Lessons about community from science fiction

Dawn Foster: So don't thank you. Okay. I know that I'm between you and drinks. Luckily my talk is short and I think fun. I'll let you judge that. But today I'm going to talk about community because I really do think it's a key element of developer relations and doing the right thing for your community can have a pretty big impact on what developers think of you. So I have spent the past 20 years working in various technical community and mostly developer relations roles focused on primarily open source software. So I recently decided to take a little break from working and go back to school to get a PhD.

So these days I'm mostly doing research focused on understanding Linux kernel developers and looking at how competitors collaborate together within the Linux kernel, despite the accent, I am based here in London. Sadly, the PhD reading, they just stack and stacks of academic papers to read has really cut into my 73 books a year, which is what I used to do.

And I know this because I'm a little OCD about it, and I keep a list, so I check it out, whatever. I'll start with Dr. Who because it's one of my favourites. On the surface, the tus looks like a simple blue police box. Small should fit, maybe a single person, nothing special, nothing particularly extraordinary until you open the door, right? What can you really tell about the community by just observing it from the outside.

So on the surface you might see a forum, a few mailing lists, maybe IRC or Slack channels, code repositories, bug trackers, that sort of thing. But until you actually get into that community and begin participating, you won't understand what it's really like in that community. Now the box itself is indeed pretty cool, but the real magic actually lies with the people, both people inside and outside of the box.

Communities have leaders, not unlike the doctor, people who help like it's companions, but communities are almost changing. So sometimes you get a new companion or the doctor takes a new form and the box itself might not change, but things will definitely be very different on the inside. And if those new leaders are good, but community will continue to thrive, continue to flourish, not unlike how Dr Who has flourished despite a dozen or so different doctors. And in each stop the doctor meets some strange and interesting new people, especially for those of us that work in open source communities. I've met all kinds of strange and interesting people over the years.

And ultimately it's not about the leaders, right? It's about all of these people who participate in your communities.

Now. Now, HT Well's time machine, the time traveller who was an inventor, he was a scientist. He went forward 800,000 years in time during his first trip, he finds that humanity is completely changed. He manages to have his time machine stolen and he has to fight to get it back. And getting it back is being really, really difficult because he really has no understanding of what humanity is like at this point in time. Now, this is life being new in a community.

So when you don't understand the norms and you don't understand how people participate, you're likely to make really huge mistakes that can be quite difficult actually to recover from. My last job when I joined Puppet Labs, since I wasn't an active community member already, I made sure that people knew that that first month I really wasn't going to do anything publicly in the community.

But what I was going to do was spend a lot of time talking to people and understanding how the community functioned. And I started doing some behind the scenes things that I could do to make the community better over time. But then I started participating more, but I did it gradually. And I've seen too many people, they sort of come storming into a community without understanding what it's like, and then they end up just making either one gigantic mistake or a lot of very small mistakes. So start small, understand what's going on, learn from a couple of your small and mistakes and grow your participation over time.

Nobody wants to be the red shirt, right?

That person, poor, poor person beating down in that away mission with Kirk Spot and other important people, the one who gets easily killed off and nobody is going to notice by the next show the next episode. So if you disappear out the community tomorrow, would anyone notice? So they will if you are participating and contributing on a pretty regular basis. And so find some way to contribute to the community doing something that people find valuable. I also recommend if you haven't read John Redshirts to read that, it's an interesting look at what it would be like to be a rich shirt in real life. So I recommend that time Went up For Love is about Lazar mom. He's 2000 years old. He's a cynical old part who is not afraid to share his many opinions.

One of these is that a human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, calm a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, it goes on.

I don't like that for a bit. It ends with specialisation is for insects. So the best community members, and I would argue community managers along with developer relations professionals are the ones who can help the community out in a wide variety of ways. So while we do need people with some special skills, obviously it's really nice to have people that you can count on who will step in and just do almost anything that needs to be done. So these are the people who will answer questions on the mailing list or IRC. They'll help out with bugs. They'll also submit patches, write documentation, organise user groups and events, speak at conferences about the project and the technologies, and then just step in to help out with anything else that the community needs.

And so these flexible get done types are incredibly valuable to have in your community.

OV created the three laws so that he could write stories, the one against the robot stereotype of his time. So he set the Frankenstein pattern where robots turned on their creators and destroyed people. He found that to be a bit tedious, he wanted to write about a different kind of robot. Now many of us find communities sold, people acting like jerks to be tedious and annoying as well. And as laws three laws set the expectations for his robots. Not unlike we have our communities have code of conduct, which was mentioned in a number of presentations earlier, or guidelines for participation that are designed to help people understand what is not appropriate. And the guidelines fall over time the way as mob's laws have.

So they've taken various forms over the years, slightly different variations in different books with the biggest change probably being the addition of the zeros law that he wanted to put in before the three laws to avoid Robots harm humanity as a whole.

But in communities, the guidelines often change to handle new issues, new problems, new technologies to Androids Dream Electric Sheep, which was also the basis for the movie Blade Runner. Androids evolved to become so close to human that it becomes a very difficult to sell 'em apart. And one of the ways that they can tell from most Androids is by testing their empathy responses. So don't act like an Android. I talk about the guidelines. Honestly, where most people get in trouble with community guidelines is when they really don't take the time to think about how their actions impact other people and just fail to show empathy for the other people that they're talking to. So show up empathy people.

Your interactions in the community will approve, become more positive. And if you don't show empathy for other people about Dean Hunter or someone else in the community, like a community manager might track you down, might not be pleasant.

Maybe we don't want to go quite as far as the board resistance is probably not futile and we won't assimilate you against your will. But as far as community is are concerned, we really do want your biological and technological distinctiveness to be added to our own new people. And new ideas are what keep communities strong. But you also be careful not to assimilate too many people. Typically, you need time for people to get absorbed into your culture. And if you add too many people at once, what can happen is you can actually end up destroying your community culture.

And in most cases, we really do want to gradually add people and 'em along with their ideas and their technologies along with our culture. And so these new people do bring a lot of life into the community and can be a pretty great source of help.

We also don't want to go quite as far as Big Brother, but we do want to have metrics and we want to measure what's happening in our community. So that's a common theme I think throughout the day. But having great metrics helps you track progress and identify issues, but it should also help you recognise your top community members and your top contributors. So I see too many examples of community metrics that are just focused on the numbers, but community are really all about people. So your community metrics should help you find your top contributors across various parts of your community. And while I don't blindly use those numbers to recognise people, the metrics often lead me to notice somebody who has done something, done something recently, which leads to some type of recognition.

And I also, I have a curricular passion for metrics, so feel free to chat me up about it afterwards. At the Drink Up.

Stein is probably the original science fiction book. It was written in 1818 before science fiction was really a thing. And in the beginning, the Frankenstein creation was not the monster that people assumed he was given his idiot monster like appearance, but he didn't become a monster until people started treating him like one. And just because someone has different ideas within the community doesn't make them a bad person. This is important. This is where it's really important to make sure that we focus on the ideas and not the person making 'em so we can debate ideas without attacking the person who made those who has those ideas.

And there really is nothing quite like an internet lunch mob to encourage people to stay as far away from the project as possible.

So avoiding that is pretty cool. The idea behind the Highlander movie is that there can be only one Im mortal left at the end of the gathering. And this one Immortal Left becomes all powerful. So despite the fact that there can be only one of these Immortals left at the end, the older Immortals still mentor the newer ones and they train 'em to participate in the gathering. So they mentor other Immortals knowing that if the student actually surpasses the teacher, that it could actually be the death of the mentor. Luckily, the people we mentor aren't likely to kill us on. And since we are not immortal, it is even more important for us to train the next generation to eventually take our place.

And those of us that have been working in communities and developer relations for ages have probably made lots of mistakes. I certainly have.

And by mentoring others, we can help 'em learn from our mistakes and help 'em be more successful with maybe a little less pain than some of us to get there. So unlike Ender's game where battle school is filled with kids, we often actually don't know the ages of the people that we participate. There's a great story in Carl Fogle's book producing open source software where there was this person, he had submitted lots of book reports and he finally submitted his first code of contribution. So they sent him a little legal paperwork. He said, just have your company sign this just to make sure that they're okay with you contributing this code. He's like, well, I don't really have a company.

They were like, oh, no, no problem. Have your university sign it. He's like, well, I know my parents sign it. I'm 13. Maybe that would work.

And so here's this person who had been participating in this community for a significant period of time that nobody had any idea, was a relatively young kid, the old EL tour Vaults when he started Linux, he was 22 at a use Next conference. A few years ago, I saw a presentation from Kyla Banks, who's an 11-year-old at the time. She was an 11-year-old web designer programmer who's using a lot of open source tools.

She actually keynote Ocon this year at the age of 13, which I find tremendously impressive. She's quite a bright young girl, but we need to encourage people to get involved and do whatever we can to help make them be successful. Now let's face it, Starbucks really could probably kick the ass at just about anyone in this room. About Star Lactic Go is filled with strong, capable, talented women as the president, captain Fire Pilots, a few s.

And you can start by encouraging young women to get involved in technical communities and help 'em get started by mentoring them. So we also need more women speaking at technology events. So I did a great job with this one, for example, but it is incredibly difficult. So this is something that was talked about in a number of the talks earlier, and I know that I haven't always succeeded, but it's important that we do as much as we possibly can to make these women successful in our communities.

In Dune, the people who controlled the spice colan controlled the world. They even had control over space travel. Since space travel itself depended on people who are using spice. And this led to continued power struggles and the mental overthrow of those power. And communities can have similar issues, right? When a person or a group of people attempt to exert too much control.

So you need to maintain a balance between keeping things sane and productive on the one hand, and without trying to control every aspect of the community. While I may not get to travel off world 'em like I did so often in Stargate, my working communities develop relations has actually given me opportunities to travel around the world.

One of the main goals of the Stargate programme was to obtain alien technologies and learn new ways to use 'em to advance their own technologies. So while I don't get to play with cool alien technologies like those really awesome personal course fields, some of the Google will have, but actively participating in communities, you learn new ways of doing things, right? You get exposed to new technologies. You can even have super long debates with people about which approach is better. So you can't beat a good packaging debate on a mailing list maybe because instead of working at Open Source, as I mentioned earlier, I met all kind some interesting people, but working on projects with people around the world, I can actually travel to both locations and find someone that I know to meet up with, which is pretty cool.

At first, being invisible seems pretty awesome, but the Invisible man quickly realises that there are actually quite a few challenges. You can't carry anything with you because people see it floating around in the air and they kind of freak out. So you can't carry any money.

It's also really cold when you are wearing any clothes. Community management and developer relations are also as all of not as easy as it seems at first glance. So I often see people underestimating how difficult it's and how much of a challenge it is. So these are the people who think that it's mostly travelling to conferences, finding people here, getting hangout with people, and that, yes, I've got to do a lot of all of those things, and that's pretty great. But I'm also the one who has to kick someone out of the community when their behavior's inappropriate. I'm the one that people escalate problems to regardless of where that problem is happening across the community or across the project and the public face of the project when something goes horribly, terribly wrong. And fortunately, I've developed thick skin and it's, I still love the word. Besides the challenges.

We all know that the hitchhiker guides supplanted encyclopaedia Galactica, partly because it's slightly cheaper, but it also has the words, don't panic, enlarged friendly letters on the cover, which is always good advice in communities. Things will go wrong, spammers, Lang Wars debates that maybe get a little bit too interesting, but it will not be as bad as someone destroying the earth to build hyper special expressway through our solar system. So keep things in perspective. Maybe bring a towel with you just in case. Then you can calmly recover from whatever the problem was about freaking out. And when in doubt the answer is 42. Thanks.