Healthy Minds in a Healthy Community
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DjangoCon US 201633 / 52
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:17
today about healthy minds in a healthy community.
00:22
So as I said, my name is Eric and if you've seen me online you might recognize me as the stupid squirrel instead because that's my avatar on GitHub. It was mine before GitHub made it into their emoji. So I'm also a giant core developer. This is my first ever trip to the US and the furthest and longest I've ever been away from home.
00:41
My friend Mikey Ariel, she's not here. Your eyes do not fool you. But we basically built this talk together for JavaScript in Europe. I'll be coming back to that process a few times also, but it really would not have existed without her. So this talk has a mix of stories that are mine, that are Mikey's and there are also many other community members and friends
01:03
that shared their stories with us and that made it into this talk. So I do want to ask everyone that watches this talk or listens to it later or reads the transcripts to keep in mind that the point of this talk is to help trust and openness and we're going to touch on some sensitive issues.
01:22
So I would like to ask you to handle whatever is shared both by us and by maybe people later that have more courage to share things now with care both during and after. So the first thing I want to talk about is how none of us are alone. Because with so many people I meet both here and in so many other places
01:43
I feel like they very much have their life together and they tell the meal about all their wonderful work and how they seem to get along with everybody. They're doing all these amazing projects that all work amazingly and they're never a problem and everything just seems entirely smooth sailing for them.
02:00
But over the years I found that when I get to know some of these people better they open up to me and I found out how wrong I actually was about them. Because for many of the people that I admire the most and sometimes even envied the people that seem to have everything together more than anyone else that I ever know, I was wrong.
02:22
Because once they open up to me, I hear stories of depression, of anxiety, of OCD, PTSD or sometimes even self-harm. And I felt completely blindsided again and again about how serious some of these stories are and it makes me feel even more impressed about what these people have still achieved.
02:41
But it's left me increasingly thinking that I probably actually know very few people that have never struggled with their well-being. It's just that many of them have never felt the never wanted to be open with me, which is of course fine if that's their choice. But it's taught me that no matter how successful someone appears and how amazing their work might be and how well it might be going and they have endless creativity,
03:03
they may very well be spending tremendous amounts of energy just to get through daily life. And it isn't uncommon because one in four people roughly will experience at some point in their lifetime mental illness. So that could be things that are with you your entire life, like a development disorder or
03:21
things that serve later like burnouts, OCD or depression. And then once it shows for some people this is something that will affect the nurse of the life, for some it is something that with help they can deal with fairly quickly. So there's a lot of variation in those experiences, but about the one in four people will go through that experience during their life. And that might still be a minority,
03:45
but there are many other people who struggle with their well-being without necessarily qualifying for a mental illness diagnosis. So for example, 70% of office workers regularly experiences physical symptoms due to stress, which means that due to their stress level they are excessively tired,
04:03
head and neck pain are very typical, sleep problems, things like that. And so they might not always meet the bar for a diagnosis of mental illness, but especially in the long term such high stress levels are very harmful to our health. So even when a minority might have an actual mental illness diagnosis, a large majority is
04:25
or will be suffering from issues that affect their well-being and have an impact on their life. So let's do a little lesson in Dutch. Huk haat het means how are you. And the answer in Dutch to this question is gud, which means good. So there's no actual question of how you actually are. When someone asks you huk haat in an allowance,
04:44
that doesn't mean they want to know how you're doing. They just want to say gud. And this is like, this is very typical in many other cultures. It's like saying I'm fine, I'm just tired, which is also sometimes true, but it's also something we often used to hide our issues and just say no, no, I'm just tired. It's all fine.
05:04
And hiding our issues is just very common. But the reality of it is that there are other people in this room that probably have the same struggles. I know that there are people in this community that are struggling and sometimes it's a lot, sometimes it's a little. And some of these people I know and I've heard their stories, but there are many that I have never heard.
05:24
But it's left me convinced that if you are struggling, there are other people in this room that know exactly how you feel. And there are probably some people in this room that suffer from depression, someone with low self-esteem, someone with an eating disorder, social anxiety, self-identity issues or anything else. And even if other people here don't necessarily have the same experience as you,
05:47
they might still understand because they know what it's like to struggle. So I don't know exactly who all these people are, but I know that they're here. So at General Coin Europe 2015, there were three counseling sessions,
06:01
which were available to all attendees. And one in ten attendees used that service. So you could pick a time slot from a board. It was completely anonymous. You did not have to say your name. You didn't have to sign up anywhere, no emails. And so you got 25 minutes with a counselor to talk about whatever you wanted. And 25 minutes is not enough to do any treatment of serious mental illness, but it can
06:25
help a lot on getting people on a path to feeling better, to give them tips on how to deal, how to do better self-care or help guide them towards more extensive professional help.
06:40
My favorite two bits of feedback from those well-being sessions were some who said, it's been a relief to finally say these things out loud and have acknowledgement of the problem. And I found it useful and relaxed and I feel like I'm not crazy or alone and this is normal. And they reflect very well how people generally thought about these sessions, not as an immediate fix to all your problems,
07:01
but a place to say things out loud, not be afraid that you'll be judged and feel validated and acknowledged that the issues they're experiencing are real, even if they might not be the same as those of other people or you might feel they are less serious than those of other people. And that's also what this talk is basically about. So I am not a trained mental health professional in any way, so I can't treat someone's eating disorder and after this talk and with several of the projects
07:25
I'll be announcing I can't solve someone's anxiety completely, I can't remove stress and insecurities, but like short counseling sessions, even though I'm not a professional and even though you're not a professional, we can all make a difference because that we includes you and that is all of our community. By being considerate, empathic, accepting and understanding and
07:45
helping anyone who struggles to feel validated and not alone, because none of us are. And whether it's struggling with serious multiple complicated disorders or sometimes just feeling like the stress is taking a toll on you, those struggles are valid because they're impacting our lives.
08:00
And know that whatever you're struggling with, you aren't crazy, you aren't any less lovable and most of all you're not alone in our community. So now that we know that we're not the only ones struggling and that these aren't unicorn problems,
08:20
let's talk about some of the first steps we can do to help ourselves out of whatever's struggling us. Because the last thing many of us ever want to do is to admit that we're struggling, that we can be overwhelmed and that we're not superhuman. But how do we end up overwhelmed? Because most of us are responsible, mostly functioning adults,
08:40
but yet it is so easy to end up in a situation where we're constantly fighting against ourselves to balance all our work and all our tasks and projects, conferences, hobbies, friends and in the end sometimes sleep. And most of it are probably generally liked, people value contributions and our company and a lot of contributors including myself get a lot of satisfaction from participating in projects in our community.
09:04
But that is exactly also where the problem starts because somewhere along the way we sometimes forget that we need to help ourselves before we can help anyone else. So before, whether it's being excited about a potential new project, an invitation to speak at a conference, to organize a conference or
09:22
a workplace increasing your workload because you are the rock star that can do absolutely everything, it is so easy to get caught up in a desire to contribute and to help and to be a part of things that we lose control over our own time, energy and mental resources. And that is where things get dangerous.
09:41
When I forget that in the end my participation is supposed to create a positive impact, not just on my peers, not just on my community or on the rest of the world, but most of all on me. When I forget that, then being helpful does not help me. So if that sounds, if that sounds selfish to you, consider that putting yourself first is not always selfish and could even save lives.
10:04
So if you've flown in an airplane before, you might remember the oxygen mask where you should always put your own mask on before you help anyone else. And that is because if the person that needs your help passes out, then you still have time to help them. But if you help someone else first and it doesn't work, then you all pass out and nobody can help anyone at all.
10:25
So in other words, if you take care of your own well-being first, there's probably still time to help others. But if you forget to take care of others first and only focus on others first, you might run out of air before you can help anyone. And I myself also at risk of over-commitment because I get really excited about things and I want to participate in everything or
10:46
I'm invited to participate in something and then I feel valued and validated for it, which makes it hard to turn on project offers or step down from something that I've already joined. But why is it so hard for us to say no to a project and why is it even harder to say no more?
11:03
When we need to step down. From my own experience and from what I've discussed with many others, there are two main reasons for this. One, being afraid that if we turn down or step down from something, it means that we're failing. And second, that people might respond in a negative way.
11:23
So how can we address some of these fears and gain some confidence that we need to make these decisions? When I asked Mikey to help me build and present the first version of this talk, she had just changed careers for a third time, moved to a different city, moved from office work to home office work, and she had a million other projects going. And at some point I confronted Mikey with what was in her own words
11:46
she should have confronted herself with. She was dropping the ball on this project and she was risking the entire collaboration because she was trying to juggle way too many things. Unfortunately, we're very good friends and we were building a talk about well-being so we have a good productive conversation about it.
12:04
And so she was able to admit that she had a problem and had to make really tough choices about what to drop because she could not keep going with all the projects that she had. So fortunately she decided to keep building on this project which is why this talk exists now. But we have to remember that sustainability isn't only important for our open source projects,
12:22
but for the open source servers too. And that might be simpler than you think because if I burn out, I am useless to everyone, including for both myself and to others. So I cannot let short-term satisfaction or validation impact my long-term capacity.
12:40
So now you looked at your project commitments and as your free time or whatever is left of it, and you realize that you must really balance your life better. Now you need to communicate this with your peers, which brings us to the second reason why saying no is hard, because what will people think? Unfortunately, even after you admit to yourself that you need to trim down on your commitments, the next step of actually communicating this
13:05
can seem like an even bigger hurdle than admitting this to yourself. So if we look at, if we look at long-term open source servers, sometimes this is even scarier because we spoke to several veteran contributors who feel like the project has become so dependent on them that they are essentially trapped in their
13:20
roles, because the project might fail if they leave and they cannot let the community down. But humans are social creatures and most of us work at jobs where there is not really a finish line. It is more an ongoing, always developing. It is never actually done. That makes us very dependent on constant subjective feedback from our peers and
13:40
that combined in a culture that encourages overachieving and over committing means that it's not strange that sometimes we're afraid of saying no or no more. So when I wrote Mikey about my concerns about how she was handling our project, that was not an easy thing to write, because I was very annoyed with how things were going. I was annoyed with that we weren't making any progress, worried that the whole project was going to fail after
14:05
we already put months of work into it, but I know her quite well and care a lot about her, so I could be sure that she didn't do this because she didn't care about me or about the project, because what we do isn't always what we are.
14:21
So in a community of volunteer contributors, which could be thousands of people on an open source project or two people building on the top, being volunteer means that nobody has to do anything. We're doing this because we want to contribute, because we get and get a lot of value doing it, but this is all at will. It is even more so than our jobs.
14:40
So if we suffer through our projects, through our conferences or responsibilities, or if we have left building this talk to damage our own well-being, then there would be no love in the creative process, and we would not be serving anyone least of all ourselves. It doesn't matter though how many times you will tell me it's okay to step down. People will understand. Just be honest.
15:01
It's so easy for me to dive into the countless imaginary scenarios of what it would be like if I took that step, and most of those imaginary scenarios don't actually involve much understanding or acceptance. It's so easy to come up with so many imaginary scenarios of people not accepting and not understanding, but if I actually look in reality, both in my own experience and what I've heard from anyone else,
15:24
it's only been met with kindness and understanding. So our fear of the unknown is so much more destructive than the actual consequences of our actions. And even if some people might be offended or respond badly to you choosing for your own well-being,
15:42
that is more indicative of their own fears and their own insecurities, as it means they will need to make adjustments too. So if we accept that we can only be helpful if we can retain our own health and balance, then we can face our fears with confidence that our action won't just help us, but help the project.
16:01
Or the community, because it also makes space for someone else to sit in. If I stay in a role that I can't actually fulfill, then it is as if I am licking the cookie, but not actually eating it. There is no space for anyone else, but I'm not doing it either, and everyone ends up suffering, including the project.
16:21
And you might think that if you just love your produce enough, and that if you just care about them enough, that'll just conquer all, and then it's all fine. That if we truly care, we wouldn't have these issues. But that is absolute nonsense. It's not how it works. Love doesn't conquer all, and it doesn't matter whether it's for people, or for produce, or for communities, you always have to help yourself first.
16:42
So please remember to put on your own oxygen mask first, otherwise you will run out of air before you can help anyone else. And it might be taking a moment to think about whether you actually want to join a potential project, or taking some moments to figure out which of the projects is draining your energy too much and needs to be let go. And don't let your fears paralyze you from taking care of yourself.
17:04
And that might sound easy, but in practice, there are a lot of patterns in our community that tend to push us further towards our commitments. But for our long-term well-being of our community and the people in it, we have to recognize and tackle these. So my favorite is the GitHub contribution graph as it was. They fixed this.
17:25
So this was my GitHub contribution graph before I first presented this talk, and this shows that I must be an absolute useless slacker. It's like I have like 10 contributions in an entire- 17 contributions in a whole year. My longest streak is a single day.
17:41
But of course though, this doesn't actually accurately reflect my work. I also do a lot of work in private repositories. GitHub recognized this, and they removed this whole bottom part, and they allowed you to publish private commits as well in here. So mine is now a lot more full, but my weekends are still empty, which I think is good. Some people- I also made some-
18:01
generate some attention around this thing, and some people get very offended by this being removed. Someone called me a neoliberal emotional jihadist. That's really interesting. Yeah, people are very attached to that. But yeah, this saying to people will reward you for giving you a bigger number if you just never take breaks. That's for me a very bad way to push people to over commit.
18:22
A really good example is the Django Solar Foundation Code of Conduct Committee who just published their documentation, which says each member is only obligated to serve for six months, being the default term, and then you can step down without feeling guilty because your term has ended, so you are done. You can opt in again to continue,
18:42
but the default is that you will stop after six months, and no one can look bad for that. So it's a really good example of how we can help people to step down in time. It was something we should probably adopt in many other places.
19:01
Next I'd like to talk a bit about asking for help. Because asking for help can be really hard. I know very well myself, but it's always okay to ask for help. Asking for help isn't just difficult when it comes to well-being. So later this week we are doing sprints and we found, like I'm a pretty experienced contributor being on the core team,
19:23
but I found that sometimes people are so reluctant to ask their questions that when they get stuck, especially people who are shy, who are new to our community, maybe even have social anxiety issues, they might be so hesitant to ask a question that nobody will help them when they're stuck, and they just have a horrible time with sprints.
19:41
So at the Django Under the Hood sprints last year we told people that if you see anyone with a sailor hat, you may disturb them any time and ask them absolutely anything. They might not know the answer, but they can help you find it. And if they're wearing a hat, you are not disrupting them from anything else. They are not doing other work that's important. They will not think you are silly.
20:01
And that works really well because people with questions know that these people wearing hats explicitly ask to be disturbed. And it also works for me as an organizer because when at a moment being helpful doesn't help me, I can take off my hat and I won't be disturbed anymore. So it works really well for both the people who have questions, ask the people who answer questions,
20:24
to remove some of those barriers. When I first started thinking about this talk, which was just after Django in Europe 2015, I had a lot of very incomplete ideas. Like I had this random collection of ideas. Some of them are still in the talk today, but there was just something missing. Like I was just, it wasn't really going anywhere.
20:45
It just wasn't enough. I couldn't figure out what the missing parts were. And so I was pretty stuck. So a few months after I first thought about this talk, I met Mikey at a conference and we quickly became friends. And I was still struggling with the talk when someone I emailed her and said, I have this half-assed idea for a talk.
21:03
It is absolutely full of holes and this is either my best or my worst idea ever. So here are some random incoherent ideas. I don't think I can do this on my own and it's also pretty scary. So maybe you want to join me and build this talk together. So that was, that was basically all I had when I first approached Mikey. And a few months later, she was very enthusiastic. So a few months later, we started work in our appropriately named secret GitHub repo.
21:27
What it comes down to is this. If I had not asked Mikey for help to work on this talk, it would never have happened. I would not have been here. I would probably not even have been at this conference. Sometimes asking for help can seem like failing, like saying I cannot do this on my own.
21:43
I need someone else to help me with this. It could be a talk you're trying to build. It could be a conference you're trying to organize. A new feature you're trying to build in Django or how to deal with your workplace stress. It could be feeling unwelcome in this community due to social anxiety or needing more quiet time because a lot of having a lot of people around you exhausts you quickly.
22:04
Asking for help does mean admitting that you have difficulty doing something alone, but that is not the same as failing. It is in fact quite the opposite. If I would try to organize a conference on my own, I imagine it might literally kill me. So either I do it with others and I ask for help all the time and I offer help to my teammates all the time.
22:23
Because otherwise there was no conference and that would be failing even worse. So if I would have tried to do this talk on my own and had never admitted that I can't do it on my own, then there would be no talk. So I would only have failed if I would not have asked for help. And when we struggle with things, it is so easy to pretend to stick our head in the sand and just pretend they don't exist.
22:42
Osteologists just don't actually do this. So it means while you stick your head in the sand you can pretend that they don't exist and that means you don't have to deal with them because they don't exist. And this could be anything from struggling with self-esteem or having more serious well-being issues that are much more threatening and require professional care.
23:02
Asking for help can also be hard because when you ask for help you are making it seem more real and it's so tempting not to do that. And some people do that for years or decades and keep harming their health in the meantime. But depression doesn't start when you go to a professional and panic attacks are real even if you hide them from all your friends successfully.
23:23
And it may or may not meet the criteria for a diagnosis but stress that is harming your health is still impacting your life. So if you are not well, and that is impacting your life, those issues are already real. They are real whether you talk to your friends or not, whether you seek professional help or not, or whether you try to ignore them.
23:42
So what you're doing when you ask for help is not so much making these issues more real but you are taking responsibility for helping yourself because it's okay to ask for help. And when you're suffering from well-being issues it might also occur to you that some of them don't, or a lot of them even, don't really make any sense.
24:01
Which is really confusing and also frustrating and can make you feel like you don't deserve any help. Like basically it's all in your head, which it is sort of. So, but yeah, you just feel like you just need to think your way out of it. This is just silly. So for some people everything in their life is going really well, but still they feel very depressed and
24:22
maybe the workload isn't that high objectively, but still it costs a lot of stress for you. You might have friends and people might generally seem to like you. So there's no need for you to feel out of place and inferior and anxious, but still you might do. But to ask for help
24:41
those feelings don't actually have to make any sense. Our minds are not, do not behave rationally. Emotions aren't very rational and the things you struggle with don't have to be rational and often they are actually not. What makes it okay to ask for help is that you're experiencing them and that they are affecting your life, and that's all you need.
25:02
Asking for help can also be very scary because others might judge you, they might make fun of you, they might ridicule you, they might say you are silly for thinking that. When I asked Mikey to work on this talk she could have told me that this was an absolutely ridiculous idea and that I was a complete idiot for thinking this might remotely be a sensible idea. But in my experience such responses are really really rare and I've never actually personally had it happen to me in this community.
25:28
But if you do reach out for help and someone makes fun of you or ridicules you or claims that you're just being dramatic and you just act like a grown-up it still doesn't mean it was wrong for you to ask. It just means that this person is toxic and that they are not your friend.
25:42
And it might also be a violation of the Code of Conduct. So if these things happen, please support it. Feel free to reach out to me too. Personally, I honestly have no idea how often I've asked for help and I know I will be doing it a lot more times both in this community, from my friends, from peers and other communities. Sometimes it's with code,
26:02
sometimes it's with organizing something. It might be developing a new idea or when I'm not feeling well. And I can tell you that even taking into account everything I've just told you about why it's okay, which are all things I very strongly believe in, asking for help can still be very hard sometimes.
26:20
Even when I know it's not failing, even when I know that it's okay if things don't make sense to me and even when I know that the other person is probably happy that I trusted them and asked for their advice. But in reality, I've almost never regretted asking for help and it's almost always been a massive relief once I actually pushed myself to do it.
26:41
So don't expect that asking for help, if you remember these things, will suddenly make it easy and trivial. But if you're not sure, if you're in doubt, push yourself a little more to open up a little more. And this community in particular is a really great place to do this because it's full of some of the most positive and caring people that I've ever met,
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which makes it one of the best place to ask for help. And that brings me to talk a little more about helping in communities. So far I focus a little more on how as individuals we can help each other and others.
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But now I'd like to talk about how the community as a social and professional entity can provide support to our members. So as a collective, the JIRA community, which we've also seen at this conference with many talks, is paving the way with many activities and endorsed projects that have a very positive impact on the productivity and well-being of both our
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community and other people, which makes our community as a whole more healthy. Some of the good examples in our community already are the Django Fellowship program, where we created a paid position, which is directly supported by and funded by the community, where the fellow takes on
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important tasks without having the burden of a full-time job, because this is very common that open source contributors do this next to their full-time job. So the fellow doesn't need to worry about that. They have a paid position from the Django Software Foundation and that means unpaid contributors,
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which is still most of us, can focus more on things they actually enjoy and reduce their risk of burnout a bit. The Django Growth program could of course not have been successful without the overwhelmingly positive attitude of both organizers and mentors, which makes huge difference in how newcomers into our community
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perceive and how they are received into our community. Which again makes our community healthier and happier as well. And having counseling at Django in Europe was a much more direct step to reach out to community members and invite them to talk in a professional environment about their thoughts and feelings. That's not something you can easily do in many places.
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But also that is not always what is needed, professional help. You might have seen recently a Internet comic which is very sweet and very powerful called How to Care for a Sad Person, which shows, this is the last step,
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which shows how you could support someone who's not feeling well without necessarily fixing all their immediate problems. Because sometimes all we really need is someone to understand and not judge and give us a metaphorical or physical hug. And that is something where our community can make a difference and also where you can make a difference.
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Because like I said, there were a lot of horrible ideas that never made it into the talk, but there was one which I'm very happy with that did, which is the Django Software Foundation Wellbeing Committee. This is an idea that came up when we were trying to think of ways in which the community can support
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members in a more structured way as part of a global ongoing thing rather than individual counseling sessions, for example. The DSF cannot, of course, provide professional help on an ongoing basis. So the idea of this committee is to provide a formalized peer support network where Django community members can consult with other community members about anything from work-life balance, burnout, self-esteem,
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anxiety, depression, and so on. So we actually announced this plan some months ago at Django in Europe, and I hoped that we would have actually much progress now, but we haven't made much yet. Because we had other priorities and it seems a little silly to have building the Wellbeing Committee affect my own well-being.
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But it's still very high on our list. I'm probably gonna focus on this during the sprints and we still have a lot of details to work out because of course one of the points of attention is how do we protect well-being after the members of the Wellbeing Committee. But at least we do have preliminary approval and support from the DSF boards to place this under the Django Software Foundation.
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And the mission of the committee would basically be to provide peer support for community members that needs to talk to someone who understands. Because I often find that just being able to talk to someone else who's experienced some of the same issues that I have, especially people who are familiar with tech and open source, can be already a massive relief.
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When we say peer support, you'd think of projects like Big Brother or Big Sister or Alcoholics Anonymous, where people who are not professionally trained provide basically a way to to support others. So it would be a baseline communication channel that other people in the community can use
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to express their thoughts and feelings in a safe environment. And what we're hoping for is to help people get past some of their initial fears, like that nobody understands and how problems don't make sense. And if needed help, it'll make the staff to professional care easier by making people feel more validated.
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So some of the the topics that we've been thinking of based on the themes that are very common in Django Europe counseling are these, but of course is not an exhaustive list. It also depends on who we can actually find for the committee, which so far is myself, Mikey,
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Daniela Prashida of the Django Social Foundation board will get us started on behalf of the DSF. And at this point we'd also like to call for any people who are interested in exploring this yet unknown territory of formalized peer support in open source communities. If you have already responded after Django Europe, we just haven't forgotten about you. We haven't had enough time yet.
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And also remember that this community, this committee is set up to help the community with well-being issues, not create more well-being issues. So also consider your own well-being in your participation, but if you're not sure you send us an email. I will have an address later. And you won't be committed to anything. And also keep in mind that peer support is not a substitute for professional help.
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And so we'll also have to make sure that the committee members take care of their own well-being first. So we may not be able to help everyone. But that's not always what's needed, because sometimes you don't, often you don't need to be a healthcare professional to help someone feel like a happy little sushi roll.
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And that's basically what we're trying to move forward with this project. So I said before that no matter what you're struggling with,
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that doesn't make you any less lovable. But in general most people, both in our community and outside of it, don't actually feel as loved as they are. So I'm one of the organizers for Jango Under the Hood, which is an in-depth general conference with 300 attendees in Amsterdam. And basically my task in a team is dealing with Dutch people.
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And there's probably a number of people in this room who can tell you that organizing conferences, especially with volunteer teams, it can be really stressful. So there's venues, there's speakers, there's sponsors, tickets, budgets, foods, party, hotels, flights, communication on your website, your social media, artwork, posters, supporting attendees, and code of conduct, and much more.
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And there are always things that almost go horribly wrong during the conference that are quickly fixed behind the scenes without anyone noticing. But of course adding to the stress of organizers. Now for me conferences are fairly short, and I'm doing this in a team that supports me also. So even though it can be very stressful,
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I feel like it's something I can absolutely deal with. And I also feel like when I can't, there's space for me to step back and for other people to cover things for me. But most of all, all the stress that organizing a conference involves, and all the effort that it requires, all the things that almost went horribly wrong, the number of times
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we accidentally locked all our attendees into the conference room, they are all worth it for me, and I imagine for many other organizers when I get an email like this. I feel totally overwhelmed, surprised, and very very grateful. Thank you for caring. You are unbelievable. You are a bunch of the craziest, the most positive people I've met.
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You inspire me to give back to the community even more. I wish I could express properly what I'm feeling right now. May it always rain straw battles on you. But not all the time, that could be inconvenient. Only when you feel like having straw battles, or someone that you like feels like having straw battles, or you just want to make it rain straw battles. Sending hugs, you crazy amazing people. If you don't know what straw battles are by the way, I have some here, which I'll be handing out later.
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So we got this email from an attendee. They ran into some kind of problem. We were able to help them as organizers with our resources, and this was not nearly the only email or tweet that was like this. And for me being able to help people feel like this
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is why I love organizing conferences and other things in this community. So if you've ever organized events or done anything else that is a high-stress situation, you might also know that your team is everything. Because it's so important to feel like you can ask for help, and that you can stand back,
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even if you never have to, just to know that that is there. Because even when we need help, and even when you sometimes need to step back, when we sometimes flake with our work, when we make mistakes, we are probably much more appreciated than we think. Because this community is full of friends that are loving, caring, and supportive, and that's why I'm still there myself.
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And almost all of us sometimes flake, and all of us make mistakes, but our community is here to support us when that happens. So in the Jam community, there's already a lot of good work in that area by having, for example, posters that try to create a bit of positive atmosphere in which people feel welcome and feel like they're part of this, with a Slack channel so that people who might not know anyone here and might be anxious to talk to people can
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find connections with other people and maybe find things to do. And so we try very hard in this community already to make everyone feel that they're part of this, and that we are very happy to have them here.
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But unfortunately, reality is still very often like this, where we don't feel like we need to tell someone when we appreciate your work, when we're happy with our contributions, but are much more vocal about dislike of someone else's work. But the feeling that you are making a difference, and that your work matters and has value,
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that the people you work with are happy to work with you, is a really great feeling, and it's not only great, it is really important, because it makes us feel like we matter, helps us feel like we are making positive change, and it gives energy. So whether it's writing code or supporting the DSF, fixing the Django docs, or helping to build events
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which are small or large, or anything else, feeling that you've made a useful contribution has especially huge effects on people that struggle with self-esteem, that might be struggling with burnout or anxiety, or anyone even leaning towards us a little bit, which applies to so many of us.
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And I can certainly say for me that seeing emails and tweets like the one I read out makes a huge difference, and we feel that our community would be an even better place if there would be more of that. Because we don't always let people know how we feel, and how much we care about them. So with that in mind, we build
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open-source happiness packets. Because the thing is, openly expressing appreciation, gratitude, or happiness to other people can be really difficult, especially when you don't know them very well. Many of us come from cultures in which people are not open by default about such feelings, and you might naturally feel uncomfortable or even a bit creepy sharing things like that.
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So Happiness Packets is a very simple platform to anonymously reach out to people that you appreciate or that you are thankful to in this community. We can make this send messages anonymous, but of course we encourage people to share what we're there from. But if you really don't want to, you don't have to.
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So far we've had about 170 Happiness Packets sent. Some of them are published on the site. If both sites can send receiver and sender, then we publish it on our site. And we are really excited to see where this will go and also where we can take this together. And I'm very sure everyone in this room
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can think of people in this community that they are grateful to, that they admire, that have done something for them. And so I want to ask you to try to send, to find two people to send a Happiness Packet before the end of the conference. And I know how awkward it can feel a little at first, but I guarantee you you are making a huge difference to both yourself and the person sending it to.
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But don't take my word for it. A number of people already received them and tweeted about it. So Katie, who's not here, wrote about how she woke up to a Happiness Packet and it was the absolute best thing.
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And I wrote how receiving her first Happiness Packets put a huge smile on her face and recommending anyone to send one also. Lacey, co-chair here, described it as an amazing, fuzzy feeling that makes your day. And my favorite is from Ola, who wrote that she got, that Jeremy from Europe got a Happiness Packet
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and it made her tear up at a bus stop. So this is, this is the effect you can have on other people and also it creates a lot of positive vibes for yourself. I have Happiness Packet stickers. I have 500 so I think this should be enough. So find me to get some stickers. They are also, you may have seen them spread around the venue. They also fit exactly on the mini store bottles that I brought.
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But the stickers aren't edible, so don't forget to send some Happiness Packets yourself. So I almost paid it.
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First of all, the thanks go out to Russell who's conveniently over there and Amber Brown who we interviewed at the early research of this process and who inspired various of the concepts in here. Ola Sotarska built the entire design for Happiness Packets and I won't show you how it looked like when I designed it. Daniela Prashida helped us to get started from the ESF board with the well-being committee.
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Of course the organizers for giving me space to talk about this and there are tons of other people among our peers and our friends that contributed knowingly or unknowingly to this talk. So same here on Happiness Packets, on happinesspackets.io We're on Twitter as Happiness Packet because you can't fit Happiness Packets into a Twitter name.
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Slightly misplanned there. Send me an email. This goes to both Mikey and me if you want to join the well-being committee and to help us build the support network. We don't actually take support requests yet because we're still working on the foundations but there will be announcements once this actually is running.
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We also found a lot of other resources while working on this which in no way fit in this talk. There's a public GitHub repo where I also just push the slides to and there are also a lot of other resources there around well-being. Feel free to contribute your own resources as well and also all the slides from there. And the last thing I want to leave you with is to always remember that
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wanting to be happier never makes you selfish, negative or ungrateful because you deserve to be as happy as you can. Thank you very much.