About
In this episode, we have an engaging and very entertaining discussion with Jono Bacon, the founder of Jono Bacon Consulting. Jono was Director of Community at notable companies such as Github, Canonical, and XPRIZE. He is one of the top (if not the top) experts in the world when it comes to building strong communities.
Some of the topics that we discuss in this episode include:
– The role of a community manager and the importance of community.
– Building and growing strong communities around your open source company projects.
– Best practices for contributing to open source communities and how to measure the ROI of your contributions.
– How to harness the power of an Innersource culture within your organization.
Transcript
hi everybody i’m henry badgery and i want to welcome you back to another episode our second episode of open source for
business brought to you by open teams the open source services marketplace where users of open source software can
find vet and contract with service providers in this episode we talk with jono bacon
jono is one of the world’s leading experts when it comes to building strong open source software communities in this
episode we’ll be discussing topics such as what is the role of a community manager
and why is community so important how do you build and grow an open source
community around a company project that you’ve released to the world and open sourced
what are some best practices for contributing back to open source communities that you rely on
and how do you actually measure the roi of those of your contributions and last but not least how to harness
the power of an inner source culture within your organization so are you ready let’s dive right in
and i am super super excited to welcome our guest for this episode john o’bacon jono has helped to build
open source communities for nearly 20 years and was the director of community at
github canonical xprize and open advantage and he also started jono bacon
consulting which provides community strategy and execution developer workflow
and other services he is also the author of the book people powered how communities can
supercharge your businesses brand and teams so if you’re an enterprise and you’re wanting to learn
how to build communities and leverage communities either within your organization
or outside of your organization then i highly recommend reading this book and if that’s not
enough incentive to get the book today then i want to tell you about this initiative that jono started up
recently the people powered book club it’s completely free all you have to do
is buy the book and you’ll come together virtually every week the task is to read a chapter of
the book a week and you can come together and discuss the topics that you learned and read about and also
ask jono questions so what better way to learn something in a book then to learn it with
the the author so that is great uh but there is a deadline the 2nd of october is the last day that you can sign up to
the book club so make sure you go to jono’s website johnobacon.com
books slash people powered slash club jono is also offering very generously
offering two free chapters of his book people powered both in audio and pdf version where he also read the audio
himself you can find free content free training and much more at his website johnobacon.com
pact so now that the introductions are out of the way jono thank you so much for joining us that’s
the best intro ever you got all of the links out my website with your listeners i love this this is
you’re a pro thank you thank you not as much for the pros i know you run a few podcasts so
i’m really really excited to be able to talk to you and um i thought to kick off i know that in in
a world of a global world of open source if anyone mentions the word community or they ask how do
you build one your name seems to be the first or one of the first to come up so
can you take us back a bit and explain how you got here today yeah i remember it prove it pretty
vividly um i was 18 living at home with my parents i had believe it or not
long hair which started growing inwards when i was about 21 and coming out my back
um and my brother came to stay with us for a couple of weeks my older brother simon and
i was moaning about about windows or something like that i was getting really interested in in technology but i was also really into
music as well and i was kind of debating whether i wanted to pursue a career music or a career in um in in tech um anyway so he he came back
and he said you should try linux and this was back in 1998 so this was very much in the early days
and he basically installed slackware 96 on my machine um put a post-it note on the monitor
with the username and password and left and i and like didn’t just like like
dual boot it it was it replaced windows that’s all i had so i was kind of forced
into figuring out how to make this work um and i used to work in a book shop and uh
there was only really i think at that time one book on the market about about linux so i went and bought this book
with my 10 staff discount and um the first chapter of the book talked about how people
around the world come together to to make linux and you know they work on the internet
and they collaborate and they share the fruits of that labor which is which is linux itself and that was just it sounds like a
horrible cliche but that really was a light bulb moment for me i was just just fascinated with the idea of that i
was already fascinated with the concept of the internet because i don’t know what it was like in australia back then but certainly in england the internet wasn’t
very pervasive because you had to pay 10 pence a minute to get online it wasn’t like in the u.s where all the colleges
were online and all the rest of it i think in australia was still that until probably 10 10 years ago we’ve had terrible internet
yeah exactly a lot of americans don’t realize just how good they had it uh no you’re getting 100 mbs i got that at
university i had to go to university to get that i remember going to like my girlfriend
her mum worked at the university and i remember downloading like the 40 floppy disks of slackware to
update anyway um i was just so i was just captivated by the tech was interesting to me but i just really
wanted to understand how that the community thing worked and and really was just a slippery scale
a slippery slope from there you know i built a community in the uk called linux uk got to meet some really cool people and just found that a lot of open
source people were they they were my people you know i didn’t know it at the time um
and it was it really was i feel extremely fortunate i would not have the life i have today which i’m very happy
if it wasn’t for open source that’s amazing so at that point was it the hackers or what was in everyday open
source joe yeah i mean it was very much it was very male uh there were a
sprinkling of women here and there but it’s very male dominated environment um which obviously has been a real
problem and thankfully i think it’s getting better now the diversity levels yes a lot of developers um
what was really interesting for me is that i’m really proud to come from england
because england was kind of early in the open source world i think and there was a very very tight-knit
community of people in the uk and there were developers and primarily developers and sysadmins um i’d never
even heard of the concept of a community manager back then it didn’t exist as far as i was aware in fact the first time i heard the the words
community manager was when i heard about the job at canonical where i went to go and work um
but what was cool is there was an event in the uk called the linux expo which took place at um in the olympia in
kensington and my friends and i would go down to the event and basically go and wander
around but the reason why we went down was not for the event it was for the pub at the end of the
first couple of days very english was just like there were there were a group of people
that i still know i’m friends with today i mean you know people who i’ve who are many of which have had really promising
careers like john masters you know who’s kind of a bit of a guru when it comes to um
matthew garrett who’s a legend in the in the linux kernel world scott james remnant who was a legend in
the debian world we’d all hang out down the pub and just make bad jokes and have fun with each
other and a really close friendship formed it wasn’t just about the tech and i think that’s what made it
it’s so special for me was these weren’t this wasn’t just interesting it wasn’t an academic thing because i’m not an
academic it felt right um and that was so exciting
it’s amazing that you could have that feeling really before anything grew to what it is today because with the benefit of hindsight
it’s always easy to look back and say yeah of course like this was going to happen but the fact that you were there was would
have been very very interesting so you mentioned you had no idea
so you mentioned uh you had really no idea what a community manager was so could you explain what a community
manager was back then and then what a community manager is today
i mean to be honest with you back then i don’t ever remember seeing a community manager
in a formal role i never remembered any company hiring now i know that you’re gonna get an email from someone saying i was a
community manager in 1999 because there’s always there’s always those folks out there
who need to right the wrongs of the world and more power to you people but i
don’t remember seeing anyone and i you know i was really starting to get to know people at red hat and you know when i got started in 98 of
course like canonical didn’t exist um but the uh what there was is there
was a lot of people who were kind of community facilitators there were people who were just very naturally interested in the community side and very excited
about the community side and that’s kind of what i was starting to get into but there wasn’t really a
label for those people and they and they weren’t in an organized group somewhat
interestingly because you know i i like i mean i remember for example i was at
university and i finished university in 19 um sorry 2003. i had no idea what i wanted
to do for for a living i did i was i’m a terrible developer i didn’t think i was gonna be able to do that and i’d ended up writing a lot of uh articles
for magazines um because i got drunk in a bar with these two guys who were starting a magazine called linux format
and they said if you want to write an article for us uh we’ll we’ll if it’s not rubbish we’ll print it
which seems like a fair contract you got the napkin right but the uh
it was the community thing that always excited me what i found fascinating was that ev the thing that everybody always talked about it but
events that me at what linux user group meetings which you could now call a meetup was the community everyone cherished the
community it was so special to everybody um and i remember always thinking like i wish i could just spend time doing
community stuff and that’s when i when i really saw the um the role at canonical
and i think what was exciting about that because you know when i was at open advantage i wasn’t a community manager
you know i was a consultant that was helping people to use open source is that um the industry started really
kind of formalizing that hey there’s loads of people out there who are really good at the community side and really interested in the community side let’s give them a title
and have them do that and get paid for it um and now it’s way different there’s lots and lots of community professionals
out there there’s people in developer relations and advocacy and all kinds of stuff so but it really was like i mean it’s it’s
a renaissance that’s happened it’s how i would describe it like people started writing things down and figuring out how to do it and it’s been it’s been fun
that’s very interesting i know just as the director of community at x prize canonical github you’ve really
seen the power of community so just for everyone listening and also for my sake what are you
what does it come down to why are communities so so important i think communities are one
of the most magical elements of being human um which might sound like a very
overblown statement and it is but the reason why i say that is because
a community is a it’s a network of minds you know that comes together it has a common interest um
and that interest may be cardi b or it may be you know kubernetes or it may be
fortnite but those people come together and and that network of minds has ideas and perspectives and
creativity and experience and and very importantly time you know to varying degrees so if
you think about it if you think about like you know if you if henry if you have like a business you’ve got 20 people who work there
you’re limited to um you’re what you’re paying for as an employer is that is the expertise
and the time of those 20 people um and you’re fundamentally capped by that um
whereas with a community when you can motivate people around a mission around an ethos um you can end up
attracting hundreds or even thousands of people who contribute their time
and and and expertise um willingly and that is how we can do
amazing things and i think open source is one of the most beautiful examples of that i mean just take a look at for example
firefox you know the web for younger listeners the web was a very locked down thing back in the in the
late 90s and early 2000s and there was a fear that microsoft who were a belligerent gorilla in the room at the
time we’re going to basically lock down all the standards and restrict what what you know so all the good stuff would happen in
internet explorer and firefox was a response to that and it firefox
didn’t just attract um developers and you know documentation
writers but there were advocates all of the all over the world people were making crop circles in the shape of the mozilla
firefox uh logo really you know people yeah i mean it was it was incredible like there was
um a large number of people donated to get a full page ad printed in the new york times about the open web
um it was it just it captured people’s excitement and interest and you could never do that in a company
because you’d always have to meet the profit line you’d always have to make a profit and justify that and when what
you’re doing in that case is advocacy and um and activism there’s not a lot of
money in it so that to me is what’s so special about communities the tricky thing part the reason why it’s ignited my
interest for so many years is communities are really hard to do you know they’re very complicated and
they’re very unintuitive for i’d say most people um and i feel like that’s a disservice to
humanity i think that you know everybody should have the ability to make an amazing community and
do it in an easy and predictable way and that’s one of the reasons why i’ve devoted my life to learning
from lots of other amazing people and then documenting it and providing simple ways in which people can do it and
understanding the art and the science of it okay that’s very interesting i know i sort of see maybe a shift between
it used to be the enterprises they didn’t really believe in open source and yet communities came along and
ultimately after a few decades they have won arguably with open source being so
prevalent and just so much bigger and widely used than proprietary software
so companies now have to start taking the idea of building
community around projects that have open source a lot more seriously so around that topic i looked online and
i saw something called the bacon method now when i typed that into google the
first thing to pop up was uh how to cook very very crispy bacon in the oven and that’s what it is i i
needed that anyway so but i i dug a bit deeper and i’m wondering if you could describe to us what is the
bacon method it’s it’s so funny so when i wrote people powered
um so the the bitter backstory is i wrote a book called the art of community a number of years ago back in 2008
and it’s a very kind of like it’s a it’s a it’s a practical guide to how to build communities it’s really intended for
nerdy tech people you know i wrote it from a position of being a nerdy tech person but as a consultant i work with lots of
different companies you know from banks to crypto companies consumer products services businesses
um so a lot of people who would come to me and say hey we’re thinking about a community they’d often say hey i just bought your
book the art of community i’m excited to read it and what made me nervous about that was that we’re going to read 10 pages and get completely stuck because
it went into too much too much detail too quickly so i came to the uncomfortable realization oh
god i have to write another book and it needs to be a business book um so i ended up writing this book
called people powered that you mentioned at the beginning and a business book is a very very different proposition than writing
logic book it’s a very very exhaustive editing process you know it took a year to basically
create it it took me four months to write it took me two and a half months to write it um
but it took a year of editing because the business press takes like every word is carefully figured out
so part the goal here was for people who have no idea about communities who don’t know anything about open source even
potentially how do you go from explaining the value of a community
to building one in a simple and effective way so the first bit explaining the value that was relatively
straightforward i can provide tons of examples of how to do that the second piece though is the problem i have with a lot of business books is
frankly they suck like you buy a business book and it provides a bunch of waffley kind of principles drowned in
examples and you get to the end of it and you think what did i actually really learn not a
lot that i can actually put into action it just annoys me and i actually said to harper collins when we were talking about doing people power i was like
i don’t want to write that book because i think those books suck i want something that’s that’s high level enough for
people to understand it but really really does give you some very very practical things that you can do
so i had to then think about okay well how do you do that and luckily i’d been by this point i’ve
been consulting full-time for about three years and i’ve been doing consulting on the side for about
10 we’re about 10 years so so i developed my approach my method and
when i so that’s kind of forms a big chunk of people power is how i do that and how i recommend people do it
um and i was like the problem the thing with business books as well is you kind of need to label all these things everything needs
to have a name so people can reference it in discussions so what do i call this so i jokingly called it the bacon method
because my last name is a stupid name like it’s it’s undeniable what’s even stupider than having the last name bacon
is some people think my name is john o’bacon oh which is ridiculous see who
doesn’t like bacon i can agree with that patron yeah okay oh i you know so i call it the
bacon the maker method but i put in the first paragraph of the book i don’t really call it that uh it’s just
kind of what do you call it i don’t really have a name for it from being honest with you
but now people started started calling it the bacon method and uh you know my ego loves it a community is
built around it right so uh but you know yeah so that’s kind of the basic
backstory of that okay very interesting one thing that i’ve also companies have started to do now is not
just keep their secret recipe like their coca-cola recipe hidden inside
their company they’re open sourcing projects because there’s a lot of benefits of doing that yeah so can we focus on how what are
some best practices for companies to create build and engage open source communities
around the open source projects uh their own open source projects so you’re
talking about uh if they’re running their own project they’re mainly they’re running their own projects in this open source yeah
yeah what a great question um so there’s there’s i mean as you can probably imagine there’s a lot there’s a lot to talk
about here um i think the first thing is um is judging the the point of it all if
i’m being honest with you um there are some people actually wrote a blog post about this that open source
it’s not a panacea right um an open source won’t make a terrible product
or a terrible project successful open source is an amazing developer methodology
to help people collaborate effectively around things that they care about but things but people got to care about that thing
in the first place so the question i would have first of all is who is your target audience that you have for this project and what
what what is the value of the project what is it going to do for them um and i always like to start that value
proposition by evaluating what with your target audience what do they hate about their lives
what sucks for them and how can your project relieve that pain relieve that that frustration for them
you know so for example one of the reasons why kubernetes has been so successful is because it really simplifies broad-scale
deployments right one of the reasons why ubuntu when i joined uh became so successful
was because at least on the desktop it was a lot easier to use and things just seemed to work compared to some of the competitors so
that to me is the is the first step um and being clear about that i think the second thing is is really
simplifying the onboarding experience for how people get started
and you can break that into two pieces one is going to be the onboarding experience for people to use your software right so
sadly all too often the onboarding experience is you stumble on the project at github
there is a a kind of fairly poorly crafted readme.md file
that walks through some elements of what the project is and then you’ve got to kind of figure it out like some kind of
annoying rubik’s cube um and that’s not the way to do it like microsoft
um had this um this principle that a friend of mine steve wally told me about and i think he
called it the shrink wrap gap which is within 10 minutes of taking the shrink wrap off a piece of boxed software this
is back in the early days you have to get some kind of value out of it within 10 minutes that’s how long you’ve got and i think
open source projects need to do the same thing like how do you easily get someone up and running like downloading it and
deploying it and using it and then and then getting some value out of it within 10 minutes and that’s an installation piece but that’s also like
a how do you get started and do something please um so that’s kind of one piece of the onboarding but the other piece of
the onboarding is then how do you get people to contribute and participate in your project and that’s more complicated because
they’re going to need to set up the tool chain and be able to build it and uh and not to work on um but
i think the key thing there is put yourself in the position of somebody who is brand new
like flip your brain into private browsing mode and think look at it through their eyes
and then figure out like what are the different pieces and each step of the way say um is this obvious
you know so for example if if step one is going to be uh build the software so you can actually make right code
ask yourself the question is it obvious how to build this no well now it’s time to write some documentation or simplify it
so that to me is really important because too many too many projects and this the open source world is very
guilty of this is they’ve really excited people who go out and kind of waffle on about it on social media and
mailing lists and elsewhere and get people excited about the software and focus a lot on the on the outreach
but then they don’t do the homework of getting the onboarding piece in place first of all and i think that’s
really critical and then finally just building a relationship with your with your audience like when
projects are very small this is pretty straightforward because you can often just know everybody um but the reason why
people join open source projects is not because they just want to build great software they want to solve interesting technology problems
it’s because they enjoy the human interaction they enjoy the sense of team spirit and and camaraderie
and we need to be intentional about that and it’s easy to uh with the best of intentions forget
that because we get busy with other stuff like you know you’re in your email all day you’ve got stuff to do your family’s
you know needs you you’re nerding out over the latest ps5 news
and you know you don’t have time to tap someone on the shoulder and say hey how’s it going you having a good time
with the project is there anything i can help with we’ve got to be intentional about that stuff i think that it definitely gets
lost especially when open source projects start to grow and grow and grow it’s not just the issue list that grows but
uh it’s the inability i guess to touch everyone off make everyone feel welcome a lot of these projects at least a lot
of maintainers i’ve talked to they struggle with that um totally agree yeah throughout your
uh tenure or your your time in open source what are some open source projects that
you think have the most thriving communities that you’ve observed and i’m i’m talking more
about actually let’s just go with open source projects oh great question um so i think there’s
a number of of good of good examples here i mean kubernetes is killing it right now they’re doing an amazing job
incredible and just frankly the overall cloud native computing foundation kind
of ecosystem is doing a they’re doing a really good job there’s lots of projects that live in that fish bowl
um i think debian has always been a very long-standing great example of community
and and they’ve and they’ve experienced the the true test of time um you know there can be a bit of a
grumpy bunch from time to time but uh uh that’s what you get when you have people who’ve been doing something for a
long time is there’s kind of ways of doing things and people like to stay within those ways of doing things which by the
way can be a problem for certain projects um is is kind of changing gears a little bit
uh but debian’s done a fabulous job um i think apache have done an amazing job um i think
there’s many foundations that have been doing a great job as well like the apache foundation i think the open source initiative
i mean the linux foundation i think could do an amazing work i’m a little biased to the linux foundation because um either a client and b uh jim zemlin
who runs the linux foundation is a good friend of mine um but i think they’ve they’ve filled a very important gap of
making the open source world to be a really palatable place for a lot of businesses large businesses who have no
idea about any of this stuff works and you know you kind of need an endpoint for that
and just kind of facilitating those projects um another great example that i have a real
soft spot for is a a project called blender and it’s a 3d graphics tool yes
very popular yeah yeah it’s amazing and part of the reason why i have a soft spot is when i was starting out in my
career um blender used to be owned by a company called not a number and then it was open
source ton rosendahl who’s the creator of blender bought the essentially bought the rights to it off
the company and then open sourced it and built a community around it and um i remember he i can’t remember
why he did this but he invited me to go and speak at one of the first blender conferences in amsterdam
and i met that group of people and i’m not an artist i have the artistic talent of a rubber hammer um but i was just they’re just such a
nice group of people and uh and i’ve actually just reconnected with blender recently reconnected with tan
uh and i just they’ve done amazing work i mean they’re just an incredible community out there so lots
of good examples well thank you for that that was great and i definitely always see glenda on the open source subreddit
it just continuously pops up and that’s how i knew there’s a strong community so i’m a company i
have a project that i’ve just open sourced there is value in it there’s definitely
a problem that i think a lot of users out there they they want to solve and they have that need
uh and we’ve made it easy to onboard where do i start and how do i go about
attracting people to that community so i think we can break again we can
break this into two pieces one is going to be users and then one’s going to be contributors um
i think you always want to start with users because
at least in my career so far i’ve never seen anyone become a contributor of an open source project without being a user
first yeah i think those people probably exist and they’re weird people why would you do that just for
fun just like yeah just like a like a batman style figure who just swoops into a project submits a pull
request and vanity i don’t know maybe there’s some interesting people out there
um i think it all boils down to value like one thing i i bang on about constantly in my
certainly in people power but also just in videos and books uh articles and whatever else is the importance of value
like everything to me is about value uh human beings are mercenary creatures we
um we’re not going to do something unless we can get something out of it right so the key thing i think is
is explaining what the value of your project is the problem with a lot of tech people uh that tech people are
guilty of is tech people are by definition interested in features like we talk about
specifications capabilities you know technical specification sheets we’re interested in all that kind
of stuff but when you’re talking to people who are new to something you have to talk about the benefits you have to
talk about what is going to what is going to be beneficial to them you know how is it going to benefit their lives
you know so to use a a comparison imagine you’re selling a a car
right the tech folks will probably talk about you know the speed and the wheel rim size and
you know what the entertainment systems in it and the suspension all that kind of stuff but for the people who are not who are
brand new what they want to know about is how is this car gonna how am i gonna use it in terms of my comfort in terms
of my commute in terms of how it’s going to make me feel those are the things we should talk
about so i think it’s important first of all to emphasize the value clearly the second thing i think is
really critical as well is to build a relationship with your users that um
is long-lasting right so the problem here is a lot of businesses and a lot of
of projects what they do is they say hey go and use our project and then come and hang out on our slack channel or
join our forum or something like that and you know if you build it they will come
doesn’t work uh i’d like it to work it makes my job a lot easier
but it doesn’t work so what we need to do is we need to give them a regular drip feed of stuff
that’s valuable right so you know to give you an example one of the things for um until when was it
february i thought email marketing was a complete waste of time um because the vast majority of the
email i get in my inbox is crap it’s yeah it’s it’s really really
beautifully designed coupon codes um and i just ignore it it’s and it’s people desperately trying to sell me
stuff um but then i’ve been kind of exploring a lot around digital marketing and i’m you know i’m doing some work in this
area with my own business where i’m making some some expanding out into a few different markets
so i thought i should probably do some email um and i thought what’s the kind of stuff that i want to read right so i decided to focus on just
sharing like best practice and guidance so you mentioned the beginning of this episode you know people who sign up for the book club or sign up for
the pack uh they will get added to my email and the only emails you’re really going
to get are going to be almost like articles that i send you it’s best practices guidelines it’s practical things
that will be useful and i discovered appreciate that yeah the open rates and the click rates go through the roof yeah and that’s a
great way of nurturing a relationship with people in an automated way so i think if you set up a project you you you start a business make sure
you get people have a place where you bring them together but then also you give them really good stuff it’s a heavy content
play but it’s really important um one thing that vcs always say to me over and over again
um that they have a problem with with new founders is that founders always regret they get their first round of customers
and then um they treat them like princes and princesses and then they go for the second round
and they expand out and they don’t spend enough time with that first round and then they leave and we can’t do that
in open source we’ve got to give them that we’ve got to have that relationship so yeah that’s more controversial
nurturing is what it’s all about yeah okay well now that we’ve focused on uh
companies open sourcing their own projects uh that’s not only the way that people
can oh sorry companies can come involved with uh open source communities it’s also contributing back to open source
projects that you use and it is definitely a trend companies are starting to do that a lot more these
days is it primarily because they want to influence the project to meet their needs in some way um or
why why are companies doing that i think there’s a few different reasons and it depends on the on the company
um so for example for large businesses like microsoft like i mentioned earlier on that microsoft were kind of the gorilla stomping around
getting all upset with everybody back in the early days of open source they they stopped the cancer sorry
open source of cancer they said open source is the cancer yeah unbelievable now an open source first
company right exactly i mean they’re they are huge participants in the open source world and there’s but you know you’re
gonna again you’re gonna get some emails henry from people who are who who spell microsoft with a dollar sign inside of
it you can be like never ever forgive never forgive but come on come on forgive forgive you forget give
forget live live love life exactly exactly and drink loads of gin
um yeah so i i think that um for companies like microsoft one of the reasons why they participate in a lot of
open source projects is because um these pro they really have high level like infrastructure requirements
and they’d have to build that code themselves and then maintain it so their philosophy is why don’t we just
build it out in the open we’ll put it into these projects and then it becomes something that everybody can value and benefit
from and it becomes a shared burden when it comes to security and maintenance and things like that and and that’s one of the reasons why i
think open source has been especially popular in the infrastructure world where you get companies like you know
microsoft and dell and amazon and google and all these businesses who
have to scale up infrastructure to such a massive degree as the cloud has become popular and
everybody’s building businesses now that are online like how when was the last time you downloaded an application to use it like it’s just
old school now like photoshop maybe but even that’s going online so um they’ve had to react and that
that’s a big burden so that’s where i think they can do that in open source now there are other
companies and smaller companies uh especially in an early stage startups that have maybe got
their first round of funding from a vc um often what they want to do is they want to kind of be a bit of a force in
an open source in the open source world so they can build an open source business around it it’s been a really
popular trend towards what are called open core companies recently where they have an open source project
and then they kind of have commercial services that sit on top of it and open source then becomes a market
for them but frankly the companies that succeed
the companies that primarily succeed there are the ones that are doing it for the right reasons they want to build great products want to build
great tech if they’re only doing it to raise brand awareness then it’s just like brand marketing it
becomes a very expensive exercise that you can’t really measure so okay that was great thank you and i
know uh one thing just on that note similar to on the contribution side i know that
you have to be very very careful as an enterprise going in and getting involved with the community because open source communities in particular
don’t want big brother or someone to come in and control them and take ownership so what are some best
practices for companies that are using an open source project and they want to contribute back how
can they best start integrating with that community i think the first step is is go and
mingle and spend time and understand them first because communities are subcultures
right and they’re a set of cultural norms that apply there and you know the thing about culture is
you can’t teach culture you can’t enforce culture um culture is the set of rules that the
people decide right so there’s no well there may be a law around this but there’s no
law stating that i can’t go to my downtown in my local town dressed as a peacock
screaming latin at people there’s no law that says that well it probably is um but
one of the reasons why i don’t do that is one i’m not insane but two is it would be a real social
faux pas to do that yeah so and and there’s and there’s these variances within these different in these different communities so go and
hang out and just watch and and learn and one of the great benefits of open source is it’s not like
many other industries where you can’t do your research with open source because we live out in the open you can go and
read the discussions read the pull requests go and read the the mailing list discussions read the slack channels and go and understand and
see it and ask people about it first so when you kind of go into that community you can kind of figure out how
it’s going i think many businesses frankly are nervous about this because they always
hear these horror stories of how prickly some open source people can be and you only have to say one thing wrong and
you know some dude on the neck beat is gonna hit you hit you to come down on you on on twitter
and i think to be honest with you that’s largely untrue there are a couple of miserable individuals but
you get that in any any group of people i found that the open source community is a very very friendly diverse
uh wonderful place to be and and so but yeah do your research first of all um and then i think just start simple
like go and do something that’s small like don’t for example um sun many years ago got
into a bit of hot water because um they open sourced um star office and it became open office
and it was just dumped on the internet there’s a code dump and they were thinking oh this is great you know like we’re open sourcing this
aren’t we good good citizens but a code dump means you have to go that’s a lot of work for people to
figure out how that works um and uh so that for example is a is a faux
pas in the open source world you know it would be better to go and start with something small build a relationship and then do
something a little bit bigger build relationships just kind of dip your toes in um and and and get get warm to the water
and then you’ll be fine i think yeah that that piece of advice to have small increments because i know
yeah like you said with the code gum we definitely have i’ve seen that at quansite which is an open teams partner
travis oliphant the founder of open teams also founded quansite and they it’s piecemeal because if you just chuck
everything in then it’s likely it’s not going to be accepted so start with something small build it up i think that’s very very very valuable device
but companies obviously really are focused on the bottom line well executives are focused on the bottom
line yet people understand how important open source is so how do you convince an executive
who wants to know that this is worth doing contributing back to this community is worth doing in other words what is what is the roi
how do you measure the roi of your involvement with an open source community
good question i mean um and that frankly will vary quite significantly so i can share a few
thoughts but um i think it would need to really be tied quite specifically to that individual company
um let’s say for let’s take an example let’s imagine somebody is um
um let’s say they’re a bank right and they and they’re deploying a service to the
internet and they use a bunch of open source components and they their engineers are saying we’d like to
build something new that this project doesn’t do and we feel like we should then contribute it into the
into this particular project let’s say it’s kubernetes again as an example um and the executive’s saying like why
are we doing this like why can’t somebody else build this for us like why can’t we sell this um
the first thing i would say is um the the maintenance burden is significantly reduced um is that it’s much easier to maintain
that at that particular point so it lowers the cost of overall infrastructure management
your security posture is improved um because projects that are open source
tend to be very very secure because you know more eyeballs are looking for bugs and therefore looking for security vulnerabilities and
and and it makes you more secure the other thing i would say is if this bank let’s say is interested in building a closer relationship with
the open source community um there are many benefits to that in terms of hiring recruiting people in
to work on your infrastructure your technology um also kind of building relationships is
the brand that’s known and well respected in the open source world which again can help with recruiting but also potentially help with sales so
let’s say this is a bank that has a series of cloud apis for people to interface with their
mobile payments as an example um um and a lot of the companies that
would be buying that service or paying for that service maybe are active in the open source world well again that kind of sets you
up as a very very prominent well-respected technical leader because you’re a prominent part of the open
source world let’s say you’re sponsoring conferences you’re speaking at events you’re you know contributing actively to open
source projects you know it positions your brand in a really positive way um the good news i think is that uh
more and more business business leaders are pretty savvy towards open source at least in the technical
technology infrastructure and services world what we’re starting to see more of is people you know kind of on the edges
who are less familiar with this who are now figuring it out people in art and sciences and um consumer
products and uh gaming and things like that they’re the ones who are now saying like what is
this open source thing it’s just a bunch of hippies hanging out in a drum circle and writing software like they’re taking
over right it’s weaponized yoga is what it is
so yeah that’s uh there’s but there’s many benefits but again i think the key is if you’re gonna have that conversation those are kind of
generic benefits but you’ve got to tie it specifically to what that organization is seeking to achieve like so i would broach that by saying to
the person like what are your goals like what are your top four things that you want to achieve with this business
and then let’s see how the work being done in an open source way can serve those goals and if they can’t
serve those goals then you shouldn’t do it but it’s very rare that it wouldn’t serve those goals
so yeah one thing too i think we always talk about at open teams is the idea
that you’re not just saving money now whether it’s maintenance or other costs you’re saving money in the future because you don’t have to maintain this
thing indefinitely um and that’s one thing i think a lot of companies at least forget about is it’s
not just the short term that you’re saving money it’s going to be the long term so i’d like to shift
these again i’m sorry i was just going to say also the pizzas go to our conferences as well
so uh you know that’s one of the ones that’s that’s not an excuse to get me there
it appears that pizza is good sold i sold i didn’t mean to wrong okay let’s go
back to the you go back to the serious important meaningful content and i’ll continue to destroy it is serious are you saying
peter’s not serious that’s a good point pizza is serious sorry peter gods of peter
i don’t know if you follow the bastards they um are now they do pizza reviews all around the country it’s really interesting just
really seeing all the different restaurants yeah i follow them largely just for that reason because you’re going to see
all the different types of pieces where you can get the best pizzas but um that’s something i’m gonna get a
pizza for lunch it’s only 7 47 here in australia but i’ll get a pizza for once um 7 47 a.m a.m
yes oh my god thank you this by the way my um my time is usually i get up at 4
30 now these these days so i can make half a day in the u.s just for a short period of time
4 30 i know but i i thought i i thought it would be um difficult and
i never expected i’d be that person but it’s fine if you get your seven eight hours in you wake up i usually leave my
alarm play for about five minutes just living sitting there until i’m annoyed and i have to get up and turn the alarm off but it’s
um oh yeah yeah what i love about it is by the time that everyone else starts i’ve already got
half a day under me of work um yeah and then you’ve got to hold it dad what time do you get uh between eight and nine so quite early
yeah i’d never done that in my life i don’t think i’ve never done that and it was usually
at 12 or 1am but um yeah i guess i just want to adjust to the circumstances now
it can be done you’re an inspiration to all of us henry exactly i’m trying to do that in the past
yeah it’s disappointing about going to bed earlier i think i’m in lockdown now in a hotel so i’ve got nothing else
to do there’s no excuse um i thought it’s been good to get these routines but um you’re our
very own snowden so exactly and we we respect you for this henry you’re locked down
responsible i’ve got four days left i’m counting the seconds
one thing i wanted to quickly focus on before we wrap up is a big movement which a lot of
companies have been focusing on lately and really seeing a lot of value out of implementing it and that is inner
source so can you explain what is in a source and how does it relate to open source
yeah so the the idea of inner source is that you take the uh the methodology and the approach of
open source and you apply that inside of a business within the walls of that business right so um
again uh let’s use a bank as an example um and i’ve worked with a couple of different banks in helping them with
their inner source strategy uh you know they don’t want to put open source outside this is going to be technology that they’re building for
their products for their customers um technology that would be inappropriate to to put out there for lots of different
reasons um but they they look at open source and like this is a really great way to work like it’s it’s um developers across the
business having access to the same code uh it’s a consistent uh method of contribution and participation it’s open
workflow and collaboration it’s decisions being made in an online setting and documented an
online setting instead of drafty meeting rooms it’s all of those different pieces and
it’s it’s a really really really powerful model um we often look at open source as as
the code that’s the really valuable bit of it but for me ever since i first got interested in this the most exciting piece is the
is the the method the approach it’s the collaboration piece and i arguably that’s part of the reason for
that is i think it’s so important is because i’m a nerd when it comes to communities and collaboration you’re a community
right right but it’s bringing that into into the organization um so a lot of
businesses have been very excited about this like bosch and santander and deutsche bank and
huawei and sony and all kinds of businesses have done this but it’s and it seems like an easy thing
to think about like if you know open source then you could go and work in a business and do it but it’s really
really hard work and the reason why is because you have you may have an executive team who wants
to move to an inner source model and your engineers will almost certainly want to have a more free and open
way of working rather than the command and control culture of many of these big businesses the big challenge is the middle
management layer it’s the people who’ve got all of the responsibility and the resources and frankly not a lot of the power and
it’s getting them into a different cultural and technological mindset and approach
so it’s um it’s really rewarding when you pull it off but it’s hard hard work to do well how do you do
it do you hire someone internally do you go to johno baking consulting what is the best way for a company and what are the best practices uh i
thought it would give you a plug there but the the only solution here by the way is is john a baking consultant
consulting there’s no other solution
i think the um i think what you need is you need first of all you need to empower you need someone who owns the project
you need somebody who’s going to facilitate that growth in the company in moving to an open source model i think the key the key thing is you got
to start small and simple and get some wins if you show up and you design this big
complicated let’s say you you design this big complicated system and it’s like all right we’re all going to have our code in this internal
github or gitlab gitlab repository and this you all now have to work this way you’re not gonna succeed
so what you need to do is you need to um start small and it could be one project um in an internal github repo for
example or git lab um and just get people contributing code within that one team
in an open way and then maybe attract a couple of other developers in there and they can start doing it you
provide training and guidance and things like that um the key is that when you do this when you come up with that initial first
idea that really lightweight idea is you’ve got to get all of your different teams who are impacts
part of the process of designing how it’s going to work um if you go in if if you’re a community person or in a
source person design
you’re more likely to be successful but what it also needs is it needs your execs to be very clear
that this is something that’s important to the business the big challenge within a source is that people
developers love the idea of doing it but one they’ve got other things that they need to do that they know their manager
considers to be more important and two they need to have the time to do it like it’s unfair to ask one of your
employees to work late to work in your inner source code so that requires you being able to say
okay if we if we want to do in a source that means that we’re not doing something else
and what is that other thing so you need to set the expectations very clearly from your executive team the inner source is important and the
manager and the middle management layer should expect to make time for it um
and the middle management layer should ex set the expectations that some of things won’t get done or things will get done late at a later
uh milestone to make time for it but then you also need to really reward and celebrate
those people internally who do it so when your first couple of developers start doing it you want to shower them with with with
validation and affection and gifts and whatever else so other people in the in the social grouping which is that business
know that that’s something they should be doing too yeah well thank you so so so much this is
where we’re gonna wrap up i’ve really really enjoyed talking with you uh it’s good to have another accent
on the pla on the podcast and yeah it was a great conversation thanks for your insight yeah exactly make sure i’m gonna get a pizza
this pizza is still in my head can i have pizza prep for breakfast is that is that okay i you know what i think
this is this is innovation we’ve read all this innovation in those in those business books right and i yeah sure it can be you know i don’t
know kanban or whatever but i think eating pizza for breakfast that comes under the banner of innovation yeah i think i think i’m
going to i think i’m going to i get one over each order a day in this prison so i’m gonna use that on a pizza i love
it i love it but yeah thank you so much it’s been a pleasure and um make sure you go out and get the book
people powered and sign up to the book clubs i think that’s an amazing opportunity to be able to learn something i know i was reading
through the reviews and people said it’s a book you need to read twice one to go through all the theory and understand it the second to understand
how you can actually put it into practice so go out and get the book and i know you also run two podcasts what are the two
podcasts that people can find you at and want to hear your voice yeah so one is called bad voltage which is two idiot friends and i
talking about tech and open source um and then the other one is is is is conversations with bacon where
i just interview people like a long form and kind of like this just just a long form conversation
for an hour and it’s you know i’ve had a it’s it’s a a really broad variety of people from
mark shuttleworth who runs canonical to the ceo of meetup.com to a guy who’s a vc of psychedelics
someone who invented a hangover cure uh executive coaches all kinds of people yeah just interesting conversation
that’s awesome and to those of you who are watching this on youtube then please like the video and also
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how we’re doing and what kind of content you’d like to see so thank you very much for everyone for
listening thank you jono and stay safe everyone until next time
you
