- This exercise is about gauging people's
feelings about where they are and who they are on the team.
And how they see themselves contributing.
- You don't have to be a great drawer
to succeed in this, you just have to draw some sort
of animal that has to represent you.
- I don't draw much, I just started
drawing and seemed kind of like an alien at first
and then I tried to make it into a dog.
And then I tried to make it happy, and I don't think
that worked out too well.
Oh what the heck man I wasn't ready for that.
Sure, first of all, I have next to no dexterity.
I can't do calligraphy, I can't do anything like that.
I can barely recreate my own signature on a check.
And then to begin with that, I've got this camera watching
me draw this thing and I am like okay, just whatever.
- My animal is a pig, it's in the middle row.
It's depicted from below because I didn't know
how to draw a pig from the front.
So my wife wanted to actually go pet some baby pigs
this weekend, we didn't make it, but that's why
my animal is a pig.
- And what's your role on this project?
- I am a research scientist with UNICEF.
(upbeat music)
- One of the really interesting things
that we see is that sometimes on these engagements
the client is actually meeting each other for
the first time.
(people talking)
- They may not have worked together
very closely in the past.
We've actually got to do building exercises to get them
on to the same page as some of our group.
- There's always the kind of sniff test,
as I call it, of like who in the room knows what and
how much is established versus not established when
it comes to understanding of platforms and roadmaps.
Mike has been very excited about working with us,
however, I think, also nervous.
- I am always wary of working with a
private sector company if you are working
on the side of UNICEF.
At first I was kind of thinking, well what product
is Red Hat gonna try to push and is that going to
influence the solution that we use or the path that
we choose or the map that we choose, or what we even
decide to do?
- It is super important for us to be able
to communicate as a team.
The exercises that we have really are about that.
To help the team focus around the objective that
they are working towards during the residency that we have.
- Today we are going to do an
exercise called Start from the End.
And from Start from the end, you try to imagine where
you are at the end of the project, and we are going
to be looking at it from a success point of view
and from a failure point of view.
From the success point of view, we are going to be
looking at it saying what would the news headlines
look like if a year from now Project Connect and
Magicbox was a big success?
- Thinking about what the New York Times
headlines would be in a year is actually an amazing thing.
Software shouldn't just be for the corporations to earn
tons of money, it should basically be here to help
everybody in the world to have a better life.
So to be software for social good.
That was one of the headlines I am sort of envisioning.
- I am thinking on how this can be
more impactful, so I write UNICEF or Magicbox is helping
the government of Columbia to reach this number of
kids, or to take these decisions based on the data
that we are providing.
- It's allowing us to think more longer
term than the shorter term engagement that you may have.
- So we are a small team, actually,
and we are trying to make this, which is a very big job.
I think that its a good way to realize what are the most
important points where we need to focus in order to
reach that goal.
- The way I understood it is that we want to take this and
synthesize it into a smaller goal statement that we
might be working against and kinda use that as the
mission that we've got against these eight weeks.
And of course, we are not going to be able to do all of
these eight things, or all of these great things, sorry, but
what we can do across these eight weeks is test some things
that might cause us not to hit that goal.
- And then we reverse it and we do
a tombstone exercise and we write some bad things
about what happens, some epitaphs, if the
project were to fail.
We use that then as a feeder into the next exercise
where we can start understanding what the goals of
the project are for the next couple of weeks.
- It was by the time that we got to the tombstones and I started
realizing, okay now I understand what we are doing and
why we're doing it.
- [Interviewer] And for you personally, what was your
biggest fear of how the project could maybe turn out badly?
- There were two, one was not having users.
So, one of the things that I said is that Magicbox shuts down
because of lack of users.
And the other one is about providing incorrect data
that UNICEF, or our platform, is driving decisions
that may not be correct.
- I have two major issues with the data
sort of the way, or the platform that's maybe
going to be built.
That's-- one of them is data security, or data privacy.
What happens if we leak all this data?
That would put UNICEF in a really bad position.
I imagine Red Hat would also be in a bad position.
The more important thing is, what if this platform
is used to discriminate people?
We have to ensure that this doesn't happen.
(soft music)
- I think at the end of the residency we
want to come out of this with the ability to say
that we really did a good job working together
with the UNICEF folks and manage to fulfill their
needs and wants,
and that we have really good software working. It'll
still fairly nascent and fairly young, but it will be set up
for success in the future for the open source community
to continue to contribute to it.
So lets think a little bit then about some key questions we are
trying to answer this week in order to support the
work that we are creating over the six or seven weeks that follow.
So what key questions, what jumps out at you
as a key question?
- The question is, is that coming into
this engagement, with so many goals and so many unknowns,
I don't really know anything, I don't know much about
the Red Hat people, or what their skill sets are.
Are we going to be able to arrive at or produce, deliver
something that is compelling, that is well designed?
That the country office, or whatever government agency, in this
case, maybe the ministry of education wants to use.
If we can do that and the code is clean and we have good
onboarding resources and stuff like that, that's the
question, is can we do that?
At this point, day two,
I am less and less skeptical.
At first walking in I was actually pretty skeptical.
So, but we will see, but I am excited.
I am terribly excited, but yeah, a lot of unknowns.
(upbeat music)