The Heart of Open Source: Understanding Personal and Corporate Involvement

why someone would want to be involved in open source I got involved in open source in 2012 and I'm not a coder absolutely not I the the developers and the engineers that are managing in wring today's software they're light years ahead of me uh I can I can hack away I can do some scripting and stuff like that but I am absolutely not a developer anymore I used to be not anymore um but when I got involved with open source a little over 10 years ago my role was more about training and um running workshops presenting really amazing tools for larger customers larger partners and

things like that uh and that's a really interesting way to get involved with an open source project uh so one of the first open source projects I got involved with was a puppet a fantastic automation project uh or product um that has a large open source following and I was a presenter at several events I met a ton of fantastic people through that uh and through my years of Open Source involvement I I've met some of the best and smartest engineers and some of the best and funniest and friendliest people I I could ever wish to meet so it it's just a such a fulfilling

thing to be a part of this wonderful Community because everyone that joins the open source Community practically everyone wants to give back somehow uh and having everyone gather together to give back to the community uh just having that type of mindset when you start to interact with someone that hey I want to help rather rather than hey I want something out of you uh is such a powerful thing so it's so so much fun uh both on a personal level and a corporate level but it's so much fun but there are a few things of course if you want to join in uh in an

open source Community there are a bunch of really good benefits for you personally uh the first one is of course professional development you get to enhance your skills you get to learn new technologies you get to meet people who are trying to solve real world problems right now and you get to interact with them on a global scale so instead of just being in your bubble and have your understanding of tech as it is right now you get to interact with others who are creating something new and that's really cool and really interesting just to see that and have those interactions and by connecting with

like-minded individuals and like-minded professionals around the world of course you grow your network um and you build out your portfolio as well when you showcase your skills and your expertise in these public spaces so it's just a fantastic thing to do when you're out there you're talking to someone you're learning as well as sharing so when I when I tell some rather when someone ask me hey how can I get involved in open source I say the first thing you should do is try to share knowledge doesn't mean that you have to go to an open source product and tell everyone how awesome you are

but rather go there listen first of all listen and then take all the information that you gathered and share that with someone else uh because that way you get a better understanding of the project you get a better understanding of how the team works and everything like that uh and you get to well share that with someone else so the community grows by you sharing that knowledge so that's the first thing that I always recommend everyone to do just go in there learn and then share something to someone else and yeah um personal satisfaction as well of course I mean it's just fun meeting all

these people and traveling the globe uh at least before covid uh traveling the globe and uh meeting up a bunch of people and things like that it's just super super fun so it sounds like there's kind of a couple different ways to go about it I imagine that I mean you're talking about joining a community that is already growing and prosperous um but you could kind of also start your own right like what if you had an idea as a you know a software engineer or even just the idea person and you want to just get something started it's a open source is a is

a place and a space where you can an idea a concept where you kind of like take your ideas and your Concepts and you begin to bounce them off other people and getting more ideas from a variety of people all the way around the planet which is so cool that we have right the the internet I don't know I there was a time I'm not going to tell you my age but I do remember a time when this thing did not exist or it was not in my world and so to have this now and to have this ability to talk with and collaborate and

share ideas with people around the world and build something that people need I mean usually it happens with a need right and so there's all kinds of I mean there's like probably an open source project for everything you could possibly imagine so what's your favorite place Jonas to find open source projects is it just on GitHub or like where are other places you can go to find things that people are working on collaboratively uh I would definitely go to conferences uh go to meetups and just listen to what people are talking about that way you will find interesting communities it might not be Tech communities

that you are currently a part of maybe you want to Branch out maybe you want to build a really cool uh diving simulator then you go to diving clubs and talk to techy people there um you can there is so much to do not just infrastructure and the the stuff that we are in right now there's so much out there and the communities out there are very very different so every project has their own community and every Community is different they might be similar in some aspects but they are always a little different being a part of a community is a very social thing um

so again you go in there you listen you understand the community and then you share your knowledge as well and your expertise but it's very very social and not just a technical thing I think open source has been painted as uh the only people that can participate in open source are open source developers and engineers and that's not true absolutely not so I've been doing presentations marketing um trainings documentation and things like that th we call those non-code roles and there are so many non-code roles out there um maybe you're a great visualization expert that can explain things to through graphs and workflow diagrams and

things like that that I can't I can barely draw a stick figure um so if someone can do that and explain a very complicated thing to a lot of people that is incredibly valuable so you might have different uh different expertise and different knowledge that you want to share with the project that doesn't necessarily go into the code of the project and that's perfectly fine um maybe um maybe you're great at social media uh I am on social media I'm not funny on social media but I'm on social media uh and maybe someone else can be funny for the project that I'm involved in that

would be great because my no one wants to read my tweets um so there are so many ways to get involved in open source and I really admire everyone who even wants to be a part of Open Source because that shows that you have a willingness to be so to be within this social construct and and share knowledge with others and I think that's a very uh it's a great quality to have as a person so just by being interested in being a part of that Community um I try to Mentor as much as many people as possible to get involved in some way or

another it's just really really fun i' love that so you touched a little bit on the you know the value of the individual person really kind of getting involved with open source and the Curiosity and the community part and I mean it's a little bit of both right like you're you're you're giving to the community and you're you're giving back and that's a a way of looking at the world is that it's collaborative and sharing but there's also a little bit you kind of touched on this a tiny bit where it's like I I get to show off a little bit too right it's like

everyone's got some unique qualities and it doesn't always have to be the tech part although that typically is you know what kind of you know drives the in but that everyone has a little piece of some way that they shine when you're in a community you really have to have a variety of individuals that are involved yeah absolutely it it's it's incredibly important to understand the individual what the individual needs out of a project uh so it's very important for an individual that wants to be a part of the project um it's important for them to be transparent U so to be transparent with with

here's what I would like to get out of this community I'm trying to learn technology X or I'm trying to build up my um my technical writer portfolio or um I want to learn more about this particular thing because that would help me at my job so if you're transparent then people can help you much much better as well so go in there and share what you want and then also so here's how I can help um so the the first thing that I recommend to everyone is to just join in on community meetings uh join in on the communication channels and listen first of

all just listen because it might be that this community is not for you um so it's important to understand that it might not be for you you might think this community is super super interesting but you might not want to be a part participant because maybe your your expertise doesn't really fall into what's needed right now um so go in there listen um that's what I usually do I go in and listen for a couple of weeks and then I see hey I can help out in these specific areas so I'm a um I'm a community leader I'm a community manager uh I've been a

developer Advocate sales engineer uh I've been a consultant and teacher throughout my life I've I've done a lot of things but they all uh they all have gone into the bucket of teaching people Tech and um letting letting people understand Tech in a in a good way so that's what I'm really good at that so I try to apply that to any project that I'm a part of uh it might be improving documentation it might be uh creating blog post might be creating YouTube videos on how to run a specific thing it might be creating internal training so people understand the technology better at the

company that I'm at so take your quality and see how you can apply it uh it's a very personal thing you can't be um a a top contributor just all of a sudden but rather work yourself into the project and see where you can help out see where there's a need you might want to work on a specific thing but the project doesn't want to work on that specific thing right now so that means that you can step back for a bit and say yeah that's okay um um is that on the road map are we doing that in like three to six months or

something like that yeah yeah yeah we'll we'll start that work in six months it would be awesome if you can help out them it's like okay cool I'll keep on listening in and see if there's uh anything else I can help out with but I'll make sure to check back in in six months so you don't have to be a part of the community all the time uh the community is a living thing we do uh community health checks for our open source projects to see how healthy they are from a maintainer standpoint from a contributor standpoint um from a user standpoint and that's one

of the things we look at like how how many contributors are we attracting how many contributors are we losing um and if that fluctuates that's that's good that that works out well but if we're just declining then that's bad obviously um but it can also be an issue if we're growing too much and growing too quickly uh every project has a number of maintainers uh a number of people who are responsible for driving the project forward and if the community grows too quickly and there are way too many issues too many PRS coming in too many questions coming in the maintainers don't have time to

work on features um so we want to make sure that we uh measure the growth and the decline to see that we're at a steady level uh we don't want meteoric rise because that can actually lead to issues so yeah there there's a lot of things to think about when you look at uh managing a community and handling uh communities and it's just a fantastic and fascinating subject so you kind of you kind of got into it a little bit but if you because you are a community leader I don't once you find a community you want to be involved with people start wanting to

kind of take that role or get into that role what exactly does that entail and how much I mean obviously it's going to depend on the project but how much time does that take because being able to go in and out of a project is one thing being a leader in a project is not necessarily the same same situation so tell us about leading a project yeah so when you talk about leading a project you're Pro most likely part of the maintainer team in some form which means that you're involved with the project on a day-to-day basis um you're consistently involved it might be that

you're involved as a leader for a specific um time period as well and we've seen some really cool examples of that from the kubernetes project for instance where they vote in a release team for every release that doesn't mean that it's the same person doing the release every time but they have a different release team and then they have people who wants to be part of the release team Shadows the current release team leads and then they can take over during the next release and it rolls like that so you can be involved in One release and never again or you can be involved in

multiple releases um but it's up to you and being a leader means that you are responsible you're responsible for something you are responsible to adhere to deadlines of course making sure that everything uh gets done in a certain way when you look at different types of leadership in open source projects there are a wide variety we have um maybe you're a security lead uh making sure that the product is secure maybe you're a networking lead or a storage lead or an AI lead or maybe you're a community lead which I have been and when you look at the the different aspects of the different leaderships

uh or leader roles rather within a project you will of course have um a wide variety of different types of people who excel at certain things so each person has something amazing that they're each person has something that they're amazing at uh and they try to apply that to the project so I realize that again I'm not a coder uh so I can't really participate in that portion of of projects but I'm really good with people uh and I love managing people and I love uh setting up structures to make things easier I'm a blocker remover um that that's that's what I tend to nin

yeah exactly no it's I just want to remove blockers because people want to work on things they they know they want to build this cool thing so if they're blocked I try my hardest to make sure that that blocker goes goes away yeah I like that I love it so what is what what what's like the benefit or the value or why would a why would a company get involved in an open source project and and tell me about that Dynamic and that those relationships so there are a bunch of different reasons uh company would get involved in open source the the number one right

now it didn't used to be this this way but the number one right now that I see is uh Talent acquisition and also Talent retention if you are a company that do not support open source projects or you do not want your employees to be involved in open source projects you're going to have a really hard time right now to find people who want to work for you um depends on what your company does obviously but if you're within the tech sphere like we are and you're not welcoming to open source contributions it's going to be really hard for um for you to acquire the

the right talent that you that you want to BU build out the the next level of features the next level of products that you want to deliver um on the retention side it's also very very valuable for a company to have people involved in open source projects for a long time because if you are involved with a project and you work yourself in into the project you're a leader within the project uh the company can also uh potentially influence Tech road maps so when you're when you're when you have many or not many but when you have several Engineers working on an open source project

for you the company of course you the company most likely will have some feature requests it's like hey it would be awesome if this project did X Y and Z because then we can build a product on top of that um so again we go back to transparency the the people involved in the project says hey we would love to do X Y and Z because then we can build upon that is that possible at all and if the rest of the community thinks that yeah this would be a good thing to actually do let's do that so now you as a company have um

potentially then uh influenced the road map for that specific Tech that you're building your products upon so that's a really really good uh benefit for a company to be involved in open source that doesn't mean that a company can just go into an open source project and says hey do this because it has to benefit the community otherwise it's not going to happen um the the last thing here is of course your reputation within the open source Community again this goes back to Talent acquisition and talent retention if you are known within the open source community as an open source friendly company uh as a

company that works on really cool Tech within the open source World more people want to work will want to work with you and for you I think it's something seen quite a bit of Jonas over the past 10 years especially with companies in the beginning not wanting to be involved with open source at all yeah and not letting their people work on it they wanted to hire another company and tell them that they had to contribute back so it was kind of that proxy way of being involved it seems to have shifted a lot where there's a lot of companies that allow you to do

this and it seems to have ramped up really fast what have you seen yeah the the open source world for the past 10 years has just grown immensely and it's been a fantastic ride I've really really enjoyed it uh I was a part of the the automation scene then I was a part of the docker scene I was a Docker Captain for a while uh did a bunch of dock workshops and stuff like that before um it become widely adopted and then I've been a part of the kubernetes project I haven't contributed a single line of code to those I've done scripting and and side

projects on top of them but I have contributed in ways uh to teach people um and it's been really fun to see the growth of those communities uh seeing them go from hey this might be cool to oh my God we're having 10 ,000 people at the conference um it's been really really cool to see how big open source has become and and how many contributors are out there not just uh corporate contributions or um organizational contributors but also individual contributors who contribute their free time to an open source project and I I think that is one of the most impactful ways that you can

contribute to anything because you're essentially donating the one very very limited resource that you have that is nonrenewable which is time and you're donating that to a common goal um so anyone who volunteers their time to anything be it a nonprofit like the hit save nonprofit that I lead uh or if you're volunteering to for an open source project I applaud you I I think it's just a fantastic thing to do um and yeah it's just a beautiful community in that way but the growth of the community had a bit of an issue a few years ago so in the beginning of covid a lot

of people we we saw this throughout our metrics a ton of people started to contribute to open source projects because all of a sudden everyone was at home everyone stayed home and wanted to have something to do I guess but we saw uh an increase of contributors for the first couple of months and then we saw a decline uh and I think I I don't have any concrete proof of this but in my mind it's because people saw that hey we're going to be home for quite a while I have other things that I want to do with the time that I have right now

um so I don't want to spend my free time all the time on this project or open source projects in general so we definitely saw a decline um and I think that decline has stopped now uh it stopped like last year and kind of stabilized but we definitely saw an increase and then a quick decline as well so right now I think we're at a steady level of contributors of course we're uh onboarding more and more people every day to GitHub and gitlab and what have view but I I think the the meteoric rise that we've seen in the past 10 years I think that's

that might be slowing a little we may be accelerating in in different venues of course uh like the AI um large language models and stable diffusion and all of that you know it got me thinking some of the um open source projects that uh we work on and uh Provide support here at ciq as well so werewolf aper Rocky where am I going with this Ascender you mentioned I have an idea and it goes from an idea in one or two you know one person's mind and they share it like oh I have that same idea and then it kind of begins to grow and

grow and all of a sudden you've got 10,000 people at a conference my mind just went like explosion us because I don't think we've had a conference like I've been to other conferences where people are talking about werewolf and they're doing presentations and they're talking about at taner and doing presentations and obviously Rocky is its own amazingness but like are there plans like I think that would be so cool to have our own I know I'm like sidetracking here but like I'm just imagining 10,000 people at like an amazing com you know I'm a people person too so I love the idea of Open Source

and just all the quirkiness right it's like just really people from all walks of life getting together for the same thing it's just really it's such a good time so anyway I'm putting it out there in the universe you guys I have set it here it's out on YouTube it's live so I'm looking forward to an amazing Conference of that nature where we I don't know could we have all of those things like does it is it a company that puts it together I don't know I I would love to see more conferences in in general um I've seen meetups have started to pick up

again which is which is really nice we had to shut hours down we I ran the the cloud native Meetup here in Boston we had to shut that down during covid but I've seen those pop up and become more populated as well so I think that's great to see I would love to see more larger open source conferences as well uh some of the my favorite open source conference in the world right now is all things open in Raleigh it's a fantastic conference so anyone out there listening and watching this if you haven't gone to All Things open yet uh highly highly recommend it it's

a fantastic friendly Community just a fantastic conference some of the smartest people again I I say this all the time but some of the smartest people I've met are at that conference um and they have a whole Community track as well which is really really cool if you want to get into Community Management or if you are a community manager able to talk to other community managers they have a whole Community track as well all things open so I'm going to have to go look that up maybe Jess you can put a link somewhere uh for us to all be able to access and benefit

from but I imagine that there like any open source project is welcome to come or something like that absolutely absolutely so you have a bunch of um great vendors obviously but then you have presenters from all walks of life and it's a it's a really friendly and open and um it's a large conference but it feels very non-corporate um so I I really enjoy it speaking of that you had a session at all things open recently I did yes I did unfortunately that was not recorded um my last two presentations at all things open have not been recorded so I'm I'm hoping if I have

a session at all things open this year that that will be recorded but yeah it did have we won't let it happen we will we will record it ourselves if we have to so that sounds good sounds good yeah I uh I talked about how AI can help uh in managing open source communities so focused on using uh content Generation Um content generating AI tools to help with uh Communications in different languages for instance also looking at condensing information and condensing it down to really really good information I did a uh an example on this was I took documentation from an open source project that

um it was the harbor project I believe it was and I took uh some pieces of the documentation and pasted it into Claude which is one of my favorite AI chat bots of the uh right now and I said based on this documentation which just outlined how to do things based on this documentation give me five of the most common pitfalls that an admin could um could fall into if they're doing something wrong so based on the context of how to do it right it understood uh or rather generated an understanding of what could go wrong so it came out with a great list of

items that could be perfect for an FAQ um because if you just have that out there yeah like uh it was something about setting up the the right databases and stuff like that so yeah of course if you misconfigure it you will get this error if you do uh if you don't configure your users correctly the replication will not work and things like that so it was it was really really powerful that way to use AI to not just improve documentation but to add more uh valid information to your community I also uh looked at how can we reach more people because not everyone has

English as their first language English is not my first language um Swedish is my first language so if I take uh let's say I have a a mailing list for the open source project and we have hundreds of people on there maybe thousands of people they're not all going to be here on the east coast of the US um they're going to be all over the globe what if we could ask them and say hey would you like to receive your newsletter in English or would you like to have it translated so I showcased how we can easily translate it not using Google translate and

getting a whole butchered translation like that but an actually good translation using modern AI tools that can then produce content in the reader native tongue uh so they understand Concepts quicker of course we'll uh all the technical jargon and and things like that uh will be then translated so it could be easier for a Community member to understand what's happening in the project instead of trying to wait through all the the technical things that might be hard to understand um awesome and also this goes back to uh I had one more example one more example and then I'll I'll wrap this part up um the

other example was Community meetings so we recorded all the community meetings we put them up on YouTube and that's great again that's it's great to have they're there but they're maybe an hour long not everyone is going to watch an hour of people talking about an open source project and that's fine that's perfectly fine so what I did was I used open AI whisper to get a full transcript of the the community call the community meeting and then I asked Claude to uh give me five paragraphs of the most important topics and the potential outcomes and also the calls to action from the meeting and

it gave me that and it also understood the context of the meeting uh this was a a harbor meeting for the harbor project and it understood Orland uh or orene the community manager at the time uh understood uh that he was going on vacation and the China team the engineers um for the harbor project was usually referred to as the China team because most of them were based in Beijing and it said that the China team will take over responsibilities During the period that orene is is on vacation so just having that context to see that makes it so much easier to get really good

community meeting notes just being able to have the real recording get a full on transcript of it and then shorten it down to here's the most important information that you need to know here's the outcome and here are the calls to action it's just so powerful so this all ties into um my ending of that talk which was AI has helped me so much in uh getting more time out of the day to do other things I have a family I have five-year-old daughter I want to spend time with her as she grows up I don't want to sit for hours on a on a

weekend or an evening to write up documents that I don't need to write anymore uh I can have ai help me write those documents and then I'll edit them and work through them and verify that they're correct but I don't need to start with a blank canvas and have writers block for two hours so yeah using a like that is just great so that leads me to two other questions and you kind of answered it because you go back and edit your own stuff but how do you validate accuracy first question um so if you're writing something for an open source project or for anything

really if you're using AI to generate content and you just take it at fa face value and publish it you're going to have a really bad time uh if you're using Ai and build using AI to build content around something that you know you're going to have a much better time so if you're a subject matter expert on something and you ask AI to generate it based on context then you're going to have a much easier time to actually get valuable information out there if you just ask it to write random stuff you're going to get random stuff so you have to be a subject

matter expert you can't um you can't just ask it to um create things out of thin air and then think yeah that's great I'll send it in um as a book report or something like that no make sure you read the book uh and then you can ask it to create a book report but then you add your own thoughts to it um so yeah you you definitely need to be a subject matter expert so You' mentioned two different tools that you like to use Claude and Whisper what are are your other favorites so Claude is just a fantastic chatbot and they have um they

have added a bunch of things last week I haven't uh D into the uh the announcement there yet but they they added a bunch of cool stuff uh whisper is fantastic for transcription I use it for our nonprofit as well I do interviews with game developers and they're lengthy talks they're like an hour to two hours long so getting the transcript out there is really helpful uh so we post that up on GitHub so people can search for quotes and it also helped me when I create a blog post about the the interview to get the the most pertinent information out there so it's it's

really really useful there so those are the um the two main things that I use for written content generation uh and then I use stable diffusion as well for art it's something that I started with a long time ago now a year and a half two I don't know um but it's just so much fun I've created some some fantastic artwork um and well it wasn't me who created it but using the tools there now exists art um and I've created some some really fun stuff with my daughter we created a a cute kitten with green fur and a c on top of a mountain

very brave little kitten that she now has on her on her wall and a bunch of things like that just Fantastical things and you can create abstract things that might resonate with you and your brain and uh it's just a a really fun thing to do um I've also dabbled a bit in uh AI music generation which I find terrifying but also really fun it is pretty terrifying and also fun thank you yes yes all right that's awesome Jonas what else would you like us and the community to know and understand about open source projects so I I would say just get involved uh head

over to your favorite project and see if they have a community meeting just join the community meeting or watch recordings if they're not in in a good time uh within your time zone watch the community meetings read the community notes uh to understand what the project is doing uh check out the road map to see if there's any place that you might be able to help out maybe you want to be a beta tester for some features or things like that um adding issues um when you encounter bugs maybe you want to run a Meetup around the project maybe you're not the the uh presenter

at the Meetup but maybe you want to host a Meetup May maybe you have maybe your company has a fantastic location um where you want to host meetups absolutely reach out to the community and say hey we would love to have someone talk about your awesome project there are so many ways that you can contribute to a project to um and not just code so I I really really encourage anyone that has an interest in participating in an open source project absolutely to do it it's so much fun okay I'm just going to spout a little bit of competition here within the company so of

the open source projects that we support which one is like your favorite Community uh I I'm I'm not gonna have I'm not gonna talk about any favorites not gonna do it no no uh each Community is different uh each Community is does something platforms are different too that they really end up you know um spending time on I always like for Rocky I always tell people I'm like go to MOS like that to me that's like the most active Community for for Rocky but I mean there's also forums and there's other things going on as well and yeah it I would say the the best

community for you would be the community that you want to participate in um because if you're passionate about something then it's much much easier if it's a struggle for you just walk away do something else that's not worth it away walk away I like that you you know what that's a good life lesson right just hashtag if it's a struggle was walk away maybe not for everything but yes yeah oh but it it's supposed to be fun being a part of Open Source and being a part of Open Source communities is a very social thing it's supposed to be fun it's not supposed to be

a struggle if it's a struggle then maybe it's not the right thing yes not always easy but fun I I you know what thank you we we all just you know Le a little reminder lighten up it's okay to have a little fun and that's beautiful okay Jonas you know what I don't I this is like the first time I've really had a conversation and gotten to know you and your thoughts and your ideas and and what you are doing here I mean I know I see you in our internal slack you know it's like you're doing stuff so thank you so much for coming

on and hanging out with us and sharing with us the the beauty of Open Source and as a company who does you know provide a lot of um uh time and energy and money and interest in open source and just the it's it's intricate right there's intricacies to a company's relationship with open source and what does that mean and how do we do it and how do we be good STS of the open source so thank you for you know jumping in and being part of the team and and helping us you know navigate those relationships really appreciate it thank you for having me this

is this is super fun yeah heck yeah all right you guys well thanks for watching we'll be back here next week same time same place in the meantime if you have any questions or you want to know more you can reach out to us info@ C q.com go to our website there's lots of information there lots of little links that you can link you know you can click on that would like give you access to the different open source projects that we work on specifically werewolf Rocky Apper Ascender um we are always happy to talk to you about any of those and have a wonderful

wonderful day thank you again bye-bye thanks everybody [Music]