Zoom out to zoom in on the community
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OSullivan, Adrian
Open Source is all about the community being able to engage with each other efficiently. This is why events such as FOSDEM are so essential to enable us to meet members of our communities face to face to create these essential connections. In 2020 the annual OSS physical event circuit was broken due to the pandemic, and was replaced with online versions. It has meant we spent the year on weekly zoom project team/ steering committees & more meetings online. Then we have yet more zoom webinar or some other online tool for our flagship OSS events. This can be sufficient when you know the people on a mature community, as you may have met them before, but what for new OSS communities just starting out?. How can we get that personal connection that is needed to help avoid unnecessary conflicts due to simple misunderstandings. What people see in print, say in a gerrit review comment, can seem a lot more severe if you do not really know the person who had typed it. That is why I'd like to give my experience from 2020. Lessons I have learned and adapted in my meeting. To take the time to step back/zoom out in our OSS commnity meetings, and take just a little time so we can zoom in on the people.
 Hello and a very warm welcome to you all today for a session that we're just going to take a little bit of time to zoom out so we can zoom in on communities and specifically talking about open source communities. So just to give you a little bit of context to the picture that you're seeing here, this is a picture of a shed that is down the back garden that we converted into a teenager room for my 15 year old son. I have taken over as an office in 2020 as I started working from home. So I spent a lot of my time down here, luckily enough in a quiet area, but it's down the back end of a garden. So things have changed for me in 2020 and I'm sure things have changed for a lot of people, everyone practically in 2020. So I'd just like to take a little bit of time to look at little things we can do to acknowledge firstly that things have changed, but also how to keep that human connection that we have in open source communities. So just like to go through a little bit introduction first of who I am. So I'm the director of the EU open source ecosystem development team. I'm based in Cork in Ireland, which is down the second largest city in Ireland down the south of Ireland right on the coast. I've been in software for a long, long time now. I've started back in 96 with Motorola, writing highly proprietary software that was geared for the mobile switching centers, which are used to connect your your mobiles together when when making and translating the digits that you dial to make a phone call. So in more recent times, in around 2017, so I haven't worked very much in proprietary across a number of companies like IBM, Motorola and then into Huawei where I am now. I switched in around 2017 to working with open source communities, started off with the Linux Foundation and networking teams on a project called own app, which was just starting off, which was the open network automation platform. And that's where I got my first taste and experience of open source communities and and the actual, you know, the ability to be able to meet and work with communities from different companies across different parts of the world. And it was actually an experience that I really enjoyed and since 2017 and I never looked back and I've changed my career from proprietary now switching over to working with with open source communities. And then more recently, we started off on the now community lead for a new exciting project called open harmony. So I'm now the community lead working with the open source foundations. And so open harmony itself, we do have a stand here at Fosdome. So if you get a chance to go out and have a look at the the open harmony stand, exciting project basically trying to utilize all your consumer devices as a virtual resource pool to give a better experience in terms of the applications that you can run on those devices. So please, if you get a chance, have a look at our stand. And I've also continued as a project technical lead within the own app community in the Linux Foundation and networking team, where own app itself is over 50% of the code for the Linux Foundation networking. It's a very large project across multiple different operators and vendors alike. I'm also a member of the Edge Native Steering Committee in the Eclipse Foundation. So I represent Huawei within that steering committee and working with the community in the in the Eclipse Foundation. So just a couple of things I'd like to point out as we go through this presentation is to be aware of the human side of OSS communities. And so I always feel it's a good example to give you a few details about me and who I am and a little bit more about me than just my business introduction. Three things you didn't know about me is I coach a sport called hurling. So this is a hurly and this is a slitter. So at the weekend, it's a sport that's played Gaelic Games Association in Ireland. And it's something that I do with the weekends and coach some kids how to play and used to play it when I was younger myself. So some of my favorite places to visit one of them is the Dingle Peninsula. You know, it's a beautiful area of Ireland and Kerry in County Kerry in Ireland. It's a place I visit every year. It became famous if you're a Sky Wars fan for Luke Skywalker and Ray as the island Skellig Michael, which is an island that Luke Skywalker was hiding from in episode 7 and also featured in other episodes as well. So if you're a Star Wars fan, you might recognize those beehive huts, which were monks used to live there before in reality. And then also just to let you know I have three kids aged 15, 12 and 9. And so some of them are down at the moment doing homeschooling because their schools are closed. So again, that's just some of the context about a little bit about me that you may not have known. So what did 2020, what did I experience and how did it affect me and the way I work with open source communities? So in the start of 2020, you know, I actually was here at Fosdham in Belgium, experienced the true Fosdham community, been in all those large lecture halls and also into the small developer rooms, meeting outside for a get in the coffee or a bagel and meeting people was the main thing. Met loads of people, made great connections, learned about new projects I had no idea of before. So it was a great experience. But then when I came back from Fosdham in February, that's when news that a pandemic was starting to break here in my country in Ireland, where we had a lot of cancellation of travel. So for me, I travel a lot with my job. So first thing I noticed was, okay, you know, you're now canceling some travel that you had planned. And then eventually, I actually taught, you know, in Q1 that this was going to be a short term thing. So I did feel that, you know, this wasn't going to be going on as long as it has. I think a lot of people didn't understand, you know, much about COVID-19 at the time. And, you know, I felt that maybe I was working from home was going to be a short term thing. So I carried on normal or normal ish. In Q2, I did see the first of many physical OSS events being either canceled or rescheduled to later in the year, such as ONES, for example, that was by a plan to be at in North America, that had been scheduled, you know, to later in the year in September as a virtual event. But work in my projects continued on as normal, because when I look at it, like from an on app perspective, which I was still working on, I knew the people I've known them for a number of years now. So we carried on as normal. We ran our weekly Zoom calls. And for the most part, it felt fairly normal. And I also discovered in Q2, a little bit about my locality here. So where I live, you know, so because we were in in bubbles of where we could actually go within five kilometers of our home, I discovered a whole series of things around my home. But I did start to miss the, my, my, my, my workmates, because I'm used to I've worked all my career in an office. It was the first time for me experiencing working from home on a prolonged basis. So in Q3, I joined a new exciting, you know, project called Open Harmony. And one of the things I noticed was that as I joined that, we had a lot of virtual meetings, our online meetings, you know, to actually get the project off the ground. But one I noticed was I started to have a little bit of online meeting fatigue. And it was also the frustration that as we were normally, if you're starting a community, you may actually get to try and actually meet together. And these were all brand new people for me. So I've never met them. And they didn't know me. And I didn't know really know them. And that's when I had a little bit of frustration that, you know, we had to do everything virtually. So it became more difficult. And, you know, just, just speaking of Open Harmony, I mentioned that there's a stand that the event, please go out and visit it, you know, if you get a chance. But also, I noticed that feelings of isolation started, started to begin in Q3 for me. So then in Q4, a little bit of virtual event overload. And I also experienced my first time of hosting a stand or actually, you know, being at a stand at a virtual event and manning that stand and giving presentations from a virtual stand. And again, this for me wasn't the same thing as at the physical thing. And I'll get to that in a while of things we can maybe do to improve the stand experience from the physical to the virtual. So I started worrying a little bit about the loss of the human side of communities. And that's when I became determined as well to deal with any feelings of isolation I was having. And at the same time, at the end of 2020, we had news that a vaccine coming out. So hope was coming out. And I also decided at that point to talk to you guys at FOSDM 2021 about it, because the best thing we can do is to talk. So isolation, okay, I'm not a doctor. But if you look at Cambridge Dictionary, they say it's a condition of being alone, especially when it makes you feel unhappy. So now I give you context, I'm down here at the end of my garden. But I'm not alone. I have my wife and I have three kids were in our inner bubble. But I'm a lot more alone than I've ever been in my life before in terms of interaction with people. So we're limiting our number of contacts. So it's not natural for me as a social person. So humans interacting virtually is no real substitute for me personally in a way into face to face communications. And I was at FOSDM last year where Andrew Hutchins gave a fantastic heartfelt talk about recognizing burnout. And it was really a brave presentation that he gave. But he did note that isolation can become a potential cause for burnout. And burnout and depression can go in hand and hand. So I do think we need to actually identify and actually acknowledge that there is people feeling a little bit potentially isolated in 2020 going into 2021 with the way the pandemic has had an effect. And just to take a few little actions in the way we run our communities and the way we operate can go a long way. And that's what today's talk is all about. So again just looking at it from the open source communities basis from what I've seen. Again this is just my experience. The code itself kept growing. It was actually immune to the virus. Developers kept developing code. We had projects that still went out on time. We actually had new open source projects that were starting that were helping combat the pandemic. For example code was being written now to develop visualization tools for healthcare workers. But the code itself was reviewed by more and more people that we had never met before. Okay so then I'll get to that in a minute. But also then from a governance point of view or the foundations point of view they too had to adapt. So I work with foundations like the Linux Foundation and the Eclipse Foundation. They would have had to adapt to running their you know events physically and also the way they actually interact and gain new members. And they would have also had a loss of funding from potentially from running events which is some of the you know the way they fund their actual activities through the year. So they've had to adapt as well. And events then themselves as I mentioned moved online and we had the introduction of the virtual stand or the virtual boot. And again there was a rush to develop platforms that tried to make them as human connection as possible but not quite the same as the real thing. So just a few things that we can do to improve the experience of virtual events. And then the public itself, the pandemic effect on the public was from an open source point of view was that they actually got a lot of new you know tools that were based on open source that helped in the combat of COVID-19. Such as you know contact tracing apps or also even because they're more and more public or working from home. A lot of the cloud network connectivity to actually bring and bring these virtual tools back to people's homes was built on open source software. Even a lot of the work that we do in the network function virtualization or software defined networks is built on open source. And then the developers us ourselves so I still develop, I'm a developer as well. You know weak transition mainly for the most part all over the world working from home. Open source teams had to work virtually by virtual meetings and you may like me felt a little bit isolated. So which is one of the things I'd like to do today now is to move on to well what little things we can do to improve you know just small things. Small things as I said I'm not a doctor, I just suggest my own experiences that I'd like to share. So one of the things that I tried to do at the start of this call was to give you a little bit of introduction of who I am and some of my interests and where I'm from and you know my hobbies and my favorite places to visit. So now you know a little bit about me but when we're running community calls and community meetings especially when they're meetings that are not with a thousand people online where it's not physically possible to go around and ask everyone you know a little bit about themselves. But there's a lot of smaller virtual meetings where there might be just 10-15 people dialing in for a small project weekly meeting or steering committee call. It's a little bit to spend a little bit of time to try and see actually how do you actually do you know any of these people and do you know where they're from. Things like that are very important for example is what time zone they're in because maybe you as host could be changing the or have a perception of where they actually are based on their accent and the way they talk but they actually may not be physically living there. They may be in it living in another area with a different culture. You don't know until you actually facilitate getting to know your members and physical events allow that you know at having a coffee or having a beer afterwards you get to know people but that was taken away from us you know with the pandemic for open source communities. So we just have to make a little bit of adjustments to actually find out and know your members which is also helpful because the more you know and especially for if you're a project technical lead or you're a host of a steering committee it helps you actually get the most out of the meetings I feed personally anyway if you know what people actually want what their goals are. Some people may want to be always just contributing technically some people that might have a business aspect to wider involve but you're trying to keep them involved and keep the community growing and keep the community producing good software that is going to be used and useful. So the more you know your members I think the better you actually can make that happen. So some of the things I would annulce as well I mentioned earlier on about you know is there's more and more people that you've never met before and this comes even into code reviews so I've experienced this myself this year where for example in the Linux Foundation networking team we would have used GERAT and I would have seen just comments coming in from people that I've never met and sometimes you might see something that means no harm you see something like why did you not add the associated J unit for this code modification but because maybe you haven't met them before you're probably thinking that seems to be a bit to the point you know and you may feel a little bit that it's someone being slightly aggressive with you when maybe they're completely the opposite they're just pointing out a mistake or that improvement now they could have done something a little bit better they could have written a more verbose comment in the current review like something like look at his best practice for this code modification to also have J unit tests it really will help our code quality and coverage please add the associated J unit test you can add it here now that seems a lot more you know from a personal point of view from someone you haven't met it actually looks and feels a bit better that someone's trying to be constructive but it does take more time but what I'm saying is if in if you think of it at point number three what I'm here is if the same text that you saw the more short version of the GERAT review was from someone you knew and had beers with in FOSDEM for example you may not you may just say oh yeah I forgot the J unit I'll add it and you don't think of it as being someone being aggressive because you know they're not an aggressive person but we had the danger we have now is that more and more we're seeing more and more comments from people we have no idea who they are and so just have to be a bit more conscious and I think if you just take a small little bit of time to be a small bit more verbose and constructive in your comments it can help right because these same people could be struggling with work and you know getting their code reviewed and seeing comments that look like they're aggressive may not may not be a nice feeling that they would have and may actually make sure that they might not come back and add another code to this project you know you know we have to take that into account so then also from a from a virtual boot experience okay so from at the start of the year I would have said you know FOSDEM 2020 and as I said was a physical event and then 2021 now here we are we're talking virtually and I'm pre-recording this in my shed out the back in Ireland so I'm not there with you but when you think of the events we also have stands and we have a virtual boot stand here at you know for the open harmony community which I hope you will go and visit but when you're at physical events when you have a 15 minute break you go out and you might have a coffee and there's a set of stands there and there's people there and you can see the people and you can actually interact with the people whereas when it's a virtual event and you have a 15 minute break where do you go for me I have to walk down the garden I get my cup of coffee there but I'm gonna come back up it's 15 minutes gone and I'm back into the next session or else I'm the likelihood is I go check my my work email and start working I may not even go back to the sessions so we have to understand that virtual events has this item of when you're when you're showing a stand and how can you make them less scary for someone to actually go into and actually interact as humans and interact not just you know one of the biggest fears I have is when you go in and you arrange your virtual boot that just just has it download this brochure and off you go and so some of the some of the things we can do a little bit better is maybe put pictures of who is answering the chat box or who's who's who's responding to you if you do ask a question and you know even try and have the event platforms allow you know to move yourself as an icon towards a stand and actually have a meeting a virtual meeting with the people on the stand so it's actually a it's a an interactive experience with people that you can see and or even just arrange your your virtual space really trying and twice this this human contact versus just simply just putting the brochure up at the top and download it and off you go and so that's some of the things we can do I think from a virtual boot perspective so finally I just want to finish with a little bit because of role play okay so I'm again just take this as a these are all fictitious characters and you know but it's just something maybe to get you a little bit thinking about the next time you're hosting a call or you're on a call in your open source communities whether it's a project call or a steering committee call and just maybe take note of who is on the call and maybe try and work a little bit on on the human side of these calls so Harry is the host he's a ptl so he's running his weekly meeting Harry takes a very good care of his project he's a diligent ptl he knows exactly what's going on in and going into the project and he keeps an eye on most of the activities that are happening so then we I'll introduce you to Vera the veteran Vera is the top prog merchant he's an absolute great asset to the team highly skilled has contributed to this project for years the one thing I would say though is Vera given half the chance will take the entire meeting she likes the sound of her own voice we all know people like that and that would actually when given the chance will take the entire call which is you know which is good because she's giving good technical content but you do need to be aware of the person that you know you know the person so that's Vera the veteran and then we also have on this call again it's only a small call for the sake of time for Fosdam and Nile Danubi so Nile is the newest member to the open source community it's only a second project call and he's made his first contribution during the week so he's very proud about that it's his first contribution ever to open source and but Nile does not know anyone on this call he's never met them before and he's only ever seen Vera via the Gert review where she's had a few harsh comments maybe on his review that he actually made and changed and actually got in so he's actually he's coming onto his call proud as punch and he's waiting to actually you know to meet the members of the team. Aiva interest is someone that has been dialing into these calls hasn't contributed code much but hasn't basically been asked you know about her skill sets and what people don't know is that Aiva she has fantastic skills that are actually really required for this new feature that is being planned for this release but no one has actually understands or even asked what type of experience she has or what what what kind of skill set she has so you know it's it's unknown. From Shirley Shai is the final person around this role play call and Shirley Shai everyone just assumes is shy because she never turns on her camera. What actually people don't know is that Shirley is in a in her local time zone is dialing in extremely late and is normally in her pajamas ready for bed so but no one has ever asked her where she was from and no one has any idea what pressure she is under to make this call in terms of the time zone that the call is on. So just to get you a little bit thinking maybe this is the wrong way if this is your situation if you know your community in this regard this is the wrong way I would suggest that Harry would start to call he say hi all welcome to the meeting we have a very busy week ahead Vera can you please take us through the new feature design for Project X I think you can take the full hour because it's really important we get through this today. Maybe the wrong way to start this call because that's the only way it's going to go and I would suggest just taking a little bit of time potentially to start the call like this. Harry says welcome everybody I'd like to acknowledge everyone for dialing in your participation in these difficult times is really appreciated on today's agenda Vera would kindly take us through the new feature design for Project X before that I just wanted to congratulate Nile D'Nuby for his first commits to the project I want to round the applause everyone for for that Nile if you'd like to introduce yourself please do as I know there's a lot of new faces on this call for you I also think it will be a benefit for a quick we limit it to maximum 10 minutes round table for everyone to introduce us feel free to introduce yourself where you're from what you're interested in or anything else you'd like to share with us to me it's bounded into a start of a call so you put it it will may potentially get you to allow to find out that I've a interest has this skill that's going to be a great asset for Project X something Harry the host may never have known if they didn't ask so that's just one of the a little bit of role play for this call so the final thoughts is just just take that five ten minutes show a little bit of empathy and awareness not just in calls also in the way you arrange your boots and in the way you actually write your your code comments just take note of the way people may be feeling in 20 in 2021 now you know with the effects of the pandemic and again if you please follow me into the chat room if you'd like to discuss and have a conversation on this further and any other experiences I've had please visit our open harmony stand as well I hope to be there as well and I can talk to you and thank you for your time and I hope I hope it's been useful so take care thanks everyone
 Hello and a very warm welcome to you all today for a session that we're just going to take  a little bit of time to zoom out so we can zoom in on communities and specifically talking  about open source communities. So just to give you a little bit of context to the picture that  you're seeing here, this is a picture of a shed that is down the back garden that we converted  into a teenager room for my 15 year old son. I have taken over as an office in 2020 as I  started working from home. So I spent a lot of my time down here, luckily enough in a quiet  area, but it's down the back end of a garden. So things have changed for me in 2020 and I'm sure  things have changed for a lot of people, everyone practically in 2020. So I'd just like to take a  little bit of time to look at little things we can do to acknowledge firstly that things have  changed, but also how to keep that human connection that we have in open source communities. So just  like to go through a little bit introduction first of who I am. So I'm the director of the EU  open source ecosystem development team. I'm based in Cork in Ireland, which is down the second  largest city in Ireland down the south of Ireland right on the coast. I've been in software for a  long, long time now. I've started back in 96 with Motorola, writing highly proprietary software  that was geared for the mobile switching centers, which are used to connect your your mobiles together  when when making and translating the digits that you dial to make a phone call. So in more  recent times, in around 2017, so I haven't worked very much in proprietary across a number of companies  like IBM, Motorola and then into Huawei where I am now. I switched in around 2017 to working with  open source communities, started off with the Linux Foundation and networking teams on a project  called own app, which was just starting off, which was the open network automation platform. And  that's where I got my first taste and experience of open source communities and and the actual, you  know, the ability to be able to meet and work with communities from different companies across  different parts of the world. And it was actually an experience that I really enjoyed and since  2017 and I never looked back and I've changed my career from proprietary now switching over to  working with with open source communities. And then more recently, we started off on the now  community lead for a new exciting project called open harmony. So I'm now the community lead  working with the open source foundations. And so open harmony itself, we do have a stand here at  Fosdome. So if you get a chance to go out and have a look at the the open harmony stand, exciting  project basically trying to utilize all your consumer devices as a virtual resource pool to  give a better experience in terms of the applications that you can run on those devices. So please,  if you get a chance, have a look at our stand. And I've also continued as a project technical  lead within the own app community in the Linux Foundation and networking team, where own app  itself is over 50% of the code for the Linux Foundation networking. It's a very large project  across multiple different operators and vendors alike. I'm also a member of the Edge Native  Steering Committee in the Eclipse Foundation. So I represent Huawei within that steering  committee and working with the community in the in the Eclipse Foundation. So just a couple of  things I'd like to point out as we go through this presentation is to be aware of the human side  of OSS communities. And so I always feel it's a good example to give you a few details about me  and who I am and a little bit more about me than just my business introduction. Three things you  didn't know about me is I coach a sport called hurling. So this is a hurly and this is a slitter.  So at the weekend, it's a sport that's played Gaelic Games Association in Ireland. And it's  something that I do with the weekends and coach some kids how to play and used to play it when  I was younger myself. So some of my favorite places to visit one of them is the Dingle Peninsula.  You know, it's a beautiful area of Ireland and Kerry in County Kerry in Ireland. It's a place  I visit every year. It became famous if you're a Sky Wars fan for Luke Skywalker and Ray as the  island Skellig Michael, which is an island that Luke Skywalker was hiding from in episode 7 and  also featured in other episodes as well. So if you're a Star Wars fan, you might recognize those  beehive huts, which were monks used to live there before in reality. And then also just to let  you know I have three kids aged 15, 12 and 9. And so some of them are down at the moment doing  homeschooling because their schools are closed. So again, that's just some of the context about a  little bit about me that you may not have known. So what did 2020, what did I experience and how  did it affect me and the way I work with open source communities? So in the start of 2020,  you know, I actually was here at Fosdham in Belgium, experienced the true Fosdham community,  been in all those large lecture halls and also into the small developer rooms, meeting outside  for a get in the coffee or a bagel and meeting people was the main thing. Met loads of people,  made great connections, learned about new projects I had no idea of before. So it was a great  experience. But then when I came back from Fosdham in February, that's when news that a  pandemic was starting to break here in my country in Ireland, where we had a lot of  cancellation of travel. So for me, I travel a lot with my job. So first thing I noticed was,  okay, you know, you're now canceling some travel that you had planned. And then eventually, I  actually taught, you know, in Q1 that this was going to be a short term thing. So I did feel  that, you know, this wasn't going to be going on as long as it has. I think a lot of people didn't  understand, you know, much about COVID-19 at the time. And, you know, I felt that maybe I was  working from home was going to be a short term thing. So I carried on normal or normal ish. In  Q2, I did see the first of many physical OSS events being either canceled or rescheduled to  later in the year, such as ONES, for example, that was by a plan to be at in North America, that  had been scheduled, you know, to later in the year in September as a virtual event. But work in my  projects continued on as normal, because when I look at it, like from an on app perspective,  which I was still working on, I knew the people I've known them for a number of years now. So we  carried on as normal. We ran our weekly Zoom calls. And for the most part, it felt fairly normal. And  I also discovered in Q2, a little bit about my locality here. So where I live, you know, so  because we were in in bubbles of where we could actually go within five kilometers of our home,  I discovered a whole series of things around my home. But I did start to miss the, my, my, my,  my workmates, because I'm used to I've worked all my career in an office. It was the first time  for me experiencing working from home on a prolonged basis. So in Q3, I joined a new exciting, you  know, project called Open Harmony. And one of the things I noticed was that as I joined that,  we had a lot of virtual meetings, our online meetings, you know, to actually get the project  off the ground. But one I noticed was I started to have a little bit of online meeting fatigue.  And it was also the frustration that as we were normally, if you're starting a community, you  may actually get to try and actually meet together. And these were all brand new people for me. So  I've never met them. And they didn't know me. And I didn't know really know them. And that's when  I had a little bit of frustration that, you know, we had to do everything virtually. So it became  more difficult. And, you know, just, just speaking of Open Harmony, I mentioned that there's a stand  that the event, please go out and visit it, you know, if you get a chance. But also, I noticed  that feelings of isolation started, started to begin in Q3 for me. So then in Q4, a little bit  of virtual event overload. And I also experienced my first time of hosting a stand or actually, you  know, being at a stand at a virtual event and manning that stand and giving presentations from a  virtual stand. And again, this for me wasn't the same thing as at the physical thing. And I'll get  to that in a while of things we can maybe do to improve the stand experience from the physical  to the virtual. So I started worrying a little bit about the loss of the human side of communities.  And that's when I became determined as well to deal with any feelings of isolation I was having.  And at the same time, at the end of 2020, we had news that a vaccine coming out. So hope was coming  out. And I also decided at that point to talk to you guys at FOSDM 2021 about it, because the best  thing we can do is to talk. So isolation, okay, I'm not a doctor. But if you look at Cambridge  Dictionary, they say it's a condition of being alone, especially when it makes you feel unhappy.  So now I give you context, I'm down here at the end of my garden. But I'm not alone. I have my wife  and I have three kids were in our inner bubble. But I'm a lot more alone than I've ever been in my  life before in terms of interaction with people. So we're limiting our number of contacts. So it's  not natural for me as a social person. So humans interacting virtually is no real substitute  for me personally in a way into face to face communications. And I was at FOSDM last year  where Andrew Hutchins gave a fantastic heartfelt talk about recognizing burnout. And it was really  a brave presentation that he gave. But he did note that isolation can become a potential cause for  burnout. And burnout and depression can go in hand and hand. So I do think we need to actually  identify and actually acknowledge that there is people feeling a little bit potentially isolated  in 2020 going into 2021 with the way the pandemic has had an effect. And just to take a few little  actions in the way we run our communities and the way we operate can go a long way. And that's  what today's talk is all about. So again just looking at it from the open source communities  basis from what I've seen. Again this is just my experience. The code itself kept growing. It was  actually immune to the virus. Developers kept developing code. We had projects that still  went out on time. We actually had new open source projects that were starting that were helping  combat the pandemic. For example code was being written now to develop visualization tools for  healthcare workers. But the code itself was reviewed by more and more people that we had never met  before. Okay so then I'll get to that in a minute. But also then from a governance point of view or  the foundations point of view they too had to adapt. So I work with foundations like the Linux  Foundation and the Eclipse Foundation. They would have had to adapt to running their you know  events physically and also the way they actually interact and gain new members. And they would  have also had a loss of funding from potentially from running events which is some of the you know  the way they fund their actual activities through the year. So they've had to adapt as well. And  events then themselves as I mentioned moved online and we had the introduction of the virtual  stand or the virtual boot. And again there was a rush to develop platforms that tried to make them  as human connection as possible but not quite the same as the real thing. So just a few things  that we can do to improve the experience of virtual events. And then the public itself,  the pandemic effect on the public was from an open source point of view was that they actually got  a lot of new you know tools that were based on open source that helped in the combat of COVID-19.  Such as you know contact tracing apps or also even because they're more and more public or working  from home. A lot of the cloud network connectivity to actually bring and bring these virtual tools  back to people's homes was built on open source software. Even a lot of the work that we do in  the network function virtualization or software defined networks is built on open source.  And then the developers us ourselves so I still develop, I'm a developer as well.  You know weak transition mainly for the most part all over the world working from home.  Open source teams had to work virtually by virtual meetings and you may like me felt a little bit  isolated. So which is one of the things I'd like to do today now is to move on to well what little  things we can do to improve you know just small things. Small things as I said I'm not a doctor,  I just suggest my own experiences that I'd like to share. So one of the things that I tried to do  at the start of this call was to give you a little bit of introduction of who I am and some of my  interests and where I'm from and you know my hobbies and my favorite places to visit. So now you know  a little bit about me but when we're running community calls and community meetings especially  when they're meetings that are not with a thousand people online where it's not physically possible  to go around and ask everyone you know a little bit about themselves. But there's a lot of smaller  virtual meetings where there might be just 10-15 people dialing in for a small project weekly meeting  or steering committee call. It's a little bit to spend a little bit of time to try and see actually  how do you actually do you know any of these people and do you know where they're from. Things like  that are very important for example is what time zone they're in because maybe you as host could be  changing the or have a perception of where they actually are based on their accent and the way  they talk but they actually may not be physically living there. They may be in it living in another  area with a different culture. You don't know until you actually facilitate getting to know your  members and physical events allow that you know at having a coffee or having a beer afterwards you  get to know people but that was taken away from us you know with the pandemic for open source  communities. So we just have to make a little bit of adjustments to actually find out and know your  members which is also helpful because the more you know and especially for if you're a project  technical lead or you're a host of a steering committee it helps you actually get the most  out of the meetings I feed personally anyway if you know what people actually want what their goals  are. Some people may want to be always just contributing technically some people that might  have a business aspect to wider involve but you're trying to keep them involved and keep the community  growing and keep the community producing good software that is going to be used and useful.  So the more you know your members I think the better you actually can make that happen.  So some of the things I would annulce as well I mentioned earlier on about you know is there's  more and more people that you've never met before and this comes even into code reviews so I've  experienced this myself this year where for example in the Linux Foundation networking team we would  have used GERAT and I would have seen just comments coming in from people that I've never met  and sometimes you might see something that means no harm you see something like why did you not add  the associated J unit for this code modification but because maybe you haven't met them before you're  probably thinking that seems to be a bit to the point you know and you may feel a little bit that  it's someone being slightly aggressive with you when maybe they're completely the opposite they're  just pointing out a mistake or that improvement now they could have done something a little bit  better they could have written a more verbose comment in the current review like something like  look at his best practice for this code modification to also have J unit tests it really will help our  code quality and coverage please add the associated J unit test you can add it here now that seems a  lot more you know from a personal point of view from someone you haven't met it actually looks and  feels a bit better that someone's trying to be constructive but it does take more time  but what I'm saying is if in if you think of it at point number three what I'm here is if the same  text that you saw the more short version of the GERAT review was from someone you knew and had  beers with in FOSDEM for example you may not you may just say oh yeah I forgot the J unit I'll add  it and you don't think of it as being someone being aggressive because you know they're not an  aggressive person but we had the danger we have now is that more and more we're seeing more and more  comments from people we have no idea who they are and so just have to be a bit more conscious and I  think if you just take a small little bit of time to be a small bit more verbose and constructive  in your comments it can help right because these same people could be struggling with work and you  know getting their code reviewed and seeing comments that look like they're aggressive may not  may not be a nice feeling that they would have and may actually make sure that they might not come  back and add another code to this project you know you know we have to take that into account  so then also from a from a virtual boot experience okay so from at the start of the year I would have  said you know FOSDEM 2020 and as I said was a physical event and then 2021 now here we are  we're talking virtually and I'm pre-recording this in my shed out the back in Ireland so I'm not  there with you but when you think of the events we also have stands and we have a virtual boot  stand here at you know for the open harmony community which I hope you will go and visit  but when you're at physical events when you have a 15 minute break you go out and you might have a  coffee and there's a set of stands there and there's people there and you can see the people  and you can actually interact with the people whereas when it's a virtual event and you have a  15 minute break where do you go for me I have to walk down the garden I get my cup of coffee there  but I'm gonna come back up it's 15 minutes gone and I'm back into the next session or else I'm  the likelihood is I go check my my work email and start working I may not even go back to the sessions  so we have to understand that virtual events has this item of when you're when you're showing a stand  and how can you make them less scary for someone to actually go into and actually interact as humans  and interact not just you know one of the biggest fears I have is when you go in and you arrange  your virtual boot that just just has it download this brochure and off you go and so some of the  some of the things we can do a little bit better is maybe put pictures of who is answering the chat  box or who's who's who's responding to you if you do ask a question and you know even try and have  the event platforms allow you know to move yourself as an icon towards a stand and actually have a  meeting a virtual meeting with the people on the stand so it's actually a it's a an interactive  experience with people that you can see and or even just arrange your your virtual space really  trying and twice this this human contact versus just simply just putting the brochure up at the top  and download it and off you go and so that's some of the things we can do I think from a virtual boot  perspective so finally I just want to finish with a little bit because of role play okay so I'm  again just take this as a these are all fictitious characters and you know but it's just something  maybe to get you a little bit thinking about the next time you're hosting a call or you're on a call  in your open source communities whether it's a project call or a steering committee call  and just maybe take note of who is on the call and maybe try and work a little bit on on the human  side of these calls so Harry is the host he's a ptl so he's running his weekly meeting Harry takes  a very good care of his project he's a diligent ptl he knows exactly what's going on in and going  into the project and he keeps an eye on most of the activities that are happening so then we  I'll introduce you to Vera the veteran Vera is the top prog merchant he's an absolute great asset  to the team highly skilled has contributed to this project for years the one thing I would say  though is Vera given half the chance will take the entire meeting she likes the sound of her own  voice we all know people like that and that would actually when given the chance will  take the entire call which is you know which is good because she's giving good technical content  but you do need to be aware of the person that you know you know the person so that's Vera the  veteran and then we also have on this call again it's only a small call for the sake of time for  Fosdam and Nile Danubi so Nile is the newest member to the open source community it's only a second  project call and he's made his first contribution during the week so he's very proud about that  it's his first contribution ever to open source and but Nile does not know anyone on this call  he's never met them before and he's only ever seen Vera via the Gert review where she's had a few  harsh comments maybe on his review that he actually made and changed and actually got in so he's  actually he's coming onto his call proud as punch and he's waiting to actually you know to meet the  members of the team. Aiva interest is someone that has been dialing into these calls hasn't  contributed code much but hasn't basically been asked you know about her skill sets and what people  don't know is that Aiva she has fantastic skills that are actually really required for this new  feature that is being planned for this release but no one has actually understands or even asked  what type of experience she has or what what what kind of skill set she has so you know it's it's  unknown. From Shirley Shai is the final person around this role play call and Shirley Shai everyone  just assumes is shy because she never turns on her camera. What actually people don't know is that  Shirley is in a in her local time zone is dialing in extremely late and is normally in her pajamas  ready for bed so but no one has ever asked her where she was from and no one has any idea what  pressure she is under to make this call in terms of the time zone that the call is on.  So just to get you a little bit thinking maybe this is the wrong way if this is your situation if  you know your community in this regard this is the wrong way I would suggest that Harry would  start to call he say hi all welcome to the meeting we have a very busy week ahead Vera can you please  take us through the new feature design for Project X I think you can take the full hour because it's  really important we get through this today. Maybe the wrong way to start this call because that's  the only way it's going to go and I would suggest just taking a little bit of time potentially to  start the call like this. Harry says welcome everybody I'd like to acknowledge everyone for  dialing in your participation in these difficult times is really appreciated on today's agenda Vera  would kindly take us through the new feature design for Project X before that I just wanted to  congratulate Nile D'Nuby for his first commits to the project I want to round the applause everyone  for for that Nile if you'd like to introduce yourself please do as I know there's a lot of new  faces on this call for you I also think it will be a benefit for a quick we limit it to maximum 10  minutes round table for everyone to introduce us feel free to introduce yourself where you're from  what you're interested in or anything else you'd like to share with us to me it's bounded into a  start of a call so you put it it will may potentially get you to allow to find out that  I've a interest has this skill that's going to be a great asset for Project X something  Harry the host may never have known if they didn't ask so that's just one of the a little bit of  role play for this call so the final thoughts is just just take that five ten minutes show a little  bit of empathy and awareness not just in calls also in the way you arrange your boots and in the  way you actually write your your code comments just take note of the way people may be feeling  in 20 in 2021 now you know with the effects of the pandemic and again if you please follow me into  the chat room if you'd like to discuss and have a conversation on this further and any  other experiences I've had please visit our open harmony stand as well I hope to be there as well  and I can talk to you and thank you for your time and I hope I hope it's been useful so take care  thanks everyone
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