C in CRM stands for Community

Speaker 1: Just to give a little bit more into context, like, why why this topic and and why started to to think about CRMs and and communities. So, if you don't know that, I came from marketing, and Marrique is just an opposite where he he came from the open source ecosystems. Right? So when we were thinking about what does a DevRel do and and what does DevRel do, we we had different visions. And for me, it's more selling technologies.

Speaker 1: So my marketing view was was telling me that, like, it's to help developers, but also to have sign a a technology. And on the other hand, Marika, you can explain better what's your point of view.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I was more in the mood of technology, how DevRel can help to engage community to build a technology. So the way I was seeing is, okay, it's part of engaging people, but to get technology built because my background as a okay boomer person is coming from open source ecosystems and open source communities. And now with this technology communities, I still thinking, okay. All these people, all these community managers and dev roles are helping communities or companies to to build technology at some point.

Speaker 2: So that was the the question for us.

Speaker 1: Exactly. So what Marvika did was, okay. So let's let's ask the community. Let's ask the Twitterverse and say, hey, the real people. What what do you think?

Speaker 1: This is more to sell the technology or to build the technology? And what we got there is that although some people said what I thought, other people says what Marika saw said thought. And other people suggested, like, maybe it's depending on if you're reporting to marketing or engineering, a mix of both. Well, things were not really clear at the end. Right?

Speaker 1: But what we know for sure is that it's about developers and building communities with developers.

Speaker 2: Yep. And that's that's very interesting because at at the end is us as as Peterias, Matthew giving the introduction is about, okay. We measure the impact in communities and all this stuff. And the kind of DevRel we we are working with is basically what we call open source DevRel. So how we see what's the goal of these people is beyond creating an an engagement about the technology or helping developers to start using the technology is one one step beyond.

Speaker 2: And the way we are seeing it, I I don't know, and as you can bring the next slide, I think is one one that explains clearly this position is they are trying to get people used to the technology, but also start contributing to the technology, and at some point become became maintainers of the technology. So, basically, one of the main goals in this for this community managers develop and sort of develop is to ensure or to have the sustainability of the technology that is being built. And this is how we are seeing, like, okay. We are seeing, like, three different stages of people, like, people that is users or most valuable users, As I like to call them, they are basically people that is coming to a community to ask questions because they started to, I don't know, for the project, clone the technology, start playing with the solution and start asking issues in forums. They are start asking, okay.

Speaker 2: What is this about? So it's more than downloads. It's more about, okay. We have to identify interested people, interesting well, that is interesting in the technology. And then how I can help these people to go to the next level that this will be like, okay.

Speaker 2: I would like to contribute to this because I'm used to use this technology and I can answer the questions. Or I can even submit some ideas of how to fix the problems of the issues I have found. I think it's a next level of knowledge of the technology itself from a tech developer point of view. Once these people start to contribute and keep contributing regularly or the kind of call they are contributing is accepted by the, let's say, maintainers, they are already becoming maintainer of the of the technology itself. So it's like we have all these stages and how people can interact with others is creating this notion of, okay, there is some kind of onion or something like layers layers of people interacting and exchanging from one layer to another along how how that that's how I see the community.

Speaker 2: But even when we are talking about not only open source dev reps, but dev engineer engineer, even if it's not open source, even the first stages, like, okay, people that is asking questions is also interesting for them. Even people that is helping to solve questions or or solve issues is also interesting because it's also part of the technology. Probably, they are not gonna contribute to the code because if the technology is not open source, they are not gonna be able to contribute. So please make it open source. But that's that's about the different talk, I think.

Speaker 1: Yes. And what Marika has been saying, right, about the the sustainability of of the project, it's a key point will be this try to know the transition from user to maintainers. Like, how is this transitioning happening? And to understand that is for me, and I think for most of you that thinks about it, the journeys. Like, where are my developers?

Speaker 1: Where are they interacting with the product? And how how are they evolving from moving to most valuable users to contributors? Or when did they start? Did they start as a contributors and then they moved to maintainers? Did they start first as users asking questions and then progressively started to get more engaged and more engaged?

Speaker 1: So it's not one developer journeys, but multiple developer journeys. And in order to understand that, in order to know what's going on, I think measuring is really important. And now, again, my my marketing side start saying, okay. So so we need a CRM. Right, Marrique?

Speaker 2: Well, that's very good question. And that's when we were discussing about the topic for this talk was all, okay. CRM. We are talking about people, journeys, different stages. So it looks like a CRM and all this funnel theme.

Speaker 2: But I would like to, first of all, remove the c as it is now in the CRM and move to something I would like to call the community relationship manager or management. Because, actually, when we ask any dev DevRel in the world, what they talk about is, okay. We are about connecting people. It's about connecting external developers with internal developers or external communities with current documentation, people working on marketing and stuff like that. So it's about, okay, all these people relationship.

Speaker 2: But the main point I I've seen is that from DevRel mindset is more about I don't want to do marketing in the same of selling the technology. I want to engage people to contribute to the technology. So let's try to remove the customers' work. And there are already some some tools out there that are happening now that I think they are amazing. Savannah is an open source tool that is is doing is progressing very impressive.

Speaker 2: And the other one is Orbit. I suppose you I'm very sure that you have already heard about the Orbit model. This idea of onions and level of attraction and all this stuff is scientific research for ten years ago, and now it's becoming a product. So it's nice to see that people is is using these ideas to to drive something like as a product. And what we are here is to share our experience because I think it's it's quite interesting is we are not providing a CRM.

Speaker 2: We are not in that business. We are more in the business. Okay. We are helping companies and organizations to understand how the software that matter to them is being built. And, again, when it's open source, that means the community.

Speaker 2: And we have an open source solution or tool kit that is able to measure tracking information and and stuff like that. It's Grimor Lab. It's part of the Chaos initiative. Chaos stands for community health analytics for open source software. So it's chaos for us.

Speaker 2: What we have to identify in in this in our experience is some key points that I think that are important for anyone willing to build whatever CRM where c stands for community. And I think the first the first thing is about, okay, the all the different areas where community is happening. That is the different touch points. Think the next slide is nice view of all of this. It's not only GitHub.

Speaker 2: It's not only Slack. It could be GitLab. It could be MatterMost, but it could be also. It could be also Stack Overflow. And and when you're talking about with with DevOps, it's like, yes.

Speaker 2: But my my community is everywhere. It's how I can track all that information. And I and the thing is, yes, there are very different touch points. The diversity of tools that are there, either you focus on some of them or you build something that could be able to to support a lot of them. The nice thing about Vimmar Lab is this it support, like, 30 of this platform, so you can start playing with that.

Speaker 2: And the other thing is about the diff different motivations from when we are talking about marketing in the saying of, okay. My motivation to measure all these people movement is how I can move them to the leads funnel and then continue make make them customers or make them advocates to the people that has decision power in their companies to buy my technology because it's where my my bosses is how evaluating my work. And here we are talking now, okay. We can measure things that could probably could be different by how people are helping to be your make your technology known, for example, or known or like it or trusted. That I think is the last part of all of this is how how I can become a trusted provider of technology that then I can keep communities engaged.

Speaker 2: And last but not least is how all these interactions are very different in in from sales. Like, okay. Let's put things in Google Analytics in our website. Here is more about talking. It's more about how people are mentoring each other.

Speaker 2: And that's that's one part of that diversity of things. And the other is given that diversity, people is using a lot of different identities and profiles depending on the tooling they are using. And that's already known in also in CRM when they are providing in sales, like, okay. We have the use cases or people over there that download the use case, and then they submit an email through the web form and stuff like how you can merge all of that identities. We have found the same issue when we are talking about measuring communities.

Speaker 2: And one of the solutions we we have provided as part of RemoteLab is is something hub. It's an open source tool that the game the name comes from Harry Potter, the the hub that decides which house do you go to. So, basically, it it allows to aggregate all this information about people, and then you can merge the different identities into a single profile. So once you start querying the data, you can see, okay, my community, where they are participating. All all these people are only doing code or are contributing code or also asking questions, are solving questions, and all this information can be now seen quite differently.

Speaker 2: Like, it's not only, again, in GitHub, but you can start to play with that. And that's that's based out of a an experience, but I will ask Anna to share the the experience we have with with Jeff, for example. Yes. I I will let you drive that part because you do that much better than me.

Speaker 1: Yes. So Jeff is one of our customers and one of these open source DevRel's profiles we we have here. Right? So let me introduce a little bit for those who are not familiar with Jeff. Okay.

Speaker 1: My video has been frozen, but you are still listening to me, so that's great. So as I was saying, TEV initially had a consolidated user community, but they wanted to start building a more consolidated contributor community too. And because of that, last year, they started to see to start to implement dev web programs. And the goal was to see how people who transition into this contributor community behaved before when they were in the user community. So Jeff is defining, in in their case, user community, as the people who source activity mainly on Slack and Discourse.

Speaker 1: And the people, can be filtered by active users, inactive users, top contributors, and also organizations involved. And then on the other hand, Jeff, also defines the contributor community as the people who shows activity on GitHub, and it's divided by commits and pull requests mainly. And, also, the people can be be filtered by organization. So the outcome of all of this is that this Deborah dashboard that we call it was developed for Jeff to show the activity in the user and developer communities across the different platforms used by both. So Jeff was, at the end, able to understand the community pathways.

Speaker 1: And in this case, execute a strategy to grow their developer community, which was the the main goal they were having. So just to to end this, Marike, do you know that or do you think that DevOps can can do more than that they already think they they are doing right now?

Speaker 2: That's that's a very good question, and and I I think that's for me the main outcome of of this talk is I really think that DevRel's can the the means to help build the technology there for the companies they are working on or for the organizations they are working on. Beyond just consider that they are only measured by the number of output case leads or whatever they can provide. One of the things we are seeing is with this information, having this information, if they can smartly show that information to the managers, they can showcase, okay. We have more than just leads here. We have people willing to contribute to make this project a successful project.

Speaker 2: And, of course, I'm this is my open source mindset here playing, but I have the feeling that this is this should be the natural way of any dev rel open source person. But it could be also in any other case that, like, okay. If someone is willing to help in my forums or in my Slack channels to answer questions that, okay, it's not our support system answering the questions, I can provide that as valuable resource to the to the company. The other thing I would like to highlight is, like, Savanna, Orbit, and even Remora Lab. There are open source technologies out there that can be used to build this kind of solutions and frameworks for for devils.

Speaker 2: So it it's a matter of, okay. We are all technical people. It's a matter of reaching agreement and start working on a nice open source place to to solve all this. And I would like to to listen to your to your comments and questions in the in the audience because I think it's it's gonna be more than than important. Not not for us as as as we tell you, I I love the Revver community.

Speaker 2: So for the Revver ecosystem to have means to showcase what is the value of the Revver beyond being part of anything is how my connection with the development ecosystem can help and I can how I can showcase that to to the organization I'm working for.

Speaker 3: Great. Thank you very much for the talk. So, Anna, you're still frozen.

Speaker 1: So Yeah. See.

Speaker 3: We can hear you just fine.

Speaker 2: It's a photo. It's a nice photo.

Speaker 3: Yeah. It's worked okay. Alright. Thank you very much for that talk. That was great.

Speaker 3: I have a question, though. I would say that probably these days, most developer relations activity happens around nonopen source products, so APIs primarily, things like that. What can and, of course, well, I would say that most developer relations heavily borrows, if not is, you know, just a a retread of things that were built up in the open source community over over the past two decades. But what in particular about measuring activity and so on and understanding the extent of a community can nonopensource DevRel programs learn from from the open source world?

Speaker 2: That's very good question. Matthew, thank you very much for for asking it. And if I have understood about if we are talking about measuring not open source ecosystems, not open source communities, I think there are as I try to explain, good lessons to learn, like, okay. One of the main goals, for example, when you're talking about APIs, when I'm seeing dev roles or people advocating about APIs, it's about exactly that. Advocating to use my API instead of any other because this is my the nice API we have, you can start playing with it.

Speaker 2: And then the the corporate that oh, oh, sorry. The organization I'm working for has some customers that are sure usually are corporates that are using APIs. So, basically, it's how I can convince the developers that are working for that corporation to use this API instead of other. And that's that's the as I said, the marketing and sales funnel. And then what I can learn is if those people start using that and I have a way to provide them a way or a mean to provide them a way to submit any issue they have found or any feature request they would like, again, DevRel has the capability to say, okay.

Speaker 2: Probably our marketing and salespeople are looking talking with our customers and all the feature request they have from corporations, but the developers that are working on those corporations are telling me also these requirements or these issues. And then it's up to the company to decide, okay. I'm not gonna listen to my dev team because I'm very focused on on my business team because he's the one that is getting the requirements from the customer. My and this is only me probably. But my view here is then you are very narrowing your mindset and not learning the lesson of how community can help you to have a better product or a better technology.

Speaker 2: And if you look at, as you said, this twenty years of technology, twenty five years of technology, thirty years of technology, A good example is a couple of examples of projects that has just been sustained and survived all these waves of digital transformation or buzzwords or whatever. I can give you a couple of example, the Linux kernel and the web technologies. Like, the web as it was invented. But nowadays, it's like, there could be a lot of customers asking a lot of things, but people are willing to contribute and make that better thing has become a product that is still there. And it started like, okay.

Speaker 2: This is just a test. This is not something big as Linus Torvald said in his email or Tim Berners Lee also said in his first, okay. I have implemented this for the CERN, and I don't know if it's gonna end somewhere. And now it's everywhere. So this is how I think companies could learn, okay, if if all this crowd out there is willing to help, why I should be only listening to my customers?

Speaker 2: That's that's my my third point here, I will say.

Speaker 3: Okay. Yeah. So whether or not you give people direct access to modify the technology that you are responsible for, certainly, that feedback loop is is essential to improving the product. Yep. Okay.

Speaker 3: Let's see if we've got any any questions in the Slack. It looks like not. So okay. Not to worry. Alright.

Speaker 3: So then I guess, I will say thank you very much for your talk. I know you did put it on the slide, but where can people find out more about Bitager?

Speaker 1: So you can go to bitager.com. And, also, if you follow us on Twitter, it's bitager. Also, we already put it on the slides. Marika's Twitter is j s Marika. My Twitter is n a j s n a ninety five.

Speaker 3: One one last question. The name, where did it come from?

Speaker 2: Oh, do you want me to explain that, Anna?

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead.

Speaker 2: If I find five crazy people, yes, How I can name a company that is talking about technology, and we were talking about energy, synergy, beats, and it was like beats, energy, bitergy. But we started with bitergy, and it was like, no. No. Let's let's put a more Spanish name, Bitergia. So now we have Manrique working in Viterjea with a technology that is called Remora Labs.

Speaker 2: It's nice for this international world.

Speaker 3: Cool. Alright. Great. Thank you very much. Okay.

Speaker 3: Well, again, thank you. We'll we'll wave goodbye to you, Anna and Marie Kay.