from around the globe it's the cube with digital coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat hi I'm Stu min a man and this is the cubes coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 of course this year the event is happening all online and that gives us an opportunity to meet with red hat executives customers partners and practitioners where they are around the globe in this segment one of our favorites ever years we're talking to the women in open source and joining me for this segment first of all we have Elissa and Alexander who is the executive vice president and chief people officer of Red Hat this award fit thunder her domain dallisa it is great to see you again thanks so much for joining us thank you so much for having us all right and we have two of the Award winners so first if you see right next bit Elissa we have an epic Sain who's a doctor and PhD candidate in clinical neuroscience at the University of Gothenburg coming to us from Sweden method great to see you thank you very much all right we also have Megan Burge Sinicki who is a manager of research and operations at the open source program office at Google Megan thank you so much for joining us off though thanks for having me all right so dallisa let me hand it off to you is give our audience a little bit if they're not familiar with whipping an open source what the initiative is the community and you know what might have changed from previous years when we've talked about this sure so we realized that the tech industry is a great industry for diverse populations but a lot of diverse populations don't realize that and so as the open source leader we wanted to shine a light on the contributions that some of our underrepresented populations are making an open source that trying to inspire more people to join communities to participate to contribute we know that more diverse populations help us to innovate more rapidly they help us to solve more problems and so it's really important especially today with what's happening in the world lots of important problems to solve that we really invite more of our other upper sort of populations to join in the communities awesome so absolutely there there are lots of people that volunteer there are lots of people that do it as their day job Megan why don't we fuck you have a roll open source first Google as a strong legacy and open source in general so tell us a little bit about you know what you were working on and what you're being recognized for here yeah well a lot of the recognition comes from my work with the Drupal Association I had been with Drupal for 8 years hoping to build that foundation in supporting that community and lots of different ways from fundraising to community events running sprints and helping with their developer tools and so that was a lot what the award was based on and now I'm at Google and I've been here for about a year and a half and I run their research and operations and so Google is an expression of open source and we have thousands of people using thousands of projects and we want to make sure they do it well they feel supported that we are good citizens in the projects that we participate in and so my group provides the operational support to make sure that happens you know you know what one of the things that's always fascinating when I go to Red Hat there's so many projects there's so many participants from various walks of life last year at the show there was a lot of discussion of you know it was a survey really and said that you know the majority of people that tribute now it's actually part of their job as opposed to when I think back you know you go back a couple of decades ago and it was like oh well in my spare time or down in my basement I'm contributing here so maybe talk a little bit about the communities and you know what what Megan is embodying CSUN she worked on project now she's working for obviously a good partner of Red Hat's that does a lot of open source yeah I love the way she described what her role is at Google and that it's fascinating and Google has been really a huge contributor in the community for in communities for years and years so I think that what we're seeing with the communities and people saying yeah now it's part of my day job is that you know 20 years ago the idea that open-source development would be kind of on par with proprietary development and on par in terms of being used in the enterprise and the data center was something that I think many people questioned proprietary software was the way that most people felt comfortable making sure that their intellectual property is protected and that users could feel comfortable using it within the parameters required so that was the way it was 20 years ago and then now you think about you know most companies there is some form of open source that is part of their infrastructure so now open source is no longer you know that disrupter but it's really a viable alternative and organizations really want to use both they want to have some propriety or they want to have some open sources so that means like every company is going to need to have some need to understand how to participate in communities how to influence communities and Red Hat's a great partner in helping enterprise customers to be able to understand what those red Nets might look like and then helping to kind of harden it make sure things that they need to have application city to have certified or certified and make it really usable in a way they're comfortable with in the enterprise that's kind of special Red Hat place but it's just a tribute to where we come in a world in terms of open source being really accepted and thriving and it helps us to innovate much more rapidly yeah and there's there's no better way to look at not only where we are but where we're going then talk about what's happening in the academic world so that gives it brings us Aneta so you are the academic award winner you're a PhD candidate so tell us a little bit about your participation and open source what it means to be part of this community my PhD project involves using virtual reality to measure the arm movements of people with stroke so we have participants coming in into our lab so they we're these 3d glasses and then they start seeing virtual objects in the 3d space and they use their hands to touch at these targets and make them disappear and we have all these movements data specially interpreters and then we write code and analyze the data and find out how much they have recovered within one year after stroke this is my PhD project but my involvement with open source happens they before like in starting from 2010 I have been editing Wikipedia and I have been writing several articles related to medicine and healthcare so that is where I started with open open knowledge and then I moved on words and after my medical studies I moved to research and worked on this awesome project and so there are multiple ways by which I have engaged with open source that's far that's awesome my understanding is also some of the roots that you had and some of the medical things that you're doing have an impact on what's happening today so obviously we're all dealing with the global pandemic in Koba 19 so I'd like to hear you know what your involvement there you know your data obviously is politically important that we have the right data getting to the right people as fast as possible definitely yes right now I'm working on writing creating content for Wikipedia writing on articles related to Kobe 19 so I mostly work on writing about its socio-economic impact writing about Kobe 19 testing and also about the disease in general mental health issues surrounding that social stigma associated began with it and so forth so I use all these high-quality references from the World Health Organization the United Nations and also from several journals and synthesize them and write articles on Wikipedia so we have a very cool project called wiki project code 19 on Wikipedia where people who are interested in writing articles creating data uploading images related to poet 19 come together and create some good content out of it so I am a very active participant there alright and making my understanding is you you also have some initiatives related to kovat 19 maybe you can tell us a little bit about those yeah well one I'm loosely affiliated with this kovat act now and that is a combination of developers data scientists epidemiologists and US state government officials and it's looking at how was the curve look like and how does that curve get flattened if governor's made decisions faster or differently than what they're making today and how does it impact the availability of ICU beds and ventilators and so that is a tool that's being used today by many decision-makers here in the US and my contribution to that was they needed some resources I reached into Google and found some smart generous volunteers that are contributing to the dataset and actually I just connected with Neda do this award program and now she's connected and is gonna start working on this as well yes oh that's fantastic yeah I mean dallisa you know we've known for a long time you want to move fast if you want to connect you know lots of diverse groups you know open sources is an important driver there what what else are you seeing in your group you know with your hat is the the people officer you know obviously this is a big impact not only on all of your customers partners but on fun Red Hatters themselves well it is a huge impact we're so fortunate that we have some experience working remotely we have about 25 percent of our population that historically works remotely so we have that as a foundation but certainly the quick move the rapid move to really thinking about our people first and having them work from home across the globe that is unprecedented and at this point we have some individuals who have been working from home for many many many week and others that are really in entering their fourth week so we're starting to have this huge appreciation for what it's like to work remotely and what we can learn about more effective inclusion so I think you know back to the idea of women and open source and diversity inclusion one of the things you may always prided ourself in is we focus on inclusion and we think about things like okay if the person is not in the room with their remote let's make sure for including them let's make sure they get to speak first etcetera well now we're learning what it's really like to be remote and for everyone to be remote and so we're creating this muscle as an organization I think most organizations are doing this right getting a muscle you didn't have before we really really having to think about inclusion in a different way and you're building a capability as an organization that you didn't have to appreciate those that are not in the room and to make sure they are included because no one's in the room you know we're really important pieces and dallisa you know one of the things that that's always great about Red Hat summit is you you bring together all these people as we just heard you know that your two Award winners here you know got connected through the awards so maybe give us a little bit of a peek as to what sort of things the community can still look forward to how they can continue to connect even though we're all going to be remote for this event yeah this event is is it going to be great event and I hope everyone joins us along our journey we are fortunate that Red Hat you know as the open source leader really wants to take a leadership position in thinking about how we can shine a light on opportunities for us to highlight the value of diversity and inclusion and so we've got a number of events not throughout the summit that we'd love people to join in and we're going to be celebrating our women and open-source again at our women's leadership community lunch is now not a lunch it is now a discussion unless you're having your lunch that you can check your desk but we're having a great conversation at that event I mean by people to join in and have a deeper conversation and also another look at our women in open source Award winners but these Award winners are just so amazing every year that applications that are submitted are just more and more inspiring and all the finalists were people that are so impressive so I love the fact that our community continues to grow and that they're more and more impressive people that are joining the community and that they're making those connections so that together we can you know really shine a light on the value that women bring to the communities and continue to inspire other underrepresented groups to join in and participate then a you know research obviously is an area where open-source is pretty well used but just give us a little bit of viewpoint from your standpoint yourself and your peers you know I would think from the outside that you know open sourced is just kind of part of the fabric of the tools that you're using is it something that people think specifically about a course or does it just come naturally that people are you know leveraging using and even contributing what what's available the tool I'm using is called cuteness it's an open source tool written in Python and so that gives me the possibility to have a look in deeper into the code and see what's actually inside for example I would like to know how what is the size of the target that is shown in the virtual space and I can fit know that correctly to the millimeters because it's available to me in open source so I think these are the advantages which researchers see when they have tools open-source tools and at the same time there's also a movement in Sweden and in most of Europe where they want the researchers are asking for publishing their articles in open access journals so they want most of their research be published as transparent as possible and there is also this movement where people want researchers want to have their data put in some open data city so that everybody can have a look at it and do analysis on the data and build up on that data if other people want to so there's a lot going from the open access side and knowledge side and also the open source side in the research community and I'm looking forward to what probably 19 will do to this movement in future and I am sure people will start using more more and more open-source tools because after the Manderly yeah making I'm curious from your standpoint when I think about a lot of these communities you know meetups are just kind of some of the regular fabric of how I get things done as well as you know just lots of events tie into things so when you're talking to your colleagues when you're talking to your peers out there how much is kind of the state of reality today having an impact in any any learnings that you can share with gaudí yeah that is definitely a challenge that we're going to figure out together and I am part of a group called Foss responders we are reaching out to projects and listening to their needs and amplifying their needs and helping to get them connected with resources and one of the top three areas of need include how do I run an online community event how do I replace these meetups and what is wonderful is that groups have been moving in this direction already and so who would release a guide of how they run online events and they provide some tooling as well but so has WordPress put out a guide and other projects that have gone down this path and so in the spirit of open source everyone is sharing their knowledge and Foss responders is trying to aggregate that so that you can go to their site find it and take advantage of it yeah definitely something I've seen one of the silver linings is you know these communities typically have been a lot of sharing but even more so everybody's responding everybody's kind of rallying to the cause don't want to give you the final word obviously you know this is a nice segment piece that we usually expect to see at Red Hat summit so what else do you want to help share where the community is final closing thoughts well I think that you know we're not done yet we have been so fortunate to be able to highlight you know the contributions that women make to open source and that is a honor that we get to take that role but we need to continue to go down this path we are not we're not done we have not made the improvement in terms of the the representative in our communities that will actually foster all of the improvements and all the solutions that need to happen in the world though we're going to keep down this pathway and really encourage everyone to think through how you can have a more inclusive team how you can make someone feel included if you're participating in a community or in an organization so that we really continue to bring in more diversity and have more innovation well excellent thank you so much Alisa for sharing it thank you too - both of you Award winners and really look forward to reading more online definitely checking out some of the initiatives that you've shared valuable pieces that hopefully everybody can leverage all right lots more coverage from Red Hat summit 2020 I'm Stu minimun and as always thank you for watching the cube [Music]

(slow music) >> From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back. This is the cubes coverage of a Red Hat Summit 2020. The event happening digitally this year. We are bringing in Red Hat executives, customers and partners from where they are around the globe. And happy to welcome back to the program. One of our cube alumni. Robin Bergeron is the senior principal community architect with Ansible part of Red Hat. Robin, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us. So we've got the community coming together even while we're apart. >> Indeed. That's what we're good at. So, I'm glad to be back here again with you all. So, hello. >> All right. So, Robin, we caught up with you last at AnsibleFest of course Red Hat Summit. So much community activity that goes on. The Ansible, community is a big piece of summit even though they also have, the separate AnsibleFest. So just give us a little bit update what's happening in your world and in the community. >> Well. I hate to say it's a, "it's a big wide world" because it sounds very cliche, but the Ansible world is fairly big. I don't know if, let's see, we talked, lasted, AnsibleFest and that was in September in Atlanta, is that correct? >> Sounds right. Yep. >> I believe so. So right around that time was when GitHub released their annual list of, they have a report called the Octoverse they publish every year, in conjunction with their annual event. And one of their metrics they have on that list is, most active projects. So, we clocked in at the number ninth most active project on Github this past year. And that's out of, I've lost count of github, like number of projects. It's not quite the, United States national debt status, but it's a, like a hundred million repositories or something like that. So we're the number nine most active repository this year. And I believe we are one of two projects who's been on that list every year since 2016 I want to say. So, yeah, we're at 5900 contributors right now. So it's, all over the globe. A lot of people keeping us very busy. I guess that and fact it's so busy and we talked about collections a bit when we were at AnsibleFest this past year and it's been a thing that we've been talking about continuously in Ansible community and also, as part of Red Hats product line for a while and we've actually now gotten to the point of sort of splitting out the Ansible repository. Ansible is going to continue to be the, you a car and you look under the engine and there's like the things that make the car run. >> Ansible base, separate from the windshield wipers and all the ad-ons and all the cool stuff that you actually, want to get when you get a car. And that stuff is actually getting split out into Ansible collections that we'll have or repository that's actually more managed by the community, which will empower them to be able to make more decisions for us to be able to get things done, more rapidly. Cause in the past it's always been a really a tug of war between, work and github have always been very respectful about, how the balances between community and product because obviously without a community you don't have a product. And this is a obviously a method that Red Hat has sort of nailed down. I guess IBM really liked the idea. So here we are. But we're really looking forward to, right now we've got a handful of contributors who are adding new modules into this new repo. But, they're also helping us work out all the kinks in the contributor process and how it works that way. Once we opened for business, since we've got several thousand contributors, we don't say, open for business and then have everybody comes running into a glass wall like it and then all on the floor, right? We want the doors to be open. We want the, registers so to speak to be processing things. We want, all the box to be working, all of the, all of the magic to be happening just as it is, as it has in past. But, this time with a little bit more empowerment to the community, that's on a work progress for it was like forever, but, nine months, and here in the next few weeks that will be open for business and we're hoping that, by the time the AnsibleFest rolls around, that will be part of the two, part and parcel to the 2.10 release. And, we're hoping that, even though under the hood for contributors, that's changed. We believe we'll be very transparent brand eaters, which has been one of the most important things for us because, we don't like to break people. That's, >> yeah, >> {Robin] Glad yeah >> Absolutely Robin. So it was one of the key things a announced at a AnsibleFest last year. Anybody that knows the software world is the traditional release train. Get on that train. Got to make sure you get your feature in there. But for a solution like Ansible, which as you said, has a lot of partners and it's a very big ecosystem. If you have to worry about how much stuff do I get shoved into one release, it's a little bit limiting. So you break those pieces up more like the, containers, that go on the train and you can make sure that you're adding and, doing the various pieces as they go. So maybe >> Yeah >> not the perfect analogy. >> Yeah. >> But very important so, Robin, as you've been going through this, I'm wondering, what feedback are you getting from the contributors there? and how about as you said, very active community. We know if anybody you know, says something, you got, the crowd and the wisdom coming in and giving you ideas. But, how do you balance that? You're not going to have everybody be happy about every decision, but making sure that the ultimate release train, does the job and delivers the overall solution. >> Yes. What color are we going to paint? Paint our bike shed. Right? Like the yak for circling. So it's, I don't want to to say it's been mixed, it's, you know, we, I can, I compare and contrast this, one of my, previous roles was being the newer project leader, right. And, which is, as we know the upstream, for Red Hat enterprise Linux, and its some of the, Linux and, a lot of the Linux distributions have been around for forever. Back when there were like, I don't know. 10, 15 opensource projects that anybody at all, could contribute to. Now as we can see looking on, github and many other places get lab, open dev. There's a, you name it, there's a gazillion opensource projects out there. People aren't always as attached to, I don't want to say attached, coz that sounds, terrible, but open source has become such a norm people are just very used to, there's something wrong. I'm going to submit it, I'm going to hope it gets accepted, but I'm going to move on with my life because I also have all these other places that I can also contribute, right. That said, we do have, a significant number of compute of contributors who have been with us back since Ansible started. Some of those folks go back with us to Fidor days, on Linux days on and on and on. Some of them, some folks I have concerns, they do like that this is the opportunity to give them more empowerment to figure out better ways to run the, contributor process. I think the number one thing that everybody's been concerned about is what diseases your experience going to be. And I think that's a testament to, just the power of our community is that, people aren't just concerned about how am I going to get my stuff in and your stuff in and like the tug of war of like, is one person can get something else in before someone else. Everybody's very concerned about is this going to still work for the end users? Is this going to disrupt them? Because it's a change under hood. Are they going to have to change all their playbooks and all of their, rules and everything that they have. And right now the goal is, it should be transparent. Anything that you have written right now, you should continue work, you shouldn't notice. Once we get your 3.O our goal is to ramp people up into harnessing the power of collections. But first we need to get the collections, infrastructure in place, before we get in. Start giving them to artists the power of collections. You can't just flip the switch and be like, hi . So it used to be this way, now we have collections and now you've got to redo everything, right. Because that's-- you still have the opportunity because it's open source. We'll have this window where we can still find all the bugs and get that re rapid feedback, which means, once we roll out, Red Hat Ansible automation platform, the next version. I'm not going to say an AnsibleFest. That would be shocking, right? We never do announcements at events. But, whenever that product comes out, we want to make sure, that power of open source and, having that rapid feedback loop, ensures that, what we end up, we'll bring to customers, winds up being solid, but I believe it will be very, very solid for contributors because or, and, a community. There's, because, a significant number of our contributors are community users and they have that in their own interest in mind. And we've seen that not just from, I'm a community user at a university, but all of our partners are actually participating in the community as well. And there, just painting and chatting and we had a, we had planned to have a European as well contributor summit, which is a thing we normally run in combination or the day before AnsibleFest. and we had planned that for Sweden. I was so excited. I was going to go to Gothenburg. I hear it's a charming little town, except, when we are all stuck in, the a world that we are in currently. so we ran that virtually and a lot of our longterm contributors are actually from Europe. So that was really exciting except for me, cause I had to get up 8 Am but it was still nice to see them all. So we had, 50 some odd folks pop in over the course of, that day. And we talked through elections and debated and, got some demos from folks. Had some folks talk through some specific collections, folks talking about AWS and some of the networking things. So, yeah it was nice to see everyone. I was sad that it wasn't in Gothenburg. But it is what it is. I'm going to roll. >> So Robin, I think back to 2019 an automation, was right at the top of a hot topics. When I talk to practitioners out there, many conferences I went to, not just of course Ansible test, which focus on it, but many other shows and events. Well when you talk to people about key initiatives, its in a really leveraging automation, something that I've heard talked about my entire career, but really it feels like the last painful of years and people are much more serious about it. You know, you referenced the times that we live in right now, we're unprecedented global pandemics. So I'm not saying that, somebody, everybody all of a sudden woke up and say, Oh my gosh, I have to work from home and I need to be smarter. Let me finally use this automation that I've been hearing about all these years. But why don't you bring us into, what is happening today, what you are hearing customers, because automation obviously is a critical piece of what everybody is doing and probably just, shines a light on it even more. Now that we need to make sure that people are being efficient and still being able to deal with their lives while everything else is going on. >> Yeah. It's interesting because some of is, as well as used. Yeah, there's actually a, there's the dependency graph that you can look at on github and it will tell you how many other things in github are actually depending on the Ansible. It's, I can't even remember the number. It's a very large number, like tens of thousands of things as I recall. Disclaimer, my memory is terrible sometimes. I believe it was in the tens of thousands of things. Lots of people use Ansible and it's almost like probably not quite as popular as, the uses Docker container to get started, but, venture to guess it might be a number to that. Type this Ansible thing and this thing will magically come up. Right. For folks that are, in a traditional IT department, just trying to get along, day to day right now who are, they're like me. They're at home, they're with their spouse, they're sharing an office. They're also homeschooling their kids if they got out of bed. Hopefully we all have enough bandwidth. For those folks it's, I'm just glad that I continue to have this Ansible thing, they're using Ansible tower, they're glad that they can still manage to figure out how to collaborate their coworkers in that type of environment. For all the folks out there who are doing, research or trying to set up any type of infrastructure anywhere to related to this, I don't care if it's a, grocery store or you're a research laboratory, whatever it is. Last thing you want to do is spend five hours, be like, oh God okay, let me get out my manual. Where did I, it's hey, there's an Ansible. Excellent, I can type this Ansible thing in. And if for some reason it gets hung up. We have folks on IRC, we have, there's folks on stack overflow . There folks literally everywhere. You can ask a question on Twitter and It's a Pretty large, friendly, global community of people who have plenty of answers. And that's, I can't say we're like, hey, we solved everything, but we got all the >> stuff out of the way so that people can actually solve all of their, they can get down to what's actually important for them. And so that, that's always been one of the most redeeming things about Ansible that it's, for me, it's, the thing that I work on is, it's easy and it helps people solve their problems and gets all there, stuff out of the way so that they can concentrate on what's actually important to them. So I like to think, it's most important to them. And I know it is, but it's interesting seeing how things change, as people are like, are you going to teach a bunch of people Ansible now? And it's like, well, if they're in need of a job, there are a lot of online resources for that. But if they're just trying to get through their job, like everybody's sort of in a don't rock the boat position. Like if I can get a little bit ahead, that's cool. If I've already got a bunch of stuff automated Yes. That's one less thing that I have to worry about right now and that's all we can really hope for at this moment. >> Yeah, great stuff Robin. One of the high point always is seeing, the value and support of the community and as you said, it's something that we definitely see highlighted up out there. All right, Robyn Bergeron, greatest as always to catch up with you. Thank you so much. I'm sure you know so many community activities that people will be able to participate in. This week at Red Hat Summit, even though we're, all doing it remotely, >> and the >> yeah >> challenges there. >> Glad I, great uni central area city. You can come on, come on by and see all of the, various Red Hat open source communities doing their thing. >> All right, watch lots more coverage from Red Hat Summit coming at you. I'm Stu Miniman and always, thank you for watching, the cube (slow music)