So, let me ask you a simple question. How many of you have used LibreOffice? The chances are that if you're a Linux user, that's the only office suit that you would be using. There are so many other office suits that you can use on Linux, but this is the most popular one. And even if you're on Mac OS or Windows, there is a possibility that you have used LibreOffice in subcapacity, you have heard about it, or you're already using it right now, just the way I am using it. I use all three platforms, Mac OS, Linux, and Windows, and I use LibreOffice on all these three platforms. As you know, LibreOffice has been in development for a very long time. I have been actually covering LibreOffice since day one, when it was announced. Actually, if you go to the Document Foundation Viki page, you will find that I am one of the first journalists who talked to them. So I've been writing about it since the very beginning. It's really amazing how much work they have done in all these years, because they inherited a lot of code from OpenOffice, and they kind of modernize all that code and everything, so there's a lot of work. A few days ago, a new version of LibreOffice came out, it's LibreOffice 6.0, and I wrote about it for the Linux Pro magazine. It's an amazing release. I've been using it on my system, and it's kind of, you know, from the UI perspective, it has a ribbon interface. I don't know how many of you like it. I love it, because as a writer, I need quick access to all the tools, so I can very easily choose the tool that I want, and I have this 4K 32-inch monitor, so I don't really care about the space that much. I have ample space there, so I love it. And then there is something called Collabra productivity. I don't know how many of you have heard of it. But it's a UK-based company that creates or sells LibreOffice-based products, and that's what a very common practice in the open source world, you know, where you have a fully open source project, and then you have a commercial offering around that project. So Collabra productivity offers, I think, two products. One is an online suite, which is called Collabra Online, and then they offer a desktop suite, which is based on LibreOffice, so both these versions are based on LibreOffice. So what they do is that they kind of customize a bit for the enterprise customers, and they offer full support and SLAs around these products. So once you get LibreOffice through them as their branded product, you get all the support that you would expect, you know, around an enterprise-grade solution. And a lot of companies and a lot of organizations in Europe, they use it. So I talked to Michael Meeks, he's general manager of Collabra productivity. He has been involved with LibreOffice since very early days, days before that. He has worked with Suzy and all those companies, and then he has been working on this office suite since, you know, very early on, and he has been an open source developer. I love talking to Michael. He's an amazing guy. I met him, I think, twice at Fosdham, and I've known him ever since. And whenever a new release of OpenOffice, and whenever a new release of LibreOffice or Collabra comes out, I always talk to him. So in this interview, we are going to talk about LibreOffice, what's new there, we'll talk about Collabra online and Collabra suite, what's new there, what are the kind of new things that you can expect from the productivity suite, what kind of market is there, and a lot of other things. So without further ado, let's talk to Michael. Michael, before we start this interview, I mean, I have known you for so long, but just for the sake of our audiences, can you quickly introduce yourself to that? What are you doing there? I'm Michael Meeks. I'm a Christian hacker, a Christian husband hacker, something like that. You know, you've got to get these three words in the right order. And yeah, so I spend my time working on LibreOffice primarily. I'm also the general manager of Collabra productivity, which is a subsidiary of Collabra that does, well, I guess, LibreOffice development and tries to drive that. Before that, I was at Novell, and Souza, and Zimian before that doing awesome stuff in the free software desktop. So you know me, Evolution, and of course, OpenOffice back in those days, too. So lots of stuff around office documents as well. Right. Since you mentioned this is totally office script, you know, since you mentioned three things, and I do know, you know, you said Christian hacker and husband, right? I don't know the exact order. But how are these three related? Because I can very easily understand your religion and spiritualism when you mix that with open source. Actually, that's not community, serving help others, helping others. So is there any correctional and husband? Of course, you are taking care of family and open source can be a big family. So, yes, I think it's important to get your priorities and life in a sensible order, isn't it? And so, you know, I think, yeah, so I think I became a Christian in my gap. Yeah, I suppose. And and it was fun because I used to program sort of with stolen compilers. You know, I'd write assemble games and well, yeah, everything was kind of pinched on my machine from the operating system upwards. And it's funny, isn't it? How I don't know, God put his finger on this one thing in my life that was probably irrelevant to anyone else I met. Like, I don't think anyone else I knew was even concerned about copyright, you know, and any of these things at all. But this was the thing and it was a real struggle, like, you know, why? But eventually I switched to this Linux thing. It was just terrible at the time. It was, I don't know, 95, 96 and it destroyed my hardware.  And there was no games on it. You couldn't write UI. But, you know, anyway, I persisted over time. And, yeah, so I met a whole lot of cool people on whose coattails I have, you know, managed to to write, which is absolutely brilliant. And so my very good for my career. But, yeah, and then, of course, my wife is very, very important to me. You know, she's the power behind the scenes. The thing that makes possible to this. And, yeah, and then I like hacking, I guess. For your name. That's all the holes. OK, good. Yeah, I when I finish my journalism, I joined the Linux for you magazine and I have been like covering Linux open sources my first day of journalism. So I've been doing it over, you know, years. And, you know, as you rightly said, I used to call it beer mode when I drink beer at night and I will know all the time I'll end up formatting my hard drive and my my friend. And the next day we'll try to restore it.  You're always experimenting. You're always learning new things. So, of course, you know, and you're playing at the hardware or sorry, file system level.  Yeah, absolutely. But I mean, I think this is quite one of those quite interesting things where it actually wasn't even the disk.  The actual hardware was burnt out by the kernel. You know, like, so the disk no longer functioned, which is which is pretty bad when you were kind of a young student. But anyway, we got past that. And now, you know, when I I continue to cover Linux, but my whole, you know, coverage is also evolved. And now, whenever I go to any enterprise event, it's everywhere is Linux. So my job has become very hard to keep up with all these technologies.  Yeah. So so let's let's start with the LibreOffice 6 was released recently. And and then, you know, you have announced the Collabra Office Suite. It's Collabra Online. That's what it's called, right? What is the name of the product? Yes, yes, absolutely. Collabra Online. Yeah. So how much so what's the new in this release? Can you talk about that? Sure, sure, sure. So I mean, there's just a whole load of things there. And I think what you say about Linux going everywhere is just so true. And I think one of the slightly sad things, I think Karen Sandler was saying this in one of the Oscom keynotes, is that if you look back in the day, in order to use Linux, you had to be some kind of self-semi-masochistic, self-sacrificial person. You know, you were passionate about it because of software freedom and that it was important. And these days, you know, I think there's a very low tolerance for things not working. You know, and oh, well, I have to use a Mac because insert very minor problem that, you know, most of us would have suffered with and helped fix back in the day. It seems a bit of a shame. But yeah, so I think there's a little shallowness now in the open source of a lot that's missing. So, yeah, six zero, LibreOffice six zero. Well, it has lots of cool new stuff in it. So I think. Where do I start? I think one of the problems with LibreOffice is that it's so large that, you know, you can't revolutionize one part of it in, you know, in a single release cycle. But there's some pretty cool things like, so I don't know, the open PGP integration is pretty nice. There's a document rotation there from at CIB as a whole way to open XML improvements. So starting to have a smart art implementation for some of the pieces that hopefully that will evolve. EPUB export is really useful for a whole lot of people that like, you know, the benefits, those open standards, Quark Express. I mean, just another thing that's nice, I guess, is the EMF plus filter. So when you have lots of embedded objects in Word documents, instead of showing you the object, they show you a preview of it because often it can be slow to load the object and render it. So much better show you a preview. But the preview is essentially a Windows API dump of how that would be drawn on Windows, which is called EMF or EMF plus. So the original EMF is just a dump of the GDI calls, I guess, system calls, which comes, GDI is really ancient, like Windows 16 had this, you know, Windows 1.0, you know, I guess started with this GDI rendering API. And then GDI plus is the more recent one. Either way, EMF plus is just a lot better now. So lots of corner cases fixed, much better previews and renderings and so on. But it's quite funny. You have to bring all of that Windows rendering stuff effectively into your platform to be able to show these Microsoft documents. Obviously not ideal from an open standards perspective. But we're getting a lot better than that. Right. So these are the features you're talking about LibreOffice 6.0, right? This is 6.0. Yeah, LibreOffice 6.0. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But but but I'm also curious about what's new in the Culebra. Three point, is it 3.1 or 3.0? Yeah, absolutely. So Culebra 3.0, so Culebra Online is is bringing LibreOffice to your browser, I suppose, and well, more specifically, Culebra Office. And the key things in 3.0 is trying to break this paradox. So at the moment, you can have an online office suite. But if you use it, it's terribly feature pull. So and if you start to look at, for example, Office.com or play with Office 365, you know, there are a whole lot of things you can't do that are really frustrating. And so a lot of these things look like an extended advert for the offline PC version anyway, like you can't do this, try it in the PC version, you can't do this, try it in the PC version. Simple stuff like just editing a chart, you know, like if you if you want to edit a chart and position legends and things, this is just not possible in Microsoft Office online products. See, so what we're trying to do is we're trying to break all of the richness of LibreOffice into your browser. So you don't have to choose. Do I want, you know, online collaboration browser deployment? Or do I want features? You can actually have all of them. So yeah, that's I guess where we're going. And so 3.0 brings a whole load of dialogues there around rich paragraph formatting, rich, rich functionality, you know, in a whole load of areas, you know, rich cell formatting and bringing functions that just not there in the browser elsewhere. If that makes sense. No, that makes perfect sense. So it's a start. We will continue doing this. Those are all well, you know, increasing the amount of service. Yeah, because I was comparing the because there is a demo available that, you know, I was comparing that with Google Docs and Office 365. And of course, you know, it's like kind of you cannot even tell the emotion and sentiments that, you know, you are literally running LibreOffice on, you know, in a cloud in a cloud based environment, because it frees, you know, you from from being attached to a platform, you can move easily.  So so let's just keep it simple.  So how much of these features are actually coming from what users need, because you are compared to LibreOffice community, you actually have being users, you know, you are not just throwing out features, what you think you are, you are you are actually responding to what your customers want. So what kind of what kind of demand or what kind of feature request is there major features that your customers need? We have a case study on Astor Hospital, which is a large hospital in the UK. And they're moving to Colabra office, I guess, Gov Office on their PCs. There's about eight and a half thousand users there. And they're they're saving that they're going to avoid costs of around a million million pounds or so. You can go and read up my slides from the LibreOffice conference. And they have a lot of a lot of interesting problems. So a lot of them interoperability corner cases, you know, their automated system generates open XML in a pre standardization dialect. And hey, we didn't support this, right? So, you know, go support that. So you do or we produce time sheets and the time sheets, you just have to delete any blank rows, because if you don't, when they go into an automated system to get paid, you don't get paid. And, you know, so we have to add permissions that allow people to delete rows, but not, you know, sort of make the permissions more granular. So stuff like that. Another one is amusing is mail merge. And this is a feature in LibreOffice 6. So, you know, I think it's already a bad idea to mail merge from anything isn't a database, right? You should you should store that. And so spreadsheets that some people use spreadsheets for storing their address books. It turns out other people use writer documents like a table, you know, in a word processing document to store their address list. Well, now we can mail merge from those as well. You know, so again, just user user input wanting those features, terminal server optimizations for large businesses that have particular use cases. So yeah, we fix stuff. Obviously, for our customers, we love to delight them. That's what we're here for. And yeah, so lots of our work is, is customer driven, just fast amounts. Right. And you mentioned this hospital. So are they using the online version? Or are they using your other collaborators? They're currently using the PC version. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. But we have, we have other hospitals, actually, two hospitals on the continent that aren't approved, you know, they haven't allowed us to, you know, say who they are, that they're actually using, using the collaborative line. Right. Yeah, because as you see, there is a trend going on more and more, you know, people are moving towards the cloud, because now you can have your own private cloud with open stack.  Of course. And that's a huge benefit of collaborate online, you know, continuing to control your server, your data, your network, I mean, all of these things are really quite important to make sure it's not going out of the building.  And now it seems to be increasingly the case that people don't, they don't even care where the data is, or how they control it. And who shares the machine. So we've seen with the meltdown specter things that it's not just where the data is, it's just who else is running on that same piece of hardware because they can be exfiltrating with data in all sorts of weird ways. So I think just being able to control that and bring that in houses gives you great degree of confidence. Great. Yeah. The adoption of open stack is growing a lot in Europe. And Europe is also one of those, you know, places where you can, you know, think about privacy and all those things are very, very. So with this adoption of, you know, this public private cloud, do you also see growing kind of interest in collaboration online there? Do you see any kind of change in the market? So we see lots of people who are very interested in collaboration online. So we try and partner with people, you know, our preferred approach to market is to go to market with partners. And we have a number of those. We see lots of interest in, you know, you know, the privacy benefits of being able to control your data, partnerships recently with Dell, I think, and a number of other, you know, keep you look at our site. I mean, of course, next cloud in cloud, a PIDOC file will be four of the open source people we partner with. And we, you know, we love to serve those customers and integrate with them. I think there's a whole bit of sort of OEM integrations to where people want a Microsoft office embedded. And they've got some legacy PC version written in VB or something. And then they think about, well, we need to move to the cloud to provide this, you know, much more widely and expand our scope and reduce all those installation problems and so on. But then how are we going to deal with this office piece? And so we see some customers who are like, oh, well, what we want is someone to show us a spreadsheet, select a range, integrate that with our database system and so on. So that's, that's, there's some whole bit of nice use cases there, too, around sort of offices or service, you know, in this, this embedded box that we provide. So from collaborators, you know, as a company's perspective, which is a, like, launch here, like the desktop market or the cloud based? Because you offer both. Sure, we offer both. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think lots of people are interested in the PC piece. And so by, by revenue or by interest, you know. So I think we have to live in the real world there with this. Exactly. That's what I tried to understand, you know. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think there's probably a lot more people interested in the PC, in the online version, obviously as a strategic direction to go in. I think the cloud is very attractive to lots and lots of people. I think from a bread and butter business, you know, in business down the five years doing your office, I think the PC version is still okay. It's still indulging. Although there's an interesting third part of that market where people are using a server use of LibreOffice already. So they're generating documents, they're doing all sorts of automation with it. Okay. And that's another chunk of our business, right? Yeah. So let me talk about desktop space. That's why I wanted to understand so that I can next question could be a piece of that. The thing is that you're literally looking at Microsoft's market. So a lot of people, if they're using Collabora, they have to move their workloads to LibreOffice based solution. And it's not like, you know, you just format the hard drive, install it done. I think it's a process of migration and mindset and everything else. So do you also assist companies in that or they just buy your product and done? Yeah, that's a really good question. Obviously we want to help people migrate in a sustainable way. So they get those cost benefits and they get the minimum of hassle and fuss. And to do that, we have partners. So we partner with a large number of people who are experienced at exactly this. And we try not to get too involved in that process. We can train people to help do that. Of course, the Document Foundation has a certified migration professional scheme as well that can help, you know, give people confidence that they are actually choosing someone's done this before, which is very, very helpful. I think our key recommendation there is to, so when we talk to people, they realize that probably the alternatives are overfeatured for what they want.  But I think probably the piece they miss is that you should install Collabor Office, Libre Office everywhere. So sometimes they go, oh, well, we'll just install, you know, Collabor Office in this section, but we'll leave Microsoft Office here. The problem then comes with which formats do you interoperate.  It's a real problem. And it's no surprise that it has spikes and bumps around the edge of its shadow, you know. And so this causes grief. So what we really encourage people to do is install Collabor Office everywhere, exchange ODF documents and keep those problematic documents, you know, maybe there's some horrendous HR system that's an integration of Microsoft Office and some VB stuff and sometimes a screen scraping of an HP Arc's mainframe, like we see this in the real world. Keep that guy, but don't don't send the files around. And often we find that the files, the huge accountancy files or, you know, spreadsheet say in Excel are not ones that are mailed to everyone in the company, which sits in the sort of self self isolating into islands, which is great. And so, you know, we see, for example, there's a bank in Italy, the third one of the three biggest banks in Italy. And you know, 20,000 seats of Collabor Office for all of their branch offices, which is great.  So but that works well with again, huge cost savings. I mean, just very impressive. And the second piece of the same question is that so when somebody buys from subscribes or buys from Collabra, what kind of service do you they actually get, you know, so it depends to some degree what you buy, what we try and encourage people to buy is the product. And that then comes with a whole load of product management integration, they can file as many bugs as they like. But we don't commit to fixing those immediately. If you want to an SLA on those bug fixes, so engineers start working on your issue immediately, we provide that too. But so then, you know, the base product has, you know, security bug fixes, maintenance and so on. And we try to build a relationship with those customers and clearly the big of the customer, the more we put into it. And unlike many other companies, you know, we have an open source mission of Collabra. You know, we want to actually make open source rock. That's basically the focus. So your money goes into improving, you know, Collabra office, Libra office by extension, everything we do goes upstream. So, yeah, you know, it's, it's, it's really, it's really exciting to build that relationship with the customer and improve Libra office in ways that help them.  It's just exciting. The new version of Libra office is out. Do you also help them in upgrading because it's not because it's a lot of data is attached to of course, of course. So we try and make sure that the new versions, of course, are, you know, backwards compatible and work really well. We tend to ship an enterprise supported version which doesn't come out can aligned with the Libra office schedule. So we, we have an annual schedule for our supported version. So we're still on five three will be moving to six zero sometime early this year, perhaps. But so we do a whole load of extra work on top of that to try and, you know, try and make sure the customers get a very good experience. And yeah, so we do help with that. We also provide MSP patches. So if you're deployed a large windows estate, it's very easy to manage and upgrade and, you know, configure those, which helps people. Right. And do you like, okay, like honestly, do you really think that Libra office or Collabra is really ready for the, I mean, you have a lot of customers who are using it? Do you think it like really, really ready? And why should customers move to to to it instead of using the same age old, which is actually becoming subscription based. So it's also so I mean, we see increasingly large numbers of people doing this. I think often the driver for the PC version is cost saving. I think the online version is much more around privacy and control and service and support and having a real relationship.  I think it's a bit sad that people get this idea that it is what it is and you have to live with it, you know, because it's software, right? It's infinitely flexible and we can make it better and better. And so we do, you know, so it's great to see that, you know, if this is your top help desk problem. And I like to remember Clippy, you know, the paper clip, which sort of hindered people from from doing their work for months and months and months and removing this thing, turning it off, which was actually not possible in the first releases. It's just a single flag. It's a boolean. It's a compile time check.  And one of the things we found is that a lot of people actually would really value a an inflection point where they need to do some training. We're constantly seeing documents produced by experienced professionals that show they don't understand their office suite and actually giving them an excuse to go to a training session and asking silly questions and being shown stuff is actually common to all office suites. I can really improve their productivity and their acceptance of the product. So yeah, I think it's ready. It's ready. Go get it. Capture that when the other people are capturing and get a great relationship. Yeah, I think yeah, because that the how they create, because you know, it's they can create so many ways, but that's also leads to a lot of incompatibility or, you know, issues in the future. So training is, I mean, when you're upgrading or migrating or whatever you're doing, it how you created, you can use a tab or a space or you can do so many different things to. Absolutely. So I think there's some things there just, but I think just having a good understanding of how to quickly use your office suite and to use styles and to format documents that look pretty and you can change how they look and so on. It is a really useful thing. I think if you're generating documents in the Libre Office, they are more likely to be better documents into a great better in both directions. Just because of the subset of the tools we provide, just lean in that direction, quite quite strongly. Right. Now, one more question, while we are still talking about, you know, the desktop market is that, and this could be uncomfortable question, but I've been covering industry for a long time. So it's when is the year of the next desktop swap? No, I know you guys. No, no, no, it's not. Yeah. So the thing is that historically, when we look at open source, it has always been to create alternatives, you know, whether it was Red Hat or whatever it was, you know, there was a big market and what open source does what it commoditizes everything, you know, and it so a lot of people get involved. And for a long time, it was just chasing other, you know, products or, you know, services which are there's a Linux with Unix over it. But now things are changing, like Kubernetes has come out. There was nothing which was like Kubernetes and a lot of innovation nowadays are happening in the open source world, even if companies do work like Google open source TensorFlow, you know, and a lot of things companies do work, they throw it in open source so that, you know, let's let's build it together. So from from Libre office's point of view, are you still chasing Microsoft's market?  So can you talk about that? Yeah, so it's a really good question.  I think it's easy to look at open source and it's easy to look at the office market and to think that everything goes one way. But actually, I mean, there are some just huge, huge innovations that changing changing the market they've gone completely the other way. So I think, you know, the open XML file format in a zip file, for example, you know, where you can actually start to interact with the document structure and generate things and integrate with other systems in a clean way. It's just a, you know, it's just a it's really revolutionary in terms of document creation and processing. And that's clearly come from, you know, open document format and the, you know, the open source projects that back that you see other things, you know, like remote controls for slide presentations, you know, standing in front of people and using your phone to see what's going on and using this laser pointed song.  So I think there's a sort of kind of a mixing bowl of, you know, ideas and ways people do things. And yeah, so I'm pretty excited. I think there's a lot to do here. A lot of innovation possible. So yeah, I think open source can provide some distinctive advantages here. Yeah, but the thing is you're based on document or creating documents. So what new thing we can do with? Oh, yes. Well, that's also you know, what you think can we do with documents? Well, that is a good question. And so I think there are all sorts of crazy things that we can do. I mean, one of the things collaborators are interested in is virtual reality. I was actually about to talk about because I think your CEO is yeah, Philippe Philippe is CEO, I guess of our parent company, which is which is collaborators doing lots of consultancy for all sorts of awesome stuff across the scenes from you know, in vehicle, you know, car systems through no, don't put document creation in the Tesla's because people will not be driving their car. They will just be working on the spreadsheets. There's a little paint application. I was just watching Jeremy Clarkson use whilst automatic driving. But you know, when you can take your hands off the wheel, why not? Yeah, so yeah, talk about VR. Yeah, you're talking about VR. Yeah. So, you know, the thing is that I don't know what's going to happen in the future. You know, there's so many interface choices coming down on there. One of the things I'm excited about is Missila's deep speech, you know, providing audio input and speech recognition for this kind of application. And that's really awesome because I think as a strategic open source project, you know, we are so suckered into send your voice to the cloud, have a device in your house always listening and pushing speech out. But I think, you know, I'm really thrilled, actually, Missila's putting money into that and making it and encourage people to go and provide their voice. So one of the problems with AI is donating, finding the data sets. These are really expensive.  And then there's a big blob of weights that go into this magic brain and it does cool stuff. But how do you get those weights? And so, you know, trying to build open data sets that help people train and learn is really cool.  So I think that that's a really interesting direction to go in. And I'm really hopeful that we won't have an Amazon Echo and a Google thing and something else all listening to us at once and a Cortana and a, you know, but we can actually have something we can control and lock down and understand and know what's happening with our data. So I think that's one area that I'm excited about. Of course, VR is, you know, I don't know, there are so many directions the computer industry goes in all at once, which will succeed. We have a limited investment capability, but it's communities investment is unlimited in theory. So if you're interested, we want to work on this for making LibreOffice better in any of these areas. Grab me, talk to me. We'd love to help you get working on something cool. Right. From a user's perspective as I also write science fiction and my own, when I look at any productivity suite, whether it's LibreOffice or pages, because I use all platforms just to keep myself updated. I don't want to live in a cave. Very sensible. Yeah. So one thing that I like about Google Docs or MacOS platform is that I can very easily use references or contact, like for example, whether I'm looking at a word, not only just the meaning of the word, but I can, you know, it also opens a snippet from the Wikipedia where I can see what it means.  So these kind of features, you know, I mean, I'm just thinking that definitely a lot of scope is there, but I think all it needs is the engagement with the actual user's community and people comment. Yeah. And I think those things are key for keeping you in the flow. So when you're editing a document, probably the worst thing you can do is go and look in a web browser because immediately you'll be reading the news, the Twitter, there's something, all right. And you're doomed. I just get one notification and after half an hour I realized that why am I on my phone? I was still not done anything. You know, yeah, I don't know. I didn't know this is a new experience.  But but he was, of course, absorbed in some maths textbook, you know, looking at some, you know, I don't know.  It's just so, yeah. So those kind of feature really cool in, you know, and of course I would love to have a VR where I can, I mean, because I don't want to use this 15 inch or 32 inch screen, you know, when I can just open a dock here in virtual reality, work on it using the virtual keyboard, close the dock and go back to what I'm doing. It will be awesome. That's my like kind of, yeah, I mean, I've never, I think about it. I think, oh, that would be the future. I would really want just to wear some, not Google glasses, but something better. Yeah. Saves buying lots of high res screens if you can take one with you. And I think in terms of the internet of things, it's quite interesting to you in terms of providing, yeah, you know, monitoring and sensor information and you know, you can't put a screen on everything. It's just too expensive, but you can put a little Bluetooth chip in it that can talk to your glasses, isn't it? I think there's a lot of innovation possible there. I like to focus on something and get it to work well and my customers are not currently asking me for. A virtual reality, yes. I know, I know, and I know the innovators dilemma and I know that if I don't do all sorts of awesome things then I'm like, but my hip is that other people in the free software ecosystem will prototype and play with all of these things. Yeah, as little as Torval says, while everybody is looking at the stars, I have to look at the potholes, you know, and see the potholes that should, otherwise you will be just, you know, you cannot keep looking at the stars. Somebody has to fix their road also. So that's the kind of work you are doing, you know, keeping making sure that you have a productivity suit that is working fine without any... Definitely, definitely. And I mean, for all of the talk of tablets and mobiles and all these things, I still think people need keyboards to create content. This is something interesting because initially when I talked to Italo and I was like, oh, we need a version for Android, but honestly speaking, even if I have an iPad Pro, I don't use it to create documents. I always want to go to my laptop or my... It's okay if I'm in a plane and I just want to read a document, but if I really... And reading a document means you have to work on it, you know, so I always prefer either go to my desktop or a laptop. So I think, yeah, I don't think there should be too much focus on that, but desktop version should be totally... I think online version is even more important than mobile version. Yeah, yeah. So I think the online version for a PC user with a keyboard to create content and collaboration. I mean, the collaboration is brilliant. I use collaboration online at times of the day. We do product management ranking in it, in spreadsheets and finance staff and we're often miniting calls together and this little thing. It's nice to share your minutes as you write them so people can check they're not too slanted. And yeah, it's a great tool for that. And that's where the actual competition in the market itself is with the Google Docs or Office 365 where people can control without having... Because cloud offers a lot of flexibility, but it also compromises on your ownership of the data. So with Colabra, you get both the best of both worlds. Yeah. Any other... Ownership control features works. Yeah, exactly. Any other words to wrap it up? Well, what else? Yeah, try it out. Grabcode, it's free. You can get it online. It's really awesome, get involved. Have a play with LibreOffice. Get involved in the community. There's so many things people can do. I mean, just running the latest test builds is useful. Getting involved with filing bugs, de-duplicating other people's bugs, getting better prioritization for the developers, all sorts of stuff. And of course, the simple code tasks too, easy hacks on LibreOffice are a great way to get involved. And then there's some real heavy lifting that can be done too, if you wanna really get involved with the project. So yeah, it's great fun and some good people involved. So yeah, get stuck in. Yeah, I do know a lot of great people who are involved with it. So you don't have to do that. Because I've been monitoring LibreOffice from the day zero before it was announced. I still have on the LibreOffice doc wiki page, that Swapna Bhatia was the first journalist to interview the team. So yeah. Awesome. Well, your support is much appreciated, Swapna. Thank you for your hard work. Yeah, thanks. And keep working on this. And I know I'll be looking forward to the next version of it with all those cool features. And once again, thanks for your time and we'll look forward to meeting you again. Yeah, absolutely pleasure. Well, thanks, Swapna. Bye, guys. Bye. Thanks for watching. I think that was a great interview. As usual, it's always fun to talk to Michael. And I want to say thanks to all of you who have subscribed to this channel, who have joined me on Patreon. If you don't know, a few days ago, I started Patreon channel. And it's not a very big channel. It's very tiny because I have not promoted it at all. I have a lot of contacts, but I have never talked to any of my friends about my Patreon. Because I'm still putting content there. And at the same time, I have some kind of personal issues. Like we had flu and everything. So I'm kind of recovering from that. But a lot of big open source events are coming up. And that's where I'll be promoting this Patreon. And the new site that I'm working on, TFIR, I'm sure you have heard of it. I'll be promoting these products and those events heavily. So you'll see a lot of support there. But whoever is already on Patreon supporting me there, thank you so much. Everybody who has subscribed to this channel, thank you so much. And if you like my work, if you're already not on Patreon, please consider becoming a patron and support me there so that I can continue to create these videos. You know, it's an expensive project. And this is my full-time job. The more support I get for this channel and for the site, the more work I'll put there because it pays my bills. So whatever pays, I will write for other magazine. Once again, all I write is open source. So whether I write somewhere else or write here, it's the same thing. The only difference is here I have a lot more freedom to talk about things that I want to talk about, like talking to Michael, which may not be possible but a lot of you know, enterprise magazines. So this gives me all the freedom to talk about open source and free software technologies across the board, not just enterprise. I actually collaborate as enterprise-grade technology. So anyway, the point is that it gives me the freedom to talk about everything that I want to talk about and the thing that I want you want to hear about. So please consider supporting me there. And once again, thanks for watching. See you in the next video. Bye for now.


Are you as obsessed about Peachette and Bowsette as I am? Judging by my Twitter feed, you probably are. Bowsette has gained a phenomenal fan base very, very quickly, despite, let's face it, not actually being an official Mario character. This all stems from Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe, a port of a Wii U game that's heading to the Switch with some unique changes. Toadette is now a playable character, and by grabbing a crown power-up she can transform herself into Princess Peach, or a variation thereof. I guess they don't call their Princess Toadstool for nothing. Many of you have been trying to figure out how this works. How can a humble Toad metamorphosize, or in the words of Pokemon, evolve, into the ruler of the Mushroom Kingdom? Is Peach herself a Toad that has reached her max level and morphed into her final form? Is this simply a title that's passed from one princess to another? Is Princess Peach basically Tim Allen from the Santa Claus movie? If something should happen to her put on the suit the mushrooms will know what to do. And if so, how did Daisy and Rosalina factor into all this? Or Baby Peach for that matter? Even more interesting though, has been the question of what happens if other characters specifically Bowser were to grab the power-up, hence Bowsette, the internet's latest and greatest obsession. An explanation of the working of all this seems unlikely. In a game series where green dinosaurs can swallow enemies before birthing them out as eggs, I don't think we'll ever get clarification on how Toadette will become Peachette. Personally, I'm far more interested in the changes that Peachette will make to New Super Mario Bros. You. This is a massive step forward for the series as a whole, and what looks like a bizarre addition to the game could actually fix one of the biggest problems with Nintendo's 2D multiplayer platforms. New Super Mario Bros. You was the very first game I bought for the Wii U. I actually bought it before we got a Wii U. I was buying a 2DS in order to play Pokemon X, and New Super Mario Bros. You was on sale for just £15 new, and I thought, eh, why not? And so, about a year later, when Breton Stripes got a Wii U and Mario Kart 8 for her birthday, we had a second game to play together as well. Except, Breton Stripes didn't really care for it, so I played most of New Super Mario Bros. You by myself, and I have to say, it's not exactly the most original game that Nintendo has ever put out. Sure, there are some neat ideas in here, and some fun platforming mechanics that I enjoyed well enough at the time. I recognise Yoshiaki Koizumi's trademark approach to inventive gameplay ideas, as each stage introduces a new concept before making it increasingly difficult as the player is tested. But I can't help but feel that New Super Mario Bros. You is simply more of the same. By the time I got my hands on this game, I'd already played my fill of New Super Mario Bros. on the DS, and New Super Mario Bros. Wii. I consider both of those games to be fairly interchangeable. There's not much to separate them in terms of world design, art style, or play mechanics. If you've seen one New Super Mario Bros. game, you've seen them all. Except, of course, for New Super Mario Bros. 2, which has the distinction of simply being filled with coins and therefore incredibly boring. It's a good game for teaching the dangers of inflation, I suppose, as suddenly all currency and extra lives are meaningless. If I had to try and pick something that makes New Super Mario Bros. You different from the other games that have come before, it's possibly the presence of Yoshi, although I can't say that I think the character adds all that much to the gameplay. He might well have turned up in a previous title in the series and I simply didn't notice. Even if New Super Mario Bros. You is the first game to feature Yoshi, it's not like we haven't seen Yoshi before. As I've already established, the eggy dinosaur is a staple of the series, and unless he's hanging out around the top of Peach's castle in Mario 64, his presence in a game isn't really all that noteworthy. Personally, I wonder why Nintendo would even bother bringing New Super Mario Bros. You to the Switch. It seemed like it would take just as much effort to bring Mario and make it to the platform, and that game actually offers something players can't get anywhere else. But then comes Toadette, and we finally get something new. Now obviously Toadette isn't completely new. She's been showing up semi-regularly since her original debut in the best Mario Kart game, Double Dash. She's one of the best characters in that game, by the way. She and Toad get the special king mushroom item that blasts you through the level and nothing can beat it, except maybe the chain chomp that Baby Mario and Luigi get. Wow, this game series feels strange sometimes. But by joining New Super Mario Bros. You, Toadette brings a new character to a platforming series that is in desperate need of a shake-up. The character roster for the New Super Mario games has always been eye-rollingly uninspired. Nintendo needed four characters for the Wii version of this game. So we got Mario and Luigi naturally and Toad because, sure, why not? And then another Toad. Hmm. I'm not sure what caused Nintendo to think that this was ever a good idea. Here we have a game where two of the characters are classic Mario characters and are well-defined with distinct personalities. And the other two are just random NPCs, given a chance at the big leagues, but never actually given their own names. They're simply Yellow Toad and Blue Toad. Or at least they are to the casual observer, like me. I'm sure they probably have a much more extensive backstory for those who've been paying attention, but even at its most deep, the Mario series is hardly fire emblem. Perhaps that's why Nintendo figured they could get away with simply throwing in two Toads for the third and fourth player characters in the games. This isn't a series that really cares that much about the story. Of course, the notably absent character in all this is Princess Peach herself. Traditionally, when four characters are needed for a Mario platformer, we get Mario, Luigi, Toad, and Peach. But this was a style of play that was chosen based on adapting another title, Doki Doki Panic, for a Western release. And yes, I said Doki Doki and not Doki Doki. The Western Super Mario Bros. 2 is an aberration and not generally seen part of the standard Mario gameplay canon, even if Peach did end up adopting her floaty jump from the game forever. Originally, the new Super Mario Bros. games were dreamed up as a return to the classic formula of Mario gameplay, and this meant making Peach the damsel in distress, locking her away in a cage while Mario and Luigi save the day. If you've seen some of our previous videos on Amy Rose in the Sonic franchise, you may be able to guess where my argument is heading here, but bear with me. But the new Super Mario Bros. series doesn't feel so new anymore. What once was the nostalgia trip, novel in its retro charm, has now been revisited again and again and again. Princess Peach has been kidnapped in four new Super Mario Bros. games, making this whole plot woefully predictable. But Toadette changes this. First off, she adds another playable character to the lineup, so we're not just dealing with two interchangeable toads. There's a bigger conversation here to be had around the token female and the often-cited Smurfette principle, but I'm going to leave that to one side for today. The other benefit to Toadette is that she gives Princess Peach a more hands-on proactive role in her own story. Peach is one of the most iconic famous characters in video games. Her fame borders on that of a Disney princess, which is saying a lot. Especially if you've ever seen the inside of my house. Princesses, princesses everywhere, such as life with a three-year-old. But in spite of her fame, Peach is more of an idea than a character, present for so very little of the story. She exists to be sought after, either by a large tyrannical monster or by an earnest working-class hero. Peach's role in the story is to give Mario something to strive for. In practical terms, the damsel in distress is an object that the hero and the villain fight over. For her actual impact in these games, Peach could often be replaced by an inanimate object, and not much would change. She is a symbol of control over the kingdom, but one that has no agency of her own. Essentially, it's not Peach that Mario and Bowser are fighting over, but rather Peach's royal status. Her crown. And what key item will Toadette use to transform into Peach? In conjuring up the appearance of the famous princess, Nintendo is basically giving Peach agency of the sort, while also continuing to use her as the damsel in distress. Mario is still fighting to rescue the princess, but Peach is also fighting to rescue herself, albeit using Toadette as an avatar. Or maybe Toadette is using Peach as an avatar? None of this is clear, it's a cappy situation all over again. But what matters is that Peach is able to be involved, even symbolically, in her own rescue. Toadette's inclusion in the story helps to overcome some of the more dated problematic elements of the traditional Mario formula, while simultaneously giving Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe a unique character with her own controls that makes this game a lot more interesting. This isn't a perfect solution to the problems that the new Super Mario Bros. games face. I'd still love to see a sequel to Super Princess Peach. Or, alternatively, some form of canonical character that resembles Bowsette. There certainly exists a fan base for the idea of a female Bowser in some form or other. The Mario franchise could do with a nuanced female villain. There's something inherently potent about the Bowser Peach hybrid that's captured imaginations, and it would be wonderful to see some form of this appear in a game. It's not entirely dissimilar to Nintendo fans' constant call for a War Peach or a Wario Peach. People like the idea of seeing the darker side of gaming's premiere princess. Until then, there is plenty of, shall we say, varied fan art that depicts Bowsette. In the meantime, Peach will be far more active in Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe, if only because she's lending her face to Toadette. This is an interesting development and it is certainly a step forward.


Alright, well we'll go ahead and get started, so good morning and welcome for joining this morning. I just want to say thanks for being here. I hope the morning's off to a good start and DrupalCon's off to a good up, more volume. Let's see what we can do. How's this? Any better? A lot better? Okay, there we go. I'm just saying good morning. So this title of the session is Cultures Curated. So we're going to talk a little bit about what we mean when we say the word culture, why this is important, and why improving the culture of our organizations is something we should care about as leaders. Before we start, I'll give you a quick intro about myself and Chromatic. So my name is Dave Look. I live in Chicago. I'm one of the three partners of Chromatic. My primary role as a partner is on the operations side, so I handle things like contracts, employee agreements, HR, things along those lines. I do like to do pretty much anything I can outside of work, so I'd love to be outside. I like to hunt fish camp, fly airplanes, drive jeeps, do team endurance challenges, kind of whatever I can to be outside. So that's just a little bit about me. As I mentioned, I'm one of the partners of Chromatic. We're a 10-year-old digital agency, primarily focusing on Drupal. We are an entirely distributed team, so I'll probably say this a couple times this morning. I don't think anything that I say doesn't apply to co-located teams, but we are entirely distributed. We have 12 team members, many of them are sitting right here, so thank you guys for being here. We have 10 people in the United States and two in Europe, so we do get to play the time zone game a little bit, and we have a wide range of clients that we've worked with over the years. So we spent a lot of time working with Meredith Publishing on shape.com, parents.com, my weddings.com, Martha Stewart, Martha Stewart weddings. We recently launched a subscription site for Adult Coloring Book, so you can log in and download pages and color them in. We've been working with Casper, the mattress company, to do front-end performance and AB testing. I couldn't tell you everything that we do for them. Brian is somewhere he could. We've worked with Outside Magazine. We help support their Drupal team and improve their website. And recently, we've been working with Knowledge and Sunglasses to do a front-end bruise on their V2C and V2B site. We have a long list of other clients. We've worked with State Farm, Data Mania, Hive Motion. So, yeah, that's just a little bit about chromatic. So the topic and the word of culture, I would have to say that as I wrote my session proposal, I didn't really realize the depth of this conversation. And obviously, I hadn't written the whole talk when I wrote my session proposal. So it's kind of been a fun journey to read articles and talk to our whole team about culture, what culture looks like. So I hope that you find this helpful this morning and definitely in the context of company culture and tech company culture. And as I said, we are distributed. So I do look at everything through the lens of being a distributed company. And I think there are some pros and cons of being co-located and do impact and influence your culture. So one thing that I did find is a fun fact was that in 2014, Miriam Webster said that the word culture was the word of the year. And in all the articles that are written about it, I couldn't really say why they chose the word culture to be the word of the year, other than that the search volume for the word culture had gone up exponentially. And really, if you do look around to try to define culture in and of itself, there are thousands and thousands of responses to that. So as I'm saying the word culture, I want you to just think about that word. And what is it, how does it make you feel when you hear me use the word culture? What do you associate the meaning of culture to be? When you think about in terms of good culture and bad culture, I took some time last week and I talked to every person on the chromatic team for 15 to 20 minutes about this and a handful of other questions that I would share their answers to. And I said this exactly in this way. How do you define culture? And I would say every person on the team either immediately responded with, oh, that's a really tough question, or a long pause as they thought about their answer. And I think that's true for all of us, as we do press into this word culture and the usage of it in context to business, it is something that stirs up different emotions because of how we use the word. And I don't have a degree in language, so I can't really explain all the lies of that. But I think our team put the definition of culture pretty well. So, man, I messed up my slides. I will get to that in a minute. But I said, Adam said the social norms of the group include communication, ethics, really millions of things. And he said that includes sarcasm levels. And I think what he meant by this was that our team has a unique culture in and of itself that we can joke with each other, we can be sarcastic, we can press into each other. And that's part of the culture that is part of our map. Gus said it's beliefs, traditions, values and a shared history. And I found the shared history piece to be really interesting because in terms of, there's all of these pieces that come into culture, but I think that one gets left out of a lot of the definitions. And there is a sense of, when somebody enters into the company, in this case, chromatic, they all of a sudden are associated to all of the shared history that we have and the culture that we've built up around. Gary included behaviors and beliefs, but he also added that it's hard to have a culture without, by yourself, that communities are required and you can't be strangers. And he also added that the behaviors are the outward expressions of culture, so what you see and what you hear. So the culture isn't just the phrase and the words and the way you talk about your values as a company, it is actually how you live it out. I'm going to go fast in this slide because I didn't give Claire a cool title. Claire said it's a contained group or demographic. I think we have to take a minute to talk about all of the different pairings of the word culture. So we have American culture and French culture and Estonian culture and religious culture, non-religious culture, company culture, art culture, dog culture, cat culture. There's negative cultures, we've heard the word rape culture, celebrity culture, young culture, all of these things throw up different emotions. So what culture are we even talking about when we're having this conversation? Mark said, I also didn't get a good face title for him, Mark said the concept of saying we don't have a culture, everyone can do whatever they want within the organization, is a culture in and of itself. So again, I don't want to overemphasize it, but it is difficult to determine what we actually are talking about and then why we care about this. Sebastian Junger, who is not a lot of work with PTSD and veterans returning home, wrote a book called Tribes and he said, we have a strong instinct to belong to small groups defined by clear purpose and understanding or tribes. And this tribal connection has been largely lost in modern society, but regaining it might be his psychological survival. So he's making the case that this sense of belonging and the sense of being part of a small group is something that's being lost today and that is something we do need to care about on an individual level. I highly recommend the book, it's a very quick read, you can pick it up and read it on the airplane and going home. But I think it's this longing that we have at an individual level to have a sense of belonging in a group that makes us care about the culture of our organizations. And I think it's why as leaders or team members this is something that we should care about and we should try to improve. Lastly, I think it's at this kind of intersection of your personal values and the values of an organization where those things align is where you do start to feel that sense of belonging. So I mentioned this idea of we have beer on Fridays and that's something that people talk about when they talk about, oh we have a great company culture, we have beer on Fridays. But I have to challenge that a little bit with like why you have beer on Fridays. Did you grind everybody on the team to a pulp and the week sucked so bad that you have to drown out the feelings of the week with beer? Or is it really part of your team's core values of camaraderie, teamwork, celebration and are you coming together to celebrate and enjoy one another versus drown out those terrible things? As I said, we have to really define what we're talking about. So I think I already said this, but this morning we are going to talk about company culture and tech company culture or Drupal company culture. And obviously a lot of this is going to be biased toward problematic company culture. I took a little bit of time to try to define what I mean when I say culture. So I used a bit of what the team shared. So I said culture is a set of beliefs, traditions and values shared by a contained group. And that culture is manifested in the groups inward and outward actions as well as their shared history. And I think this is a little bit broader than a lot of the different dictionary definitions, but it doesn't conflict with any of them. I also think it's important that as we have this conversation, we talk about the things that culture is not. So culture isn't a means of exclusion. So it doesn't mean, oh, we built this culture or we have this shared history so you can't join it. So it's not an excuse to not hire someone. It's not something you can hide behind. You don't get to just say, this is our culture. So we can live one way internally and externally, we can say, this is the way we really are. It's not something you should be idle toward. I'm going to emphasize that over and over and over. And it's not a fancy word for retention. Culture is not your means of, yeah, keeping your team together. I also want to emphasize that culture isn't your demographic, but your demographic will have its own culture. We can see that across all of society. And those things are part of why you can have dog culture. So this is Chunk, my Boston Terrier. And any person that owns a dog has this shared sense of, I know a little bit about you because of our shared history of having a dog. And anybody that has a Boston Terrier also automatically knows a little bit of something about that other person. It's the same way men and women in the military can immediately associate with each other because they have a shared set of beliefs, values, shared history, a sense of camaraderie. I think this is why when you travel and you meet somebody from where you're from, we have an instant connection to them. So again, this is my definition. I hope you guys are tracking with me this morning. So I mentioned community, and I want to say this again. You can't have culture without community. It's difficult to have this as an individual. And this is why as business leaders, if you started an organization with just one person, you had this idea of what your organization looked like. And then you added in another person. And then maybe you ended up at five or 10 or 15 and you're kind of this accidental CEO. Well, you have to take a step back and define what culture looks like for your organization. If it's not something that you've kept out out in front. This is why when you go from 10 to 20, your culture changes from 20 to 50, and 50 to 100 and so on. That's where the title culture is curated came from. So this is where I emphasize this idea that we have to keep the concept of culture out in front. And we really have to be cognizant of the actions that are around our culture. So how do we cure culture? And I think this is a really simple concept. You find good culture and you increase it and you reduce bad culture. So that's it. Have a great day. Obviously, there's more to saying, you know, just increase the good and decrease the bad. We have to have to define what those things mean as well. And I think this is where it gets really complicated because you have to take into account the different people in your organization. You have to take into account the way you have been historically. And if this hasn't been something that you're keeping a pulse on, it can be really hard to realign cultural values for an organization. Mark also said when we were talking, the worst culture is a culture where part of the group holds to and believes something to be true or to be good culture, but the other half holds true to be bad culture. And I think his like at the underlying concept there is that there's inking gruity or people feeling on the outskirts of the group. So what is good culture? I asked this question to everyone on the team as well. And I found the answers to be interesting, especially when I share our team's core values. But I do think good culture is subjective. I have a great friend that works at JP Morgan Chase. And I'm betting he can't go into the office wearing a sweatshirt and dress sweatpants. You know, but I can. And that's part of our culture and who we are. And we have to take some time to map these things that we see as good culture to our values. And if we don't, we're going to see conflicts between individuals that have different values and different value alignments within the organization. So honesty, but not feeling like I have to share everything in my life. So I think the values that this maps to are things like openness, honesty, inclusion, trust. And many of those are going to be common throughout the responses to what is good culture. Feeling comfortable together, sharing and talking. So again, openness, vulnerability, trust, not feeling like you're going to be ostracized for the way you feel. Having inside jokes that aren't related to work. I think this is a sense of knowing one another and actually having a forum that isn't just writing code to relate to one another as part of the organization. All right. So Larry is pretty smart. And he explained to me this concept of code switching, which I would butcher. But the basic sense is that in different people groups, you might kind of change your personality or you might talk slightly differently with your parents versus with your coworkers versus with another group. He said good culture is when you don't have to code switch to integrate. So basically being able to be genuine and be able to be yourself in the group for your human respect. Positivity over negativity. So caring for one another. Not fostering things that are toxic in the organization. Willingness to openly ask for help. So again, trust, vulnerability, humility, openness is paired with this idea of openness to respond to those asking for help. And in a kind way, Alfonso said it's kind of like being a front-ender and somebody said, hey, have you used this technology? And their response being, can't believe you haven't tried that. Versus, oh man, you're going to love it when you get to try this. Just that simple way that you respond to that question is important. Something that everyone buys into and holds dear. So the sense of team, the sense of camaraderie. Somebody said actually having a focus on good culture. So actually caring about the culture of your organization is indeed an indicator of good culture. A few of the other words were trust, comfort, security, consensus, openness, honesty, code reviews. I thought this was an interesting response in that it doesn't necessarily symbolize to me the sense of actually doing code reviews, but the sense that we're in this together, that you're not alone, that you have somebody else that's supporting the work that you're doing and confirming it. And I thought that was a cool comment. So I hope you agree with a lot of those. I definitely do because I think they align with chromatics core values, which is do right by people, delight our clients, foster collaboration, give back, have fun. And I think there's one more, which is be smart in public that didn't make my list. But all of these things are actions and they all track back to the values of our company. So I asked the same question. What is bad culture? And I think my instinct is to just say, well, bad culture is anything the opposite of good culture. So we're done. But I think the, as I explore this, and I use the phrase anti values for the organization as I heard the phrases. So not being willing to share hard truths. I think this is somebody being closed off, possibly being selfish, somebody possibly being dishonest, but it's also, again, do you have the place that you feel secure enough to share that hard truth? Do you know how that person's going to react to you? It's not asking questions. So are you not asking the question of pride? Are you not asking the question out of fear? Both of those are not necessarily indicators of good culture. Lack of diversity, this came up the most. Not being inclusive. Not being able to say what you want to say. Not necessarily something bad or negative, but something that you think could exclude you from the group. Again, that fear, that sense of I could be ostracized for being myself. Being afraid to ask for help. Some are all of the team not feeling secure. Other words that were used were authoritarian, dogmatic, petty competitiveness, one-upsmanship, selfishness, dishonesty, deception. So I think this is somewhat obvious, any of these things that we consider at least a chromatic to be good culture and to be bad culture. But I have to challenge that a little bit with why do we miss this so much as business leaders and team leaders across the way? And I think it goes back to this idea of either the leadership not being bought in or not being willing to curate the content, the culture. And to do that, we have to entertain these conversations. Excuse me. So to curate and to improve our organizations, I think we have to, as leaders and as owners, you have to empower and allow for change in the organization. You have to create a forum to have these conversations. And you have to allow everyone in the team to speak into it. And I guess at some level, you have to value culture to even enter into this. So how does somebody influence culture? I asked everybody this question as well. And I apologize in advance for the repetitiveness of the answers, but I think it's pretty telling. So you become who you're around, lead by example. If you want something to be part of culture and live it, if something is toxic, don't encourage it in any way. So the concept here was, hey, if there's crash jokes being told, don't don't even laugh at them. You don't necessarily have to call that person out immediately, but don't encourage the negative behavior. Use positive reinforcement. Negative reinforcement isn't needed. We talked to Larry and I talked about this and it was kind of that concept of a diet. So when you say you have a super restrictive diet, you can only eat x, y, and z. A lot of people struggle with that, but instead saying add in the good things and the bad will start to fall off. You could influence culture in small spheres by sharing ideas. It could be how you relate to others, anything from food to clothing and how you engage the outer world. I think it's just as important to say the inner world here. So it's inside the company as well as outside the company. Lead by example, creating the culture you want to be in. Participation is the best way by being proactive, by creating culture. Everyone's actions have the ability to change culture. And by example, by example is a large part. Anyone in the company can do the right thing and get others to do the right thing as well. Christopher is also much smarter than me. He uses large vocab words. He said, culture is recursive. And I said, can you explain what you mean by that? And he said it really depends on the organization. For everyone to impact culture, you have to be in a place that allows for it. It's how you treat each other, how you communicate with each other, the energy you bring or you don't bring, the way you celebrate or you don't celebrate one another, and how you deal with problems. So I thought it was interesting when all of these were very, very similar responses and they had a few things in common. So the takeaway I had was that everyone can influence culture if your organization empowers it. The influence of culture comes from action, not simply words. So leading, by example, living it out. And that ties back to our definition that this is manifest in the inward and outward actions of the group. And lead by example. It might not have been said in every one of those statements, but that was what I heard in every one of those statements. We need to implement this now. So if you're sitting here thinking, I'm not sure if these are things that we've hit well or done well in our organization. This is the six-ish step plan to try to implement and increase good culture and curate the culture of your organization. So first and foremost, leadership has to be bought in. It starts, like many things, it starts at the top. If the leadership isn't bought in, it doesn't mean that culture can't be changed, but it does create a large hurdle for people to affect the change. So I think a great example, as I was thinking about this, was our Apple rep in Chicago works with a small team. And he can influence that his team in Chicago and the culture of their small, co-located organization. But if he wants to influence the change of the entire organization of Apple, he's going to have a much harder time than Tim Cook is going to have.  So Alana emphasized this.  And that's going to trickle down.  So you can check that out for a little more information. We might have talked a little bit about ride sharing companies during that conversation. And I just want to remind everyone that you still can influence culture. You don't have to be at the top to influence culture. So you can start with your team or your peers or a small group within your organization and try to expand from there. So I think we have to have a baseline before we really try to figure out what's bad and what's good in our organization. So it's just like you have to have to know where you are to know where you're going. If you've ever done anything with a map in Compass, it's really hard to navigate with a map if you don't know where your starting point is. With that, I think group discussions are really important as part of this. I'm going to say that again in a couple of minutes here. But I think it's important to remember that leaders have to lead. A group discussion doesn't necessarily mean that the group votes on the end. You have to have leadership that is willing to make the hard decisions and determine what is good and what is bad for the organization. So we have to define our vision and values. You have to have some of these defined to be able to check your cultural alignment and determine if you have good culture or bad culture. And I think you have to have them in a place, I'm going to emphasize this in a minute as well, that they're public and written down. I asked everybody on the team, do we live out our values as an organization? And just about everybody said yes. But Ryan said, hey, can you remind me of all of them? And I only got four out of five. Five out of the six. And I think it's important to keep that front of mind. And they need to be communicated broadly. So other people in the community should know them. Your clients should know them. Every person on your team or somebody that's trying to join your team should know these before they get there. And if you don't know what your values and your vision are, here's some practical ideas. As I mentioned, I think you can talk to your team. I think it's the best place to start. It's the people that are part of your organization. I think you need to check your gut. So if your gut says there's something not right in our organization, there's probably something not right in your organization. And you can call in the professionals, as I say. Quick caveat, I would say Jen Dairy from Plucky is an excellent business coach. She works with us specifically related to people and culture of our organization. There's a lot of people that you could call. But I think calling in the professionals is something that is needed from time to time. That's why people hire us to build their websites. They don't know how to do it. Another quick pitch is for Know Your Company, which is a tool that is relatively simple. It sends out three emails to your team during the week. On Monday, it sends out a, what are you doing question? It's going to stand up. What did you do last week? What are you doing this week? It sends out a question on Wednesday that says, is there something in our organization that we could do better at? Yes or no? Is there a benefit that we don't offer that we could? And then it lets people fill in and answer to that. And then the Friday question is something like, what's your favorite movie? And it compiles every person's response and it emails that to the entire team. So I think implementing this tool really allows you to take a pulse on the company and it's relatively easy to implement and get rolling. So happy to connect you with them. I don't get a commission, but they're wonderful people. I think you should find other resources. So I'll share my slide deck and about 20 links to articles that I thought were fascinating when we're done. But I think there's a lot of resources on this topic. I highly recommend finding and listening to Todd's talk called The Culture of Empowerment. Todd's the CEO and co-founder of Fort Kitchens. It's a talk that I've heard him gave a couple of times and I think it's very worthwhile in terms of talking about vision and culture. Talk about this with other people in the industry. So talk about it with other business owners. Talk about it with people outside of the tech industry. I talked about this with my buddy. I mentioned the J.P. Morgan. What's the culture at J.P. Morgan compared to chromatic? And obviously they're much different organizations, but it's always fascinating to talk through these things. I think it's important to find other companies that inspire you. So Apple and their concept of challenging status quo or Zappos and their concept of caring so much about culture that they will actually pay you to not take the job if you're not a good fit. I think you can ask your peers in the industry. I think, I haven't done this, but I've thought about it a lot as I've just talked. We're good friends with folks at Lullabot and Four Kitchens and I'd have to say if I went and asked them just chromatically about its values, I'd be curious to know their answer. And I think if you want to be really bold, ask your clients, tell them, this is our core values. Do you see this in the work that we produce? Do you see this in the way we interact with your team? And I think this is important enough that you should do whatever else it takes. So if you haven't figured out what your values are and if you don't know what they are, I think this is something that's business critical. And you should take whatever it takes to get it sorted out. You need to put pen to paper, as I mentioned before. So your values need to be written. They need to be clear and they need to be explained. So you can't just put a single word, trust is our value and have everyone know exactly what you mean by that. There is a depth to those. So each of the values that I mentioned for chromatic, we have a paragraph or more writing up what we mean by that specific path. Again, step five here is curate. So good is better than bad and we need to increase the good. So how do you, you know, this is something that has to be continuous and you have to be continually working on it. So we have to purge anything that's toxic. Now don't hear fire anything that doesn't align 100%. That's not, it's not the thing, but we have to start getting rid of all of the things that are toxic to our organizations as quickly as possible. And then we have to refine what can be refined. So maybe somebody doesn't have 100% culture to align with your organization, but they're at 75. And that's fine. We're going to, we're going to work on increasing the things that are good and we're going to not encourage the things that are bad. So I say slow to hire and fast to fire. Again, don't fire everyone that doesn't fit 100%. I think this is the place where you do need to, you need to take time and you need to refine the things that can be refined. I will also say that anytime someone has left chromatic that wasn't a cultural fit, every person on the team said, oh, I'm surprised it took that long. So usually every person in the company knows the thing that's toxic and knows the thing that needs to be refined. So when you're interviewing somebody, ask questions based on values, not just skills. I think this is also important to have numerous interviews. So ensuring that they have multiple points of contact on the team. Now, I know chromatic is unique. We have 12 people. So you can meet with half the company before you join. Maybe that's not possible, but you can still have them meet with numerous people on your team. And a couple of my favorite interview questions, I'm going to share them. You're welcome to use them. So I like to ask how someone defines success. I think the answers to that question show cultural alignment. I think they show people's motivations and where their personal values lie. And another one that I like to ask, which is what is your favorite vacation? What was your favorite vacation? And part of the chromatic team is we're totally distributed. We travel a lot. We have the whole team here this week, for example. So if somebody doesn't like to travel or they've never really left their hometown, it's not to say that they're not a good fit for chromatic, but that's something that they're going to have to figure out how to integrate and be pushed out of their comfort zone to be part of our team and to get the culture that we have. I want to emphasize that you're not looking for 100%. Part of the curation is figuring out what you don't have that would be better for your culture. It's part of adding people to your team that increase your diversity. It's part of adding people to your team that increase and add to your values, not just the predefined group that you already have. Lastly, you have to live this out. You have to keep it front of mind. And I said it's kind of like continuous integration. You have to filter all of your decisions this way and you have to continue having this conversation. Like I said, each one of those inflection points of a company changing is a place whether you just lost five people or you added five people, you have to revisit this conversation. And I said, you know, you have to live it out with the leadership starting to live it out as well. You can't say do as I say, not as I do, which is what my grandpa said to me all the time. But yeah, I think that's important. I'm just about done. I figured one of the questions I would get are there tools to help you with this. So I already mentioned Know Your Company. I think this one is fantastic for helping with this conversation and curating regularly. I highly recommend using Hey Taco. Hey Taco is a Slackbot integration that is really around giving people public recognition for things that they do. We have some fun stories around Hey Taco that I'm willing to share if there's time here at the end. But I think this ties to our sense of have fun and foster collaboration and give back. There's a lot of other tools similar to this. There's tools that will do micro bonuses to where your team can give bonuses to other people on the team. I think Slack is important. So Hey Taco integrates with Slack, but we use Slack. We have channels set up for specific things that we care about as a team. So we have a recipes channel. Everybody that cooks can share those things. It's a place to foster collaboration, creativity, and I don't know, just be inclusive of everybody. I'm certain there's a thousand more tools that we can talk about. But that is actually all I have this morning. So I would love to continue the conversation and talk to any of you guys about this. And yeah, I'll be here for a while. So thank you. Challenging question from Chris. So how does our organization approach diversity in a space that's tough to have diversity? How do we try to foster diversity? I think that's a great question. And I think this is something that did come up with most of our team. So one thing is you have to be cognizant of it. You have to recognize at the point when we were five people and we were all white males. You know, what are we doing? So you have to you have to recognize it and admit it. You do have to acknowledge that we are that is the predominant demographic of this specific industry. And then I think you have to not hide behind the excuse of, oh, we only got those people as applicants. I think that's the number one thing that I see most organizations. So what are you doing to increase women applying? So Alana does a lot of work with girl development. She is married. She talks a lot about women in the tech industry. And I think that's part of our company culture and part of the way we want to attract women to come work at Chromatic. I think it's going out and posting jobs for the, I'm a product which are the titles, so forgive me, but like the African American engineer, association of engineers, you know, post your job there, actually trying to get more applicants from the diversity that you're looking for. And talk about it. I think those are the things that I think are will help the most foster university. Alana, for sure. So Alana said just for the recording, she said that your job description also helps. So what are you saying about the job? How are you writing about it? How are you talking about it? Are you sharing benefits and things along the lines of maternity leave and being willing to publicly say what you're supporting women in the community? Thank you guys so much for being here.


What's up everybody? Jason here for jasmiescasebase.com. This is technically our last filler guys We have to sell seven straight-o spots to unlock the break But if those don't move then maybe we'll have one more filler But for now this is the last filler we needed to do to unlock seven spots in the Tom Brady mixer With this prism pack fat pack number 11 guys So first we're gonna do the break randomize the customer names Teams distribute the hits out then at the end we'll re-randomize only the names and top seven get into the Brady mixer guys So split dice roll two and a four six one two three four five six six six Jose down to JC. All right, and then we got six one two three four five six Ravens down to the dolphins All right now Course no training guys, but stick to what she got.  So we got it here Portals Joe Burr pick it Wilson Cooper All right, nothing's super crazy Now let's switch scenes guys. Let's do the giveaway switching it Top seven guys get in roll Six and a five eleven times. Good luck one two three four five six seven eight nine ten and eleven Eleven six and a five eleven Just missing out was Jose. Sorry, buddy, but still be in there. I know you had a couple spots chat right.  There you go. Nice. So top seven are now in the Tom Brady mixer guys. Now remember guys, like I said before we technically need to do We technically need to do another another seven spots sold straight up. So if That sits there for a little bit guys probably maybe turn that last seven spots into one more filler and We'll post up number 12 But hopefully now guys maybe people just start buying the straight up spots and then we can just break open the mixer straight up What I'm having to do another filler.  Get yourself a nice hit from the mixer It's a nice little 11 box mixer, but also have that one in 32 shots to win that Brady so There you go guys. Thank you. Jasby skates breaks.com


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