You add comments or questions. Why don't we use the mind share room on on matrix for that Or IRC so if you're on matrix you can go to pound mind share Fedora project and if you're on IRC you can join pound Fedora dash Mindshare and someone is saying has the talk in Harbor 8 started. There's no streaming yet. So Let me just double check that Someone was just asking Justin I think you're the only person I've seen with a fedora Yeah, yeah, I thought I was trying to decide if I bring it or not, but I went for it And you had I had to wear it on the plane ride the whole time Yeah Okay, I see the live stream, but there is a delay So maybe maybe just took a minute for the person watching Perfect So I figure why don't we just go ahead and start with introductions to kick off and then we'll share a little bit I think on the the context for this session and then we'll do some Some sticky noting and open discussion around how the how the money gets spent in fedora You can start here you already have the mic I'm Justin. I'm the fedora community architect. I joined red hat last October So I've been at red hat for about 10 months, but I've been in the fedora community for Going on eight years So around the topics that we're going to be talking around today The mind share committee in fedora is One of there is one of the major leadership bodies in the fedora community and the mind share committee also has the The delegation around how a lot of our event and swag budget gets spent in the project community So there is a group of folks who Are some are elected some are appointed from different teams to the mind share committee and as a whole those folks help Gonna be the interface to the community for things like event event sponsorship or travel support for a speaker or getting new swag ordered doing a Lyme survey For a community survey So that's where the mind share committee fits in and that's also where me and Nick are are coming in on this too, you know Hi, I'm Nick I'm barely awake Yeah, I woke up about 915 and was getting red was like oh, I'll go get breakfast that I looked at my schedule like oh, yeah My talk is this morning I've been a I've been a member of the mind share committee Ever since it started in around 2018 there used to be a Group called fams go fedora ambassador steering committee and then that kind of got revamped and expanded into mind share which includes ambassadors design Websites Elected members Docs, I think and something that I'm probably forgetting It includes the representatives from several different groups So the context for this session was the the clickbaity title of help us spend Fedora budget in 2024 So there's there's two things that we want to talk about in in the session and talk with you about in this session is on one part You know, we're gonna be starting to think around how we want to spend our budget for 2024 and One of the things that didn't happen last year partly because I joined red hat at the exact moment when the budgeting conversations were happening Was that we didn't really have a chance to have a wider community conversation around What do we want to do this year? What do we want to prioritize and spend and what places do we want to have a present? so the first or one half of this session or this conversation is going to be trying to understand what people here in the room Will are interested in and would like to see a fedora presence in and that might be things from event sponsorship It could be things from new community swag I can see folks from the fedora Mexico community here and we did the the skull sticker the Dia de los mortos sticker So there's opportunities to do like customize local swag for our different sub communities and Also travel sponsorship so people who traditionally like the ambassador program having people from the fedora community going to conferences speaking or Doing a workshop and getting support from fedora to go and do those things So that's the first half is just coming up with a list of the things that we We want to prioritize for next year and the second part is especially seeing the wide range of folks who are in the room I see some folks who probably Have never interacted with the fedora mind share end of things and are very new to that and then I see people who have probably seen mind share for as long as me and Nick have been in Doing that end of things too. So I the second half of this is going to be What are the challenges and barriers that make it hard for people to? Ask for funding or to get the resources they need to go and do awesome amazing things for fedora So that's that the two halves that we wanted to Kind of split it up today I think just to kind of get our our brains moving a little bit I've got some sticky notes that I'm going to pass out and we'll do some Here a silent exercise to won't get started and we'll have everyone put their sticky notes up here on the flip chart and the question that I want to Start you with is either You answer it one of two ways is where is an event where you in if you've Been in the community for some time an event where you had people in the fedora community or it was a Booth or a speaker what was an event that made an impression on you where fedora had a role there or Where is an event or or a commute a local meet-up or some other kind of community event where you would? Really like to see fedora more present So I'm gonna go and pass out some sticky notes here, and then we'll do like probably Five ten minutes until the writing slows down perfect, and I Probably should grab some pins from a distration desk. Oh, we're in the room. Okay perfect, so Nick is gonna pass out some of the sticky notes and if you are in the Live stream you can also put in the pound in the mindshare Matrix room or IRC channel as well, and we can pull some of your feedback in and we'll write a sticky note for you And put it up on the board here so we are at 945 local time so we will take we'll start with five minutes see where we are from there if we need more time We'll take some otherwise once we'll done with that we'll come and put all the sticky notes up here on the front Mike it could be many Do you only have everyone should have a few I think so you can write? Okay, yeah, take take a few. Yeah, sorry. I should have been more clear on that So take a few and it could be you could have just one note or you could have five you could have seven I can't make any promises that will do all seven of those things, but if you have seven feel free to go for it So we'll just take five minutes here, and I'll also watch the the mindshare chat for the virtual So we're at 949. We'll take just another minute or so here I see most of the the writing is slowed down But we'll take just another minute or so just to wrap up what you're what you're writing down Anonymous is up to you You can either initial them or just leave them blank is fine So if you are already finished and you have your notes ready You can come and bring them up here to the flip chart and Stick them any any which way or or that we're gonna do some of the sorting after Right. I think that was everyone So as a reminder for also for our live stream We prompted everyone to and we also got some of the virtual ones. Thanks to Robert So the folks in the virtual chat. Thanks for participating there as well. The questions was What is either an event that you've been to where Fedora had a presence that really made an impact or impression on you? Or what was something that you really wanted to see Fedora at? So just looking through here Part of me was just curious to see what kind of themes came up from this and I see a lot of these like bigger events like Fosdem Lot of Fosdem and Flock I guess Flock Ireland to repeat a flock Ireland. All right Hey Also Fedora hatch events, which was That was one that Marie Norden helped kind of pioneer of doing more of the around the virtual nest event having small Localized meet-ups for the Fedora community around that time Maybe we could do this by I Don't help me sort it we can do it by region Maybe for some of the ones that are like a pack or North America or Latam And then we can split it with the virtual ones or localized ones Let's take a minute to try to sort these out and then I'll read them out for the stream So Definitely seeing some common themes emerge on the board here I think from the the European side of things We definitely have a presence for the or a preference for some of those bigger community events like Fosdem Where we have several people from across Europe who come together and usually we have a lot of speakers that are there We have a booth we do some community social events on the North American side I see Linux Fest Northwest which is in Seattle, which I know we've had folks go in the past. I also see Yes, and I also see some here for Latam. So conference Panama conference Latam support to cross-border meeting events Presence at community events in Spanish. So having some language diversity with how we're doing our outreach and events and Then on the more general side, there's things around supporting more local events at communities and community events at Universities including swag and venue fedora hack fests Gnome Gwadek, which also rotates its location in the same lane. There's also a KDE Academy or two some are two biggest upstreams Excellent. So for the virtual folks, it was a comment that Luis put for our Latam events But as a in-progress item is that it's something that you know, we're trying to I think with COVID and other factors really paid an impact At least at least in Panama or maybe more broadly with all of Latam around and then I also saw some Desire for doing some of the virtual keeping keep going on the virtual events as well I think that one probably is a huge one because You know even with flock, you know, we're trying to kind of move it towards a more hybrid format because we're always gonna be people who we can't Can't do the travel or can't bring into the event. I think this is an interesting list But I want to turn it back all to you all and see if there's anything that you thought was interesting while you were thinking about this Was there anything that you hadn't thought about before with how fedora is doing our events or is this all Was this all kind of what you'd expect I see a lot of like regional Linux fests a lot of like Linux distro communities open Susie good gnome KDE a lot of like FOS events But is there anything on here that you think is missing or you were surprised by or is everything just kind of what you expected There was there was Matthew, but yeah, it was so the comment was Amy mentioned Red Hat Summit This was something that Latam used to Have like a program for array. Yeah, it was fedora University in So I think this was a good warm-up to start trying to generate some of the ideas for our events I think from here we can share a little bit on What we're looking at for the next year also some of how the process has changed So some of you have been around for a while Some of you are new to all of this so I thought From here we could I can share a little bit more around what the process looks like So say you want to go and do these events or you want to have make sure that for Dora sponsoring KDE Academy or GNOME Guadag What does that process look like and then also I want to talk around some kind of future thinking around budget reporting in fedora because that's also Had many eras and chapters of how we how we talk about those things the fudcon question And there's some really interesting things in the chaos. Yeah, I appreciate it there's some really interesting things in the chaos project, which is a Community that creates metrics for community health in open source and open source communities and they have a metric in their DEI subgroup for Event location diversity, which is exactly that point because even for flock I was really bummed because we had we had Seven possibly more folks who were not able to get here because of visas and The the big burden that some people have to go through to get to Europe or North America that other people don't have to deal with So I think it's a great point and I that's something that I would really like to try to explore in the next year as well I think we'll fit into this this piece. I'm going to share so I'm going to talk first on Process and then going to get into the future kind of ideal Where where as far as our budget goes in the Fedora community how I want to try to push and drive things make it more easier and more Transparent for folks to understand how our budget gets allocated and how you can request resources from our budget so Many moons ago in Fedora, we've had the ambassador program, which is one of our oldest and I think probably one of the more well-known community programs that's come out of Fedora in the last 10 15 years and We had folks it was in many ways I think our ambassador group was also kind of this subtle mentorship group as well Which is partly why it became challenging later, but an ambassador was someone who? Was a approved Fedora contributor who could request budget to go and travel and speak conferences or meet-ups or local communities about Fedora and would get support from the Fedora project to go and do those things and Back back in the day there was this very long process So you you'd have to if you wanted to become an ambassador, so then you could then request resources You'd have to connect with a mentor who was in your region and this was part of what I think you mentioned in your intro about There was the Fedora ambassador Administration Fama was that Fedora ambassador steering committee or FAMsco would kind of Develop some of that was the leadership body that Ray and ambassadors Right, so there was this leadership body that was also kind of like what mine share is today of elected people in the community who are representing our Regional groups are people who are going and doing our events and then there was the so there's FAMsco The ambassador steering committee that was the leadership group there There was also the member the Fama the membership administration, which was kind of the more Procedural part so you're you want to be an ambassador you find a mentor your mentor works with you for a couple months Kind of walks you through Fedora and how all these things work what the processes are in the community And then if your mentor is is feels like you're ready He'd go to Fama and you would become an improved work with the the administrators to get you the approved ambassador status, so then you could go and do the events fast forward a bit to 2018 and There were challenges with growing and scaling how We ran the ambassador program and a lot of that I think was just because Fedora had grown a lot since we launched ambassadors Red Hat our primary sponsor had grown a lot since we started the program We used to ship out credit cards to people in all the regions of the world Who are outside of Red Hat like we had folks in Lattam in India in North America? I think we had three credit cards at one point Four at one time There was North America Lattam Europe and APEC so it was a very different time back then and so for a number of reasons, you know compliance things and International business law was a tricky thing so we had to had to come up with a different way So in 2018 some of you might have already met Brian Exelbeard who's also here at flock He was in the role the Fedora community architect role two people before me right before Marie Norden and Back in 2018. We had a group of us together with Becks Nick Myself and a handful of others who came together to come up with a better way of trying to make sure that we're still able to support all of our folks in different regions to Be able to get the resources they need to keep doing all the awesome stuff that they're doing in their local communities So we created the mind share committee is a different approach to this And so the idea being that if someone needs resources or support in Fedora You can come to the mind share committee Which is a collection of representatives from across the Fedora community. I mentioned in the intro You know, we have some elected roles that are in mind share. We also have appointed reps from different teams We have a design rep. We have a websites and apps representative there or was a community operations representative and a handful of others that I Probably should have committed more to memory before the session, but Docs and mentored projects. Yes, Mira Which unfortunately wanted to bring in more of those folks here to flock but again location diversity visas and timing of things was hard But so mind share was this new approach of having a group that would Get together and be the kind of the interface for the community You need something the mind share committee is where you go And there's a group of people who are from all across the community can ask questions So we had designed folks or the idea at the beginning was oh well If there's an event that needs swag or you need those kinds of things Well, hey, there's a design team member who's there and they can they can help like oh Have you thought about these things or have you done this yet? Or hey, you have a websites and apps person that's there and like hey Do you need like some support like you know the what can I do for fedora org site? It was a big part of that for a time of like helping people talk about fedora and be consistent in doing that and then then COVID happened and Really put a damper in all the physical events. We had some excellent amazing virtual events. Thanks to Nest and Marie. We also got to do all the cool swag because all of our Event budget that we normally were giving to people to travel was not being spent So that's why we got all this really cool amazing swag and shipped it all over the world to people who went to our virtual events But now we're at this junction where present-day, you know There's a lot of challenges in the community. I think around trying to reboot this We heard from from Louis yesterday in the Lattam session About some of the challenges that they're facing in their community to try to revive the the local community that they had before There's also, you know, I think as new people are coming in there's been a lot of different processes so things have changed and People who were in the project 10 years ago are like, whoa, like I don't know how I do this anymore Like things have changed so much and I don't know where to start anymore And then new people also have the same challenges like there's sometimes old documentation new documentation It's a little hard to figure out where those things are So that brings us to kind of the present moment and what as we're going into next year 2024 We're getting ready to start thinking around what things we want to put into our budget for the project next year It's not a guarantee that we will get all of those things But we want to start the conversation now so we can make sure that the things that are really important to To you all the things that people have had an impact on in the fedora community that we can still keep doing those things And make sure making sure that we're making space for them next year so it's kind of the future part of this is you know You might remember from Brian exelbeards time. He had the budget dot fedora project org website Which I love to death, but it's in this it's built in a very accountant style way and both Both me and my predecessor Weren't quite accountants or that was not our preferred Or our most successful way of working on these things But at the same time we need that transparency and visibility into budget so going into next year I want to try to come up with a system or method similar to the old budget site of of your But just the goal of which trying to make sure that people both who are on the mind-share committee and people who are in the community Can get a clear idea of where are we right now with our budget spend in this quarter for fedora?  Are we gonna have money to sponsor that? Or do we want to send a speaker there? so that's kind of the long-term goal and Kind of using flock as a beta Version for that for trying to come up with a system to communicate that but from here I want to turn it back into a more interactive session and actually Nick. I don't know if you wanted to add or I was just kind of Giving background or content. I think Justin explained it. Well, I mean, I've noticed things lately where it seems like people Don't know our procedures, which I Think are pretty well documented. Maybe we need more somehow to publicize Where the docs are because we have procedures there Because like we've had some one was fairly recently that put in a ticket after an event and said hey, I spent this money Please give me money And we're like well We no one asked for approval that I mean that person didn't ask for approval. They just were like hey, I spent money well As for approval first so maybe we need to do more outreach of Hey, if you want to run an event Go read this doc about the procedure. So So I think from here, I'd like to flip it for the people who do know the process Were there challenges or things that confused you when you were going through that or was it all just it was all easy? Like a breeze had no problems and then I'll turn it to the folks who haven't gone through the process of What was what what things would you need to feel more confident in? Being like hey like we have Picon Latam that's gonna be next year. How can we get you know or are your your event here, right? If you haven't been through the process, you don't know how it works. What do you need? To feel confident to ask for it or what information or tools you need so we'll start Okay for me to be honest if Justin wouldn't tell me where I need to apply and everything. I wouldn't know so maybe have it a bit more like Visible and to share it more with the community how they can do it and even for the approval and everything because I think since many things have changed since the Original ambassadors program. Maybe you know some things need to be refreshed What I really like was the template. It was way easier So I didn't need to think you know what I need to include what I shouldn't forget So it was really nice like issue template on the lab. Yeah, that was really really helpful So yeah, that's that's from my side As someone who hasn't submitted before but it's kind of like trying to understand what that process is It would be nice to see some example breakouts. So like if you're saying like let's say you wanted to say Sponsor an event or like have someone go to an event, right? What would be you know just set up saying hey?  Just as an example because then it would set the stage of what fedora's standard is of What you're expected to or you know what you should spend or what you could spend to represent fedora in the community Just sort of echoing that I think given the current economic climate of a lot of open-source projects I Would simply just I would go in expecting that these sort of things are not offered So if this is something that you're interested in the community having access to I'd be very vocal that you know Hey, we we actually have this and we're we're willing to provide travel spending to support you speaking at conferences or running events on your own So I've I've hosted a regional them hatch Version for a floor as well. So this is my experience from that perspective It was quite straightforward to open the the funding request ticket because there was some links already provided for it Hey, if you want to run a hatch here you here you go And it was in pager not get lapsed I don't have that that experience and but again the ticket template was very straightforward the challenge I found was it was literally Hey, do you want to host a hatch event with very little parameters around that then so the guidelines of How many people are could could I theoretically start planning for what are my budgetary constraints? They weren't obvious nor were they obvious throughout which I get as a reflection of like Then you might have known the money spent that was available that that gets caught up in bureaucratic red tape the whole time. So I get that but it was very challenging to try and Plan events without knowing how much I can spend because that varies 55 people or 50 people. I think that's just one thing, but maybe Just an idea t-shirt sizing events for like a for making a budget request, you know a small event or a virtual event You know a medium big size conference, you know What kind of spend is there and what kind of things would we be able to expect if we requested that size of an event? I've never requested because I have my own budget from the same cost center, but one of the things that I I do poorly at and I think we could all do better at is Getting things announced earlier and having at least soft deadlines on on applying because travel costs of course go up the later you go and You could be in a situation where if it's not communicated well or people don't know You maybe get you know this many budget requests and you have to decide you have got so much money, right? And you allocate that And then somebody comes in a little bit later after you've allocated those and it's like somebody that you really want to send Maybe a really important member of the community and it's like you've already allocated, right? So just Making sure things are planned earlier, which I know is hard and Communicating kind of time frames where you expect people to request is very helpful So I heard a few different things there which I also see some themes that emerged as well So I think I was hearing kind of the theme around outreach You know getting out in front of people and be like hey, you know, we do this This is a thing and here's how you can do it by talking to people. I think is a big part of it because you know If you do crawl through the history of fedora events You'll see some people that have very elaborate wiki pages for their events And that was how we did it 10 years ago You had to make you literally had to make a wiki page for your event and document it all And like otherwise we're not going to fund you without a wiki page We're not doing that as much today because we also started doing some of those new mind share processes But I think that's been confusing for people You know, I think that visibility outreach piece and talking to people is is a big part I also think the other thing I'm hearing about which I heard from the part out more examples and Having too few parameters to work with is that it would help to see more examples of like how have other people done this and What are the expectations of putting together an event proposal like what do I have to do? How do other people do this kind of thing? So I think kind of a documentation information architecture piece And then I was the part around, you know more guidance for different sized events So one of the things that mind share did create at the very beginning is we have Which I should have set up the laptop now so I could go through our documentation site But we do have policy in place for small events medium events and large events and so if I remember right off the top of my head and now I'm feeling Crunched because this is being live-streamed on the internet but if I remember right small events as you can get like a hundred and fifty dollars from the mind share committee for You know, you have a local meetup and you want to get fedora cupcakes or balloons or Pizza or drinks, you know or some registration supplies. So that one you have to be an advocate for or I'm trying to remember it's the point of that one is that it's low barrier. Oh That's one thing I would kind of like to simplify is I think it's confusing the difference between advocate and ambassador I think really Which this is just my opinion. I haven't really brought it up in any of our meetings yet Titles are not as important as this is what I want to do. This is what I need to make this happen So Yeah, I would like to maybe look at changing some of our procedures to not Really care about which Title right so that was for that context as well So I mentioned ambassadors as old in 2018 around the same time that mind share spun off We came up with this idea of advocates which was meant because ambassadors at that time in 2017 18 was really touchy because the mentorship side of ambassadors had not Received the care that it needed to support the people doing the mentoring and bringing new people in So as a result if you want to be an ambassador you often times six years ago You would email people and then you know like hey, I want to do this and then Maybe they come back to you.  You don't want to do this whole process for it No problem. We can give you you know the hundred and fifty dollars to go and do an event and You can get that really get those resources. So there's policy for the small events Medium events and large events. I think those I know the large events but also medium you have to be a still have to be in ambassador to Request funding and that can be anywhere from like 500 to a thousand dollars I think for medium and large is like over a thousand You know, you're trying to do like international travel or an event sponsorship kind of thing So that's I think also been a confusing point as well is that I and I felt this even when we started the mind share committee, but I was in a different Now it's my problem to work with but You know, I think it was it's confusing about what that that difference is right because we created this new program And if you're interested in this topic, I will try not to skew too hard because I know we're getting into the end of time But the next session in this room hosted by yours truly and Shimantro Mukherjee is going to be about the community operations team, which is the Relate team as of now or as of in our documentation that holds ambassadors and advocates So that is something we're actually going to be talking about in the next session But you know, I think there's that the things that I'm hearing around our challenges with you know Getting the right resources and like support, you know having examples and models that you can see how have other people done these things I Also think it's you know, the outreach piece is that we have people who are old-timers and newcomers who Both of them don't know all the processes unless you've been talking with with me or Nick or someone else in the community Who's been around for a while? So I think we need to think around, you know Maybe it's one of the reasons or ways we could do it is with release parties is Talking about how these things work in the community or giving some more like behind-the-scenes view to that There's probably other things that we could do like Fedora classrooms for instance I really does that came up with kind of the Fedora University I know that was more in-person, but we also have these Fedora classrooms, which are virtual workshops that we haven't had any of those in a while that I know of but there used to be People would just schedule and that was before matrix. So it was on IRC usually people would just schedule. Hey, I'm gonna have a Meeting to tell people about the build system or whatever I mean They would just schedule basically workshops virtually on whatever topic and I went to a couple of those occasionally and That that was quite useful to learn about whatever topic the presenter Wanted to do So there's a couple of things there that I'm hearing first is maybe people don't know That there's this funding available And the other thing is maybe people don't know what kind of events or what kind of things they should spend the money on So I was just thinking as a suggestion Would it be something like you could advertise for this quarter or something like that that you're interested in getting You know proposals to send people to conferences in the next quarter It's like hosting many events in the next quarter.  There's some kind of guidance or some kind of theme around it for a quarter or half a year Whatever, so that's just a suggestion. I Think that's a great idea because it came up with Sean You know talking around like having soft deadlines earlier announcements for these things one thing that is totally absent in our Documentation now for all of these event sizes is like as far as I know like how much lead time you need for that and I really like that idea of Doing it in a quarterly way so like say, you know January to March like hey If you want to do an event from April to June like get it in those first three months. I I really like that idea. Thanks for sharing that Alex for example in in our case in Mexico, we have meetings every month. Maybe we don't need $100 or something like that, but maybe we need a little pieces from swag or something to in the meetings To get something to the people, you know, maybe not not teachers Personalizes or something like that. But yeah, and I don't know if this impacted the budget to counting in the in the small event budget So even from your perspective and hearing like even if it's not Money dollars that we're giving to you other kinds of ways that as someone who's doing regular events and regular community events Yeah, exactly Mmm, and then would you think it would just be things like swag that you'd be that would be helpful Or do you have other things in your community that would be it depends because in the regular events? We maybe just only need to swap but if the event involves Two or more communities like us. Maybe yeah, we need our something else more I don't know A bottle or a t-shirt or something Yeah, for example because because because now we spend more or more money to to make these stickers and mugs and T-shirts and everything and and that's okay. We we have a refund With you, but but yeah, maybe in a for us in a regular way, maybe we need a little stock from things Like swag or something like that, which the democratization of swag. It's a big word Yeah, you know, I think that's gonna be also a an Opportunity to explore that more in the next session because that's also something that In case you haven't heard it's the 20th anniversary of the Fedora project this year And we've got got to come up with some cool swag to recognize that But I won't we'll do I think we probably have time. We'll do Robert Amy ifa and then we'll we'll wrap for the session It would be really cool if we could send swag is sigs So if for members who are contributing so not just for an event, but just as we're bored in recognition So if we have participants who are doing things just be able to request that I have a Passive I have a sub topic that I would love to actually have other people who can make the the orders for swag Like I do so it's easier for people like so. Yeah, hey, you got someone in Fedora pride send them three stickers So that's a good suggestion or you might be able to do something like we have the cool stuff store for the Ospo, that's it. So I'm saying actually I've all I've wanted to Community people I can help you with that. I do it Fardia. It's all about the promo codes So one thing I did want to mention because we talked it was mentioned January through March events and things Keep in mind from a budgeting standpoint You don't have the budget for that but you never know how much budget you have left over at the tail end of a year So you can take advantage of that money that you're gonna lose and maybe pick up some extra swag and have it available or You know buy those plane tickets for FOSDOM anything you can spend that end of the year money on for that first quarter Use it before you lose it. Yep. I Like so like that timing our swag spend towards the end of the year because then we could also be more creative or ambitious With some of the more unique stuff. It's a good idea So my question is probably something that I'll have to take offline with the Justin But just to ask in the interest of transparency I'm curious as to how the accounting and budgetary Checkpoints work for the Fedora project for that stuff like who's running the numbers in the books? I would love to have a coffee tea Beer wine chat for that exact topic because that is one of the things that I really want us to get back To the old system that we had with Bex because I think for a number of reasons for a number of reasons that's important, so Find me and I'd love to talk more about that that would make the suggestions of soft deadlines and Spending allocations and quarters and having themes and things what if it's planned in advance in a spreadsheet It's easier to read track plan 100% Hey That for the people who don't know so for flock I was coming up with I knew our budget for flock That was a fixed mostly fixed number And so I came up with this format that I was trialing and if it works. Well, I want to try to Use that for all of Fedora's how anyone can see our spend so there's works in progress there But I think we are we are one minute until the next session. Fortunately. I'm the next speaker, so I don't have to Rush out of here. Oh Coffee great, so I will get some coffee as I have not had that this morning, but thank you all for being here I know this was kind of a kind of we were we went in many different directions, but this is all really helpful feedback Thank you all for being here and spending your your morning here talking about Fedora project budget and how we're going to spend our 2024 budget So thank you all and we'll see you in the coffee break Hello, welcome to the community operations workshop here.  Thanks for coming back if you haven't seen me I work at Red Hat as the Fedora community architect I joined Red Hat about about a year ago but I've been in the Fedora community for for eight years or so and one of the very earliest things that I did in the Fedora community with the the first Fedora community architect Remita Cosmaker was launched a community operations team often shortened to comm ops Which was a team of kind of people who did this Interesting work of working across multiple teams and kind of were connectors in the community And that was eight years ago. A lot of things have changed in eight years But part of what we're wanting to do today is to restart that conversation. So I'm looking forward to We're have some some activities plan some discussion as well But I'm looking forward to hearing from all of you around this idea and getting your feedback, too So I'm Shumanthro most of you know me as Shumanthro M over IRC I work for the Fedora QA team, but since last seven years or so I used to work for or rather assist few of the comm ops members one of them I would highly name as Sachin Kamath if you have ever seen him on IRC, you know who is So most of these guys used to develop matrices and data points and crunch numbers And I was more interested into that thing to get community matrix to have an understanding of how the quality of life of a contributor in Fedora would go about and comm ops was one of my very starting points. So I am here to Start this conversation and gather feedbacks So I think to kick things off. We're going to do another sticky note activity if you were just in here in the last session and Yes, I have got the pad here. I know you all already have pins if you want to go and distribute those out I'm going to deviate from our playbook a little bit here because I Really there's a question that I'm Let's do like what we might use them again so you can give like three or four per person We can always share more if we need to but the question that I'm going to pose to you all is when you think of Community operations what things come to mind for you? What does this term? What do you think this this kind of work in open-source community looks like? So you can write it all on one sticky note. You can write different things on multiple sticky notes format is totally up to you But we'll take let's see. So it is 11 0 8 now We will come back around 11 13 14 or so and then we'll have everyone come and put their sticky notes up here in the front And we'll take a look at what what do people think community operations is and what does it mean? Yes, so we're all we're doing is what do you think community operations is in an open-source project? What do these what does someone who does comm ops do or what does this team? What kind of tasks do you think or? Give us your feedback when you hear community operations, what do you think of? So we'll take five minutes. We'll come back around 11 13 14 or when everyone looks like they're done writing sticky notes you can come to the front and Put them up here and in a minute or in a few minutes. We'll start to do some groupings All right, do we have anyone we got one more person coming up anyone else have some sticky notes left? written ones I Like that one All right, so feel bare with me I am going to read through some of these just for the benefit of our our virtual folks who are here and To help me remember when I look back at this recording in two months So what we have up here some of things people wrote what is community operations? What do you think of when you when you hear that? There's definitely some common ones care and nurturing of the community So I think generally a community health and well-being is something I'm hearing a lot health and belonging in the community and On that same one ensuring member safety This might fit into this one creating spaces for community discussion and interaction kind of community health one having safe places for spaces for discussion Contributor journey kind of in that. I don't I think that one might be different like how do people move through the project? I said that's what I think of with that one. I don't know who wrote that one, but maybe they feel different We have organized the community have inclusion programs code of conduct and maintaining harmony in the community Some I think are kind of on their own So under the contributor journey we have supports community members who are getting started in the project technical and Resources etc Communication Transparency and coordination of community goals. I'd say that's kind of in the contributor journey newcomer support bucket on the Right side. Oh, so also in the care and nurturing of community create I think that one would fit here So we have one for creating and updating governance processes and under that we have some that are Infrastructure this one's a lot of them infrastructure contributor user experience politics and diplomacy sociology and group dynamics swag and funding Governance partnering with bigger contributors. I might leave that one on its own No, those are all good things, but it covers a lot of the different. Let's put no Let's put this one. I think that's a new new category here So you have building and maintaining systems and workflows for the community releases and also creating and updating governance processes Maybe organizing the community fit in this one. Maybe Events I think is its own bucket. That's one that's on its own same as statistics. I'd also put that on its own bucket Community advocacy towards red hat or maybe red hat advocacy towards community So we'll put that in the events bucket for now. This was another multiple one Yeah, statistics is its own one Yes, we have some great chaos representation in here We were just talking in the last session about chaos, which is a community of practice around Measuring and understanding community health and open-source communities They do they create metric definitions as well as create software to help people measure those metrics group this one It is kind of in that bucket. I would group it So we have one that's manages chat platforms behind the scenes So people can meet and work with anyone in the community and in this one that I really liked is the cement between the Bricks or the oil that keeps the engine running. I I love that one actually So it's kind of in the care nurturing of the community bucket statistics Then identifying the needs that are common across communities and addressing them from that broader perspective Kind of like yeah, it's kind of in the middle of the care nurturing and contributor journey one And then I'm holding this one coordinating projects across multiple teams and making connections event planning and promotion Facilitating meet-ups and processes for teams and conflict resolution. I want to put that on the other one with a lot of ideas Check-ins with groups follow-ups establishing standard operating procedures or SOPs finger posting Manned or unmanned. I don't know what that is. I don't even want directing people I Love that so think so for the stream finger posting is kind of a way of directing people Through the community like oh go over here for this thing or over there helping kind of help people We're putting it in the contributor journey bucket here and Then also she had up here driving transparency in general Give work glue work glue work No problem glue glue work is an important one. I think that fits in cement between the bricks, too So let's see we've got one two three four five six And then a lot So roughly six ish groups that are up here So I'm gonna turn it back to the audience as I was as we were reading these out and sorting them into different groups and buckets Did any of these things that you heard from other people surprise you or did this all just make sense when we were Talking it was all like oh, yep. That sounds like commops community operations Or were there any anyone have like a surprise or thing that they they didn't expect to hear when we were reading off these stickies What do one and two I Kind of thought I'd hear more about advocacy and Kind of the ambassador program kind of activities and I didn't see that and I was kind of surprised by that so I Had a couple questions. I found myself asking because there was a lot of sort of organizing Bringing people together These sort of things and I kept on asking myself to what ends on behalf of whom Like these sort of questions, you know, because I think oftentimes it's like well, what are we organizing for and in whose interests and like So would you say it's like who are the team members or who are the stakeholders of this team? How would you How would you describe that? I would be like Who are like this team who are they representing who are they beholden? to What are the incentives that drive? like their their focus Coming from other organizing backgrounds, you know, it's it's very different You could think of something like human resources in a company versus maybe a union organizer oftentimes have logistically very similar tasks, but Because of the nature of like where they're suited Situated within their organization have like very different goals Even though they're doing like practically very similar things not that like It maps directly here, but I found myself thinking about that. Yeah, those are good questions in the back or Yes, okay So I was pleasantly surprised to hear when you said define what community operations means to you to me My I went to the very mechanical technical button-pushing stuff So I was very surprised to hear how like how much the soft skills come into this particular function of the fedora project It's it's very nice to hear that that that's focused very actually I would say probably even higher than the the technical button-pushing, but that was that was all Thanks for that anyone else surprises observations questions that you had when you were hearing these groupings someone I suspect it might be Greg and someone said Sociological I would love further expansion on that All I really meant was that I've been reading a lot of books recently But no, but seriously, there's a lot of study around Online communities of all types right not just software gaming support groups Review sites etc. And how they form and what we learn from that from psychology sociology economics, etc And I'm finding it fascinating Putting a lot of end practice and so really for me think getting a chance to think about that is one of the really great things about the job That I do within my communities in red hat, right? It's it's really good fun, and it does help a lot This is one of the things I think it's great out open source You can go read a bunch of stuff and then be like and learn a lot of things you're like, all right Let's build a team for this. Let's do it So thanks for that any other observations questions or surprises? Again in the front here, I guess I was thinking more at the like to expand on the who we are here to be for Like if you think about like the funnel of people coming into fedora, are we here to represent? The you know post-join sig kind of function like keeping contributors in fedora because I saw some of the comments were you know more around Kind of users or you know bringing folks in but it's kind of a unclear I guess as I look across it where do you sit in the contributor journey of you coming into the project you being you know Mentored and and then being converted from you know, just a new member into somebody who's doing you know actual You know pellets a packaging right or documentation or anything like that. Like where do you go in that funnel? So The answer is yes So when I said Karen nurturing Where in the journey do you see this is it once you're in are you new? For me Karen nurturing is almost everything that's on that board Because it doesn't start when someone joins and it doesn't really even end when someone leaves the project so I'm unclear I might just need explanation because I am extremely jealous of fedora's multiple teams of People doing stuff be careful what you wish for So I I don't always necessarily know where so from perspective of now bringing in community members I I think maybe some of that that that outreach and talking to people before they're in might be part of Mindshare for fedora And I'm not clear on where the I don't have those I Don't have separate teams doing these different things You know with then sent to us. So I'm not sure where Where the where the boundary is between these these different kind of community oriented? Teams that you have that's a great question. And I also want to know these things too So I think do we have any last ones as for we'll we had I kind of got a three-prong approach here, which all I'm kind of improvising a little bit here, but any last observations groups about what is come ups? Going once Going twice so Okay, so I think what might what I'm thinking might be helpful to kind of set the stage for the heart of this workshop I think is sharing a little bit on where is come ups in the Fedora project today how did it get there and What we're thinking about now for rebooting this team So I'm going to try and not put that one, but this one so I would be it would be a Shame for me not to Mention this amazing organization chart that was just updated by someone who I wish could have been here But was unable to Marie Norden just updated this a month ago So this is very fresh since the last update it had in November, but this is our organization chart the map of the Fedora community and If you've never seen it before you're probably feeling overwhelmed. That's that's a pretty natural first reaction, but I Do quick question or remark That would be I would endorse that we have you don't have a design team wait Maybe I'm not sure whether that was audible for the remote audience. My suggestion was to have that as the default wallpaper in Fedora It would be a cool Default a cool wallpaper. I would use that wallpaper. So So if you look at this chart and maybe I should zoom in here I always like I don't know if other people feel this way, but I feel this way about the org chart is kind of a Left-brain right brain way of thinking about it So at a high level how Fedora is structured you have the Fedora council as the top level leadership in the community We also have two other leadership bodies that also play a significant role in the community So on the left brain side, which you could say is the more engineering probably more engineering side of Fedora At the top the governance for that side of the community is the Fedora engineering steering committee Or Fesco so these are the folks who review all the changes that are coming in from all these other places and little bubbles in the community The Fesco is the group that reviews technical changes and kind of helps provide technical leadership around the direction of the distribution And we come over to the right side to the right brain We have what for lack of a better term. I would say is like our non engineering groups although there is engineering work happening in some of those places, but more generally they're not Usually code and software work So the mind share committee, which if you were in our our last session we talked a lot about that So I'm not going to harp on it too much here But it's kind of a another again a decision-making body that kind of helps represent all these other Bubbles and teams in the right side of the project and also helps manage a lot of our budget and spending priorities for for the project So this has changed recently in the last couple of years Comments has moved kind of moved around a bit in this chart But in our current situation of where community operations exists It's one of the groups under the mind share committee So kind of like a SIG or a working group I guess would be the parallel and then the ambassadors the advocate program and the ambassador emeritus Groups are kind of a subgroup of community operations which Nice Nice concept, but I'm not sure if it has quite worked out that way because again if you're in the last session ambassadors carries a lot of baggage in Fedora community it comes with because it's a group that's been around in Fedora for longer than comm apps was 15 16 17 years ago it ambassadors have been around for a while And I don't think in practice it's ever been under comm ops. I mean maybe according to the org chart, but It hasn't been really Operationally, I mean stuff just goes from ambassadors to mindshare So there was some restructuring work that happened in the last couple of years during COVID when we Weren't really doing in-person events and travel so we tried to you know, there's been challenges and that in these areas of trying to revive those groups even before COVID started and You know, I think I'd still say it's a work in progress There was a lot of great structure that was created in the last couple of years, but I don't think it's been fully realized or implemented So that's where things are right now, but how did comm ops get up there in the first place? How did this team come to be? What's the origin story? Marvel Cinematic Universe origin story of community operations. So Well before I open the docs, I think the context here is that in 2015 that was the year that we had the first well different title back then but the Fedora community architect role was created at Red Hat to try to take some things off of the Fedora project leader back when He was doing a lot of a lot a lot of things so it helped diversify or spread out some of that work to be a little more balanced for the role and The person who was the first community architect Remy de Cosmaker kicked off the community operations team with the he had this vision of heat light and love Which maybe I can pull that up because he went to Twitter later and I'm not going to get Twitter.com on this If I can hit it That would be great, but I I can't yeah move permanently. Oh, no, it's still here amazing I don't know. I would probably assume this is not the opera operating procedure at Twitter today X yeah, you know here. We are it's Twitter. So obviously But his vision he put here for Twitter He kind of actually built out in Fedora and so the vision for this community operations team back in 2015 Was to provide these three roles in the community was to provide heat which means work Upstream, you know, I will say this definition is a little more code focused But I wouldn't limit your imagination to code on this So he wrote here is like upstream contributions bug fixes designs documentation the rigorous work that drives the community Light which means visibility So for the projects contributions opportunities challenges and people that impact the community and Love that means culture and support why we care how we work actions that grow the community so commas was Created as a team to help serve these goals in Fedora because if you looked at that org chart There's a lot of stuff happening in Fedora all the time every day Nobody I'd like to find the person who makes the claim that they know everything in Fedora I don't even I don't even think Matt. Yeah, Matthew shaking his head here. So if you find someone I'd like to meet them But comm ops was trying to fill this gap of like, okay, we have all these teams Everyone's doing all this work, but how are we? Coordinating it of like oh we have an ambassador going to an event And then they would create a sticker sheet on their own with a local vendor and then you know It's the weird if you look at some of the older history of Fedora There's some very funny looking Fedora colored logos things that you know So the design team input maybe came too late or they weren't even consulted or there'd be people who were doing their own documentation and could actually been very useful for everyone else but you know Everyone's kind of plug in a way to do in their thing And you might have a few of these people who are kind of doing the glue work But there was no structure for these kind of people in the community Well, there was a community working group that was actually before my time, but I don't know how successful they were with that either so Comops started with this and some of the the origin back in 2015, you know coming back to what we just did with this exercise Well, what did we think comm ops was in 2015? We have these kind of high level concepts But like okay, let's drill down and actually think around what does this work mean? So in 2015 2016 really we developed I'd say the five main buckets of Things that comm ops focused on at the time one of those things was culture Really trying to promote the community culture that exists in Fedora I think if you spent much time at flock this week, you hopefully have been feeling some of that feeling as well But we have all the rest of the year that's not flock and making sure that we're sustaining that culture and people feel connected and We're all on the same page as like the values of our community. That's really important. So things that comm ops did We do interviews with Fedora community members about things they're working on or things that they're interested in We launched the community blog in 2015 was was comm ops that that launched the community blog website that we have now We did a Fedora appreciation week for the anniversary week of Fedora We had a week where people could just go and reach out to their I could be a package maintainer or someone else you work with in the project users even came in to just say thank you And be like hey like you're doing great work or there's some people be like I love you know come and do very general Oh Fedora is great or then there'd be people who would be like, oh Kevin Finsey got my thing my ticket fix. Thanks Kevin for you know more individualized kind of feedback So we built a structure for that for a whole week, you know people coming in and and really appreciating each other and calling out Good things that people are doing We also did a series top badgers of the year So we'd look at the leaderboards of who the top five badger earners were in 2016 or 17 and then we interviewed them How'd you get here? How did what have you been up to in Fedora? What's your story? another thing that comm ops did in the beginning was elections so These days well Ben Cotton had it down to a system. We did have some bumps on the way in the last election or two But even before Ben took that on it was actually always been a community There was election wranglers is what we used to call these people and usually a like Ankur Senha was usually the Person who drove a lot of that someone else who couldn't be here from flock Even though he's been in Fedora for so long and he's literally just on the other island adjacent to us, but Visas but anyways, so we would help do some of the coverage So we'd be doing interviews with folks helping collect those interviews and publishing them on the community blog Doing the infrastructure plumbing for the elections app And also just trying to you know do automation for the calendar so everyone's like aware like hey, here's the deadlines Here's the expectations of what's going to happen The third bucket was storytelling So, you know, I think it kind of goes close to the culture piece But you know being able to go out in the community and talk about like hey Here's the things that we're doing as a project as a community Here's the things that we're caring about and making sure that people I would say this isn't as much of a Outreach as it was an in reach trying to talk to other Fedora people about things happening in Fedora because it's huge You saw on the org chart so things that we did back then was we interviewed There was the Python 2 Python 3 migration back in the day And there was the Python SIG was doing a mass migration of you know trying to update Python 2 packages to Python 3 So we interviewed some of the maintainers for their hackfest that they were doing and how people could help We did calls for nominations for the server working group when they were trying to find new chairs and new governance for the server working group At Fedora events where people would be going like I think it was FOSDOM specifically We would do like an overview of like hey, you're gonna go to FOSDOM. Here's the Fedora Report out of you know all the things happening. Here's the Fedora content and sessions We did help wanted columns. So say like hey, you're trying to get help on something a Community operations person would jump into your chat or hang out in a meeting Ask where you needed help and then we do a column on on the community blog like hey Here's some things people are looking for help with right now in the community. I Missed this one, but we used to do year-in review with different teams to help different teams create a structure I get the end of the year what was marketing up to this year We're ambassadors in a Mia doing that year. What was community operations doing that year? the other one is metrics which I Don't want to make this exclusively a metric session, but we have some really cool things in Fedora that most communities don't have There's some age in some of those tools, but it's still really cool. We have this if you don't know We have the Fedora messaging bus, which is this Bus of activity every time someone does a contribution of some kind in the community Get leaning more on the engineering side of things So I'd say a git commit or a package gets built or tested or a comment is made on a pagore or github issue That gets reflected into the messaging bus and we can query all those things and take a look at you know What's happening in Fedora? So the comm ops team back in the day. We did a couple of things I'm gonna guess that first one analyzing Fedora contributor activity. I promise we're not doing spying or Those things but what we did was looking at I think that was Fosdem 2016 so we had Baguio Sri Padalkar who was doing this work at the time in comm ops who looked at people who took the badge at Fosdem 2016 and she looked Have these people who scan the badge have they ever shown up before or are they are they newcomers who? Just showed up and then what happened after Fosdem. Did they go on to do other things in the community or do they drop off? She also looked at At flock 2016 she presented on the life cycle of a fedora contributor which Seven years ago we found out that roughly 50 or 60 percent of people who came into the messaging bus would drop off after three months Some people would be shorter some people would continue on for a longer term but at the time that you know that Opened up other questions and things that were interesting of like okay Well, why are people dropping off after three months? Is that that they they hit a barrier or were they just trying to do one thing? And they got it and they're done It opened up those deeper questions that we wouldn't have been able to ask without looking at it There's also release party metrics back when we're doing more in-person release parties and the virtual end of things Kind of leaning on the badges end of stuff as well I also have to mention Alberto BT zero from the fedora Mexico community who was also a big part of all the metrics work that we were doing at the time And has created some really cool scripts around geographic activity as well So that was a big pillar of commas and there were some key people who really drove and owned that and used our tools to Tell interesting stories feeding back to the storytelling piece And then lastly in 2015 what was commops we we wrote out supporting Subprojects or other teams other six so that might have been like wiki gardening. We are working with the fedora join sig We were helping fedora modularity get started back in the day We helped the fedora net sig launch when they were trying to get established when net just went open source So we wanted to get that on the Linux and a handful of other things like mentored projects We did some with a plumbing for G Sock 2016-17 and So that was what we started off with in practice People come and go and there were changes in in the community and You know and also I think you know we had a the first founder of Remy de Cosmaker left the role Brian Axelbeard came into the role and he had a different approach for it and some of the The way that team functioned wasn't as document I think what happened was scope creep kind of you know Then people are like oh well commops can do this commops can do that And suddenly commops was doing all these things and then the people slowly dwindled and the team kind of I won't say Went away completely, but it's definitely not it's it kind of fizzled out after a while and then co vid Didn't help any of that either So this is kind of the lay of the land eight years ago And so why we're doing this workshop today and what we're gonna switch to here to have more of a discussion in a little bit is Trying to reboot or revive this team in a sustainable way because even though even if we don't do all of these things Again, I still think there's a huge value in having a structured place where people can jump in and you know If you want to do storytelling you want to talk to other people and help do that in reach you know making sure that other contributors are on the same page and Aligned, you know, I still think there's a place for this kind of work So the last thing I'll mention here before we transition over is Where we're where we've been out in the last couple of months if you've seen on fedora discussion We've had a conversation already for It was like June or like May or June that we kicked this off Trying to figure out like what what will this look like again and if we try to revive this and reboot this team What is it going to look like? We have a few folks who've already some folks who are also in the room who have listed their interests so the The idea that I came out with the original proposal. Well, what should come up is being now I put out there's three things just three things that come up should I think come up should do today Which is again the data science piece coming back to that metrics part. I Don't know what to call this one, but I've leaning I've leaning into product operations That's definitely not what I there's better better things to describe it But kind of that glue work that came up earlier, you know being able to jump between multiple teams and to Have a place for people who do that cross-team work to connect and kind of be organized with how we do that and Then the storytelling piece, you know all the old blog posts that we used to do the interviews with other Contributors and doing that kind of in reach work But what should come ups not be this time? I was like alright We probably need to lay out some things that we're not going to do in this iteration One of those is the community blog back in 2015 when we launched it It was the commots people I guess that did kind of fit under our storytelling thing at the time the team managed it and It was largely I mean it was a lot of me I guess but we had it we did have a team of editors there and I Think now with how the blog has evolved and changed it's not a test not an experiment anymore The comm blog is here to stay, but I don't think come up should be the team to own the editing workflow for that anymore I Think we've got other processes that work, and I don't want to Undo that the the system that is working the other one is app development which a Comment from Matthew that right now been cotton is doing the calm blog The challenge is that we'd still probably need to have a team. It is a one-person read you one So calm blog still probably needs some love and attention, but yeah, so one thing we could actually do is call for editors We actually did not ever do that right, but I I'm sure like I am one of the editors of com blog So I keep publishing my own stuff, but yeah Yeah So But yeah, if we actually call for editors I think there will be people who will show up and then we can do something Yeah, and then the last thing coming back to why the ambassadors were kind of boiled up under comm ops I actually don't think community operations should own Ambassadors whether it's its own thing or it's somewhere else. It's an it's still a good discussion so a Little bit of history in the last About one year during covert. We kind of launched this revamp operation to get ambassadors somewhere Somewhere from a dormant phase so we actually phased out most of the information that was necessary Unnecessary not there would not ever be updated and was mostly be trotting We kind of took care of that moved everything to this Docs shiny page on the when the website, but We decided to move ambassadors under comm ops and that was not a Very great way to start things. So I guess yeah, we would not want to have that there at all If you were in the last session, you know that that's still something we need to fix But probably not in the scope of at least this session and what we're trying to drive here so That was a lot of talking and and history lesson. Hopefully didn't put well, okay I don't need to sleep just making sure but just want to see before we kind of transition to a more interactive part and Thinking around what people are interested or would be like to see from a new revive comm ops Are there any questions or comments people want to add in I see to here. We'll start with Robert So kind of going back to earlier. I think the you know, and especially going into some of the sticky notes I think there's maybe against some confusion of is community operations more Inward-facing into fedora or is it outward-facing and outside of fedora, right? Because I think there's a lot of And there's a lot of overlap right because it's it's that funnel of getting new Contributors in in some cases is events right awareness and things like that But I think also at the same point the bridge of bringing everyone together is kind of also what community ops does too so yes and comm ops is not fedora marketing and Will not would not you know take over that work either I think it's a very clear distinction is the marketing team and Joseph are doing awesome things and we don't want to Feel like we're taking that away from them. You know, it's I see it as different work in the back that we not just find distinguishing part between the ambassadors and comm ops comm ops Looking inside ambassadors looking outside say like to elaborate ambassadors are there to promote Fedora to get the word out on Fedora to get get Get people from who are not part of the community yet to join fedora whereas comm ops would look more to To the inside of the community and help them to Collaborate I Actually would be curious for Sumantro to take that one and get his take on that I would be Right, so I guess I'm my quick comment there is I feel like it's tricky with ambassadors because on one hand Yes, like going out to events doing kind of the outreach arm of talking to the pub general public and open source world about Fedora But I also have seen ambassadors do this role of doing kind of that inward stuff I don't know if we have any the Fedora Mexico I don't see any of those folks here now, but they do a lot of like I mean in one hand Maybe it is kind of that outreach, but they do a lot of like community building in their in their region in I always get the idea that my voice is hard enough to be heard but It's more the definition part that I'm after it I mean it doesn't prevent you to be an ambassador and be part of the comm ops team at the same time but the definition part would be Ambassadors are focused on Spreading the word whereas comm ops would be enabling Ambassadors or enabling parts of the communities to get the stuff done And it's it's more than definition part. I was looking at not that you cannot be part of both or that there is no interaction But the definition part for me would be ambassadors are looking outside They are spreading the word and the comm ops team would be looking at the inside Where do you need help what we can what can we do for you to improve the situation? That's what I was thinking of. Yeah, I think that's that's a fair assessment So one thing that I would always add to this and this came up multiple times this exact same definition came up multiple times. Oh So basically want to see you on the camera So basically I all I wanted to specifically point out is see ambassadors are They belong from the federal project on multiple teams, right? So think about it like if I am an ambassador and I work for the QA team So I basically have some working knowledge of what QA does, right? So when I go around and do advocacy and that's probably the next part of our talk, which is Fedora advocates that was created to basically do advocacy for Fedora and most importantly Do advocacy in such a way that we could Get and retain contributors to a specific part of Fedora So if you're good at let's say design you would onboard somebody to design team and you would help them maintain that retention period And that would drive or help commops mint or get the matrix out to understand if that is what a Contributor sustainability story you'd look like for us. Yeah, that's that's one of those things So I like the idea of making anything makes a clear line both with the marketing and Ambassadors and all those things to say commops is internally focused That might include supporting teams in their externally focused roles and you know things are fluid There's no like you can't talk to people when he's not part of the project yet. You're in comm apps But I think yeah as part of that I think it might make sense to move the commops bubble from underneath mindshare to actually directly under the council I think we talked about this a little bit before as well because it's something that is supposed to operate on both sides of that project and and you know part of the reason mindshare exists as a thing is because previously everything on the left side there the Engineering side basically was connected up through Fesco at least nominally Whereas all the other groups were just kind of bubbles floating around the project and it didn't feel like there was a The place to connect so that's kind of where the idea of It was originally outreach and then mindshare and commops kind of grew out of that So that's why there's a thing there I'm not sure that you know that it's had that's had its own challenges, but I think commops doesn't fit under that And I think moving it to council and making the whole org chart get redrawn. It's probably the best thing Should kind of match the program John make a very confused looking face, but I want to hear what that's All right, I guess and I feel like I'm gonna derail the current conversation So please feel free to jump back in but like I guess my question is Like what's what's the point of this reorganization? Right is because I'm hearing a lot of different discussions You know some of it feels like it's like well, you know Commops doesn't have enough capacity to do these sort of tasks and we want to move them Into some other part of the community or organization that we feel might have more capacity to do these things You know like maybe the blog or something some of it feels like maybe Because we're situated here within the organization We don't have as much easy access to groups in other parts of the organization So maybe we should move somewhere or like we don't have the Capability to standardize certain processes across these groups and then you know and this is purely like I'm not saying it is or it isn't but some of it might feel like just kind of organizational bike shedding Where it's like well, you know, are we gonna be like this color or that color? You know, are we internal or external or that sort of stuff, which you know our I'm not saying are invalid But I'm curious from Everyone else's perspective like, you know, what it what is the goal if this were to move like what are people hoping to do I? Could respond to that, but I'd actually really like to hear from Response to that that point specifically from Mike Or did you want to make a reply to Mike's comment? I Think the question to be asked then to move away from the bike shedding is Is there a need for a commops team? You know, what would be the purpose of the commops team and basically what we already defined is to enable different teams To work together and or to bring teams together basically to help people out And I think that need is there that is that is real and there is no There's no good I need to choose my words carefully toes along these days There's no good part in the community where you can turn to if you if you get stuck Then it's usually asking different people around and until someone steps in and gets it unstuck And I think that's exactly the idea behind the the commops team to To have a body to turn to we need to bring people together to Keep keep things going and that's also what I was trying to refer to with my analogy to the Cement in the brakes and the oil in the engine, you know, sometimes stuff gets stuck and it needs to get unstuck and that's Usually a hard part within the community Currently kind of feeling like maybe the why Commops part hasn't been clearly articulated. I'm not sure if that's So I guess we need to emphasize more on why the the value for commops to the entire Contributors like why would we want to have contributor investment in Commops to make to make more sense think about it this way that when we add anything in this org chart It is to either expand the project in a direction or get quality of life better or in some ways Make a meaning out of this particular group So one of those things that we probably need to understand or talk about is how commops can actually benefit the larger community So if we are doing story telling should we be doing storytelling for like and the approach how to get the pieces Do Robert come back to Sean maybe and then ifa So one thing I would just add and I'll I'll think of it in my DEI mind So some of the things that co-ops is doing is very much around, you know About contributors, right? So I'll think of it from Fedora pride, right? We want to make sure that everyone has a safe space who is in our community, right? The same thing for the accessibility team or four door women or anyone in DEI. It's kind of an overlap It's you know making sure contributors have a safe journey. It's kind of in a different mindset It's more about the work you do at Fedora like what you're volunteering and contributing in but you know in the DEI side It's kind of a little bit different our focus is more about, you know, specific community issues But in some cases Comops is more about the community as a whole So I'd actually kind of agree with what Matthew was saying just a moment ago is Collops and DEI are kind of in some cases an overlap because I would care from a Fedora pride perspective Are we losing contributors? I wouldn't want to know how many of those join the Fedora pride Say again, you know was contributing and then you know, they're leaving, you know, was it a you know a Contribution issue somewhere, right? They struggled to get information or something like that, right? And maybe could as DEI could be a provided more support. So all right. I'm gonna take a look at matrix Okay, my confused face was just about the like whether it should be under here or under here. I guess I just don't know what Logistically it means for it to be like I know what it means for me to be under my manager in Ospo in red I like I report to him. He gives me performance reviews here proves my budget like What is it? What what's the logistical difference of comm ops? Do they report into Mindshare committee versus reporting to council. Do they like what's different and so, yeah, they're Although we have It's been a challenge to do it this way We have had efforts to have like reports of what's going on in the project wrap up in in this structure So there is actually that literal reporting structure not in terms of like who does your paycheck, but where the reports go like that that that there's It's very hard to do that even when you're when when your paycheck is on the line But even for volunteers it's been hard to do but but that's idea for reporting But also I think just for the like Where that group is supposed to have impact. I think I'm putting it there on the chart makes a little bit of a difference part of this of the why to me is There's there's two things one is from the fedora council point of view the fedora council is comprised of people a couple people like me and Justin who are hired to do our do our jobs there But also people who come from these other parts to kind of connect things together at the top Which is it's good, but it also means it's people who don't have a lot of time to do things So when we've got like the council should do this or we have we often have ideas or people come to those ideas and then we have no Actually doing it branch of the of the council. So to me in some ways commops could be the I don't know what's what's the right term, but the the actual Yeah, I didn't want to get too much It didn't want to get too much into like the structure of the US government into it, but yeah, it's the it's what? Yeah, the implementation arm of the council or the council. I hear some things we'd like to do and somewhere We can hand them where there's people like, oh, yeah, we'd like to work on this or else, you know Tell us that can't do that or whatever But just like some place council can delegate things that would that would be a really strong Why for me because we don't have that and the second one is actually more personal for Justin which is When Ben and Josh and I were kind of talking about the role when he was first hired that we did some white boarding about like what are How our roles exist and overlap and we did there was a comment somewhere that I'm not the CEO of fedora Which is absolutely true But in terms of analogy of where my job sits and what I do it kind of is like that chief executive officer kind of position where it's Everything that happens is my fault ultimately in some ways and it's kind of that's a lot of those sort of roles and Ben saw the the program manager role as a basically chief Operations officer and that's actually why we went with Fedora operations architect for the possible new job like that and it yeah This has got some secret stuff on it Justin. So don't show that with everybody. Don't read it with fine print but Yeah That role was was fairly well focused much more than mine and far much more than the Fcake or FCA role which in you know, the corporate analogy is Chief people officer chief marketing officer CFO financial officer like there's like I don't know five or six Imaginary C-level titles we could put on this role. So that's a whole lot. So it felt like wow, that's too much and Maybe it would be nice to have a team that could help support some of those things It doesn't necessarily need to be comm ops, but that's Just all that stuff kind of needs support and that's that's much more vague than the first thing But that's part of the why from my point of view also and maybe come ups as an answer to all of them But come up. Hopefully can be the answer to some of it So we're gonna shortly get into the last interactive portion of this. So we will go. I think is it Mike Eiffa England P We'll do those last few I just declined his questions. He's sick of being ignored I'm joking and Just just a short observation and maybe as a possible output for the session. So We began the session like with people giving what they think that the comm ops team does and I'd say that it surprised me that I was expecting it to be more Technically mechanical focused and there was an awful lot of the soft skills, which is a wonderful team to have but It's quite hard to scale which sounds like it's one of the core problems Not to say you should reduce, you know, your your soft skill mentoring and support But sometimes it's hard to be both and if you're missing your main primary focus How are people supposed to know what you do in every other kind of governing body that we saw on that that diagram? you can tell The door council is governance. You can tell that Fesco is technical steering or engineering or steering technical steering, etc We now know mindshare is more administrative and budgetary, etc If you can't list what your your group does in one sentence, you're doing too much So maybe as an output for this is the is it would it be feasible to get some sort of like mission statement or vision or simplified This is who we are and this is what we do and then obviously there are layers down to that so operations might and be There's many meanings to that but a main core tenement of the group that's a great point and You are all going to help us draft that in just a couple minutes here. Thanks for the idea. I Just want to check Penguin Peter Mike. Do you have any? all okay, okay the why or so a Comment about moving the comm ops team around and like was it makes sense. I've been under something else or on the higher part part part of that being about a visibility and Making some of that work more supported at higher levels of the project if I'm summarizing that right So Amy mentioned about the open stack Governance board and how they've structured it with some of their their teams So I know you want to be mindful of time. We're in the last 15-20 minutes here. So what we're going to do is by show of hands. How many of you know what a Community initiative is formerly known as objectives It's like okay like 25% I'd say okay, so if you don't know what these are we are going to ask you to help us draft some of the mission statements or high-level goals of a initiative for community operations If I can remember the It'll redirect me. Yes. So what are community initiatives? I will summarize this for you in that whenever we're trying to do a big thing in fedora that usually involves working with lots of teams and Lots of people and might take anywhere from 12 to 18 months We encourage people to do it as a initiative community initiative formerly objectives Put that better. Okay. Thanks for that. So You know again the Every community initiative has a designated community initiative lead it can be a group of people We've had co-leads for these before the logistics aren't so important But the important thing to take away is we're you know, this is like a 12 to 18 month Timeline for doing work doing like big work in the fedora community So without getting into the nuance here I'm just pointing this out as what the structure is But what I'd like each of you to help us draft is what are based on all this discussion We've been having in here. What are top-level goals or objectives that you would like the community operations team Are you feeling the community operations team should address in this reboot revival? So I think do we still have we maybe do some more sticky notes I don't know if everyone is exhausted on their sticky notes or see a few Do we have the big pad? Where did the big pad of stickies go? I do not have it Do you so have the big pad some on trouble? So it is 12 11 right now. We'll take this one might be a little more thoughtful So we'll take like six seven minutes. We'll come back at 12 18 or so We'll give us seven minutes to kind of discuss what we all have here. So What really I missed type it We won't hold you for lunch. We won't we won't keep your appetite But we'll just take like six to eight minutes here and just write down what things based on our discussion today What things do you think should be top-level goals or objectives of a community operations?  We got five minutes. So we're gonna do five minutes to go through uh the future destiny and Fate of commops in five minutes. Let's go. So while we were uh while there was the chatter Simantro and I were going through and grouping the stickies again We've got a few that we want to ask some questions about But we were roughly able to put them in four buckets of work and then life advice column of general tips and tricks I don't think We probably don't have time to read all of them But the four buckets we came up with was the one common theme was around processes the creation documentation and maintenance of How collaboration works and making sure that those things are clear The second theme is around I'd say outreach and engagement making sure that you're not just having processes that people are Uh know about them and are empowered to do things with those Uh, there was the metrics one uh metrics and data science piece and then one that was Kind of on its own which we we did want to ask on that one So in the first one, we'll start we'll go left to right on these. We've got three under the um processes How to do things bucket and I'm going to read out the sticky note and while we want to know for these ones It's like just clarify what you wrote just to get your perspective on this So the first one we wanted to ask someone wrote managing organizational and project processes That was ifa So give us give us the juice and because we're tight on time a few sentences Of these quick as I can Still interrupting me okay, so um The fedora project has many processes and things like that And it's basically just around standardizing on them making sure that either they all like if there's wiki pages if that's what we're using or fedora docs or something and they they have a coherent kind of template And they're up to date They don't go stale. So just managing that upkeep The maintenance work Yeah, not necessarily writing them but making sure they're written correctly. Yes The next one we had was execution on strategic plans parentheses project management pgm That kind of goes to what math you mentioned around then the fedora product the fedora council needing a group of are teamed to execute on plans and stuff so I have a triage one as well. So if you want me to run through that one too I can but basically it's if the fedora council has some Initiatives or objectives that they want to execute on then the community operations team does seem like a logical choice to Execute on those plans again not doing the work but shepherding the work overseeing the work making sure the work is happening And that there's like a reporting structure in place or accountability They're just that linchpin that a project manager or a program manager would often play perfect next one is Determine and quantify the roles and responsibilities of commops so as to remain focused and head off scope creep Is that a familiar Who is our author of this one? unless they I think we were curious on that one because there was the quantify Keyword in there and we just wanted to understand that but maybe our our author was too hungry so All good. The next one so in the second column around which was general ones around engagement Uh, this one we I think we wanted to understand the diversity piece on it It just says enhance engagement and diversity. I don't know. Do we have the author of that one in the room? Dang should have front loaded all these stickies all the people had the controversial ones. I wrote it and then they left Uh, and then the last one that we just wanted to clarify is Manage cross organizational infrastructures bullet points community metrics fed message fedora blog fedora policy docs That was mine. So in a few sentences, you know commops is a cross organizational team, right? It's kind of meant to work Be the glue someone said right So any infrastructure that is assisting in that Whether it's like whether it's fed message or if you're running for more lab Or if you have other infrastructures like technical infrastructures that Kind of are helping glue all these communities together. I would say A cross organizational team like commops would be a good place to put that I know there's probably a lot of that and to like dump it all on your laps would probably Make your brain explode and you know be bad, but that was sort of my thought Well, that's that's really interesting because I would say that from my perspective that comm option own those things, but perhaps we should find a Cpe friend to be our co Adjective lead or someone who could help us rep that side of the house I had exactly the same thought that sounded more like the definition of cpe So it seems like working with the right stakeholder is a key part right because that infrastructure is important. It's Community platform engineering team at red hat that basically is the we should not be saying cpe here We should be saying fedora infrastructure. So cpe is a red hat team that one of their remits is to work on fedora infrastructure fedora and sent us infrastructure and There's been a little bit of conflation Not badly intentioned but just Over the last few years and I want to make sure we keep that separate. So let's not Accidentally do that and add more confusion Yeah in for a team that's that that's what's meant Yeah, it wouldn't necessarily have to be somebody for example who is a redhead or on the cpe team to do this So one of the comments I wanted to add over there is I think I attended a Talk yesterday. So some of these apps that was mentioned over there. They already fall as a part of Critical one or two in that case any which way Fedora takes care of it But if there is something that is not like a grimoire lab would not probably fall under it But sent us and fedora can both benefit from it. That's the ecosystem stuff in that case So we'll do ifa robert and lunch. This would be really quick just to kind of like Just to compliment what Samantha was saying and like where those kind of where that help would would lie Yeah, the the cpe team the community platform engineering team that red had That red had sponsors pays for like there's a couple of us on the salary And we do take care of a lot of those applications But the fedora infrastructure team is not just cpe It's community folks But the comm ops team would be a very interesting team to be able to like Know the the processes to get tickets opened in the cpe team that the Infrastructure is failing for whatever reason in the in that. So maybe there's just a bit better synergy Needed between maybe the comm ops and the internal red hot teams Well, we are pretty much at time. So I don't want to hold you from your lunch But before we wrap I did just want to give a huge appreciation and thanks to my co-presenter because I was buried in all the Flock things and did not get to put a lot of time in the organizing end of this And sumancho owned a lot of that and in addition to this session He's also been doing a lot of it for the last two years with the outreach revamp together with mariana bala and marie nordin So I just wanted to acknowledge that All the work that sumancho isn't yeah and sumancho mariana and marie specifically Because as you saw on the org chart there's a lot of history It's a very big thing and it's it's hard work And i'm appreciative of the work that people like sumancho is doing I'm thankful for all of you for spending some of you have been here since nine with me others if you join for this session so thank you for your time and Enjoy your lunch Okay, uh, wow. Hi everyone. Um, are you all sure you're in the right room? Um Okay, that's good. This is discourse on discourse exactly Cool. I don't have a presentation But I have some of an agenda and I can just start from the beginning of that agenda Um See there are three things one is to talk about how we got here making an agenda. So you can make you laughing at me for that Yes, right It's fair Uh, how we got to where we are now and you know what to do about it um, some terrible python scripts I've written and some and you know what to do about them, um, and Uh, maybe showing off some of the like what moderation tools and things discourse has and what they look like and for people who aren't familiar with them um So I expected like three people and so I'm excited to see everybody here. This will be good. Um First like how many people have logged into fedora discussion site? All right, almost everybody if you haven't you you might want to discussion at fedora project.org. That's what we're talking about um, it looks Like this it's logged into my account here Uh, I'm really pleased with this cookie notice because we were told by the compliant so in order to get discourse onboarded Uh red hat as they've gotten to a bigger and bigger company like their Requirements for vendors that red hat will give money too for things have become very very very strict and it's like Over a year long process to go through getting the vendor onboarded here with a lot of compliance checkboxes and things and like They had to hire a penetration testing company and a whole bunch of so they went Anyways, um, it says this website uses cookies to function the compliance people asked To tell you and the links to have something with more information and then it says fine over there, um, which I Yeah, exactly Exactly and and I was really pleased that they allowed me to make that message Be that message What's that that message was my draft? I had to make a message and they accepted the one that I drafted which I really feel happy about Um, so how we got here exactly and I'm going to try to make mode feel too sad about this But I'm a little bit sad about it too, right? Um, we've known for a long time. We've talked a long time about how How the mailing lists are not Easily accessible to a lot of people. I'm not going to rehash all this It's it they feel buried behind things and so we had in fedora Awesome project mo is designer for it called hyper kitty to kind of make a mailing list first Interface for it, but for reasons it didn't get the investment it needed and didn't like it It really didn't get very much development beyond the first launch And I think that if it had it would be an amazing competitive platform, but You know, if wishes were horses, we'd have a really awesome get forge Powered by horses So, yeah, that uh, uh, so this wasn't like Didn't come into fedora's a haha I'm going to you're going to get rid of hyper kitty and get rid of mailing lists Although getting rid of mailing lists is on my agenda So but we're getting rid of mailing lists as a interactive discussion thing I think there's a lot of like mailing lists as a broadcast platform or as notifications I think are going to be around for a while until The big companies destroy email completely which I don't know 10 years. We'll see But um, we we had a platform and it had a thing called ask fedora, which was modeled on stack exchange stack overflow My phone is doing lots of notifications. Maybe people are tagging that things. Let's And uh It was going pretty well in terms of the community, but the software we use which was a was a you know, open source thing called Askbot, which is kind of a clone of what stack exchange looks like But it had really none of the like back end things and just uh, it didn't really understand the things that have made stack overflow successful As a as a thing, which that's a whole another thing But also it ended up being maintained by one person who was not really doing very much with it And we couldn't get any new features. Nothing was happening. They weren't even accepting pull requests very well So that was basically dying off. We actually even paid that person for a while to try and get things Moving, but it didn't go anywhere. So they decided they wanted something else and decided on discourse as a thing and at the time uh, saunya vanek was the community manager for uh like the project atomic stuff and She would wanted a place to talk about Like silver blue and which is an emerging thing at the time and you know, some of the coro s fedora coro s stuff And so she said let's set this up And I said, why don't we set it up as a general thing and this is one of the places where I made mosad? I'm sorry because I just set it up with um your discussion dot fedora project org and I you know, maybe could have done more more discussion beforehand. I'm sorry It wasn't meant to be a surprise like that but It has gained in popularity and a lot of people are using it and at this point I think it is really the best candidate for a primary asynchronous discussion platform for the project Skepticism is okay, but I think it has it has a lot of nice features and also it's a lot of other open source projects are really I don't know Standardizing is not maybe not quite right, but like python switched to this as their main thing, you know Like all their mail they they got rid of their mailing lists You know ansible. Um, I've got ansible person right behind you there. No, um, he's going there. Um, and Uh, there's a lot of other projects that use this Either in conjunctions of mailing lists or instead of mailing lists a lot of newer projects Um had you know not setting up mailing lists at all um I don't have one of my one of my pitches for why this is a important thing A lot of people were moving away from fedora mailing lists to Basically using getforge trackers as their mailing lists for things So we have people basically using get hub get lab pager for their teams things Which is which is fine for a lot of things, but those aren't really very good like if things get big There's no Threading or anything like that. There's not written. There's not moderation tools. There's a lot of they're not really meant for extended discussion They're meant for you know tracking issues and Worse than that let alone whether they're good or bad tools They're scattered all over the place and there's a whole bunch of like one of the people on the mailing list a develop list are talking about how People moving you know way for mailing lists which all come to your inbox to discourse sites Which are all in different places feels more scattered But I think we were really already getting more scattered because You have there a bunch of if you wanted to follow a lot of things are just a bunch of different Like get trackers somewhere that you have to follow in order to follow a lot of what was going on Like you know core os stuff in one place What's that? Those well this can go to you these can go to your email too, right? Yeah, so mo doesn't think the email interface is very good. Um, but what's that? Yeah, so some of the so Yeah, yeah Yeah, yeah Yeah, so There's Uh, I don't we could talk about that a little bit, but they're actually you should be able to filter this pretty well So yeah, well, so so so and the problem with should is google, right? Because so if you are using anything else to filter your emails Discourse puts Useful and meaningful headers into the mail that can be used to filter this very effectively and nicely Sure, I would that I'd be happy with that Yeah, yeah, um, so I know um There are some scripts that will you that if you if you happen to be using enterprise Gmail that you can actually run There's a scripting thing that can run and you can run it like every I don't I don't know how fast you can run it But it will take your mail and we can can actually process it in more complicated ways And so we there's a script. It's actually on Um, I don't see if it's gonna find it here clearly What's that? Yeah, yeah, right it is not, um Yeah, there we go look at that so What if you don't use Gmail? So if you don't use Gmail like whatever your mail client should be able to filter on the headers What what what are you using for your? And they don't I I would be shocked if colab can't do this Yeah, so hold on Okay, okay, can I can I sit down with you and and look at it? Okay, okay, so um if I can hear Yeah, yeah, and so um Maybe Yeah, right So so yeah, so this is a design difference between hyperkitty and discourse, which is an intentional different direction They went so discourse is although you can interact it with the email. It is definitely Web interface app interface first and Because of that It There are some things it isn't limited to things that are easily sent through email, right, which yeah Sorry Yeah, well, yeah, sure. In fact, um, we have that we have that so this Announce list here is an ounce list feeding into disc discourse here So Yeah I could stay with a mailing list and people could interact with me through discourse and I never have to log in or deal with its email interface So the problem is it doesn't go back It doesn't go back the other way very well. It's not it's not a good two-way intervention Oh, because wordpress does with the comments, right? So the no the wordpress we've turned off the comments on wordpress So the word the comments on wordpress are coming from from discourse. So it's a it's it is still a It's a one way from one the articles go one way and the comments go back the other way And it's not a so it's not a yeah, it's a motorcycle Sorry, thanks for you bring me. Yeah but um Yeah, I mean I've I I grew up on mailing lists and I've come to find this the web interface a better approach because Who was I talking to someone I was talking to just the other day was saying that Here here flock that you know, they've gotten into the habit of here They had like I'm going to my mailing list in these folders in my you know, webmail and instead I'm going You know, I have these are my discourse sites that I have bookmarks that I go to and just kind of a slightly different workflow And that's basically what I've adjusted to as well If you are in both the 10 different communities I actually actually yeah, I find that I find that um for me that's I mentioned this in the uh the meet your fesco session that an observation I've made is we're kind of Balkanizing the community where you have long term or a long time technical users who have an established workflow Who are also expected to live in high traffic mailing lists You're creating another Thing for them that they already had a workflow for and what that's leading them to is to ignore this So we've shifted the participation from one subset of fedora to another and I don't Like I'm not opposed to something new, but we have to solve the bridging problem Like we we can't alienate the established workflows At like as much as possible because we still want those users to participate And this this is this is just like what's happening internal at redhauer We have multiple chat systems and all this bullshit going on that we have to check multiple places and it Only adds more work for everyone involved like I still have to live on irc for upstream communities It's beautiful that we're on matrix great awesome Nowhere else is doing that internally We aren't even doing that either and I have to live on two chat systems internally that can't talk to each other so this is Like new stuff is fine, but we have to have that bridging effort so that we don't break workflows for people Well, I there's Yeah, I do use email, but in to to your point I don't use gmail. So I you know if you use gmail, so then you're kind of stuck right or you have to use the script Or whatever, but yeah Email works for me. It's it list ID. It's just like I'm subscribed to a list I do miss out on like reactions polls Things that don't translate, you know to emails But other than that it just is another folder and I reply to it and it it all just works, but That's That's a different investment in in infrastructure that I've made that I don't get to choose where that lives So I could go and shift all of my fedora community involvement to my personal email account And and and gain that filtering and and that would be great, but I mean I already have a workflow like that That's that's the concern I have and I I know I'm not the only one impacted by Well, the other thing is that if you do the email, I mean It's 90 of the stuff going through there is stuff I don't care about and I have no involvement with and it's for that little bit I've just shifted to using matrix and I just ignore this because I have I've tried so much Like I know you know that I've tried you know that I have I can't I can't do it. I just can't I don't know So Maybe to answer a bit. I mean I don't use I use a method where I get notifications to email and If I want to look at polls reactions or to reply Then I go to the click on the link and go to the web and I think that's I mean like In my workflow, I Read a thousand messages and reply to maybe two out of that and this This isn't this isn't really that much different than the the old workflow and Like Matthew said, I don't know like the same thing happened with pleasure and github and github already So it wasn't like I was able to do everything from the mail client. You had to go From mail to other places all the time anyway Like I forget hub like github has reactions that you can only you have to go to the website to do those You can't do the reactions through You don't see the reactions. All right. I don't think the reactions are what's important I think it's just I'm in one system and I'm just skimming through and evaluating And I can't get that skim through evaluation from the emails that the no You can't And so the only way I can use it and read through it is to go to the website And the problem is the website is so cluttered and disorganized that I can't find what I actually care about Tell me right now like before at least with a mailing list I could go the design team list and that was a place It's this has so many like tags and categories and nonsense like it doesn't feel like there's a place. Yeah, so So how many layers how many clicks do we have to make to get to design team? Can you see design team? I don't even think I see it So yeah, this page needs help, but there it is right there Okay, so there so this is the design team Space right there and you could also get that you could get that another way would be to go to all categories And then but when somebody posts something Yeah, so and this is actually when you post something you have to know to tag it with the right thing Yeah, so but but if you were in this if you were on this page and you hit new topic It will it comes up that way I'm Am I going to make a faux pas if I tag in like workstation? Are they going to get mad at me and like you you have a limit of only five tags and I don't even know So, uh, so in the in the so this is part of some of this is I I wrote a post Which is um In the help go away this thing, please Maybe well, no So no, uh, the one you could never find was the email one right, but Uh, this is the navigation guide linked right there. So this talks I've tried to put that there in I don't know if you have suggested on how I can improve this I would be happy to Do that, but yeah, it is it is adapting to something new and I think there's some part about that I want to make sure we accommodate People's workflows as much as possible But like I think that Making it entirely the same without any change Like things change and I want to bring people along But we've got to be able to have some like there's got to be some at depth So that's you know, we can complain about the interface all we want and how it fits into my workflow It doesn't I can make it fit uh, you know, that's the option But the bigger problem is I think exactly what what dave said We've got this split now you have people are participating on the email list. Yeah, I've logged into here. Um, I don't regularly It's not part of my workflow I do read the email list and I can interact on that But you've got a group of people are interacting on email lists You have a group of people who are interacting on this and there's very little crossover between Yeah, um, I would like to bring everyone here. That's my agenda. Um, I think that's the solution to it because I think it is the best common ground of the things I think it needs it's not a tech problem it's a social glue problem and I was talking to um, the answerable guys and We made like we had this idea. Well, for example, if um, you're in matrix and somebody asks a question And then you have helpful answers. It's lost in the ether of because that's a very, um, synchronous medium So could there be a way to have a bot that you hit an emoji and it makes a post to discourse And it becomes like if you can bridge and that's what I think david means by bridging I'll get back to that. Okay, because it's a social glue Let's let adam behind you because he's been waiting to talk for like forever I've been like saving your comments for the but I'm I'm wondering whether I might tell a story briefly and perhaps ask you to do a little demonstration at the same time Uh, okay. Trust me. Trust me. Could you could you open a new tab? Maybe and could you go to community dot the foreman dot org? Uh, no, I can't type Okay So I have heard All of the things you have said five years ago And I said I moved this community to discourse five years. Could you go to the search, please after years just says got it Mine's way better Yeah, yeah, this is ancient. Um Could you could you just could you just put in discourse proposal? So I'm going to demonstrate the search here Uh, it should be pretty there the second one second one from november 17 This was me proposing this community move from mailing lists to a forum five years ago. It's a very long thread I'm not proposing you read through it I had an extremely vocal community member who was absolutely adamant that mailing lists were really important that we really didn't want to break People's workflows and that we really really had to consider this carefully In the end I convinced the community at large not that particular person that um that we had to do this And after three months of testing we shut down the mailing list and migrated the entire archive into discourse And moved the whole thing over within three months. He came back to me and apologized and he was a huge fan Because they're converse that's how you yeah, so I I absolutely hear you I know where you're coming from. I've done that with one community before It is definitely possible, but it is also going there's always going to be somebody affected by it There's no way around that So Right right so so the mailing list thing is is being able to work with it by email is what most people tested We did extensive testing on whether threading works properly with the emails that come out of discourse. They do Um, you can definitely say the list ID thing is a problem gmail. I completely agree, but oh my goodness trying to fix that as a pain in the neck Um, the threading works and that you know the in reply to headers are set correctly so they show up properly But like if I'm on my phone reading the mailing list, I can see the context of it because you know people You know quote the end whereas I cannot Do that with discourse Yeah, I think we have the setting that that's a setting But just to quickly to quickly finish the point the the mo is making is there's definitely integration You can do with other systems So we have got chat integration setup for posting things from discourse to matrix on our test setup We're looking as you said whether we can go the other way Um, I definitely want to see us doing some more github integration within the answerable space as well That we have to be careful exactly how much because there's obviously a lot of traffic there But there's definitely ways to bring people along and to remind them that conversation is going on in other places Okay, the thing of is my screen above or below the other screen That's maybe the most annoying thing about having area. I just wanted to make the point The balkanization is happening anyway, and it was happening before this happened We had groups of people talking in telegram. We have groups of people talking on discord So I don't think we avoid the balkanization by just not doing this because people are not people who don't want to use mailing lists Will not use mailing lists even if there isn't an official alternative. They'll come up with another one So I don't think we can not have balkanization. I think it's an insolvable problem I want to show the chat channel, but I've got a whole bunch of private personal messages today on matrix So I don't ship but um, actually have if you look in the announce thing that is actually um We have some of them set up so that posts from discourse go to matrix channels And I talked to you before but then I dropped we can we can do some of that for the other posts as well So they go to matrix and we could also make a matrix bot that goes the other way around There are a bunch of other things so like basically every every If people people are feeling programming if you put dot json on the end of anything you will get a You know a data structure that represents that post with a lot of information And that could be used for developing any kind of complicated thing There's also rss feed equivalent of the same thing For stuff that you don't you don't have to do the developing I think it would be lovely if somebody would use this and make a NNTP gateway for it because it wouldn't actually be that hard It's like a weeks project of intensive crazy programming Because all the stuff you need to do it is actually there Yeah, right. Um, yeah, yeah, right. So um, some somebody somebody wants to work work on that. Um, Yeah Tim in the back there too. Yeah, I guess Part of the problem with this change is that it's like a huge culture shock Like part of the thing about matrix, which you know, I appreciate it as you know, the bridge is definitely not perfect There's problems with it But people could kind of Come from where they were whether they were a traditional irc user and a matrix user And you know it kind of allowed people to test the waters and slowly you saw more and more people You know coming over to matrix and getting more comfortable with it. Well, I think you know the problem with this discourse thing It's just it's you know a really big culture shock and a big switch and the whole Tags thing is very foreign to people and you know the email interface is there, but it's not perfect So I think we kind of need some way to you know have a transition without you know fracturing things too much Um, and I guess I'm not sure the current proposals that I'm hearing are exactly going to accomplish that I just wanted to address the thing you said about yeah, it's going to be simple to do an ntp Uh, I am the first when you first made your thing about oh, I want to get rid of the mailing lists and move to discourse That's one of the first things I looked into someone started and never finished Which does not give me a good feeling about whether it's actually possible So actually the thing that would be easy easy is the nntp Read view of it the thing that was hard is making a posting back part Okay, and I didn't get that far into it because that's the first thing I thought is like well, you know This feels like news groups. Um, so maybe there's a way to do this so I can have my client and I don't have to be You know complain about the the web interface and that kind of stuff But I found that someone tried to do it as part of a migration and they never finished it and it never actually worked So I'm not sure I'm I'm worried.  They started that never got finished So I I don't know what you're talking about. I've never started a project never finished it Ifa So I have a question to the gentleman who actually spoke about is it the the other discourse platform How long did it take for your community to like Get a bit more okay with conversing there like was it three months six months a year? Are they still kind of upset about it? And to follow up and I'll let you finish that but where I'm going with that is to like the general fedora community Would we not as good people inherently just try and give this a chance? um We have had it for The four years something like that and there's been increasing adaptation of it all along like it's been I mean, that's It has grown significantly So so to uh, right, right Yeah, so if I could just answer you for and then I'll pass the mic on to you So you've timed your question perfectly because the person who took over from me running that community is sat right here So we did a three month trial period of running them side by side Where I was importing the google groups into discourse every night, which was awful At the end of that we took a community vote and decided to go for it At which point I shut down the mailing lists and imported them finally into discourse. We moved over entirely There were only two lists. It was a small community. I accept that and that's that's one of the challenges But within days we were finding users that would never have signed up to the developer mailing list come and offering their Input respectfully in a good way into some of the development discussions that were going on We were getting more feedback more involvement and to matthew's point about how we tend to silo things when we use individual lists That was exactly the problem. We were trying to fix and it definitely worked and it worked quickly So this day they still use discourse for their work. I think they're pretty happy with it We've not had really anybody come back going. This is terrible. Can we go back to mailing lists? That just did not happen One other thing in terms of The form and community has some hardcore mailing lists Folks and I see I think There's one of of those long serving community Members there's there's one and he interacts solely with the discourse with via mail still So he's managing to and he he reads everything he responds to everything And he's managing it all via his own email client, which is It's definitely not google. I am a hundred percent sure of that and just one had one other thing that I want. Oh, yeah in terms more in terms of the anxiety around Labelling and annoying people with Mislabeling I'm assuming Did you you have done some there's somebody responsible for The day-to-day operations of that that's part of what I was hoping to do in this discussion here But well, it's okay. We're having another good discussion. We'll we'll do that I don't want to derail that then I just I so um I think it'd be worth looking at if we can get actual data from communities who have made a full-scale switch Uh on not just like okay, so you've got your individuals who were naysayers and now they've come around but Look at the People who have never been naysayers and have just silently dropped off because it didn't fit their workflow So for me anecdotally personally, I'm an old gnome developer gnome switched Completely to discourse away from mailing lists now. I'm not extremely active anymore because that's not my day job And it's hard But you know, so I I found myself really keeping up with what was happening on mailing lists And I just don't on on the gnome discourse But I'm not I wouldn't show up and you're like looking for naysayers who've come around because I'm not a I've never gone on and been like you can't use discourse. No, I'm like, I'm not I'm not gonna bike shed that or whatever I just Don't find time to do it. So, you know, let me add a contrary thing I never followed what was going on on gnome because I had to sign it for their mailing lists And I didn't have right so but now I checked the gnome discourse as one of the things I look at every week What's going on in gnome? um, and actually there's actually a pretty nice feature of You can have it send you an email every week of like a summary of highlights. So like I don't actually check I don't check the python one every every week But I get that that email and I you say if there's like drama I can be like, ah, here's the exciting stuff, right? Like that's um I get the discourse email on a friday and I sit down and I get my popcorn ready and I I go through it and I enjoy it that way. I consume So this is the this is the um like this is just page views here and ignore the purple because that's the purple is all um bots but of People at least page views of the system over time as we're going along here And then this is when we merged in ask fedora. So obviously that has a pretty big jump there um, yeah And annoyingly these graphs don't end on a month. Even if they're barred by a month That's bad bad data presentation. But so there's but there's definitely was a lot of like pretty good growth over the time they're in, you know activity and So Matthew, I didn't come here to cause a drama. It's okay. It's and I'm not here to be miss anti discourse I just want to say just to be fair. I have tried a number of times over a number of years to build a community You can google my username or whatever look at my username on discourse You will see where I made multiple attempts over a period of I guess years at this point And I see you you've actually been still interacting on it even despite you've been frustrated with it So I appreciate that I've given up. I tried I'm just done with it And I just want to say that I'm I'm trying to raise a social issue that I think doesn't just hit discourse It hits a lot of things across open source And I'm in return. Oh, well we can implement an nttp or whatever or I can do and it's always like use this script Or use this this cool hack that I have to read a six page blog post to do and I'm not interested in that I'm interested in talking a