Okay, great. Thanks for coming to my talk. It's going to be building an open source
community one friend at a time. So we're in the community dev room here, but I've been
in a couple of talks. No one has actually really defined what exactly community is.
So maybe I'll start there. Here's a photos of a couple different communities that I'm
a part of. And as you can see from this, there are many different types of communities.
There's open source communities. There's my biking community. There's my friends. There's
my running club. And there's also my party friends. And these communities all have different
strengths. And one way to look at that would be how often do I see these people? For instance,
I see my bike friends usually on vacation. Open source people is kind of ad hoc. My friends
is daily. My running club is weekly. You know, all these kind of have their own rhythm
and tempo to them. And the other thing about these communities is they're not kind of like
independent, separate groups. A lot of these are overlapping, right? So someone that I
bike with is someone I party with. Someone that I see every day is also someone that
goes to my running club. Right? Community isn't this kind of one thing. It's this amorphous
group of people. And really what I think community is, is it's built on these one-to-one connections
between peoples. So this is kind of a microservices diagram. You can think about all these different
microservices talking to each other. And these connections are kind of what holds the whole
network together. And I would say it's the same thing about community. You have all these
different nodes all overlapping, different strengths communicating to each other in
different ways. And I would really say our community is built on these one-to-one friendships.
So the question I'm trying to answer today is how can we build and strengthen these friendships
to create better communities? And at this point you might be asking why is this guy standing
in front of the room? So a little bit about me. From a large Irish Catholic family, all
of our family gatherings were a lot of people around all the time. And I think that's really
where I started to get some of my community from. And in college, the first thing that
I did was join the student union. And one of the things that they had was kind of a saying.
And it's in Latin, obviously, because it's an old-fashioned society. But what it is, roughly
translated, has really stuck with me. Light increases through human interaction. And I
think that drives a lot of what I do today. So with that, let's actually step out of the
software world for a second. I know we're here at FOSSTEM. But if you take nothing else
away from this talk, I want you to understand that there's a lot of communities in this
world and we can learn a lot from the ones outside of open source. So what other community
am I a part of? I'm a part of Midnight Runners. That's why I'm wearing this t-shirt today.
And what exactly is Midnight Runners? Well, we run together. We work out together. And
we socialize together. And really, this is the ethos that we have together of fitness
plus social. That's what Midnight Runners is. And what we're trying to do is dismantle
the idea that fitness needs to be hard and unenjoyable by combining this social aspect
into it. And this idea has really resonated with a lot of people. Midnight Runners is now
a global community with 17 cities around the world. And not only like, you know, kind
of big scale, but bring this all the way back down to me. Midnight Runners is a community
has given me a lot too. It's given me fitness. It's given me a place I call home. It's given
me my relationship. And it's also given me friends in Berlin and all around the world.
So how do we go about building community at Midnight Runners? I think the first thing
that a lot of communities need to think about is what is your wow factor? For Midnight Runners,
it's this fitness plus social. I remember the first time I went to a Midnight Runners
run. I was a little bit lost in Berlin as a lot of people in Berlin are. I was struggling
about what to do next. I was thinking about moving back to Berlin, sorry, moving back
to the U.S. And I went to this Wednesday run and I was like, this is it. This is so amazing
that the next week I changed my flight so I could come back early just to go again.
So when somebody comes into your community, what is that wow factor that they're going
to say, this is so amazing, I want to come back? And as we're saying, community is all
about the people. And so in Midnight Runners, we have the captains, which we think of as
the pillars of the community. This wow factor starts with the captains because that's the
initial reason that people are going to come back to Midnight Runners, that first experience,
that first interaction. Because at the end of the day, it's about the people, not the
workout. And in any community, it's always about the X. It's about the people, not whatever
else you're doing. And so how do we, its captains, kind of create this experience? We welcome
people, we meet new members, we introduce people to each other, making sure that we join those
different nodes in the network together. During the run, we tell people how it works,
they understand what to do. We engage in the experience that we're part of the participants
too. And we really do create that MR wow so that people are like, this is something new,
this is something different, this is something I need in my life. And then afterwards, we
encourage people to join us socially afterwards and try to remember people every single week.
And there's lots of different types of captains and Midnight Runners. There's the social butterfly
who likes to talk to everyone. There's the caribbean who's trying to be representative
and taking care of our community. There's the party animal who brings that energy, excitement,
that engagement to the community. There's the creative magician who's sparking joy and
making magical moments that people want to come back for. And after the people, how else
do we do it? Well, we do these things called party runs. And these are really creating
memorable moments for people in our community. And that's our boot camp run that ends up
with a party afterwards. And it's themed to increase the sense of community, people like,
I'm part of something. And kind of taking all together what Midnight Runners does is it
gives people a purpose, a fitness plus friends. And that's why people come back every single
week to 17 cities around the globe. So that's kind of the step out of open source. Let's
step back in. How does all of what I've said so far translate into the open source world?
Well, the other thing you should know about me is I work for iSovalent. They're the creators
of Cillium and EBPF. And I'm going to be talking about my experience in both of those communities,
building and growing each of them. And if you're not familiar with us, our kind of ethos is
that EBPF is the future of infrastructure. And it's how things are going to be built for
the cloud native world and beyond. And if you're not familiar with the Cillium project,
it's actually one of the fastest moving projects in the Linux Foundation ecosystem. You can
see it on the graph here behind Linux and Kubernetes. And if you also aren't familiar
with Cillium, it's really become the cloud native networking standard. There's now certifications
around it. Cillium is a CNCF graduated project. People are hiring others with Cillium experience.
And my company actually just got recently acquired by Cisco. And so that's where Cillium comes from.
And what we've created. But how do we actually get there? And how do we create the open source
community around the project? The first thing I'm talking about is the wow effect. What is the
wow effect for us? And for us, that's EBPF. Now, I think I don't believe in Tonex software
engineers. And maybe you don't either. But EBPF really is a Tonex software. It can help you do
things like networking, observability, security, tracing, Tonex better than previous generations of
technologies. These examples, graphs are from different blog posts that people have created in
the community. And when people come in, they say, wow, EBPF really is a different way of building,
creating, running, maintaining software. And that's the wow effect people come for. And now
somebody's interested. They're like, I want to know more about EBPF. I want to know more about
Cillium. So they're coming into your community. What do you do? The first thing you do is say hello.
A simple way to do this is if you have a Slack channel, you know, set up a greet bot. You can say,
hey, welcome, X. We're happy to have you in our community here. This is quite simple to set up and
is an automated way to welcome people into your community. Next thing is document resources to get
people started. You say, these are the jumping off points. Somebody wants to have a path, a couple
stepping stones. They know what the next steps. For midnight runners, I'm going to come back next
Wednesday and do this again. If you're starting in the Cillium ecosystem, it's check out the website,
check out the docs. These are good places to learn about the community and get started. Then I
think this is also nice, give no one point of contact. I actually put my contact info and I say, hey,
if you have any questions, message me on Slack. People feel like there's someone that they can talk to
and they're not alone in this community. Bringing them into the network. The next thing, if you saw
Paris's talk, is give them someone to look up to. We say there's contributors and there's
committers and tainters of the project. Let them know that there's a ladder. There's a way for them to
get involved. It's great for them to know that. Also give them somewhere to look up to. Give them
different roles that they can grow into and grow towards. I think there's been a lot of talk in this room
so far today about giving people job titles, giving people something they can bring back to their work,
something they can bring back to themselves, being say, hey, I'm a part of this. This is what I'm doing for
this community. In Cillium, we have a couple different roles laid out in our governance stocks. When
somebody's into your community and wants to become a part of it, make sure you engage with them. People
want to have that one-to-one connection. This friendship, if you want to do marketing, that's great. It's
one-to-many. If you want to do community, that's great. It's one-to-one. So engage with people one-on-one.
Say, hey, thank you. I really appreciate the work you're doing and that you're part of this with us. Beyond
that one-to-one interaction, you should also recognize the work that people are doing. What I do every
week is I go around the community and see what people have done and do in newsletter. Being like, hey, look at the
great content that people have been creating and call them out by name. Once you kind of do that, you start to
realize that we really have not just our own community. It's what I was saying before. There's all of these
overlapping communities. If you're in the CNC, if you go system, you'll recognize the landscape. Some people would
say overcrowded or a hellscape. But I think what is really great about this is that it shows that there's so
many overlapping communities that we can take advantage of, partner with, and learn and grow from each other.
People aren't a part of a single community and you can bring people into yours. Another way that we do that is
we're having a still-in-meaning EBPF day at KubeCon. Going off back in the strength of the Kubernetes ecosystem to help
grow our own community. In fact, if you think about it, that's exactly what we're doing here at FOSSTEM. All the
different dev rooms, right? Those are all overlapping communities. And probably each person here goes into a different
set of them and goes to a different set of talks. And I think that's great because you're creating the experience
exactly that you want. And we're all building our communities together. The next thing is to spark joy in the
community. Do something that's unique, that's something memorable. So one of our community members created a
Cilium cake. Swag is another common way in open source to do that. We also created trading cards about two of our
maintainers as like a fun thing to do. And beyond these little things, also create really memorable moments for your
community. So for example, we created an EBPF documentary. We created the illustrated children's guide to EBPF. And I
have some copies here if you want to see what that looks like afterwards. And we also created a Lego set for Cilium.
So people would be like, hey, remember when we had the documentary, we had the children's book, here's my Lego. That's what
people are going to look back at, these memorable moments, and you want to give that to them. Because what all of this
does is it gives people an identity that allows them to say, hey, I'm a part of this with these other people. Because at
the end of the day, what people really want to have is something that gives them connections, something that gives them a
purpose. And these friendships are really the building blocks that keep our communities running. Thank you for coming to my talk.
Thank you.
Hey, thank you for your talk. I really liked the tips for getting the people engaged in community. I have one question
regarding welcoming newcomers, because you showed us your grid bot in your Slack, which was kind of like a long block of text
links. I'd like to know if you measure some kind of click through rate into that. And also then you followed with one to one
interactions. But all of those on your slides were connected to some contributions. So I would like to know if there is
something in between, you know, between the grid bot, and then the one to one interactions. If we have some, you know, maybe
Buddy East or something like that. Thank you.
Okay, yeah. So do we have something between the grid bot and getting people further? We don't currently. I think that's
something I'd like to work on. You know, kind of like step one and then how do we get to step two. And I think people kind of
have to find their own way in the community right now. And then once they get to step three, they wrote a blog post,
you know, then I start to get to know them more. I think this is also like a really difficult thing in open source too,
because it's also a lot of people, you know, do like a drive by contribution. And how do you know, and you never know which ones
are going to stay around and which ones aren't. And like, unfortunately, you can't invest everything into every single contributor.
And so this may be extremely controversial, but like maybe that's like a good weeding process is like if they can find
themselves to step three, if you don't always give them step two, I don't know, like, it's always great to have more contributors.
But yeah, so that's my controversial opinion for today. Say what you will.
So I have a question. I find myself as much of an introvert person. So I don't like fitness meetings and big parties.
So if you have any advice for people like that to build communities of like mental people, even open to other people.
Yeah, I would say it's all the same advice. If you actually look at the structure of my deck afterwards, you say you can see the same structure
in Midnight Runners. This applies to the same structure in the open source community. I was just doing the Midnight Runners example,
because that's the one I'm most familiar with. And I really do think like when you're trying to create a community that wow effect is like,
okay, what is this community trying to bring people around? You know, that may be EDPF, it may be running, it may be like we really like playing pool,
we really like, I don't know, going to Quiz Night, right? And like give people a reason like why people want a purpose in their life and see if you can give that to them.
Right, that's why the community initially forms. And you kind of create those next things to build the community around that.
You need to kind of have that core purpose that people are going to come to. And I think that's the most important thing.
And it can be about anything. It doesn't have to be about fitness.
Hi. Hi, Biff. Sorry, didn't you put it to sound that way? I was going to ask you a funny question of why don't we go out for lunch more,
but I actually do have a legitimate question for you about your talk. So one of the things that you said that Isovalent and Cilium do to sort of help create that wow factor is like,
like merch because then it's a sort of physical reminder and a memory that people create. By the way, everyone, Cilium has great merch and EDPF has fantastic merch and you should absolutely find them after.
So my question for you is in our trying economic times of tightening budgets on everything, how do you justify the cost internally?
You get acquired? No, sorry, that's not the right answer. I think there's also like lots of ways to do like stuff that isn't like physical merch and doesn't have to be like doesn't have to cost money.
Like actually, like one of my favorite things is, sorry, is that a lot of people actually like is like the EB Dex. And so we have this repo of all these different bees.
You know, we wrote back stories about each of them. Like this is something that people really like and it didn't cost the cost of a GitHub repo, which is free.
And I know a lot of people like to use these on slides. I think probably the favorite one is or my personal favorite one is Excel BPF here.
There's a great April Fool's article that we wrote last year. I mean, this is another memorable moment, right? Like we wrote like now launching Excel BPF, right?
And it didn't cost any money to write the blog post. I mean, a bit of time, but like that's not something you have to put in a budget line by line item somewhere.
And so I think there's lots of ways to do it without like creating physical stuff too.
We've got time for one more question.
I'm doing my midnight runners.
Every Wednesday at 7 30.
Thank you for the talk. So you mentioned about the wow factor about creating that wow factor. But say now you already have a wow factor.
How do you like market yourself that okay, we are out there. How do you make people aware of your community and they can come and join your community?
Is there any like, you know, some tricks or some some things that we can do to grow the community?
I would say like if you want to form a community and you've decided like here's our wow factor, here's our purpose, whatever.
Know that there's, you know, a million other communities out there. And I think probably the most important thing when you're starting it is like, don't think about your.