Community Development�@ CentOS

Rich Bowen, community [title goes here]

CentOS Board, April 2018

Agenda

• Intro
• Events (Conferences, Dojos, Meetups)
• Social Media - Engaging with the larger community
• Fedora
• Newsletter
• Working closer with the SIGs
• Other stuff ...

Intro

• Transition timeline (Yes, this is taking forever. Here’s why.)
• What I’m working on right now, and why I’m not doing more

What I need

• Several items require a decision by the board, or at least your explicit endorsement, if they are going to have a chance to be successful
• Many items require cooperation (ie, time) to provide content, advice, editing, and so on.
• Most of this is stuff that I intend to just go do unless you tell me not to. But that also requires endorsement for it to be successful.
• Some of the things in here are cultural shifts, and I need you to go think seriously about it, and discuss them in your next board meeting.

Why?

We 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

Events

I’d like to see us be more intentional about how we do events, with clear plans for conferences, dojos, and meetups. We need to plan sufficiently in advance that we are maximizing participation and outreach, while not burning hundreds of hours planning at the last minute.

Conferences

• There are a few required events (Red Hat Summit, cPanel, whatever LinuxCon is calling itself these days, FOSDEM)
• Beyond that, we need to pick industries that we want to focus on, and be intentional about attending their important events
• SuperComputing/HPC/AI
• Education?
• IoT?
• What else?
• We need to be very intentional about what message we are taking to a particular event, particularly when we are “sharing the stage” with RHEL. This message is often going to be in conjunction with Fedora

Events

In particular …

Do we want a presence at:

• LISA
• OSCon (There’s three of ‘em)
• Open Source Summit (aka LinuxCon, and there’s three of ‘em)
• SCALE
• SELF
• OLF
• *LF (various “LinuxFest” events, around the country. There’s 5 or 6 big ones)
• AllThingsOpen
• Etc, etc, etc

Dojos

I would like to do 3-5 Dojos each year, with events in North America, Europe, and Asia

• Bangalore (March 23rd, 2018) (Done)
• FOSSAsia (March 25th, 2018) (Done)
• FOSDEM (February 1st, 2019) (Planning begun)
• CERN (October 19th, tentative) (Still trying to get a confirmation)

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.

​

Dojos

We usually get a lot of local help with Dojos, but we also get some “show up and put on a show” requests.

We need to clearly document what is expected of the host if we’re going to show up and put on a Dojo. Or if they’re going to do it themselves. Requests to just show up and bring an event are not sustainable. For example:

• Local team that selects dates, venue
• Local promotional activity, including local businesses and .edu’s
• Help with finding speakers from local businesses
• On-site M.C. to do intros, etc

Exceptions to these rules for “major” dojos like FOSDEM which have more of a history.

Meetups

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.

​

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

Social media is a cheap and easy (albeit surprisingly time consuming) way to engage with our user community. We currently have moderate-to-large communities on

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIN
• G+
• YouTube
• Reddit

Social Media: The Plan

• Identify reliable sources of content. (There’s a LOT of clickbait and spam out there.)
• Daily content searches for new stories, and promote those
• Actually engage with users on the various platforms
• Promote our blog posts (which should happen more often - another ToDo item)
• Promotion of upcoming events, and CentOS-relevant content at conferences
• Release notices when appropriate (This should be part of the release playbook, rather than an afterthought.)

Blogging

• Expand the pool of people that are able to post to seven.centos.org
• Try to have an actual schedule, with at least one new post every week
• Most posts are, at the moment, deeply technical. That’s fine, but we also need more user stories, focusing on the things that happen on top of CentOS. These are much more likely to attract a larger audience, including the press
• Expand the blogs that are followed by planet.centos.org as we find writers who are articulate, correct, and friendly
• This item requires that I have permission/approval to Just Do It. So far, this has been a bit of a black hole when I’ve tried to get things done, because nobody appears to own this.

SIGs

The SIGs are doing awesome things, but a lot of them are dead, or at least incommunicado

• Audit all of the SIGs to determine their membership and activity
• Attempt to get quarterly reports from the various SIGs. This will initially be Rich going to them and doing some kind of Q&A. An actual reporting schedule would be helpful (much like the Apache Software Foundation expects from projects).
• Reports would be for internal use (is this a healthy/sustainable community) and external use (Look what cool stuff is happening here! Yay!)

SIGs - Tasks

• Define what constitutes “active”, “startup”, “retired”, etc (This needs to come from the board, or a board delegate.)
• Disentangle technical requirements from community requirements (see wiki.centos.org/SIGGuide )
• Create mailing lists or aliases for each SIG, so that contacting SIG membership isn’t the huge pain it is now. (Perhaps moderated, so that they aren’t abused? What’s the process here?)
• Rich will attend each SIG meeting
• Ensure they’re actually happening
• Write some kind of report

Fedora and RHEL

The whole Fedora/CentOS/RHEL thing is very confusing to everyone not in this room. We know why, but nobody else does. The notion that CentOS is not antagonistic to Red Hat is news to someone at every single event I attend. Better messaging around our family of distributions is important both externally and internally, because people Just Don’t Get It.

• Work closer with Bex to say the right things
• Eliminate duplication of effort/services/event attendance, where appropriate
• Work with Sales people, where possible, to say the right things at events like SuperComputing, where we’re leaving lots of money on the table. Without becoming sales people ourselves.

Newsletter

Reboot the newsletter for the less connected audience. https://wiki.centos.org/Newsletter

• Events
• Major technical discussions on the dev list
• Releases
• User stories
• Highlight blog posts or useful documentation

More delegation to the community

Much of what happens in CentOS is done by a small core group. Ain’t none of us getting any younger.

• Identify tasks that can be handled by volunteers. Clearly document what needs to be done, and mentor people in doing those tasks until we feel comfortable handing it off
• Rinse, repeat
• Examples
• Rebuilding new releases from RHEL
• System maintenance tasks
• Pushing packages delegated to SIG designates
• Approving new SIG members

Promotion around releases

We have a 7.5 release coming up. We need to promote it a way that is informative to the community without pissing off sales (which is, of course, a tagline to everything we do.)

I have outlined at https://www.rdoproject.org/rdo/release-checklist/ how I believe this should be done. This needs to be tweaked for CentOS since we don’t control our own destiny. But all the same things (eventually) need to get done.

Board meetings

Feel free to tell me I’m speaking out of turn here, but …

• Board meetings should be more transparent. Open to “members” (whatever that means. SIG members?)
• Minutes posted publicly
• SIG reports (see above) as part of agenda

Decision making in a hidden dark cabal reinforces community sentiment that they’re not part of the process, and that Red Hat Is Running Everything.

What I’m asking for

• Permission to do the things I have outlined above. (Both social and technical.)
• Permission to discuss these things on public mailing lists, without concern that I’ll be opposed by board members.
• The blessing/endorsement of the board in my efforts (as this speaks louder than just letting me do it)
• Notes of specific things you object to, or would like to see me drop/postpone/whatever

Specifically:

• SIG reporting schedule (need board endorsement)
• Board meeting transparency (needs deep thought on the part of the board)
• Blog/Planet expansion (needs board permission, endorsement)
• Consideration of what kind of events we want to focus on, and who we should send to them (needs thought and feedback in the short term) or tell me that this is all my call (which seems unwise)
• Early insight into upcoming announcements, so that we can have a clear, consistent message around them. (I’m looking at CentOS 7.5 here. Stuff like https://www.centos.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=65681 with no official input is a bit embarrassing.)

FIN