by the predecessors. But succession planning must be informed by the strategic context, but there must be a common understanding about how the successor will take forward the organization. That agreement must be written down, must be agreed upon. Once we choose the incumbent, identify the based on the family context and the industry context, the succession process starts. What we suggest that succession process must start with setting the ground rules, how the development will take place, what will be the selection criteria, what are the range of candidates, identifying the potential successors, leadership partition plan and transition, ownership partition plan, what these indicators are suggesting that the ground rules and the blueprint for succession must be created as the first step of the succession planning. Next step comes the next step is about nurturing or development of the successors. That is establishing the gaps between what is required a successor should have to lead the business successfully in the when when when Reen comes when Reen is in his or her hand, identifying the developmental need, identifying the training programs or the ways of addressing those developmental need. Also identifying how the progression of the successor will happen in the organization, what will be the first step, which are the projects or which are the businesses, the incumbent will take care of, incumbent will work upon before or before the succession is completed. Then the selection process if there are more than one incumbent, selection process has to be carried forward, selection if there are more than one incumbent, then selection process must be carried out, which include designing a legitimate process, the final selection criteria, selection committee, persons, selection of CEO all these things have to be done in a transparent and explicit ways. Last but not the least is the process of handing over and the transition process. Once a incumbent is identified as a successor, then comes the process of handing over the chart and this also must not happen in a haphazard way, this also must happen in a systematic way. Shadowing is one process followed by many owners of the family owned businesses, where a successor for sometime many years just observe and take part in a limited way. So, transition process has generally the two step, one process is the managerial development or leadership development, which includes shadowing, which includes taking over the key projects first and then gradually being being prepared to take up the role and responsibility of managing the whole business and the second part is the transfer process. Transfer process may involve the transfer of the shares, control, management control, identifying the formal and the formal systems and the contracts about who will manage on what, what will be the role of other family members, what will be the financial autonomy or the financial what is the extent of the financial control given to the different family members and the firm, all these are to be identified in a legal in a in a way according to the prescribed and approved in the regulatory system. So, these are the ways and these are some of the very important things in the transfer of the power to the successor. So, Whitley has given this comprehensive model, the different elements given in this comprehensive model can be used as a checklist to successfully conduct the succession planning in a family owned firm. There are few concepts in Indian culture which can be relevant for organization development in the family owned businesses. First concept is Chamavani Perv. Many of you might have heard about the Perusion Perv followed by the Jain community in India. The Perusion Perv go on for about fortnight 15 days and one of the day is dedicated to asking for the forgiveness and this day is called Chamavani Perv. This is the day when we explicitly ask for forgiveness from our loved ones, from all our relatives and friends for whatever wrong we have done consciously and unconsciously. So, this concept can be used in the family business firm as well. When a family is involved in the business, there might be an institutional overlap, there might be a role overlap and in order to negotiate the roles properly and in order to take forward the business in the desirable direction, many a time one family member might have to be viewed or have to take stern action against the other family members. Same way, some family members may misperceive the decisions of owner family member and because of that misperception, they may hurt the owner who is a head of the family, who many time might be the head of the family. So, they can use this spirit of Chamavani Perv if not every day, every week to ask for forgiveness and explaining why they behaved rudely, why it was inevitable or why it was important and this kind of communication. If ends in forgiving each other, family members may find way to take forward their family interaction as well as business interaction in a pleasant and a productive way. Another Indian concept which is very commonly used in our society is called vanaprasth. Vanaprasth is a stage of life. According to the traditional cultural values, human life goes through four stages, brahmacharya, grahastha, vanaprasth and sannyas. Brahmacharya is competence building phase where you acquire knowledge and in the ancient time it was considered to last till the age of 25 because human life was supposed to be of 100 years. So, up till 25 years or one fourth, first one fourth part of life is related to the competency building. Second phase of life is grahastha meaning a role of a householder, taking care of the family, establishing businesses, earning money and that becomes a earning money, running business or the profession. Up till the 50 years you have to actively engage in business and the money generation or economic activities as well as taking care of your family, nurturing your family that. So, same way up till the age of 50, grahastha ashram these are stages of the life also called ashrams. So, grahastha ashram last by the age of 50 and after 50 vanaprasth starts. Vanaprasth the word the meaning of the word vanaprasth is going to forest, not literally going to forest, but it is about excluding from the day to day affairs of the business or economic activities and empowering the family members to take the main role in the economic matters or business matters. We need to at times remind the older family members about the value of vanaprasth. Many times owner of the family firms are very reluctant to hand over the autonomy or power to the young generation even when the owner reaches to the age of 70 or 75 and the successor may reach to the age of 50 or 160. This situation can be avoided if we convey the importance of vanaprasth which starts around the 50 years of age. The essence is that when you are active that is the time when we start giving and start we start giving the autonomy to the family members so that they become trained in front of our eyes to make the to grow the business. Third concept in our Indian system is captured in this popular shloka which says that meaning love your kids first five years, discipline them for next 10 years and as they reach 16 treat them like your friends. If we follow this value there can be less frictions in the family owned business we will be more open to accept the ideas of each other. The different generations can work more harmoniously and work towards growth of the family business wherein the the business is benefited by the energy of the young family members and the wisdom of the older family members. So, these are some of the concepts prevalent in the Indian culture which can be relevant for the OD in the family owned businesses. So, with these points we come to the end of this session. In today's session we looked at holistic approach of diagnosis in the entrepreneurial firm, firm planning, role clarification, organization design, strategic planning, team and career planning, succession planning are the major OD interventions used in the entrepreneurial firm in different stages. Those stages are birth stage, survival stage, growth, success and succession planning stage. Family owned businesses require a unique approach of diagnosis and intervention that requires more sensitivity. We also discussed the different OD interventions especially suitable for the family owned entrepreneurial firms and we in more detail discuss about the family therapy and succession planning as OD intervention in the family owned firms. Thank you.


The aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Sherman brings the fight to ISIS in support of Operation Inherit Resolve. I recently saw a figure that we pushed them out of 45 percent of the populated territory that they once held on track. I can tell you that the missions that we have been tasked with over the time that we've been here have been moving steadily west, which means we are pushing them back into Syria. So, you know, that is one measure of where the battlefield has gone since we've been here. The Truman's time in the Mediterranean will add to the already successful campaign. This strike force on the carrier is able to operate from many different places, and we're able to do so with the same precision that we did from the Arabian Gulf in the Mediterranean. Reporting from the USS Harry S. Sherman, I am Specialist Raul Pacheco.


And on business news, Minister of Power Babakaraliu has reaffirmed the federal government's commitment to ensuring that Nigerians have an effective power supply through renewable energy. Magret Oyimboadei, senior information officer, Ministry of Power, made this known in a statement in a buja on Monday. Oyimboadei quoted the minister as saying this during a meeting with GIZ country director Ana Homers in Hatim, led by German Deputy Ambassador to Nigeria Martin Hof in his office. GIZ is an enterprise entirely owned by the federal government of Germany, supporting it in achieving its objective in the field of international cooperation for sustainable development. GIZ do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS SDRUNK When I made a video about Super Nintendo games compatible with the SNES mouse a few years ago, there were a surprising number of people in the comments that did not know that the mouse even was compatible with any other game other than Mario Paint. And yeah it most certainly is, there's all sorts of interesting games like She ends Revenge, Trottlers, Tinstar, as well as Mario and Wario, a puzzle game that for whatever reason never got released outside of Japan. Not only that, this game was developed by Game Freak, and the project was headed by Pokemon creator Satoshi Tajiri. That's right, a freaking Mario game made by Game Freak that stayed in Japan. And that's too bad, because this game is pretty solid, and it helps that the story is actually pretty amusing and something a little different. Well, different for a Mario game, anyway. So Mario, Luigi, Peach, and Yoshi are all exploring a forest looking for this fairy named Wanda, because why not, I guess. Anyway, Luigi gets lost, of course he does. So the rest of the gang has to go looking for him. But that dastardly Wario shows up and drops stuff on everyone's heads, which promptly gets stuck and impairs their vision. Wanda shows up and decides to help them out, to try and find Luigi, and of course Wanda can't simply help take Mario's bucket off, because I don't know, I guess it's above her fairy pay grade or something. But that brings me to the gameplay. You control Wanda, and you're tasked with guiding Mario, Yoshi, or Peach to the perpetually lost and confused Luigi. Yup, this is one of those escort games, where one character is constantly moving and it's up to you to remove all the obstacles in their way within the time limit. I reviewed another game like this a while back, Rocco's Modern Life, Spunky's Dangerous Day, but this game is a great deal better than that one, and that's mostly because this game is much more polished, with more clever puzzles to get through. Plus, the mouse control definitely helps as well, and I should mention that this game only works with the SNES mouse, it doesn't recognize the controller. But really, for me, using the mouse here wasn't that big of a deal, because the Wanda sprite is big enough to cover plenty of ground, and the hit detection for activating blocks is reasonably forgiving. Plus when a character is about to fall, they have a short animation that gives you an extra split second to act. There's 110 levels in this game, and you only start with two lives, but you have plenty of chances to get more. There's three different difficulty settings, so to speak, if you play through as Peach, that's the easy setting since she moves the slowest. Mario is medium, and Yoshi is hard, and man, oh man, this game really gets hard if you pick Yoshi, so I would definitely recommend starting with Mario at the very least. What's cool here is that you can pick a different character at the beginning of each level, so you're not stuck with the same one throughout your playthrough. I'd also recommend setting the mouse speed at high, the game just plays much better that way. The game also gives you the option to start at whichever level you want via this menu screen, so if you want to skip the super easy level one, you can do so, so that's pretty cool.  You start out with just basic blocks that you have to activate, then more elements get introduced the more you play.  Thankfully, you can click on the item on your character's head and make them change direction as well, and there's some enemies that you can just zap with the mouse to make them disappear. But yeah, there's a lot going on in these puzzles, and a lot you have to try and manage, and it makes for a stressful playthrough. It boils down to clicking blocks in the right order either before or just as your character gets there, and that is easier said than done. It is a real challenge to figure this stuff out on the fly, but the game never feels convoluted or unfair. The puzzles for the most part all make sense. Well, they all make sense eventually. Some of the later levels are huge and feel overwhelming and take multiple tries to figure out, and you don't get much of a chance to explore either thanks to the time limit. And then there's enemies like these bats. But yeah, Mario and Wario is a fun game, but it's definitely a challenge, and I understand that this kind of game isn't for everyone. Not everyone likes games centered around escort missions. It's frustrating not being able to directly control one of the characters, but I will say, as far as puzzle games of this nature go, this one is well made featuring some clever design, and there's almost always more than one way to get from point A to point B. The game doesn't expect you to follow just one singular path, so I really appreciate that. Even better about this game is that there's no English patch necessary. Everything's already in English, which makes it even more confusing as to why this never got a release outside of Japan. Oh well, either way, if you dig puzzle games, then you gotta play this one any way you can. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.


My name is Leszek, I'm with Wikimedia Deutschland, more about it in a second. I would like to share a few lessons learned of doing open source software development for a couple of years. In that organization, maybe a few words about Wikimedia first. The name might not be similar to some website that you might have heard of, the Free Encyclopedia website and it's not by accident. So Wikimedia Movement is a global community of folks who are committed or dedicated to free knowledge. So there are two sides of it, kind of one is the contributors, people who create content on Wikimedia projects including Wikimedia, the Free Encyclopedia that you might have heard of. And there are also other projects and there's also a software side of it. There's a media Wiki software which is the underlying Wiki software and there's some other software pieces in it. And I will not focus on the community, the content creation part of it, I will focus on the software part in this talk for the next couple of minutes. And two organizations that I would like to call out here, one is Wikimedia Foundation which is US based on profit. There are the folks who host Wikipedia and do the whole operation side of it and they are the main maintainer of this Wiki software. And there's also Wikimedia Deutschland. Deutschland is a German for Germany in case you haven't come across that. So we are German chapter of the Wikimedia movement and in terms of software development we focus more on the projects called Wikibas and Wikidata which are to oversimplify the knowledge graphs that are curated in a Wiki way. And Wikimedia Deutschland is also my employer who sent me here, thanks for that. And I would like to start with a bit of reflection or I'm sure all folks in this room have been thinking about it, what is open source and there was mentioned multiple times in the keynotes in the morning. So the people way smarter than me have shared their thoughts about what open source is. So it's a bit embarrassing and feeling silly to share my idea about it, but with me. So if I ask Wikipedia what open source is there's this highlight on the license and on the permissions to use and distribute the source code and folks at Gabriela or Niti earlier today mentioned what is truly open, what is open and those kind of things. So the open, the license is very important but and looking at what Wikimedia Germany does it seems that we use the right licenses or like this or basically all source code that we create is public on those platform them. So it seems like we are good, but then I cannot help to think that the open source is more than that. So to me open source is a tool. It's not the tool, but it's one of the tools that could bring equity to tech. So it could be a tool that could drive the social or social or economical change.  So I have this idea of a thriving ecosystem of projects that enable each other. So apart from equity the enablement is also a part of open source in my mind. So my former colleague Pablo used to make his reference to this saying of standing on the shoulder of giants. So basically I imagine this work where folks build upon others work. They don't have to solve all the problems themselves but also they also give back what problems they have solved. So anyone who could enable through it and build software that allows that. And with that kind of extended in course definition I would like to share, I did a bit of lame analysis on my own. How the community of Germany does and I would like to share some numbers. I'm not saying these are good numbers or bad numbers, I actually do not know. But when I looked at our flagship software project they called Wikibase. We had a bit more than 1200 commits or contributions this year. And out of those seven folks have made contributions who are not non-Wikimedia staff and they made 75 contributions there. So this is less than a percent there. And when I look at our GitHub organization we have 54 members there and I looked at what those folks have been doing. Myself included in 2023 so far. And those users or eight of them made 130 contributions to non-Wikimedia related projects. I myself apparently didn't do none as well. So I think it cannot help the feeling that we as Wikimedia Germany could be doing better than that. So I did a bit of with my colleagues and my peers in the community we did a bit of analysis what we're doing and being a software engineer and other practitioners at heart. I couldn't think or couldn't help approaching it a bit like retrospective. So I will share four highlights. There were many takeaways but given the short time I have I will limit to just a few. So I kind of framed it in the framework of dropout, keep, improve retrospective if you know the format. So the thing that seems to me like is the most pressing issue or the biggest anchor for us that stops us from being more open source that we are so far is falling this not invented huge trap. So you might know it or not but for many reasons very often quite well well these are valid requirements or valid reasons but sometimes they might be excuses. So often we because of security or performance or we think we have special requirements we wouldn't use the software which exists there but we will build our own solution for a problem at hand. And while again this is oftentimes justified what it also results we built the software that no one else uses in their project so we basically build that maybe the best software in the world but this is just for us and also we are not making that much of upstream contributions because then again we don't base our work on someone else's work so there is no upstream to contribute to. And a related thing that I would like us as Wikimedia or Wikimedia Germany to changes open up for a perspective for more than a single maintainer organization. So we are in a setting that we are a single maintainer organization which makes maybe easy for us to fall in this not invented here think as well because we do not make the vision or what the software or the projects should be explicit. So as long as it serves our purpose is fine but we are not clear about it. So that makes makes it hard for others to understand how to contribute or what do I want to get from the software? So if we made the we allowed other perspectives who would then define what is the vision for the software it would also be easier for folks to contribute because they will understand what kind of things are needed what contributors maybe will be welcome what stuff makes zero sense to work on because nobody cares about it. And there was a quite interesting talk a few minutes ago about giving compensation to open source contributors. I think this is a very important topic but I think there's opposite side of spectrum that we ended up at some point in our history. So basically Wikimedia has hired almost all contributors that existed there. And I think that helps to burn out or basically limit your contributor base quite significantly because it's easier for folks to drop out if there are staff members and if that's all the contributors exist you end up again in the kind of software which is in its own cycle and no one else is contributing to it or using it. Thing that I would like to give a shout out to my colleagues at Wikimedia Germany is supporting or helping build up those self organized groups that use the software or try to build the software. I give an example of Wikibay stakeholder group there. They are very good because Wikimedia Germany is a member there but we are not exclusive leaders so this is kind of going towards what I was saying in the previous slide. So there's multiple parties who have some interest in the software. They have an idea that they can articulate what they want the software to do. And that could lead to a bit more meaningful space for contributors. So this is kind of a step towards improving what we are missing that I think we should continue doing. And out of many things that I think we could be improving or should be improving is I will highlight the overly complicated software architecture. So I think Niti Rath also mentioned in her keynote earlier today that one of the things that are important for open source is making it easy for developers. That's exactly the point I'm trying to drive here. So our software has grown off their ears. You might know that as well. You have a kind of big model that would grow for a decade or multiple. It's hard to reason to contribute. But I think in our case it's hard to get paid stuff on board. It takes multiple months for people to be meaningfully fluent in what they're doing. So there might be even harder for folks who are not paid to work nine to five on that thing. And that's basically is a massive barrier of entry that software architecture is important for many things but in this case I think the barrier of entry is the thing I would like to flag. And I think I ran out of time by two minutes but thankfully I could start earlier. So that was it for me. I'm looking forward to hearing your stories. I'm also happy to discuss those points more with you folks throughout the conference. Thanks very much for listening. Have a lovely time in Bilbao and enjoy the conference. Thank you very much.