Thank you so much, Ray. Can we get a round of applause for Ray, please?
Thank you. You figured something would go wrong, but this was resolved pretty quickly.
So thanks for sticking around to the last session of the Dev Room. It's really good
to be back in person, and I realize the irony of talking about virtual events when we're
all together, but bear with me. So my name is Ray Peck. I currently have a community
at CUBE. If you're not familiar with CUBE, we're in the semantic layer space of data
analytics. If you want to find out more, check out our website at CUBE.dev. For now, I'm
still on Twitter. I'm like a lot of people trying to figure out what to do with Twitter,
but you can reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn or other social platforms where you
can find me. And if you came to my session like three years ago in 2020, back then I
was working at GitLab, where I also done a lot of virtual activities. So in addition
to having a lot of experience along with all of you was virtual events, I went to sort
of share what we all collectively learn about getting together in virtual formats.
So what we'll talk about is, I mean, first of all, I wanted to sort of step back and
talk about why we even have events in open source. I mean, a lot of us are, you know,
even before pandemic, we work really well across different time zones, different cultures
asynchronously, but we invest a lot of time and money in events and just want to briefly
talk about why. And then what we learned, especially in the early days of the pandemic,
like the experience wasn't, you know, I think universally not great with virtual events,
but wanted to sort of discuss like what we learned over the past couple of years. And
I also want to talk about events that actually work relatively well in a virtual format.
And I think that's why like a virtual events aren't necessarily going away. It'll be in
a different, you know, improved format. But I want to talk about some topics or formats
where, you know, virtual events actually setting actually works pretty well and how can even
complement or enhance the in person events like like this one.
So I think all these photos are from pre pandemic. I just looked at like a different events like,
you know, one on your top, top left, I guess, on your top left, that's from CubeCon. It's
like a huge event that gets more than 10,000 people typically, right? I don't know what
the number was in Detroit last year, but you know, it's like a huge event, you know, almost
a week long. And the other picture, it's sort of the other end of the spectrum. I'm in the
in that picture somewhere. I can't remember where I am because it's been it's been like
four years. But that's KDE Academy. They get together like once a year for almost a week.
And I mean, this was like a sort of good way for me to get introduced to the community.
I didn't know anything about KDE or what even, you know, what the difference was between
KDE and Good Home. But they really made me feel welcome. And it was good way for me to
get sort of onboarded and introduce to people in the community. So I definitely enjoy that.
And even at large conferences like CubeCon or like OpenStack, you know, I mean, I need
to remember to call them Open Infrastructure Foundation. But one of the things I like about
a lot of these conferences is that they have like a developer hack room, hacking room,
so like a hacking lounge. So even if you've been contributing or working on something
for a long time, you get a chance to sort of work together with somebody like in person
in a more intimate setting. And I mean, I find myself sort of hiding in like a developer
lounges with a lot of other developers. So like, you know, all these sessions are great.
You know, ability to sort of, you know, act with other people in person and collaborating
are, you know, obviously a great benefit of these large events. But I think what, like
a lot of people, what I appreciate the most is, I mean, Bruce just talked about it, the
ability to sort of form personal relationship with somebody in person. This is really difficult
to do, virtually. Like, you know, you can work with somebody, you know, collaboratively
for years. But, you know, you're not going to go much beyond like having a great professional
relationship with somebody. I made a lot of good friends in Open Source over the past
several years. And I guarantee you, some of that happened in like really informal settings.
Like there's something intimate about sharing a beer or sharing a meal with somebody and
that you can't get over Zoom or whatever platform you use to collaborate with somebody. And
especially if you had like, you know, maybe you had some conflict with somebody over meetings,
like the direction of the project, how you're implementing something, those tend to all go
away if you share a meal with somebody. I mean, I've had so many instances of that happening.
So, you know, being able to meet with somebody in a more relaxed setting is something I really
look forward to. And I took a picture, I found this picture of a hallway because I think
the great benefit of these conferences is a hallway track, right? And then I don't know
if you did the same thing. When I was putting together my schedule for FOSM, like I was
trying to look at which sessions that I'm going to, I also reached out to the friends
that I knew who were going to be here and trying to decide what am I going to meet you
for lunch, when I'm going to go get together for, you know, for a beer at our favorite
bar near Grand Place. So, that hallway track is, you know, obviously, that's probably one
of the most important tracks that I look forward to in every conference. Unfortunately, this
all came crashing to a halt like three years ago. I mean, I don't know if you were here
at FOSM in 2020. I mean, shortly after that sort of will stop, right? And then, you know,
a lot of people made herculean efforts to move events online. I remember, like, I presented
at an event like in April. I mean, this is something that was sort of a local large meetup
kind of thing in the Bay Area. They were scheduling for a while for DevRel people. And, I mean,
they did a wonderful job like moving everything on to, like, hop in. Like, I mean, I think
before then, I didn't even know what hop in was. They had some technical difficulties,
even though I went through some speaker training on a platform. But despite all that, they
did a wonderful job of sort of moving things quickly online in about, I mean, they only
had about a month to do it. Having said all that, what were our experiences with virtual
events in the early days? And, I mean, I found these pictures, and this is probably how a
lot of us fell when events moved online. And it's not just because we missed the hallway
track or, you know, networking session over beer. A lot of people, I think, talked about
Zoom fatigue. They were just tired of, you know, having more interactions with Zoom.
I don't think I struggled with that as much, because I was used to having a lot of Zoom
meeting anyways. What I struggled with, what I found out was that I'll attend a session.
There'll be, like, a 45-minute session, and then they give you a 10-15-minute break, because
that's how the events were used to run, because you need to move to a different room to get
to the next session. During those 10-15 minutes, like, I didn't have anything else to do.
So what I do is I'll check, like, Slack or email from work, right? I mean, when I'm at
a conference like this, I'm pretty good at compartmentalizing. I tell myself, I'm not
going to check Slack until, like, lunchtime or morning break or whatever it is. But when
I was sitting at home, sitting at a place where I work at all day, I can get easily distracted
and I'll check a Slack message. I wasn't urgent, but I'll respond to it, and then I realized,
like, 20 minutes later, oh, shoot, this other session I was going to go to, I'm 10 minutes
late to it. So, well, I might as well just watch the recording then, right? So I was,
I think I was getting, like, really confused. Like, am I at work or am I at a conference?
Because I couldn't tell, because I'm just in my same home office. That's what I struggle
with, and I think that's why the experience was really bad, because they're trying to
force-fit in-person events, and they're trying to keep the same format, but move that onto
whatever platform that people were using. And that obviously didn't work very well.
Because, you know, I think what we realize now is that you don't need a 15-minute break,
right? You can just move to the next session. I mean, you don't want to do that for eight
hours, but you don't want people to be, like, switching their, you know, switching to a
different mode all of a sudden, like, because you have a 15-minute break. So I think that's
one of the things that I really struggle with in the early days. And, but if you think about,
like, because I think when we thought of events before the pandemic, we always thought about
these, like, almost week-long conferences, like KubeCon, or even like KDE Academy, that's
almost a week long. You're at a different location for about almost a week. But if you
think about it before the pandemic, a lot of us in open source were doing a lot of collaboration
work, like, on a virtual platform, and not necessarily in person. Like, Hackathon's a
good example. I mean, this is something, you know, I help start, like, when I was at GitLab,
we once a quarter, community members will get together for two days, and then we'll
just, you know, you don't have to commit to be, you know, at the Hackathon for 48 hours,
but whatever time you can commit to in those two days, like, we're going to encourage,
like, contributions from the community. So, obviously, the metrics we looked at was how
many contributions we're getting. Those are like, this is something that we can count
and measure. But what was more gratifying, I mean, at the end of my, like, a two-plus
years at GitLab, what I noticed during Hackathon is that there's just a lot more chatter
on our online, like, chat platform, like, we're using Gitter at the time, and more people
are helping each other, and then community members are forming connections and bonds,
right? So that was very gratifying in addition to the lot of contributions that we're getting.
So that's one example. The other example on the top right, this is my presentation from
two years ago with my friend Sophia. So this is about documentation, like, how, you know,
how to, like, really accelerate, you know, documentation on open source projects. And
the example I gave was that, so, what, I was, let me step back, I was working at Linux Foundation
at the time, and Sophia is at Ericsson. So a lot of the networking projects in DLF, they
had set release cycles, like, either three months or six months release cycle, and if
your sub-project wants to be part of the release, there are a couple of documentation related
milestones that you need to hit. Like, if you don't have stuff documented, sorry, you're
not going to be part of the release, that's sort of one way of us forcing documentation
milestones to be met. And first documentation milestone is relatively simple. You just basically,
in your repo, create a sub-directory for the release. For project ABC, you need to have
documentation structure sort of laid out with some header information and labeling. So it's
sort of a routine task, but it's not something that gets you up in the morning necessarily,
but it just has to be done. So what I suggest to Sophia was that let's make a, like, a,
you know, fun event out of this. Like, we're doing a sort of, like, a household chore, but
let's sort of, you know, almost like gamifying it. Let's all get together virtually for a
couple of hours, and people have people complete their documentation milestone for that release.
And then first, like, a documentation milestone for that particular release for OPNFE project
happened to be, like, a week before FOSAM. So I contacted Sophia. I said, I'm coming
to Europe anyways. Why don't I come to Ericsson in Sweden? Because, you know, she's a documentation
made for OPNFE, but there are a couple of other Ericsson people that were leading other
sub-projects in OPNFE. So we'll get together in a conference room. We'll set up a bridge
so people can join if they want to. And to my surprise, like, when we started at, like,
10 in the morning in Stockholm, people dialed in from Nokia, like an hour ahead in Finland.
That I sort of expected, because the technical steering committee chairs at Nokia, because
I was pretty sure that he would be able to sort of twist some people's arms. And Nokia,
but what we found out on the audio bridge was on go-to-meeting at the time was people
from Japan joined. Like, they all got together at, like, the NEC office in Tokyo. And they
were just going to spend 30 or 45 minutes in the documentation work, and they were just
going to go for beers. Which was perfect, right? And then so God tested people to get
together. And the same thing happened with some people from China. So, I mean, we worked
for, like, an hour and a half, two hours in Stockholm, went for lunch, and had another
session, so people from rest of Europe that were late starters, and then North American
could sort of join in. And then we saw the same thing happen, so that was pretty fun.
And then that sort of became, that became sort of a tradition for a lot of the documentation
milestones. It just made it fun. You don't have to be in the same city at the same time,
but it gave people a chance to bond and work together. The other thing, other example that
I wanted to add, you see a lot of open source communities or commercial open source companies
do this. They do these, like, workshops. And we do the same thing at CUBE. Like, this is
a way for us to sort of provide educational content to people, because they'll ask questions
about, we want to understand your caching feature better. How do we do data modeling?
And one of our stars of the webinar is sitting there, Adnan. So this gave us a, not just
way for us to, like, reach people synchronously through the webinar, this helped us build,
like, a content on our YouTube channel, and this really helped. I think, like, I can't
remember what speaker it was. I can't remember it was Bruce or maybe it was other speaker.
One is really King, right? So you want to have provide resources for community members
that can use. And, yeah, we've been doing this even before the pandemic. And, you know,
this is something that's always been an arsenal and something that we need to take advantage
of. And there are definitely a lot of benefits of virtual events, and I hear a few of them.
One is, like, something like a webinar. It takes almost no effort to spin this up. Like,
if you have a Zoom, like a Zoom account, like, you know, I guess you'll have to upgrade to
Zoom webinar. But if, you know, if you're not going to have more than 100% on, person
on, on, on your, on your training sessions, you can just get away with your regular Zoom
Zoom account for up to 100 people. So, you know, it's pretty easy to set up and start,
because it doesn't cost very much. It allows you to do a lot of experimentation, like a
documentation is a good example. The only cost was really, you know, setting up another
audio bridge and go to meeting at that point. But if you compare that to, like, what people
consider a pretty lightweight in person event, like a meetup. Let's say you want to schedule
a meetup at, you know, one of your local community members company for a couple of hours. You
know, like, you have to figure out a room. Maybe you have to order food and drinks to
encourage people to come in and actually feed them while they're there. But also, you may
have to deal with security at your company so that people can come have access to your
conference facilities. So that's not trivial amount of work. And it's supposedly, it's
not a full industry event. It's a casual, like, in-person meetup. But even that takes,
you know, several hours to sort of plan and organize, right? And not just for organizers,
even for, like, a community members, if you force everything to be in person, you're going
to end up incurring some costs. Like, I remember going to a meetup, local meetup in the Bay
area where I live. I should have been without traffic. I should have been able to get there
in 15, 20 minutes. But, and this was at noon, like on Thursday. Like, you wouldn't necessarily
expect traffic. But for whatever reason, it took me like 40 minutes to get there. And
I was just rolling my eyes as I was driving. Like, this is not good use of my time. Like,
I'm actually commuting to go to a two-hour event. So, yeah. So, like, compared to, like,
a lot of in-person stuff that we've been traditionally been doing, you can do this at, spin things
up at very low cost. The other thing I like about the virtual events, and this is an observation,
I don't know if this is scientifically true. Like, a lot of the virtual events, the event,
like, event material seems to be available a lot quicker. Because what happens is that
if you're doing a YouTube livestream, unless you have to do an edit, like, it's available
right away. Right? Even if you weren't able to join the session, like, synchronously.
So, you know, unless you have, you insist on doing, like, a professional editing of
the, of the livestream, it's available right away to people in the community or, like,
even people outside of the community. So, I mean, I think, like, with Adnan and other
colleagues, we've done, like, 15 to 20 workshops over the past, like, year and a half. I only
had to edit, like, one of our livestream video ones. And that's because, like, we had some
technical difficulties, like, I did today early on with, with one of the panelists.
And I just had to cut out, all I did was cut out the first three minutes of the video,
because we were just struggling with buttons. So, I mean, I think that's another reason
why I'm a big proponent of trying to see if you can move stuff, you know, online versus
doing it in person. So, I talked about documentation already, like, there are other things that
work pretty well in open source communities in a virtual setting. And one is, like, GitLab
used to do this. I think they sort of stopped this for a while. They would do, like, over
the weekend, they'd do issue triaging. So, if you have a, you know, open source project
of decent size, you're going to have thousands and thousands of issues. So, like, labeling
them, putting priority on them is, it's sort of a, sort of a mundane task that's not necessarily
fun. But if you want to give people an opportunity, I think GitLab used to do this, like, over
the weekend. Like, you don't have to spend the whole weekend. But, you know, any amount
of time that you can contribute to helping triage issues. And the big one is, like, finding
duplicate issues and, like, merging them, right, which is a great house cleaning, house
cleaning type of thing to do. So, that's another type of activity that you don't necessarily
do this in person. So, that's another example. And the other one is, like, testing. And I'm
not just talking about, like, a unit testing or functional testing. But even, like, if
you have a UI team or a UX team that want to get community feedback, this doesn't have
to be done in person. And this is pretty simple to do, set up online. So, pause for the other
picture. That's supposed to be a tape cutting thing. So, if you're doing, like, your inaugural
event, you're, like, rather than insisting on trying to do this in person, try to experiment
doing, like, experimenting with the content and the format, like, online. Because it's
going to cost you a lot less. I mean, at CUBE, we're thinking about doing our first conference
sometime in September. And we already decided this is going to be done virtually. Because
if we were to, like, secure a venue all day in San Francisco, that alone is going to be
pretty expensive. And Logistical Challenge is going to be a lot worse. So, we're going
to start, like, online. And make sure that validate the format and the content and the
type of the audience that we're going after. And then, at some point, you know, for a large
enough to do it in person, that we will have built the audience. And then we already tested
it out in a, in a more cost-effective manner. All right. So, you know, I talk, mention briefly
about complimenting in-person events. So, as we're putting together this conference later
this year, I talked to, like, several, like, event management vendors that have experienced
in both in-person, hybrid, and online events. So, every single one of them, I started talking
to them, like, in October, November last year. One of the questions I asked is that a lot
of the events are going back in person. Are people, like, abandoning, like, virtual or
hybrid events, the answer from every single one of them was no. There seems to be still
market for virtual events. And then, one good example, a few of them provided, was that,
so this isn't just, like, broadcasting or live streaming an in-person session that's
happening like it is now. So, what's happening is that a lot of companies or communities
are doing, moving things virtual, almost as a separate track. And good example was a lot
of conferences have day zero events. So, if you have an event that's, like, officially
starting on Tuesday, they might have something else going on on, like, Monday. It could be,
like, a local meetup. It could be a project team meeting. Or some open source community
do this, like, OpenStack used to do this. They'll have, like, an orientation for new
members. Like, if you want to get a good overview, introductory overview of all the projects
in OpenStack, and learning how to, like, contribute, like, submitting your first patch, for example,
they do, they make this, I mean, they actually did this, like, over the weekend before their
conference starts on Monday. So, a lot of the day zero events, I think they're moving
them virtual so that even if you can't travel on site to that conference, you can still
participate. So, you're broadening the audience, and allowing more people to sort of participate
at least some portion of the event, even if you can't travel. And my suggestion, if you're
going to do, I mean, I'm all for day zero events, I would even make this, like, happen
the week before. Like, let's say, like, if your day zero traditionally was on Monday,
I would do this, like, virtually on, like, Thursday or Wednesday the week before. And
the reason why I say that is that so that people, rather than people having to arrive
on Sunday to go to a day zero event on Monday, they can just stay home, right? They can just
watch this virtually, and they can just spend Monday traveling, so they spend less time
away from home. Like, I mean, I'm sure a lot of you have children and kids like I do, you
know, if you have to be gone for, like, a whole week, that just creates a lot of logistical
challenges, right? Like, who's going to take her to soccer practice, et cetera, et cetera.
So the less time you're away from home, I mean, I think it's a bonus. I think you're
doing your community members a big favor, too. The other thing that I like about a lot
of this virtual format, and I see this happening with FOSM, too, with some of the developer
dev rooms, is you're basically increasing the capacity of a lot of the talk sessions,
because you're creating a sort of, like, a parallel track that's what's happening in
person, so that, you know, you know, I've been on both sides of the CEP process. I mean,
well, unfortunately, you're going to have to make some hard decisions about not accepting
a talk, which is always a hard thing to do. And by increasing the capacity, you have to
deal with less of that, and especially for first-time speakers, it's a lot of the conferences
gotten pretty competitive in terms of, you know, how difficult it is to get your talk
accepted. So, you know, this helps, like, potentially increase your, you know, capacity
for more speakers and more discussion topics. So a couple of quick do's and don'ts. I mean,
I sort of mentioned the first one in terms of the don'ts. Like, when you're moving things
to a virtual format, don't do the same thing that you would have done, like, in person.
Like, you know, having a, you don't need a 10-15 minute break for between every session.
Like, you want to have some break, you know, during your conference, but you don't want
people to be distracted because they're just watching it from their home office, or even
if they're in the office, they're watching it from their desk. But they don't need to,
they don't need the 10 minutes to walk to a different room to talk to a session. So,
you know, when you have people's attention, you know, just, you know, make the most of
the, that opportunity. And then I've also seen some communities do this. Let's say you
have a five, six hours of content. You don't need to do it in, like, one single day. You
can even split it up over two to, I've seen some companies do this over three days. So
you only have, like, I only have two-hour chunk that you need to schedule for over the
two or three-day period that might make it more, that might make it easier to fit stuff
into your schedule. I mean, although that's not, I'd be a little worried about that because
like, how do you make sure that people don't drop off after day one? So you have to sort
of manage that. But that's another thing I've seen some communities and companies do.
The second one, this is the one that really drives me crazy. And I mentioned this too.
Like, if you have stuff live-streamed, it's, you know, make it available on your YouTube
channel right away, right? Like, don't have people registered to get content. Like, you're
basically asking for people's email address so they can watch the video. And I hate it
when that happens. Like, I went to a conference a couple of months ago because our CTO was
presenting and they told us the video should be available within a week. I said, great.
And then I went back to the event website. They said, oh, if you want to watch a recording,
please register by providing your email address. And I think I was diplomatic. I sent them
an email and I said, this doesn't seem very open source to me, like if you're asking for
an email. And actually, they came back to their credit and said, actually, if you go
to the YouTube channel, you'll find it here. It's like, why don't you then tell people
that on the website? It's like, why are you kind of hiding that fact, right? It just
drove me nuts. But, and yeah, so please, please don't do that by putting a wall around your
content. And it's like, please provide your email address to download this white paper
and it's like, well, that doesn't sound like a white paper then, right? But anyhow, that's,
I guess that's my soapbox. And then if you're doing the event virtually, like don't force
people to participate synchronously, because you have time zone issues, right? I mean,
this is why I like the model we had at GitLab. You have a two day window, you can participate
any time you want. We're not asking you to spend 48 hours, like, unless you want to,
right? Even if you can spend just 30 minutes over a two day period, that's great, right?
I mean, I don't, I'm not going to judge you because you have better things to do. So on
the other side of the slide here, and I know it was really good at this. I'm not just saying
this because he bought me beer last night. When we did our workshop, I know it was really
good at putting materials available like a week in advance. So people can check out the
slides, they can prep the content, and we also have like hands on workshop on our cloud
instance called KubeCloud. So people can actually like, you know, tie it up to their data sources
and they start experimenting with it. So the sooner we put it up, our scores were actually
better. Even if the slides change over the, you know, over the next several days. So having
the content available ahead of time so that people can prep, it just, it just provides
a lot better experience. And then it also allows people to ask questions like ahead
of time. So you're almost having like asynchronous Q&A session. And I, you know, that just makes
life easier for a lot of people, including presenters, right? Because you know what to
sort of expect. The last one is sort of similar. I saw this, like, Linux Foundation did this
like a few years ago. I, you know, I made a presentation, again, with Sophia on documentation.
And then there's like a Slack channel for Q&As. And after our presentation, we were on there
for like 30, 45 minutes, which I thought was great. Because typically, like when you're
at a convention center, you get kind of a shoot out after your presentation. So people
only have like a five minute window to ask you questions, like if you ran out of time,
right? This just gave us a lot more time to answer questions. And also for people to be,
you know, vocal with their comments and feedback, which I thought was great. And I made sure
that I let a lot of people know that I thought that was pretty awesome. So I know I'm almost
out of time. So I think I've covered most of these. So it's not either or. The virtual
events can complement what you're doing, like in person. And, you know, just remember that
we've been doing like a virtual collaboration for a long time. And this is definitely important
toolkit to help community members. And then especially for people who can't always travel
for whatever reason, financial or otherwise. And the final point I want to make, actually,
the platforms that we're using for online events, like including Hopin, I mean, I'm
not saying that's my favorite tool, but even Hopin has really evolved over time. And one
of the things I noticed when I talked to event management vendors is that they'll give a
list of, here are the virtual event platforms that we support. One company, they provided
like 15 logos, including like Hopin. So they're just more alternatives available. So I think
we have better platforms and tool to run events virtually. And yeah, I just, I think that's
it. I just want to make sure I have time for questions. Hopefully you'll be able to
answer them. Thank you. Great. Because it's you, you can do one question even though we're
over time, because we think you're awesome. All right. Thank you. Anyone want to ask a
question? I see a hand. Off we go. You are the final question of the community, Debra,
for Fosdom 2023. Congratulations. Well, thank you, Max. Thank you very much for the talk.
Thank you. We have a global market, but obviously we don't have big resources like big companies.
So I wonder how much it is to set up the whole logistic of the virtual event, live streaming.
Because we definitely have a global market. So obviously you can't be relying on everyone
assisting to your event if you do it in person. But I'm thinking probably best thing is to
just record it and then put it available online a week later or something like that rather
than having to live stream it as a proper hybrid event. What do you think? Yeah. So the question
for people online, you know, because even Zoom is not free, right? And then, you know,
is it okay to sort of, you know, pre-record things and make content available for people
to like consume and ask questions to? I think that's completely valid. Actually, one of
the things I learned from these vendors, they don't, on a virtual platform, they actually
don't encourage you to have like a live presentation in a Q&A, because there's just a lot more
technical difficulties that you can run through. So they call it senior lives. They prefer
that they have the presenter record and be available for 10 minutes of questioning as
an example. But, you know, if you don't want to have a person available 10 minutes online
for questioning, you can still have like a creative Google Doc, like here's a recording.
You submit your questions over this period of time and the presenter or other people
can answer them. So it's all documented, right? So I think that's completely valid.
So you don't have to use Zoom. I mean, I just happened to be, I've been using Zoom for the
past few years, so that's what I'm comfortable with. But you can do a live stream from Google
Hangout. But I haven't tried it, hands on, myself, but I know that's doable. So that's
an option. But having something pre-recorded available on YouTube channel, but here's
a documentation. It could be a wiki page or Google Docs. Please submit your questions.
We'll close the questioning in like seven days and, you know, whoever the presenter
was, whoever the content expert is, we'll get back to you with their answers. So I think
that's a completely valid thing to do. It doesn't have to be like 100% interactive.
So, thank you.