>> Welcome to the Open Source Show.
>> Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Open Source Show.
My name is Jono Bacon and
I build communities for a living.
>> My name is Jessica Deen,
and I talk to communities for
a living whether on stage or on camera.
So, why are we here? Oh wait,
before we talk about that, this is a little odd.
>> It's weird, isn't it?
>> Yeah.
>> Let's just deal with the elephant in the room
which is we haven't co-hosted anything before.
>> There's not an actual.
>> We stood in a room with a bunch of
people who are watching us doing this right now.
But, we want to talk about
how to build communities and how it
works and you've got a very
different level of experience to me
I mean you're primarily working with the Cloud, right?
>> I'm primarily working with Cloud or Azure,
yes. Really kind of dynamic.
>> You are like Seal Team Six of the engineering world.
>> So, your background also you've
worked some pretty big companies, right?
And you also wrote a book?
>> Yes. So, I led
Community Development a Canonical
around the Ubuntu operating system,
a GitHub and XPRIZE and these days I am a consultant,
I work with companies to help them build
communities either on a platform or a service,
a lot to develop communities,
but also communities inside the companies as well.
I wrote this book called the Art of Community which
is in all good bookshops.
But it's one approach to doing that.
There's multiple approaches to building communities.
>> Because there's no one-size-fits-all, right?
So for somebody who's trying to build communities,
what are potentially like three takeaways or
three tidbits that you
can give from perhaps your perspective?
>> Yeah. That's a great question.
What immediately it brings to
mind for me is first of all,
is like have a very clear mission,
value like what kind
of community do you want to build here?
What's the point of this?
You've got to be concrete about it.
So, for example, when I was a Canonical with Ubuntu was,
we want to build essentially the
ubiquitous open source operating system.
Which is kind of it actually the,
technically the mission was originally
Microsoft has a majority market share,
that's number one, but there was in the old days.
But then having that core mission,
that core way in which people
can get involved and participate with us,
developers or documentation writers whatever else,
be explicit about it.
>> Yeah.
>> To me the second thing
is simplifying the on-ramp of how people get involved,
like this is one of the problems I always see.
I'm sure you've seen this as well as is,
we say come and write code for my project.
>> Yeah.
>> But then to actually get to the point where you submit
the pull request is incredibly complicated.
It takes you two hours to figure out
how to build the damn thing.
You got to figure out where
the documentation is and where to get help
and all these different things to have a clear on-ramp
because most people are going to get stuck.
Then the third thing I would say
is figure out how to incentivize people effectively.
Like what is the best way in which you can understand
your audience and you can say, ''Okay,
I'm targeting for example developers,''
developers in many cases want to grow their skill set,
they want to build their experience,
and the reputation, they want to have a good career.
How can we incentivize people along those goals?
>> Yeah absolutely.
>> What about you?
>> So I just kind of want to recap on those three.
So I heard kind of like unify
and simplify and then incentivize.
Then taking all three of those
I kind of would also add in that you have to,
with whatever category that fits in or whatever bucket,
the biggest thing that I see is having passion.
So have passion for
your community or the project you're contributing to,
because if you're not passionate about your project,
you're not going to want to really focus on
that unity and getting involved together.
>> Yeah.
>> You're not going to care really if it's
simple because you're not invested
whether that's emotional or moralistically or whatever.
I don't actually know if that's word I just made it up.
>> I think it is.
>> I just make up words
>> It is now.
>> Well, that's also part of my job I make up words.
>> I've discovered this from today's shooting session.
>> Yes. Finally, I mean even with incentive,
the incentive isn't going to mean anything if
you're not passionate about what's there.
So I think that's a big thing when you're looking at
either existing communities or building up communities.
But then along the incentivize thing,
you kind of reminded me of one of
Microsoft's communities that our VS Code community.
We've actually done some really powerful things.
I think the last study that I heard was
15,000 contributors to the VS Code project on GitHub.
>> Yeah.
>> Then even over 3,000 closed pull requests.
So I mean there we've kind of taken all three
of those practices and kind of put it into play.
>> Yeah.
>> Which then users can kind of use that as
a model or viewers can use that as a model.
>> It's a pretty phenomenal case study
for opensource in action, I would say.
>> Yeah absolutely, and actually so,
it's something unique is we actually have
some feedback where we've gotten
to reach out to the VS Code team.
So we want to
actually hear something that they have to say.
>> Let's do it.
>> The VS Code thing, we think
it's a vibrant and healthy community.
We really try to stay engaged with
the community day in and day out.
We see every issue that comes in all the time every day.
24/7, we have teams that are
located in Redmond and in Switzerland,
so we have actually the ability to have 24/7 coverage.
We're very transparent with
what we're doing with the VS Code.
So all of our iteration plans, our road maps,
our issues are all public on GitHub.
We feel like that transparency
creates a tighter connection between
the community and the product
and the product team itself,
because we have such a tight connection with
the community and because it's so vibrant,
you feel like that enables
folks in the community to come back and
talk to us about issues
that they're running into with the product,
bugs, whatever it is.
Which is invaluable when we're trying to build
a product that's getting used by a lot of people.
One of my favorite things is showing developers,
the cool tips and tricks,
things that I do every single day.
So one of my first favorite tips and tricks,
that is because I do a lot of presentations,
is the ability to zoom the entire environment.
So I can hold down the command key, press plus, boom
pull me into type environment
because press minus will zoom out.
One of the cool things in the latest release of
VS Code is that I can now just zoom the editor if I want.
So, I want to keep the rest the
environment the same size,
I can, I can just zoom the editor out.
So that's pretty cool. Second thing
that I love to do is customize
my environment for my theme.
So, I'm going to do the one command
that everyone should know which is Command P,
I am on Mac, Command P. If you're on Windows or Linux,
its Ctrl P. This
brings up something we call the command palette.
Initially, it gives you the entire
access to all of your files.
But if I press or hit Shift dot and greater than sign,
this gives me access to all the commands in
the entire entire tool.
So I already got color theme here,
click on that and here I can cycle through all
of the built-in themes that we ship with.
These are all pretty cool but really what I want to do
is go look online
and see what kind of themes we have there.
So I would say install additional color themes,
click on that and what this is going to do is going to
open up the extension here on the left-hand side.
These are all the themes
and there are thousands that are out there.
The next thing I want to sort of show people
is this last sort
of button over here on the left-hand side,
we call this Activity Bar.
Another cool tip and trick,
I can actually take these and move them around.
So I just click on it, drag
and can move them position wherever I want,
in fact I can right click on that and hide them
so I don't want to see that one. It's gone.
Now, to get it back, I just right click again and
you get the whole list, I can turn it back on.
So we'll come back over here,
we were in the marketplace,
the extension view a little bit earlier.
I'm going to search for something I love Docker,
so all I have to do is type in
Docker and see there's a ton of
Docker extensions that are available.
Of course my favorite is the Docker extension
by Microsoft and if you click on it,
you can see over the right-hand side,
we show sort of the rich overview of what
the extension provides and to install,
just click on "Install",
boom that was it, it's installed.
The only thing I have to do now is just
reload the environment and that's it.
Now we have the Docker extension installed.
The marketplace for Visual Studio code
has thousands and thousands of extensions.
I highly recommend people go there explore it,
then tweet about it, let us know what you think.
The best way to get involved in the VS Code community,
number one follow us on
Twitter @code, coolest handle ever.
You can go to GitHub and you can,
one you can download the sources, you can build it,
you can run it, play around, see what you find.
Two: file issues,
let us know if you're having problems or suggestions.
Three, can go on Stack Overflow.
You can ask questions, you can
go and answer some questions,
that would be awesome as well.
>> So I have a question for you.
>> I might have the same question.
>> You go first.
>> So we've talked about a lot of different
things and some of these have
been fairly high-level and somewhat generic in nature.
I think a lot of people are watching this,
are going to be saying,
''What are some concrete things I should focus on,
that I can apply in my communities in my world.''
We have two very different sets
of experience here, but related,
what would you say
the most important two or three things that
you would recommend to these lovely viewers out there?
>> I think the first thing
is making sure that you are authentic.
So the community is able to sense if your efforts are
perhaps for personal gain
or about something you don't necessarily care about.
That also leads into the second, which would be passion.
So have passion for the communities you're engaging,
and the reasons why you're engaging.
Then I think the third is
to really make sure that you know your plan,
you know the big picture.
You know what you want to ultimately deliver.
You know where you're starting from and you can
use that to go forward.
Then funny enough and coincidentally.
>> Weird.
>> Weird. It's like I'm psychic
My question is the same.
So what would be two to three things from
your perspective or from your lens?
>> Yeah I mean what I would say is
the first thing is be intentional,
don't wing it, don't just set up a forum
and see how things go or a repo and see how things go.
Be intentional, be deliberate,
have a timeline and hold yourself accountable to it.
The second thing I would say is measure.
Make sure that whatever you are doing,
that you're tracking what's going on.
You're always asking questions,
you develop an hypotheses about things and you
testing them and you can only do that with data.
The third thing I would probably say
is realize that we're all a student in this.
I mean I've been doing this for 15 years,
you've been doing it for I think as long and
and we are never going to have all the answers.
Anyone who thinks they've got all the answers,
frankly is lying to you,
is that every community is different and we have to
realize that and the data will help us understand that.
>> Absolutely. There's no one-size-fits-all to this.
So that's the important thing to remember
is get out there and
try and if you want additional resources, by the way,
you can also check out opensource.microsoft.com,
there will also be links down below to some of
our favorite community resources.
If you click on Jono's head,
you can also go buy his book.
Then also down below,
will be links to each one of our sessions.
We are actually both speaking at OSCON.
>> Yep. >> So we will finally be
in the same place at the same time.
>> Hopefully. Fingers Crossed.
>> I just want to thank everyone for watching and for
joining us today. Have a great day.