Growing Sustainable Contributions Through Ambassador Networks
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:10
All right. Thanks everyone for joining us today here in the community dev room. We're going to be talking about open source ambassador programs at our different companies.
00:21
My name is Allison Yu. I am the open source community manager at Indeed. Awesome. And my name is Sheila Sabe. I'm also a program manager, open source community manager at Comcast. So today we're just going to go over what an ambassador program is,
00:40
and then we're going to go and dive into our different case studies for our open source program offices, and how we actually implemented ambassador programs. Great. So you may be asking yourself, what is an open source ambassador program? An ambassador program is basically a working group of volunteers. In this context for today's talk, they are internal to our companies like Indeed and Comcast,
01:06
but they can also be in the outside open source community. Basically they are champions and ambassadors of open source. So you might be wondering why people would want to volunteer for this program where we're asking them for a lot of time during their day-to-day jobs.
01:24
So one of the things that we really focus on is making sure that there is really good career development built into these programs. We want this to be more than a two-way street. Our hope, at least at Indeed, is that our ambassadors get more out of the program than we get out of them. So that means having career development goals, whether that means they want to be more involved in the actual community,
01:45
expanding their speaking opportunities, having more cross-developmental or cross-team visibility. We're really working to make sure that their needs are met for this. We're also looking at giving them additional training stipends or different conference budgets.
02:03
So as you guys all know in this room, people communicate better and just click better when they're face-to-face. Imagine trying to communicate with the open source community only online and behind a screen. It doesn't work as well as when you're face-to-face. So we really want them to get involved with the wonderful open source community in person.
02:22
We then give them more networking opportunities. So not only do we give them networking opportunities externally, but also internally. A good example of this is that we fly out all of our ambassadors for a training week for each class that we do. And then, of course, we also give people swag because everyone likes swag.
02:44
All right, so the different things that the ambassadors can work on. First and foremost, evangelizing open source is really, really important. Speaking at internal events, we do have a ton of internal events that happen at Comcast for our technologists. We give them opportunities to speak there when they want to.
03:03
Answering questions related to open source. Explaining the benefits of open source software across the internal community. Also, conducting policy reviews. This is a new one that we added for this year. And also approving the use of open source licenses.
03:22
Great. And now that we've kind of done that very, very, very brief overview of what an ambassador program can look like, we're just going to jump into the case studies since we do have abbreviated period of time. So I'm going to just hop into Indeed's case study. So a little bit of context. Our open source program office was founded in late 2017.
03:41
We're currently a seven person team, which is very engineering heavy at the moment. We have one additional program manager and a community manager that's supposed to span the entire company. Our company is currently over 8900 people and we're very global. So if you can imagine the amount of people that we are trying to cover from one team.
04:01
So this is just a quick glimpse into where all Indeed's offices are. Any of the ones that are labeled are considered tech centers. But as you can see, we have tons of different offices that aren't deemed tech centers. We also have people who are developers and engineers in many other of these offices. A great example is that we have a great contingent of engineers in London, Dublin, and in Aberdeen.
04:25
So we do have people in Europe, but they're just not where we would deem it to be a tech center. And we also have distributed engineers and employees as well. So the open source program office sits solely in San Francisco. That's where our entire team sits currently.
04:41
And we're able to recruit ambassadors in Austin, Tokyo, and Seattle as well. So we have very broad program goals, but our number one goal from the program office side is to really shift the mindset from a one and done contribution to working in the open.
05:00
We want to have sustainable contributors. We want people to contribute more than one time a month and not just one time in one day. We're looking at people coming back. So if they contribute more than two days per month, that's when we consider them an active, recurring contributor. And we want to see that number grow. So that's something that we're really looking forward to. And as I said before, we're really invested in making sure our ambassadors grow their careers with us.
05:25
So we want to make sure that we are giving them the right skills and the right trainings to help them grow their careers at Indeed or if they want to elsewhere as well. But hopefully they stick with us. So we're also looking at a different way of having mentorship.
05:42
So not only getting mentored from the open source program office, we have what is called a lead ambassador at each location. This might be the most technical or the person who's been an ambassador for the longest. We want them to give them the ability to mentor other ambassadors so when they actually cycle out, then another person can take over.
06:01
But we're also looking for people to go ahead and mentor others who are not part of the program already. So we like to think of open source projects as mini companies. So we're looking at people who help plan events, help with marketing, help with legal, and of course help with coding too. So we're trying to get everyone involved. So being able to have those people and those point people at each of these offices
06:24
mentor and shepherd people into this community is a really great way to do something. And we also want to make sure that we're giving them the opportunity to help, the ambassadors the opportunity to help promote us externally as well, take some of the speaking opportunities on our behalf.
06:42
Burnout is real. We all know this in this room. So by being able to distribute some of those speaking opportunities on our behalf is really something that's important to us as well, especially if our ambassadors are keen to do that. And then we're really looking on how we can streamline contributions and streamline different things across the different offices.
07:02
So how do we get more programs in place to make it easier for people to contribute? So one of the things that we did is we didn't just jump in with two feet. We definitely did a pilot program, and we named it the Ambassador Light Program. It took place in Q4 of 2019. It was time boxed to three months.
07:24
We had one very clear and concise goal, and that was to double our contributor metrics across the board from Q4 2018 to Q4 2019. And there's a laundry list of different metrics that we're looking at, not only the number of contributions, but, for example, the number of GitHub IDs that we're seeing,
07:41
the number of people that are joining our Slack channels, et cetera. And we really wanted to make sure that we could make this as successful as possible in a very limited budget because, as we know, we cobbled this together in Q4. At the end of the year, we don't have the most budget available. The way that we started this program and got ambassadors was we did this purely by word of mouth,
08:02
well, really less than word of mouth. We went ahead and put a skeleton project page up in early Q3, kind of forgot about it, and then had a bunch of people going ahead and reaching out to us and saying, hey, so we found this Wiki page online. How do we get more involved?
08:20
So by the time we were asking for budget and to get fully funded, we had Hacktoberfest results in. And as you can see, it was actually a great success. We more than doubled every single metric across the board, which was phenomenal and really showed how valid and how well this program could do if we had the proper funding and training available to all of our ambassadors.
08:46
So because we had that pilot underway and we had some preliminary results, we were able to ask for budget for this program. And that was a comprehensive budget ask that did include a training ambassador kickoff week,
09:01
which for each class, which is six months. And that includes flying everyone out to Austin, which is our headquarters, to make sure that they get all the proper trainings that they need in order to be successful to give them the network abilities and more. And then we also wanted to make sure that they had additional developmental stipends so they could go ahead and attend different open source events
09:24
if that's how they decided to use it so they could get more interface with the communities. And then we also gave them a quarterly event budget, an internal event budget, so they can go ahead and use that budget to help hit their goals in any way that they would like to.
09:41
We didn't want to tell them and dictate how they would spend that because we know what works in Tokyo doesn't necessarily work in Austin and vice versa. So we're really leaning on our ambassadors to know their communities better than we do and to leverage their expertise.
10:00
So we do have a few lessons learned from our short pilot program. One of the things that we really want to do is make sure that we are listening to our ambassadors. So one of the things that we heard across the board was that they really appreciated clear and concise goals and the fact that we didn't micromanage them. So we went ahead and kind of lopped the goal over the fence and said,
10:21
hey, tell us how we can support you. One thing they came back with was they did really appreciate a lot more OSPO support in terms of events. So currently our ambassadors skewed to being a little bit more on the technological side. So we're looking at how can we help grow their skills in being able to host events, put them together, et cetera.
10:44
So that's one thing that we did learn. They do want more opportunities to give feedback. We realize that having one call at 4.30 p.m. Pacific is not the best. Not only do we not like staying in the office right up until rush hour, but we also want to make sure that we're best serving our Tokyo and Austin offices.
11:04
So at that time point we're asking Tokyo to come in early and Austin to stay late. So we knew that we had to give them more opportunities to give feedback. They like to have more one-on-one opportunities as well, even though we do have an open Slack channel. Well, it's a private Slack channel to them.
11:22
They do want more one-on-one time with our OSPO. And then we also learned that they wanted to have the ability to tie the ambassador program directly into their review cycle. So how can this program directly impact and help with their promotion cycles at Indeed?
11:41
People really want to grow at Indeed. We find that people really have longer terms at Indeed. And so they want to know how this program can help them, especially because we are asking them to do 10% time commitment. So we want to make sure that this is benefiting them as well. And then one of our last lessons learned is that we need to secure full commitment not only for the ambassadors,
12:05
but also from their managers. We are asking for 10% time commitment. So for them to be able to both be bought in prior to the program starting is very important. And then we have a few future plans. So we are doing our first ever ambassador kickoff week in about a week and a half.
12:24
So we are bracing for that and very excited and looking forward to that. And then we're also making sure that we're going to introduce our ambassadors more widely at Indeed and the program. So instead of having it hidden on a program page, we're actively working to have an internal standing resource on our wiki page
12:42
to tell everyone what the ambassador program is, how they can get involved, and then as well as doing a global internal blog series that goes ahead and introduces each one of our ambassadors. And with that, I will hand it off to Sheila so she can talk about the Comcast. Awesome. Thank you. So you may notice a lot of similarities and some differences within our different programs here.
13:07
So a little bit about the Comcast Open Source Program Office. We opened our doors in 2017. We started off as a three-person team sort of when we got off the ground. We're now a six-person team.
13:21
We have four program managers, two that focus on community, two that focus on compliance. We also have a software engineer who helps us with tooling and, of course, our leader. We support about 9,000-plus technologists across our org. And the key takeaway from this slide is that we're a six-person team supporting 9,000-plus technologists.
13:45
So that scale is really, really big for the ambassador program. That was one of the main reasons why we even launched it. Open source contribution requests, it's a form that if you want to do open source, you fill it out. And we either approve or reject. We have a super high approval rate.
14:01
It was 97% for 2019. We definitely encourage open source contributions. We also do blanket approvals. So 135 doesn't necessarily mean there were 135 commits. It could just mean that it was a blanket approval. But you could see that the number has jumped tremendously since 2016, before the OSPO opened, when it was only 66.
14:26
I will say that not all the credit goes to the ambassador program. We do run a number of programs that helped raise this number, but we think that the ambassador program was a big part of it. A little bit of history on our ambassador program.
14:41
Like I mentioned, scale was one of the main reasons why we launched it. We wanted to be where the open source was happening, and it was hard to do with such a small team. It also, that program launched in 2017, when we were just a three-person team. We are distributed across Philadelphia, Raleigh, North Carolina, and Northern Virginia.
15:02
Most of our team sits in Philadelphia, though. So all on the east coast of the United States. Each week, once we opened the open source program office, we decided, nobody really knew that we existed. People were doing open source across the company. They were either contributing back and, of course, using open source. People were contributing back without really any strategy.
15:23
We had our technologists talking directly to legal. Some of that, we really needed a buffer. So that's sort of where the OSPO came into play, and then people didn't know that we existed. And so one of the things we did when we launched the ambassador program is that we asked our ambassadors, hey, do you know a team that's doing either using or consuming or upstreaming to open source
15:46
that they may not know that we exist? And the answer was a unanimous yes, of course we do. So we started meeting with different engineering teams each week and told them, hey, hello, we're the OSPO. Come to us if you have any questions about open source.
16:01
Here's our charter. And that was really, really helpful. The ambassadors really, really helped us get the word out. So just to let you know, open source ambassadors internally to Comcast and internally to Indeed is the context of this presentation, but it is not new to open source.
16:21
There are different ambassador programs within different open source communities. For example, CNCF, OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Yocto all have ambassador programs. If you are working within an open source community, feel free to Google the open source community with an ambassador and see if they have an ambassador program.
16:41
I noticed that a lot of open source communities did. So we modeled after those, and you'll see here, these are the different locations. Now, we are mostly based in the United States, but these are all of our different technology offices, and these are also all of the different offices that our ambassadors represent.
17:02
Ideal ambassadors. So you should have managerial approval prior to joining the ambassador program. You need to make sure that your time is approved in order to join from your manager. We also have a learning assessment. You need to get an 80% passing score in order to become an ambassador.
17:21
You get two times to take the test. Also, you should be an open source advocate. If you are not really an open source person and you don't really care for open source and you only want to use closed source, probably not the right fit for the program. Also, it's a big plus to be a committer or a contributor to open source.
17:43
Now, this one we're a little bit flexible about. If you haven't contributed to open source but you're passionate and you passed the test, we're probably going to let you in this year. Some of the tasks. Attendance. So we have quarterly meetings. We also have open source days biannually. You get a chance to participate and speak at those events.
18:01
Last year, we did Seattle Denver. This year, we're planning on doing Philly Austin. These are a day of celebration for open source. We give our ambassadors a chance to speak there. We get to answer questions in Slack, so help us. Help us get some of the questions answered. Amplify our messaging. We do have an internal blog.
18:21
We give people a chance also to blog on our internal website. Also, we have a public-facing blog. Again, we point them in that direction. If we have new procedures and process docs that we put out, or if we have news for the community, we definitely share with the ambassadors first, and we ask that they amplify our messaging.
18:42
Again, I won't say the ambassador program gives full credit for this, but it was a big help getting the word out that we exist. This is our internal open source channel. We started with about 380 right before the ambassador program launched. This morning, I checked. We're actually almost at 1,200.
19:00
It's pretty cool to see our community continuing to grow, and we still have thousands more. We haven't even scratched the surface. Lessons learned. We need tighter prereqs to enter the program. Last year, pretty much, if you nominated yourself, you were in. We need to make sure that this year we have the test, the online assessment.
19:21
If you are answering questions for us, licensing questions or compliance questions or even community questions, we really need you to have the proper training, make sure that you have all the tools you need to answer those questions. Again, just like Indeed, we need to have two calls. It's not feasible to do one call,
19:40
especially because we have Sunnyvale, Denver, Austin, East Coast of the United States, and Chennai. So we definitely need to have another call, different time zones. More swag. When we launched the program, we launched it in late Q4, so we had no budget. So we were beg, borrowing, and stealing swag from other departments, like our partners in talent acquisition.
20:02
This time around, we're going to have more swag custom for the program. Also, we need to share expectations with the ambassadors beforehand, provide training for our ambassadors. Last year, one of the folks that applied for the program, I knew he was already an open source contributor. He's an open source advocate.
20:21
He applied, he nominated himself, and instead of actually telling him that he was now an ambassador and here's what he works on, I made a huge announcement to our community. Congratulations. And he came back and said, oh, wow, thanks. I had no idea that I was now an ambassador, and what should I be working on? So we need to do better communication on our end.
20:42
And then if they want more work, we should probably give our ambassadors more work to do. Future plans. Super excited about this. We have an org-wide ambassador program now modeled after the open source ambassador program. This is for our larger technology organization. We're going to have cloud ambassadors.
21:00
We're going to have open source ambassadors and architecture ambassadors, all run by the different teams, but we're really excited. Also, we're working with our HR department to see if we can get some sort of badge or a stamp or something for our ambassadors. We want to have overall technology ambassadors and then label what subset of ambassador they are.
21:23
That way they're getting additional recognition. We'd love to have it in Slack, and we'd love to have it in our online org chart. Also, more opportunities to showcase our ambassadors. Perhaps we're looking at doing a highlighted ambassador series in our blog, make sure that we're giving them enough attention
21:41
and incentivizing the work and recognition. And then mandatory attendance and check-in. I will say mandatory is like light. You don't necessarily have to be at every single meeting, but we on our end need to check in. We did have a lot of ambassadors. I would say a handful of ambassadors. They just signed up, and then we never heard from them again.
22:03
We need to do better on our part on checking in and making sure that they're still interested and they're still involved. And if they want to off-board, we can roll them off the program and do a rolling sort of program. We did have 104 applicants this year, and last year we had about 30. So we do have opportunity there to do a rolling program
22:22
if folks get promoted or if they go to a new team. So hoping that with the information that Allison and I provided with the ambassador programs that we're running, you are inspired to either run your own open source ambassador program. If you don't work in an open source program office, that's okay.
22:41
If you are solely doing open source in your company and you want other advocates on your team, I would encourage. If not, you can also look into existing open source ambassador programs within the projects that you want to work on or start your own. All right, and thank you, everyone. I know that we are running up to time, so...
23:01
Yes, we will take questions in the hall. Folks, can we get a round of applause for Allison and Sheila, please?