A Behind the Scenes Look at Large Scale Community Management
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CodeGoogolData managementScale (map)Self-organizationLogistic distributionPosition operatorRight angleEmailBitGoogolProcess (computing)Formal languageSoftwareComputer programmingPerfect groupData managementAreaMultiplication signQuicksortGoodness of fitEndliche ModelltheorieComputer-assisted translationGroup actionLogic gateMachine codeFreewareStorage area networkThomas BayesDemosceneFlow separationOpen sourceSquare numberMereologyRoundness (object)Volume (thermodynamics)Closed setCodeXMLComputer animationLecture/Conference
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Page, LarryEmailBitWeb pageStudent's t-testMultiplication signComputer scienceProcess (computing)Boss CorporationCodeInternetworkingComputer programmingOpen sourceProjective planeSoftware developerComputer engineeringField (computer science)Different (Kate Ryan album)SoftwarePasswordInformationDisk read-and-write headGoogolReal numberFlow separationMachine codeNeuroinformatikRight angleComputer animationLecture/Conference
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Student's t-testProjective planeMereologyComputer programmingSpreadsheetGame theorySelf-organizationProcess (computing)Open sourceWeb 2.0Point (geometry)EmailCoordinate systemOrder (biology)Right angleArithmetic mean40 (number)Electronic mailing listComputer animationLecture/Conference
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Menu (computing)Open setOpen sourceFreewareWebsiteOpen sourceStudent's t-testMachine codeComputer programmingElectronic mailing listCartesian coordinate systemEmailTerm (mathematics)Service (economics)Web applicationProjective planeCoordinate systemPerformance appraisalOrder (biology)Web 2.0BitDesign by contractProcess (computing)Pairwise comparisonUniform resource locatorKey (cryptography)Lecture/Conference
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Computer worm12 (number)WebsiteOpen setFreewareStudent's t-testForm (programming)Public key certificateMachine codeCartesian coordinate systemUniform resource locatorFreewareMultiplication signNumberSource codeProcess (computing)Data miningSoftwareOpen sourceLine (geometry)Resolvent formalismElectronic mailing listGoogolEmailRight angleComputer animationLecture/Conference
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Web 2.0SoftwareOpen sourceFreewareSystem administratorNeuroinformatikPhysical systemData miningRight angleOperating systemRevision controlComputer animation
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Computer programmingNumeral (linguistics)Student's t-testSelf-organizationProjective planeOpen sourceLine (geometry)Time zoneSoftwareGoogolConnected spaceSoftware architectureRight angleWeb applicationProgrammer (hardware)Vapor barrierFormal languageCodeComputer animation
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FreewareSoftware engineeringSoftware architectureRoboticsBitSet (mathematics)Open sourceGodData managementRight angleComputer programmingVapor barrierPatch (Unix)Student's t-testSoftware developerEmailElectronic mailing listMetropolitan area networkPressureAdditionProcess (computing)Computer animationLecture/Conference
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AdditionElectronic mailing listDirected graphBoss CorporationSoftware developerProcess (computing)EmailMetropolitan area networkPressureSoftwareMultiplication signOffice suiteMachine codeSinc functionStudent's t-testGoogolNeuroinformatikLecture/Conference
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FreewareFormal languagePressureWordAdditionOpen sourceSoftwareRight angleProjective planeSource codeMultiplication signMereologyMachine codeMetropolitan area networkVector potentialDirection (geometry)GoogolDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Total S.A.Goodness of fitPatch (Unix)Computer animationLecture/Conference
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Computer programmingMachine codeOpen sourceState of matterSoftware industryProjective planeComputer animationLecture/Conference
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WebsiteFreewareOpen sourceFreewareVideo gameMultiplicationDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Hacker (term)QuicksortComputer programmingMachine codeProjective planePower (physics)Open setPlastikkarteOffice suiteSoftwareSpreadsheetStudent's t-testPhysical systemOpen sourceTraffic reportingData conversionGodOrder (biology)Data storage deviceFamilyLine (geometry)Multiplication signInformation securityRight angleBit rateSingle-precision floating-point formatComputer animationLecture/Conference
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Software developerOpen sourceGoodness of fitProjective planeSoftwareRight angleMultiplication signData managementInformation securityDirection (geometry)VideoconferencingPosition operatorSign (mathematics)Band matrixHacker (term)FreewareRule of inference2 (number)InformationConstraint (mathematics)Electronic program guideLecture/Conference
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Open sourceFreewareCASE <Informatik>AreaSoftwareVulnerability (computing)Goodness of fitGoogolData managementSystem callMachine codeOpen sourceStudent's t-testComputer programmingVideo gameNumberMultiplication signPlanningProjective planeConstraint (mathematics)QuicksortBitFreewareMetropolitan area networkGroup action
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AdditionGoogolOpen sourceEvent horizonBlogRight angleCASE <Informatik>SoftwareDependent and independent variablesTerm (mathematics)Machine codeProjective planeComputer programmingOpen setComputer-assisted translationCodeLecture/Conference
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GoogolCodeRight angleMachine codeProjective planeOpen sourceAndroid (robot)Term (mathematics)CASE <Informatik>Line (geometry)Physical systemBitComputer programmingOcean currentWeb 2.0Online helpDot productCodeVideo gameRoutingCartesian coordinate systemMoment (mathematics)GoogolAreaComputer animation
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Projective planeProcess (computing)FrustrationMereologyBitMachine codeCASE <Informatik>GodDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Thread (computing)Lecture/ConferenceComputer animation
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Maxima and minimaGamma functionOpen setFreewareSoftware developerContent (media)Endliche ModelltheorieRow (database)CASE <Informatik>Point (geometry)SoftwareOpen sourcePhysical systemDatabaseSource codeNumberInformationEmailStrategy gameMultiplication signFile archiverOffice suiteElectronic mailing listPerspective (visual)CodeFrustrationSoftware developerBitOpen setProjective planeMachine codeResultantComputer programmingMoment (mathematics)BootingLattice (order)Formal languageScaling (geometry)LaptopPhysical lawGoogolDifferent (Kate Ryan album)FreewareAreaFigurate numberComputer animation
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40 (number)Goodness of fitMachine codeRight angleComputer fileData managementGoogolStudent's t-testDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Projective planeMultiplication signOpen sourceUniverse (mathematics)Moment (mathematics)Task (computing)Open setEntire functionElectronic mailing listFile systemComputer animationLecture/Conference
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FreewareSoftware developerOpen sourceGoodness of fitData managementWindowOnline helpFormal languageMultiplication signECosDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Dependent and independent variablesBit rateComputer animationLecture/Conference
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FreewareSoftware developerOpen sourceTemplate (C++)Computer-assisted translationEndliche ModelltheorieProcess (computing)Multiplication signHTTP cookie1 (number)Metropolitan area networkRight angleNumberData managementTerm (mathematics)Confidence intervalWechselseitige InformationCodeMoment (mathematics)Insertion lossDataflowWhiteboardWordCentralizer and normalizerPatch (Unix)Lecture/Conference
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Confidence intervalEvent horizonDecision theoryComputer programmingPatch (Unix)Data managementRight angleLecture/Conference
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Open sourceSoftware developerFreewareWebsiteComputer scientistMultiplication signProcess (computing)Machine codeRight angleGoogolOnline helpEmailMereologyProjective planeElectronic visual displayStudent's t-testComputer programmingSelf-organizationRule of inferenceSoftware frameworkElectric generatorElectronic mailing listMultilaterationSpeech synthesisOperator (mathematics)Computer animation
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DemosceneScale (map)Mathematical singularitySign (mathematics)Closed setSoftwareParallel computingCartesian coordinate systemImage resolutionPhysical systemMultiplication signDemo (music)Self-organizationHome pageForm (programming)Software frameworkOnline helpElectric generatorProcess (computing)System administratorSoftware testingInclusion mapSinc functionLoginTerm (mathematics)Web applicationProjective planeMachine codeComputer programmingCodeMereologyWeb pageService (economics)Set (mathematics)WebsiteWeightStudent's t-testComplete metric spaceUniform resource locatorType theoryCASE <Informatik>Task (computing)Normal (geometry)Open sourceProfil (magazine)Right angleLink (knot theory)Point (geometry)Instance (computer science)GoogolFigurate numberFood energyMedical imagingServer (computing)FrequencyPlanningTouch typingSoftware developerPurchasingPublic domainAdditionLevel (video gaming)Computer animation
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Self-organizationStudent's t-testFreewareCodeOpen sourceGoogolBlogSoftware developerWebsiteMachine codeCASE <Informatik>Student's t-testCartesian coordinate systemFunctional (mathematics)Projective planeOpen sourceFAQFigurate numberOpen setSystem on a chipMultiplication signTask (computing)AuthorizationWeightFreewareBlogSoftwareWechselseitige InformationDifferent (Kate Ryan album)FacebookGroup actionMomentumFood energyGodEndliche ModelltheorieDenial-of-service attackMoment (mathematics)Software developerGoogolComputer animationLecture/Conference
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:07
Like one minute, so if you could conclude your fabulous conversing vanish, it would be awesome Thank you. I've already heard the volume lower. It's a beautiful thing
00:26
Okie-dokie, let's get this party started Folks before I actually begin this closing keynote I would like us all to give a round of applause to the organizers and all the other volunteers who've made positive 2009 possible and also a big round of applause personally just because I'm asking because
00:53
Philip just had to go home sick and is really unwell and was not here for your applause. So some extra applause for Philip To get started. My name is Leslie Hawthorne, and I'm a program manager for Google's open source team
01:13
And I manage the Google Summer of Code program and today we're going to be talking taking a look at Google Summer of Code behind the scenes sort of the internals of the program that all of you folks don't necessarily
01:24
Get a chance to know about as part of the outside world here revealed at Fosdom 2009 a Bit about me to begin at the beginning I come from the Ferris State of California shown here in a small red square is in fact the San Francisco Bay Area Where I live I also grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area
01:43
Which makes me something of an anomaly in Silicon Valley high-tech given that just about everybody there is a transplant from somewhere else I also attended school locally where at the University of California at Berkeley where I studied medieval English language and literature So of course it makes perfect sense that I'm here hanging out with a bunch of free software geeks
02:02
Well, they're both about sort of an apprenticeship model and feudalism, right? It was funny. You should laugh now. Thank you All right. So as I said today, I'm gonna be talking a little bit about the history of the program some of the logistics aspects for running the program as well as
02:20
lessons learned over time and Specifically I'm going to take you through My personal journey into the world of free and open source software and talk about my personal experiences as a community manager for this group of folks and hopefully this will be useful to those of you who are thinking about doing your own community outreach initiatives to bring in new contributors and
02:40
We'll see how it goes. There's gonna be some cute pictures of cats Little gossip should be lots of laughs and if not we can blame that guy right there in the middle who said Leslie we want you to come to Fosdom and give a talk about how you manage to respond to every email you receive within two minutes so Let's begin at the beginning a little bit of history years 2005 and this dude Larry Page co-founder of Google
03:05
Is thinking about solving a problem and this time Larry's not actually thinking about problems related to internet search He's thinking about an age-old problem Which is that students go to school they study very very hard throughout the academic year and
03:21
Then during the summer they take off they drink beer They get jobs that have nothing to do with computer science computer engineering or technology and they begin the academic year again Having lost Oh a quarter of what they learned the year before and Larry felt like this was a real problem Even from his own days at Stanford He felt like students were backsliding because they weren't getting employment related to their discipline during the summer
03:44
And he felt like this was harming not only their employment opportunities later on but just computer science as a discipline, right? So Larry thought okay, we should solve this problem. How should we solve this problem? So, you know Larry being an American said I know let's throw money at it. We have cash
04:01
so Larry got together with my boss Chris Devona who is the head of open source at Google and said Alright, we'd like to give you funding for a program to help get students working in computer science over the summer What are your thoughts? and Chris and Larry and a couple other folks from a couple other different teams sat down and brainstormed and Lo and behold they came up with the idea for Google Summer of Code
04:23
Why not pay students to work to improve free and open source software projects? They get real-world software development experience We can pair them up with a mentor who can actually help them understand how to contribute to their project most effectively They actually get to work in their field during the summer
04:41
Instead of doing I don't know like the job that I did during college. I delivered pizzas anybody how to do that It's not fun. Yeah, or one of our most successful Google Summer of Code students whose only opportunity to work abroad During a summer program was to wash dishes Again, not fun not terribly related to computer science
05:03
So with the informal program motto flip bits not burgers is kind of their watchword Um You know Chris went forth and reached out to his social network which for those of us who do not speak web 2.0 means he talked to his friends and
05:22
Said hey, we've got this idea. We've got some funding We're wondering would you guys like to work with some students and you know mentor them over the summer will pay the students We'll give you a donation for mentoring and you guys can find new contributors this way So about 40 projects signed up and This was very much an experiment right? No one had ever done anything like this before it was open to students
05:45
worldwide for the most part it was you know, not something that anyone had any idea how to actually make happen and There was no actual infrastructure in place to support the program at this point. So every single thing was done by email from
06:02
Organizations applying to act as mentors from students saying hey, I want to participate I'd like to work with you So again, very manual process Everything was tracked on the world's largest spreadsheet I have seen this and repeatedly need to open it and it takes approximately two minutes
06:22
And I wish that none of you ever have to see anything like this as long as you live So there were some lessons learned You know mostly about international finance and taxes again something I hope none of you ever have to deal with and Yet everyone agreed at the end of it. There were some challenges there were some problems But this was a game changer, right the open source projects that were participating really felt like they gained new contributors new ideas
06:47
New insights and they were really excited. They wanted to see it happen again alright the year is 2006 and At the very end of March I joined the open source team as a program coordinator to you know
07:02
Make sure that people got you know their t-shirt sent to them and to kind of keep order on the mailing list and you know all that other good stuff so I Sat down my first day on the job and I said, okay Chris This whole summer a code thing What do I do want a little bit something like this
07:23
Okay, so you got to go and talk to the lawyers, right? Because you know We don't actually collect any contracts from the open source projects that we work with we do all this stuff We just have like a basic terms of service and that's all we do and we don't Like do any copyright assignments or anything like that? We have to make sure that the legal team is comfortable with that because they were comfortable with it last year But we don't know if they're still comfortable with it. So why don't you go and talk to lawyers?
07:42
Oh, and by the way You need to go and talk to the accountants because I don't know something about taxes Like we can't withhold taxes or we want to withhold taxes. I don't know there's something about taxes So, you know make sure you go and talk to the accounting people and oh, yeah We've got this shiny new web application and it's going to you know, we're gonna take all applications online
08:02
Nothing else is gonna be done by email. It's gonna be great And when people submit evaluations of their students they can do that online too. It's gonna be awesome Except it's not really built yet But don't worry it will be and you know, okay. All right. So where can I learn more about the web app? Do we have any documentation now? We don't really have any documentation
08:21
I mean, we got the FAQs and we've got the mailing list archives. You've looked at those right? Yeah, I read through that already Okay. Yeah. No, we don't have any documentation. But you know That's a good idea. We should write some documentation. Why don't you do that? Okay, you got it No problem. Oh and by the way, you know in six weeks
08:40
We're gonna start taking applications from students and in three weeks We're gonna start taking applications for mentors and I don't know a couple of students from the first year They don't have their tax form or their t-shirt or their certificate. Yeah a couple of students And you know, we need to get all that fixed before we launch summer of code 2006
09:01
So make sure you take care of that too. And okay go. All right Awesome. I like a challenge challenges are great. So there I was jumping into the deep end of the pool Keep in mind this number that you're looking at right here
09:21
Is the number of lines of source code I'd read proprietary or otherwise when taking this job This was the number of lines of source code that I had written when taking this job I now have about 800 lines of Python under my belt. I didn't enjoy it I am forever grateful that you folks write code so I don't have to I will always talk to the lawyers
09:40
So you don't have to? You know, this is the number of mailing lists External to my company that I had been on when getting this job You want to get right down to it? This is the number of times I'd used Google Groups All right. So, you know, here's a more clear picture of the situation. Oh
10:00
Sorry, so now I wasn't totally and completely You know unaware of what the whole free and open source software world looked like I mean ideas, you know actually You know was my first introduction of free software a few years before joining the open source team a friend of mine was a systems administrator for collabnet the company that produces subversion and
10:20
You know, I was over at his house and I wanted to play some mp3 So I poked his computer and this weird little iconic thing came up and I'm like, what is this lawn sculpture thingy? And he said no, no, it's a free desktop operating system blah blah blah blah blah blah. I'm like, okay, so What does this mean why does it matter and he explained to me what free software was and what open source software was and
10:41
That people were willing to write code and contribute it back to the community for free And I was like, well, this is really cool. I appreciate that ethic That's really neat, but I'm not a programmer. So that didn't really matter to me, right? yeah, I hadn't really used it about three years, but You know, hey, I was browsing the web using Firefox. So how much more could there really be to it, right?
11:04
Can't be that bad Nah, so it was more like pool deep end me out in the ocean about to be smashed on the rocks But you know clearly I didn't drown right here I am and the program has been
11:21
Immensely successful for those of you who appreciate charts and bars and General numerics. Here's a look at the program over the last four years Culminating in 2008, which was our biggest offering ever. We had nearly 1,200 students 175 open source projects and 83% of our student participants completed their projects to the satisfaction of their mentors and mentoring organizations
11:44
So to give you another way to look at this Here is the lovely world Here are lines connecting all of our students and mentors who participated in Google Summer of Code 2006 the same for 2007
12:01
for 2008 Here are all the connections that have been made Throughout the world and this is just actually showing three years of the program Given that we had no shiny new web application our data for 2005 is not as beautifully beautifully visualized So What does it take to make this happen? What does it take to bring together people in 98 countries across time zones language barriers and
12:25
Help them to you know get together and write great software well It's not money money is not the only answer. It's really the shirt, but we'll get to that later So it's not shipping out a whole bunch of books on software engineering and software architecture all over the world
12:41
It's not getting Buried in an avalanche of t-shirts which actually happens every year It's not even fighting off killer robots while you're attempting to just ship out checks to people all over the world either No, it actually takes particular qualities and a particular set of
13:00
Skills in a community manager to actually make this happen. So let's talk a little bit about what some of those are first of all empathy You Need to be able to put yourself in the shoes of someone who is a brand new contributor who has absolutely no experience and Be able to help them through that initial set of hurdles as they're
13:21
trepidatious and nervous concerned kind of not really sure where to turn and We hear from our mentors in the program frequently That the largest barrier to entry that their students have is simply this nervousness this fear They don't they're not used to communicating in public They're not they hesitate to send their patches or their questions to a development mailing list. They don't want to talk in IRC
13:44
they'd rather just send private mail to their mentor and You know the general reason for that is they feel intimidated right? A lot of these people are on mailing lists with gods of open source and who wants to look like an idiot in front of your hero, right We're talking about people like say these three gentlemen the gentleman in the middle Andrew
14:04
Who in addition to being known for his work on Sam Benar sink is actually the most intelligent man in all of Australia No pressure Or how about the gentleman in the black shirt sitting down Brian acre the lead architect of my SQL again? No pressure
14:21
You could be in a really interesting situation where you could be hanging out on a mailing list or an IRC channel with a Gentleman like John Mad Dog Hall shown seated there playing with his camera You know one of the Greybeards one of the people who's been around in computing since the very very beginning again No pressure and I could certainly empathize with all of our students who were concerned about this process because I
14:46
Got to be on a mailing list with all of them and embarrass myself And embarrass myself I did frequently actually now these of course are just the folks who are Community members that I was working with during summer of code 2006
15:03
Let's talk about the folks that I was working with at Google my boss Former slashdot editor, you know the dude who talks about Linux on tech TV He was sharing an office with the guy who was the chairman of the Apache software foundation And you know the couple of engineers on my team early on they were some of the original developers of subversion
15:26
in fact at the time I Was sharing a cubicle with this gentleman Carl Fogle Who in addition for being known to his work on CVS is? quite literally The guy who wrote the book on producing open source software
15:44
No pressure my friends. There is one word in the English language for this situation It's intimidating Actually, there's three words. It's again remember when you're when you're dealing with brand new contributors
16:06
And you know certainly this advice goes for those of you participating in Google summer of code as mentors But just in general if you're interested in bringing new people into your project Remember to be empathetic remember that time that you didn't know everything When this wasn't just you know something that you didn't even have to think about and remember what it feels like
16:23
To be in that situation and think oh man anything I do is just gonna be a total screw-up, and I'm totally gonna embarrass myself again empathy is key So what kept me going right in the face of really just being intimidating That thing was curiosity, and I think that that's what you're going to find actually is a great way for you to separate out
16:45
newbies who come to your project successful potential successes from Potential time sucks shall we say right curious people? Come to your project they have questions and everyone starts off with questions right and maybe they don't look at things
17:02
quite the right way but Watch new contributors are worth spending time on is the difference between finding someone who's curious And if you point them in the right direction for example go look at this part of the documentation Check out the comments in this part of the source code, and if they come back to you with useful questions or suggestions
17:24
or even a patch Probably good potential new contributor if they come back to you saying yeah I read it, and I didn't get it and Can you just like tell me what it says? Probably not so much a good use of time
17:41
So My curiosity was actually about these people right. I'm a people geek. I love knowing how people work I love knowing what makes them tick why they get excited about the things that they do This picture is actually taken at one of our annual mentor summits each year We invite two mentors from each open-source project that participated in summer of code to come and hang out with us and talk about how
18:03
to improve the program and also how to improve open source overall, and I really just wanted to know Who are these people? Why do they do what they do? What makes this? Academic guy who's a professor at Portland State the same thing as that guy who owns his own proprietary software company
18:22
but works on open source and that dude who's a game developer and that guy over there who's like Playing the oboe in one of our conference rooms all day to like, you know, get the vibe going on Why are they here? What do they want? What makes them tick and How can we help them get more cool stuff done? So needless to say a role like this requires people skills
18:48
And it's not just you know being able to make people feel good when they're feeling socially awkward Because you yourself have a tendency to be socially awkward It's not just knowing that you know your hacker friends like the occasional free beer
19:01
That's sort of the obvious No, what I mean by people skills is the ability to talk to folks from multiple different disciplines profession walks of life and Actually be able to understand what they want so Here's an example. This is my typical everyday life I'm at my housewarming party and my roommate who works on the free BSD project proceeds to you know
19:25
Bring in guests as they enter the front door and then introduce them to each other Purely based on project affiliation PC BSD not BSD open BSDs over there and like my yeah My roommate's the Google summer of code chicken like free BSDs in the corner over there And I think there's one dude from the KDE and he's over there. That was it
19:45
You know when I was waiting patiently, I'm like IRC handle anybody know these things we call names No, not happening. And yet this didn't strike me as all that odd Wasn't that big of a deal
20:01
Now my friends, I don't think I need to tell you that this is not what most people would call a normal conversation Not really no not so much they believe in these things we call names so you need to be able to be the kind of person who can walk out of that situation feeling completely nonplussed and feel equally comfortable walking into an office with you know, a team of lawyers and
20:25
Proposing to them some crazy notion that you know, you want to run this Worldwide program for kids to write software and know by the way, you know We aren't actually going to probably use most of the software that we get written through this and we're gonna pay them And we're not gonna expect anything back from it Oh, yeah, and we don't really want to get copyright assignments or you know
20:44
a bunch of contractual stuff because then we'll never actually be able to do this so Can you make this happen for me? Kenny now fortunately Our lawyers are paid to say yes, but I can imagine I can imagine not all of you will have that good fortune
21:02
So this is when your powers of persuasion and your ability to meet someone where they're at and really understand that say lawyers are typically paid to be risk-averse and understanding that your way of helping them understand how to help you get what you want is to speak to that risk aversion and Then you know you need to go into the next room and talk to the accounting people
21:23
Who are really concerned about dollars and cents in the bottom line? And that who will still never quite understand why you're going to give away all this money to people who are not actually doing anything For you, can you explain that to me again? Sure What is this open source thing? I'll explain it to you again. No problem. And finally they just look at you and go, okay
21:43
Well, I still don't get it and that's cool But you know, we need to pay students in a particular method because you know Well, it used to be that we were using Western Union, but we discovered that their fees were far too high So now we're gonna pay people using stored value cards and no we can't really give you a report
22:00
About all the payments we made last year because the back-end system to do that isn't where it needs to be So I hope you kept a spreadsheet of everybody you paid And you know, by the way, we were experimenting with a new payment system And so we'd like your program to be the trial run for that because we figure summer of code looks most the most like
22:21
Paying everybody in the whole world because you've got like 90 countries, right? So you want to help us experiment? Yeah, that'd be great. Let's do it. All right Then you need to be able to do things like worry about taking care of the people that you care about in meatspace, right? This is a picture of the Googleplex. We host developer conferences there all the time and
22:43
You need to be able to talk to folks like your security guards Who really are paid to say no? Who are paid to wander around making sure that everyone is not up to no good? And you know talk to them and say hey guys, so, um, you know I've got some people coming in and they work for you know, free and open-source software projects
23:02
And they really don't want to execute the NDA. So can we not make them sign the NDA? Oh No, everyone has to sign the NDA. It's absolutely required. Everyone signs the NDA. It's very important we sign the NDA But they're not actually going to be anywhere where they could see trade secrets Well, it's very interesting. I don't know. I didn't really think the silly design
23:22
But but I promise you they won't actually go anywhere where they're not supposed to go. I know these people I trust these people All right, fine. They don't have to sign the NDA but yeah, no problem. Don't worry about it It's gonna be all good. And you know, then there was the the wonderful fabulous her love. So, um,
23:41
Hey Marty, it's our director of security again The guy who gets paid to be risk-averse and say no just as much as the lawyers usually so You know, we have all these great developer conferences here and it's really cool So we want everybody to be able to videotape their sessions. Oh, no, no, no, no Nobody gets the video never anything around girls not okay, but Marty they're not talking about anything related to Google
24:04
Are you sure they're not talking about anything related to Google? I'm positive. This isn't even Google stuff. Well, then why are they here? Because we love them and we have extra food and bandwidth that we need to feed to our hacker friends Alright, fine. Go ahead. It's fine. Right? Just go ahead and do it. Just make sure nothing bad happens like yes
24:23
So if you're gonna be a good community manager you need to be the kind of person who can talk to all of these people and get them all moving in the same direction and Folks, I assure you this is not actually easy but if you're good at it, you make it look easy and And a lot of this is just about being a good listener, right
24:43
Actually sitting down and taking the time to communicate with people Talk to them about what their concerns are talk to them about their constraints talk to them about what their needs are And not only just listen, but take the time to understand their motivations, right? Why is this dude worried about someone videotaping a session? Well, he's worried that you know
25:01
Google trade secrets are going to leak out onto the interwebs Fortunately, we don't have to worry about that Why are our lawyers worried about copyright assignment Well, they're worried that we might get sued but that's not gonna happen And if you can actually make a plan that speaks to everyone's motivations Then you actually achieve, you know, you get consensus you get success and life is good
25:23
You'll find that when you do this, you're actually becoming a connector. What you're doing is you're taking the opportunity To understand members of your community Be that you know your legal team Your accounts or in your case other folks in your free and open-source software projects and you'll know You'll be able to best assess the strengths and weaknesses of all your participants and you'll know whom to connect with whom
25:43
If you want to get things done in the case of bringing in new participants It may be that you have somebody who's just totally solid and brilliant technically, right? And they don't necessarily have a lot of patience say for newbie questions This is not someone to pair with a newbie. It's not a good idea
26:02
You know on the other hand you might have someone who's incredibly enthusiastic about you know Bringing in new contributors someone who really likes teaching someone who really likes mentoring and yet They're not necessarily the right person to pair up with someone who's looking to enhance their technical skill set in a particular area And that's when you make you know, you go ahead and you make the call Who do I put who do I put together to make good stuff happen and to get good stuff done?
26:26
All right Another thing that happens when you want to be a good community manager and you actually want to do You know outreach initiatives within your group. You have to be scrappy and by scrappy I mean you need to be resourceful. You need to do more with less You need to think about creative ways to use extremely limited resources to get stuff done
26:46
One of my favorite stories is we did a program for high school students to get them involved in open source We'll talk a little bit about that later, but we had no way to actually manage The program that we wanted to do so we just you know, sort of use the Google code issue tracker
27:02
Because it was there and we could make notes and it you know, actually tracked everything, you know almost killed a couple people But that's all right So that being said, you know, I tell people that you know at Google We believe in doing more with less and people look at me and go No, you're a big multinational corporation. You got lots and lots of money. You don't have to do more with less and I go
27:23
Oh, no, no this this she is not through This is the number of people on Google's open source team So this is the number of people at Google 20,000 person company who are responsible for all open source stuff nine people of those ninth people three
27:43
Shown here in front the awesome Android statue myself shown here actual size Cat almond shown their actual size and she's going to stand up where I'm going to this Well the real cat almond, please stand up Thank you very much and the lovely miss Ellen co a recent addition to our team
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We're responsible for all of the people oriented stuff That Google does around open source software. So that's Google Summer of Code. That is our High-school program the Google highly open participation contest. That is all of the news about the events
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We run the code we release and all the stuff that we're doing in the wider world of open source software on the Google open source blog and we're also Responsible for hosting all of those wonderful events when people come to our campus and hang out with us and hack and get stuff done So like I said, it's all about doing more with less
28:42
Now it shouldn't surprise you that that's the case because really our team is focused on getting code released Right and making sure that when we do big open source projects like Android they're done, right? And you know correctly in terms of licensing right and what that basically means is When we're taught, oh, sorry, we have have released 212 projects thousands of lines of code. It's very exciting
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and basically what that means is We get 25% of an engineer for this program on a good day The system that we've been using is infrastructure has built been built almost entirely by interns It's not maintained when the program is not in session. We get to experience the joys of bit rot
29:22
How many of you here have experienced the joys of the current Google Summer of Code web application? How many years did it take off your life? Two three five. Yeah ten. There you go. So Needless to say as we would not like to shorten the lifespan of our friends We came up with a great solution to this problem, which was also a great solution to another problem
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Which is folks would consistently come to us and say we think Summer of Code is great We want to run our own grant program We'd really like to take your code and your infrastructure and reuse it and we had to say well It's entirely dependent on Google infrastructure we can't help you and now we have the lovely melange project. Yes
30:00
It's named after the spice that extends life and consciousness since we knew we were taking years off your life in the first place That is a cool picture of connect the dots Paul Atreides I like so fortunately we are going to be talking a bit more about Melange and how you folks could use it as well if you'd like This is the first open source project that Google's done in the open from commit one
30:21
So if you're interested in doing your own newbie outreach program you can take that code and make use of it But for now, I will beg your patience Patience another key aspect of dealing with the newbie So and I consistently get asked by folks Like how do you manage to not like go nuts with all of the stupid question emails you get?
30:41
And it is hard, you know, because you get asked the same question over and over and over and over and Sometimes it looks a little different but it's basically the same question and it's in the same thread and usually it's someone exploring some corner case that has nothing to do with reality like
31:01
Well, I'd really like to do part of my project from to jerk a stand And I'd like to do part of my project from the Canary Islands when I'd like to do part of my project from New York and then after that I thought I'd like, you know, I don't know not submit my code at the end Can I still pass? No, really no not again not gonna happen right so needless to say
31:21
Situations like these are going to cause even the best of us a small amount of frustration a little bit of consternation In fact, it may even cause you to think My god, do I need to schedule you for an appointment with a clue bat? But you know then that's when you take your moment to relax to repent reflect reboot
31:42
To enhance your patience you do not scream RTFM you may think it really loudly But you do not actually say it and this is for a couple of reasons one Believe it or not. This phrase is completely not helpful folks You know, there were many occasions as I started off on this wonderful journey when perhaps there was no M for me to read
32:06
there were times when I would go and ask Google before asking dumb questions and since I had Absolutely, no idea where to start all the search results that came back to me were utterly useless And another thing to realize is this is a great answer to someone who looks just like you who acts just like you
32:24
If you're already here, if you're already involved in free and open source software You are the kind of person who's gonna go and dig your hands in deep and you're gonna figure it out No matter what you're gonna push on it You're gonna bang on it until you have an answer and if we're trying to bring more people in if we're trying to bring New ideas and fresh perspectives those people aren't already here if they already were going to just benefit from an answer
32:47
Like this we would have already found them so this doesn't actually help us bring new people in and that is a bad and sad thing and the other reason why this is is not really such a good thing to say is You have to figure you're not just looking for the new inexperienced contributor who is going to go I run
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And run away screaming like a scared bunny How about the experience contributor someone who actually knows how to program already someone who actually knows how your system works Who they've already checked out your source code and figured it all out what happens when they come and try and engage with your community and they hang out in your IRC channel and
33:23
Everyone's being kind of catty to each other and you know saying stuff like that What's gonna happen when they look through your list archive and they're like, whoa flame fest central This is not always a compelling strategy to get someone to spend their free time writing your free software
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So therefore I recommend patience Gentleness and you know You will have to repeat the same answer to the same dumb question over and over and over again And that is okay cast a wide net see what comes back the investment. I assure you is worthwhile Be
34:00
Available if you're looking to bring new people into your community You really need to be available And what I mean by be available is you need to be there to answer questions and really motivate things along I know when I Joined the open source programs office in 2006. I was highly available. I was getting about four hours of sleep at night I was literally responding to every email within two minutes of receiving it. I was in IRC constantly
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And you know, it has gotten a lot better since then and that is a good and beautiful thing but the point is I wanted to be there to facilitate to make sure people have the Information that they needed to be successful and that's really what being available is about And I don't know. I
34:41
Don't know too many people who when they send their hey, I'm on vacation mail. It goes to this number of people Maybe some of you in the audience. This is the case But the point I'm trying to make is you can't scale infinitely But if you're really interested in being new bringing new people into your project you need to make yourself available and Yes, it's a lot of work. I assure you it's worthwhile and if I did it, so can you
35:02
What you're gonna find when you're doing something that's incredibly successful is you're gonna end up inspiring people They're going to look at what you're doing and they're going to want to do something a lot like it just like it I've personally talked to Numerous projects who have participated in Summer of Code or have just looked at the Summer of Code model and said oh my gosh
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We love what you're doing. How do we do something just like it and it's anything from say the open medical records system project that Started participating in Summer of Code in 2007. They were making a Database for medical records and it was all to be deployed within the developing world Specifically focusing on patients who had AIDS and they came to me and they're like we have no developers in Africa
35:46
Our software is being deployed in Africa. We think this is a bad thing What do we do to solve this problem So, you know, I sat down and hashed out with them a couple of different ideas and in fact, their first externship program was immensely successful or
36:00
Say talking to the OLPC folks about their summer of content project and how aren't they, you know, stop Okay Oh, that's sorry My bad anyway, so talking to the OLPC folks about their summer of content project and you know They were trying to get content created for the XO laptop and like
36:23
You know, I don't know. What was it in three months? We want to get like a thousand different documents and at least 15 different languages and how do we make this happen and We want to use the summer of code model and how do we figure out how to pay people and and that was a Very long and interesting meeting about workarounds for the vagaries of international finance
36:40
Let me tell you I mentioned I was going to talk about this before sometimes you could even take a moment to inspire yourself I've been working on summer of code for two years and I was really excited about it But I thought I want to do something new I want to do something that has a greater impact a larger outreach and summer of code is awesome because it gets college and university students, you know involved in this world, but
37:04
By the time you get to college, isn't it already a little too late? I mean What if your college doesn't do anything open source? You're gonna have you're gonna spend a lot of time You know fighting to actually be able to work on this stuff. What if we get you get you while you're even younger Why not so we came up with the idea for the Google highly open participation contest
37:22
So we went to ten different open source projects and we said hey Do you have a lot of stuff that you want to get done that no one ever gets to that's kind of like bite-sized work And I said, yeah, we have a ton of stuff like that. I'm like, okay great Make me a task list make me a to-do list your dream stuff that you all want to get done
37:41
And no one has time to work on it, you know, don't make it too difficult, right? Like yeah rewrite my entire file system. No, not so much that And you know, we'll go ahead and we'll fund high school students secondary schoolers To work on this and in two months we had 350 kids 40 countries a thousand of these little bite-sized chunks of work
38:03
Done that was amazing Do we have any Google highly open participation contest students here? Ah We have one mentor there. I heard there was a girl from Holland who is a participant where I am see pointing Rock feel success shown actual size. All right, I think probably one of the most
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essential aspects of being a good community manager and bringing in newbies is Humility and I don't just mean humility in the sense of not being overly convinced of your own self-worth
38:43
I also mean humility in a very different way and I will explain to you What I mean, this is humility of knowing when you know too much so this lovely poster Resides in the window of a local restaurant that I frequent called el pollo loco
39:02
Which for my friends who are not Spanish language enabled means the crazy chicken Shockingly enough these guys serve chicken And I was walking up one night to get dinner and I went hey we cater. This is good I like having friends over We like chicken. Maybe I don't have to cook. That's not so bad. I can make my vegetarian friends some hummus. We're good and
39:24
then I went 1 8 8 EPL to go And I literally just stopped in the middle of the park you want what what? EPL what does the Eclipse public license have to do with chicken? What oh, yeah el pollo loco. Yeah, got it. Okay, and that was when I knew I was never going to effectively be
39:46
to look at anything with the eyes of a newbie not when my initial reaction to something that is clearly Has nothing to do with technology was a technical response, right? and so sometimes if you're working with someone who has no experience and
40:02
You're trying really hard to explain something to them and you know that they're just not getting it and you know that they're enthusiastic And they are a good use of time Sometimes you need to be humble enough to step back and say I'm not the right person to help you I can't see this problem in a way that I can explain it to you that will be useful to you and then stepping back and
40:22
Connecting them with the right person That being said There is also that whole ego thing Ego is is sometimes rampant among our kind and I'm not gonna spend a lot of time touching on that but I think that there is something else to be said about ego in a completely different fashion and that is
40:41
Not thinking enough of one's own accomplishments right not having any ego at all Like I said when I first started off You know in Summer of Code I had no experience. I had no idea what I was doing and frankly, it wasn't like there was any template or model for me to work from because no one had ever done it before and
41:01
What we were doing changed almost completely from 2005 to 2006 in terms of workflow And so, you know people would come to me and they'd say oh my gosh, you're doing a great job You know, this is really cool. And I'd say Thanks, I try and I didn't believe them and then eventually I did it for a while and I thought hey This is pretty cool and I did believe them
41:20
But you know there were a lot of you know kind of egotistical people out there and I thought you know I don't I don't want to be one of those people running around being Very overly excited about what I accomplished so people would give me compliments and I go oh, you know, it's not a big deal. Oh Yeah, no, it's cool. Like no anybody could do this. Yeah. No, it's it's fine and
41:41
You know, that's not necessarily good either Right. I know I know a fair number of folks who are involved in community stuff who have that kind of reaction and we have formed the mutual adoration society to help ourselves get over that and I think the really profound moment for me was one day. I was sitting there talking to my friend Dave D Anderson and pound GSS see anyone know who I'm talking about. Oh
42:05
You guys do not spend enough time in our IRC channel. Come on down. We're nice. We're friendly. We serve, you know cookies And I was you know, Dave was telling me, you know, oh, you know, you're doing great. I'm like man He's like well Leslie, you know, you need to respect yourself and your accomplishments and I said, you know Dave I don't want to be one of those people who runs around being
42:23
Overly pleased with themselves and he's like Leslie Humility is great Don't deny the awesome And I went and I hemmed and hawed and he said no Leslie Humility is great. Don't deny the awesome
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And so I looked at him and I thought about and I'm like, you know what Dave that's really really good advice I appreciate that. Where did you hear that? And he's like, yeah, don't you remember when he told me that? Like oh Wait, yeah now I do and that was the best experience I ever had of someone coding my own advice back to me It's quite good
43:01
You'll find as you know, you're new. I love cats You'll find as you're working with newbies and kind of you know Pulling them through the whole process and getting them on boarded that eventually they'll begin to feel confidence Right and as they feel more and more confidence They'll need less and less of your time to make them productive contributors Right and for me myself as I got more and more experience
43:22
I too got more and more confidence and if you're a community manager Again confidence is one of those essential aspects, right? You need to be the person who's there to lead the charge in matters that are non technical in matters that are technical It's pretty clear on a lot of times, you know what the answer should be this patch caused regressions. Maybe not so much
43:43
Implementing a feature this way is going to cause a performance problem. Maybe not so much in matters that aren't necessarily technical aren't necessarily Measurable this is where a community manager comes in and just makes the decision, right? I think that we should market our you know, latest event this way. I
44:01
Think that we should structure our program timeline this way And you need to just step out make a decision and not only that but have the confidence to know that you are going to make mistakes You are probably going to make a lot of mistakes. In fact, I guarantee you that you will make a lot of mistakes And that's okay You just need to have the confidence to know that you're gonna be able to do it and the course corrections are a good thing
44:25
When needed I Haven't talked anything about this yet But I'm hoping it's coming through in my articulation if you want to bring new people into your project you need to have passion I am incredibly passionate about what I do. I cannot
44:40
Imagine having a more awesome job. I get paid To help students learn more about what they're really passionate about to become better computer scientists to get their awesome dream jobs I get cool mails like hey Leslie I just graduated from college and I just got married and I used my summer of code money for my wedding and I hope you
45:01
Can come Whoa, dude, this is not you know These are not experiences that I think most people get to have and and you know What really helps me be passionate is is those? Experiences and that the awesome community of folks that I get to interact with right and the cool thing about that passion is that passion is infectious That enthusiasm really draws people in they want to know what it is that makes you so excited. They want to be a part of it
45:26
Right. So have your passion feel your love and display that passion And last but not least no one to ask for help I know like I said first year summer of code getting about four hours of sleep at night It was not fun and that was mostly because I didn't know anybody right
45:43
I you know I had no idea who all these people were and after a while as I was reading more posts on the mailing list and Spending more time in our IRC channel and really getting to know people. I'm like, okay Has clue has clue reliable has clue judicious patient You're the kind of person who's gonna get cranky later. Maybe not so much with you
46:04
And you know and these are the kinds of people who you know When there was a flame we're starting on the mailing list and maybe it wasn't the best time for me to step in I'm like, hey, dude. Yep. Got it. You know our second year We had eight channel ops who weren't googlers and our IRC channel I asked the community to work with me to create documentation about advice for mentoring
46:23
Organizations and advice for students that we published as a resource for the program even though it's Google's program Because guess what? I can't give good advice as a mentor or a student. I haven't been one and speaking of asking for help We're going back to that
46:40
Lovely little picture of you know, Paul Atreides my hero So melange the melange project as I said before is the next generation framework to manage the Google Summer of Code program and We went out and asked the community for help and contributions because as I said, we have about 25% of an engineer on a good day And we were really excited when we were actually able to take this project and make it a community owned and community driven project
47:06
Just about a month ago I'd like to introduce you to Pavel Soyega. I've pronounced it wrong again, didn't I? I'm terrible ladies and gentlemen Pavel Soyega
47:22
Two time Google Summer of Code student one-time mentor for his own mentoring organization and the gentleman who got the job washing dishes overseas Instead of writing free and open source software and he's gonna give you a demo of some of the features of melange So if you want to do your own newbie outreach initiatives or externship programs you can see what the code base looks like and
47:42
See what you want to do with it Or you might want to contribute because it's in Python and Django and we have this shiny new web application But it's not really done yet Just a thought You don't have to have the mic
48:03
Okay guys, I'll just do a quick demo what we have so far and melange The resolution is not really great. Okay Once again, yeah, so one second because yeah
48:24
Time I will annoy you with close harmony singing. Okay, that should work Okay, so I will sign out Welcome to our sexy sexy sign in so I'm working right now locally. It's not deployed to any Google App Engine
48:46
Servers right now. I'll just sign in as user Then that's ambitious. Yes, and I see the home page and I can create my profile
49:00
and I can type in my Public name which is user down of course and use a link ID which will show up in the URLs This is actually really really cool because with our old infrastructure every year you had to answer the same data over and over and over again You don't got it anymore So we can have many you will summer of code projects in the same web application and we can have
49:25
g-hop Projects and programs too and in the same application at the same time so if you're interested in doing a program of your own you can either have a Proposal based workflow a per project workflow, or you could also have a task based workflow like, you know
49:40
Do this one little small thing for me. Okay, it's done. So depending on how you want to work your magic so here is the what user normal user sees and The user doesn't have any roles yet. Like he's not an organization administrator. He's not mentor or student anything. So basically it's just Pure user site wide user and now I'm gonna sign out as a user
50:05
and sign in as a Administrator of the of the launch and now I see a lot more All right, so I have user as me I have the site settings where I can edit site settings I can place Google Analytics Google Maps API
50:23
I can set the home page Document if I have some documents I can just type in a nice auto completion shows up and I can select the document I can set the feed URL that will show up on the main weight page I can set the terms of service for both programs and
50:41
The site wide terms of service if it's needed We can We can create the documents inside my launch Which we can then reuse for example inside settings we can set up this document as a home page
51:04
So for those of you who are actually participating in summer of code right now Do you know how we have documentation in like seven different places? This is the part where you nod we aren't gonna have documentation in seven different places anymore And if you want to use this offer, you won't have to have that happen to you either Yep, so we can what else we can do we can list users
51:23
That's all that's only for the admins, but they can list users and go through them if they need to What else do we have I think the chickens are restless Yeah, well, okay, so we have a few terms that need to be explained We have program owner, which is a sponsor of the program
51:42
Basically like Google is a program owner. We can create a new program owner inside the application We have one already created here this program owners, this is Google program Who is a program owner here? It's created by false them test user
52:02
and the program owners can include Program administrators so we can invite some user to become a program administrator Since that's probably what most people are interested in To become an organization shown here actual size mentoring organization applications. Yeah, basically you see the form
52:25
Once you click Submit Leslie you can review the organization applications you can go and list and for those of you who are actually planning on applying as mentoring organizations to Google Summer of Code all those Questions that were scrolling by really fast or all the same questions. You've had to answer for the past two years
52:43
So no big surprises there. Yeah, we can list the programs that are currently in the system and we can edit the program if we want if we need to or We can create a new program So you can actually have multiple programs running on the same instance if you wanted to do two parallel programs at the same
53:06
Time, which is pretty cool. Yeah, so I want to create a new program. I can select the program owner Anyway, the point is that it's really cool and awesome and shiny and you will be getting to use this if you are summer of code participant this year and
53:22
You know if you would like to contribute to the project we would always love your help Yep, that's basically that's it. Thank you. You're looking for new contributors if you know Python, Django, CSS JavaScript or HTML we are Looking for help
53:46
All right folks in case you haven't figured it out yes, we are doing Google summer of code 2009 There is the sexy new logo for this year is very pretty hearkens back to the whole summer of love
54:00
We like And we will be taking student applications on the 23rd of March of 2009 So we will be creating all the functionality required in melange to take student applications, which isn't necessarily there now But fortunately we can reuse a lot of the code if you would like to learn more about applying as a mentoring organization or about applying as a student our
54:22
FAQs for 2009 will be published tomorrow at code.google.com slash SOC There's where to find out more about melange where to find out more about open source at Google and check out the blog We spend a lot of time writing for it, and you know we would love it if you would come read it And that's all I got any questions
54:43
Question hi hello, so a lot of the Linux users group within Scotland. I've been wanting to do what you've done with high schools How do we go around doing that how do we get high school kids to start working on open-source software?
55:05
Okay, that's an awesome question so the gentleman's question was that there are a lot of Linux users groups in Scotland And they'd like to take what we've done with high school students and replicate that model so how do you get high school students involved and Free and open-source software development, I would say that there are a couple different ways to do this one
55:23
start really really small when you're asking people to do things make tasks discreet and Make them something that you can accomplish with a couple of hours of effort and one of the reasons you want to do that Is let's face it we all have the attention span of a net High school students are no different and the other reason you want to do that is you want to give these students a sense of
55:43
Accomplishment right this is a it's a very big world out there And it can be scary if you've ever done it before and you still are very much entrenched the idea of seeing adults as authority figures and if you can actually prove that you can do something if you can have that sense of Accomplishment if you can go back and say I've done this work And it was successful then you're actually gonna find that that is what you know creates more energy and actually gets more people involved
56:05
The other thing is don't give up right at first I mean I I had no clue again what I was doing with the highly open participation contest. I just said hey Let's get some high school kids working on open source project that sounds awesome, and I also thought where do they meet?
56:21
I don't know where to find them. I don't want to use Facebook Well, hopefully our friends will find them and that actually happened But you'll find that your momentum builds up more after a couple people get stuff done And then all of a sudden you're gonna get a flood of people going oh my god. This is so cool This is so cool. I really really really really really want to do it At first it's gonna be like radio
56:41
Silence and if you would like to get some expert advice on this topic We have a high school student contributor right over there who might wish to Provide you with some guidance or we can have a beer later and discuss ways to improve our mutual offerings Other questions comments concerns yeah throwing a rotten fruit. I have fruit to throw back yeah