2019 CentOS Stakeholder Review

Rich Bowen, community manager

CentOS Board, Feb 13 2019

Agenda

• Intro
• Events (Conferences, Dojos, Meetups)
• Social Media - Engaging with the larger community
• Newsletter
• 2019 goals

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Ref: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Rnkm_DXQN7MnEDqZ8Jh97muuble8JA8LwRw7q18A6d0/edit#slide=id.g3887722cb2_2_45 ← last year’s presentation

Why?

We (Red Hat) promote CentOS because:

• Communities that develop on CentOS create things that work well on RHEL
• If they’re using CentOS, they’re not using Ubuntu. Having them in the family is step zero of winning a customer
• CentOS users are our best source of RHEL feedback. Furthermore, the reality is that there are N * as many CentOS as RHEL users, and a good relationship with that community is an investment in our future as a company
• Because we love Open Source, and it’s fun

Why?

We (CentOS) promote CentOS because:

• The longevity of this project depends on a passionate user community that wants it to continue
• The quality of the project depends on a passionate developer community, especially SIG participants
• Because we love Open Source, and it’s fun

Events

I’d like to see us continue to be more intentional about how we do events, with clear plans for conferences, dojos, and meetups. We need to clearly state what our goals are for each event, along with ways to measure if we met those goals.

For each event, we need to have a clear idea of

• Why we are attending/sponsoring/presenting
• Who we want to reach
• What we want to bring back (stories, contacts, new participants, etc)
• Objectively measure whether this happened

2018 in review

In 2018, we had a presence at the following events:

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FOSDEM

SuperComputing Asia (Singapore)

FOSSAsia

Red Hat Summit

Berlin Buzzwords

ISC Supercomputing (Frankfurt)

DevConf.US & Dojo

Open Source Summit NA (Vancouver)

Ohio LinuxFest

Open Source Summit EU (Edinburgh)

CERN Dojo

SC18 (SuperComputing) Dallas

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2019 planned events

In 2019, we have tentatively planned the following events:

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FOSDEM

FOSSAsia

SCALE

Dojo @ ORNL

Red Hat Summit

OSCON

Devconf.IN (Dojo)

Devconf.US (Dojo)

Open Source Summit NA

Ohio LinuxFest

Open Source Summit EU (Dojo?)

LISA/Usenix

SC19 Denver

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Is there an industry segment that we want to focus more on in 2019?

Dojos

This year we have 5 Dojos planned

• FOSDEM (February) (Done)
• ORNL (April)
• Devconf.IN (August, tentative)
• DevConf.US (August 14th)
• Lyon (October, tentative)

But, we want to be proactive about identifying places where we want to do these, and not just wait for them to fall into our laps.

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Dojos

We have greatly improved our process around Dojos. It is our hope that by the end of this year we will have a clear documented process so that if someone wants to do a CentOS Dojo, we can hand them a process and a budget and they can make it happen on our behalf. We are not quite there yet.

Meetups

No progress was made on meetups in 2018.

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Currently four registered CentOS meetup groups, none of them active

• CentOS India - https://www.meetup.com/CentOS-India/
• Fedora/CentOS/RHEL Finland - https://www.meetup.com/RHUGFinland/
• CentOS UK - https://www.meetup.com/CentOS-UK/
• CentOS Netherlands - https://www.meetup.com/CentOS-Netherlands/

When a place asks about a Dojo, our *first* response should be “maybe you should do some meetups first?” This avoids high-price, high-effort, brought-in-from-outside events that fail.

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Meetups vs Dojos

I’d like to avoid calling something a Dojo when it’s not one. That term should have a clear definition (N speakers, M hours, seems like a good bar) and we don’t want to dilute it.

A meetup is one, or possibly two speakers, and usually an evening/lunch/after work thing

A Dojo is typically something that you plan the whole day around.

Meetups

Encourage more local meetup groups, or participation in existing groups, to put CentOS back in front of a new set of users.

• Work with existing LUG groups to get the CentOS name into more of them (all the ones I could find were all Ubuntu, all the time). Segregating CentOS content into CentOS groups isn’t always the right move
• Fund meetup.com membership for groups ($10 - $15 per month, per group) if that is a consideration
• Promote regional meetups via our various channels
• Use active/frequent meetup groups as the seed for Dojos
• Provide downloadable files that can be printed at local vendors for stickers, tshirts, printed materials, “business card” promo cards

Social Media

We currently have moderate-to-large communities on

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIN
• YouTube
• Reddit
• CentOS Forum

Social Media: 2018

• Our Twitter following (@CentOSProject) has grown from 1800 a year ago, to 5500 today.
• We send an average of 1.5 tweets per day, with peaks around events.
• Identify reliable sources of content. (There’s a LOT of clickbait and spam out there.)
• Content focuses primarily on
• SIG Meetings
• Releases/Updates
• Blog posts/Newsletters
• Event announcements

Tweets

Twitter Overview CentOS

The number of tweets published from your Twitter accounts (including your replies)

Feb 01 - Feb 01, 19

Followers

Twitter Overview CentOS

The number of people who are following your Twitter accounts

Feb 01 - Feb 01, 19

Inbound Messages by Sentiment

Twitter Overview CentOS

The breakdown by sentiment of the inbound messages (mentions and DMs) received by your Twitter accounts

Feb 01 - Feb 01, 19

Blogging

• This year we have greatly increased the number of people posting to blog.centos.orgm including representatives of most of our SIGs
• 31 blog posts in 2017
• 54 in 2018
• 12 so far in 2019 (on pace for 104 this year if we maintain that rate)

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SIGs

SIGs were a big focus in 2018:

• Contacted all of the SIGs and tried to determine of anybody was still at home. We had about a 50% response rate
• Instituted a quarterly reporting schedule. We’re getting roughly ½ to ⅔ of SIGs submitting their scheduled report each month.
• Had a SIG meetup at CERN, which was very productive

Newsletter

In 2018 we rebooted the newsletter, and had 7 monthly editions. This has continued in 2019

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A volunteer translated two of these editions into German, but did not continue doing so. A volunteer translated one edition into Chinese.

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https://wiki.centos.org/Newsletter

2019 Goals

In 2019 I would like to

• Get more people engaged in the authoring of the newsletter - especially technical content
• Bootstrap some kind of ambassador program, initially geared at having presence at events so that I don’t have to go everywhere
• Continue to engage non-Red Hat upstream projects in SIGs. Currently talking with:
• Cloudstack
• MooseFS
• Puppet
• More cross-promotion with our SIG communities

Your goals for me?

What are your visions for what we should do with our community in 2019?

FIN