Let me start my timer because it's the lightning talk and I don't want to go long. Okay, so This is the flywheel theory of community engagement. I normally have some housekeeping slides that I walk you through we have five minutes I'm not going to do it. You can read this but

the first question you might ask is what is a flywheel in physics a flywheel is To simplify things a machine that stores energy or smooths energy So if you think about like on a car engine you've got pistons going up and down and you're not actually getting smooth output But then you put a flywheel on it and all of a sudden that uneven output

Becomes smooth output to the drive shaft and so your car goes vroom instead of vroom vroom vroom vroom vroom But this isn't a physics talk This is a community talk. So in a community a flywheel does sort of the same thing, right? It's a person who helps keep the energy of a team going

and the cool thing about a community flywheel versus a you know, Mechanical flywheel is that the community flywheel really just sets a floor For the energy the output of a team. They don't really put a ceiling on it the way

You know mechanical and you're they're not gonna be absorbing excess energy and say let's do less for a little bit So why are they important? Well in open-source communities you often have people who are volunteering so, you know They're doing this because they're interested in it They're doing on their own free time and they may have jobs or families or other hobbies or life

That just gets in the way sometimes Now in the happy case you have different contributors who are sort of coming and going and the amount of effort they put in varies over time, but there are sort of out of phase and so the actual The effort of the team stays pretty high you kind of absorb because you know

One person's inner effort is going down while another person's is ramping up but sometimes for Often just for completely independent reasons people to sort of get in phase and everyone's effort kind of drops at about the same time And then the team's effort just sort of falls off a cliff and once a team has sort of become

Stagnant and moribund it's really hard to just get it self restarted You have to kind of come in and give it a shove to get going again. So what does a flywheel do? Well, it's not necessarily the person who is the formal leader of the team

It can be it's not necessarily somebody who's doing the most work. It's not even necessarily somebody who's contributing to The direct output of a team So if it's like a documentation team the flywheel might not actually be writing a lot of documentation if it's a design team They might not actually be doing any graphic design

But they're sort of just the constant presence there to keep the team going that shows Hey, this team is active and people can come and go Which means that if a new person comes up and they introduce themselves on the mailing list they actually get a reply because there are a few things as disheartening as

Introducing yourself getting ready to join this new project and Just being met with silence. You lose your contributors that way before they even start So, how do you apply a flywheel to your project and the dirty little secret of this talk? Is that it was sort of a way for me to try and help nudge my employer to maybe

Make a little bit more contribution Because one of the things I found in my decade of contributing to the fedora project Is that the teams that have a flywheel generally that flywheel is somebody who's being paid by Red Hat to participate in fedora That's not always true. But by and large the teams that have really been able to sustain themselves over a decade or more

have somebody who can dedicate their time and The cool thing is is it doesn't have to be a full-time person I'm kind of making this up I suspect that as little as like three or four hours a week of just being present and

Showing activity in the commute in the team can be enough So when you're looking at the the makeup of your teams in within your open source community Think about who is a flywheel so either who has You know is being funded by a sponsoring organization to participate in the project or who just consistently has that time and just you know

Show them the benefits and you know say, you know here you're the one responsible for helping to make sure We're being active Because a team that is active will stay active and team that becomes inactive will need a lot of energy Invested in it to get it restarted again

So that is the very unscientific, but you know true in my experience flywheel theory of community engagement Thank you everyone