[Music]
hello again everyone uh we are back um
and we have next donna benjamin to tell
us um
about the open practice library and
contributing to it so donna benjamin is
a passionate advocate of free and open
source software for the past two decades
donna has been the glue for many
successful organizations teams and
individuals her volunteer work has been
instrumental in helping open source
organizations to upsize and sometimes
downsize as they mature with their
communities
so donna will be accepting questions
afterwards um
so if you have any questions for donna
and please do have lots of questions uh
pop them into the questions tab in venus
and i will pass them on to donna
donna they're all yours
thank you betsy
hello everyone here we are
at the lenox confereu 2022 and it is
amazing um please join me in sharing
great exuberance and gratitude to
everybody who has put this on in this
virtual space it's extraordinary
i'm also coming to you from the unseated
lands of the warunduri people whose
language is woburong so i'd like to use
one of their words woman checker to this
session live and synchronous
contribute to the open practice library
thanks for the introduction betsy um i'm
i'm humbled um and and kind of awed to
be here so let's get on with the show
but wait
what's the open practice library i'm so
glad you asked i've shared a link there
openpracticelibrary.com
learn which gives a bit of a blurb but
let me start by saying that i first
encountered this about three years ago
it was introduced to me by the wonderful
leslie hawthorne who some of you uh will
know
and
when i when i looked at this i went
where has this been all my life
the open practice library brings
open
and agile together and it was the first
time i'd i'd really seen the the
intersection of these things and for
such a long time i'd felt that there was
so much
in common between the worlds of open
source and the worlds of agile
and agility kind of methodologies and
yet the communities just seemed
so separate so different there were a
few bridges between those communities
and there were a few people in common
but they were completely separate events
and different kind of groups of people
so the open practice library
brings them together in a way that i
think is really awesome and
early last year i i was um
glad to take up the take the baton if
you like and become the maintainer of
opl as we call it the tla the
three-letter acronym of open practice
library is opl so i might use that as
shorthand as we go
so
um feel free to grab that link and you
know multitask a little bit as i talk
i'm going to do a bit of an introduction
around what opl is but then i want to
get into the into the guts of saying
well how do you actually contribute to
this thing because that's what i really
want i need help and i want to invite
encourage
cajole
people to to join me in this effort so
it started out as a fork
of mobiusloop.com
this is this is
referred to as an outcome-based delivery
model the infinite loop is something
that um
you know it we see a lot these days it's
used in all sorts of diagrams it seems
to have become the diagram of the day
kind of thing you'll see it in devops
but it really is
in this case talking about the sort of
infinite um back and forth between these
different elements that um too often
we've lived in silos um quite often in
in sort of the agile delivery world it's
all about delivery and we don't
necessarily get to interact and engage
as much on the discovery side um the
open source community hasn't necessarily
been as explicit in my experience of
these different modes we kind of just
roll out roll up our sleeves and and get
get get into it
and that's really close to my heart as
one of the things that we um
we advocate is just start don't don't
get too bogged down in analysis
paralysis but start somewhere and that
might be starting with asking questions
like why
why are we doing this who are we doing
it for
um
what are the outcomes that we're really
looking for and focusing on outcomes
rather than outputs
in the middle we've got a pivot a pivot
phase and and and then we've got a
delivery phase so that's mobiusloop.com
what we did with the open practice
library was fork that and we added a new
foundation layer and i actually it's
probably not very good
very good analogy for a foundation layer
to think of it as a seesaw but i kind of
do think of it as a seesaw because it
has two components that you want to keep
in balance and those components are
culture
on the one hand and technology on the
other we want to keep
our focus on technology and technology
practices and cultural practices and
methods in balance you can't have one
without the other if you want to have a
strong foundation
so back to mobius there's three phases
so if you've got think about we've got
this
foundation of culture and technology and
then we've got these three phases that
are supported by that foundation
discovery options
and delivery
what i want to do is kind of not go too
much into the open practice library
itself the phases all of that sort of
stuff i want to really focus on
the contribution piece how can you
contribute in what ways can you
contribute what sorts of people
might
want to contribute what sorts of people
are contributing
um last year i wrote this this piece for
opensource.com seven ways anyone can
contribute to the open practice library
and it can be as simple as spreading the
word and i'm sort of seated the chat
with a with a hashtag i'd love you to to
help me help me do that
contribute to opl
um
that's a really important part of doing
it um jumping onto the site and adding a
comment if you've used a practice
if you have a question about a practice
add a comment in our in our um comment
system then it sort of levels up from
there right add
add a practice uh if you're if you're
doing something
um if you're using some kind of tool or
practice or methodology to
get better teamwork out of your crew
consider sharing that practice with us
on the open practice library you can
improve the practices that are there
that's an absolutely brilliant way of
contributing and a low barrier to entry
add a link to a reference that
for that practice fix a typo tweak the
grammar all of those sorts of things
think of it a bit like um the wikipedia
of open and agile practices if you like
and just get in there and start making
it better
then there's the next levels up which is
you know adding an issue or a comment on
github and then finally there's helping
with the website itself
it's an open project it's on github
and
patches welcome
patches welcome or well volunteered if
you do find a bug and you have the
capability to help fix it so that's sort
of where i really wanted to kind of
explore
what i'm going to do is jump out of the
presentation and jump through a few
links and this is where i think
this could get a little
messy this is a little bit experimental
i do have
backup
material to present if it doesn't work
and we can't really interact effectively
because i did a webinar on on the open
practice library which has a bit more
detail in it so that's my sort of plan b
to jump to that um if if we need to
um so first up github we're on github so
uh go go ahead go
grab uh grab the link hopefully my my
trusty my trusty team is going to share
these links with you in the chat but go
ahead and open github.com
open practice library slash open
practice library
there's a whole bunch of repositories in
there there's some history and reasons
why things aren't the way they are or um
as my my good friend stuart smith used
to say um historic hysterical raisins
rather than historical reasons um things
just are the way they are in open
projects um sometimes for for good
reasons and sometimes just cause so
anyway um there's some stuff in there so
head to that uh the next thing is that i
want to talk about is when it comes to
contributing
we're using netlify cms
and you can log in
with your github
id
and i've put the sort of screenshots
there of what you get if you if you
go to the site and hit improve a
practice or out of practice you'll go to
netlify cms
and then you'll be given this option to
log in with netlify identity and i
strongly recommend that you just
continue with github if you already have
a github account
if you don't already have a github
account please go ahead and create one
because that's the kind of way we do
authentication for the open practice
library
underneath that i've got just a couple
of screenshots of netlify cms so on the
left
um is just the content list that you'll
see once you've once you're
logged in you'll see the list of
practices
on the right is the editorial workflow
which you get if you hit that workflow
link in the in the top nav bar there and
that shows you like a little kanban bar
drafts in review and ready and there's a
bunch of stuff in there at the moment
that's um
kind of in draft and in review i was a
good girl and did some maintenance work
yesterday to make sure that there wasn't
anything
outstanding and waiting so that's
netlify cms and that's really the
content side of it so if you're
interested in adding practices and
improving practices then netlify cms is
the place to play
whereas github is if you're more
interested in the community itself
and the infrastructure of the community
then that's where we sort of play with
all of that
um i said that spreading the word is one
way to contribute and we're on the
socials i did a post on linkedin a
little while ago which got some really
interesting responses
we've kind of really activated twitter
over the past year there is an instagram
account which is has nothing in it um
i'm not really a big instagram user so
that's an area for future development if
you like and maybe a volunteer might be
interested in helping drive engagement
around the community through insta and
there's also a slack um a slack instance
but it's
this is problematic it exists etc i'm
going to speak a little bit more about
some of the problems in a little bit
yeah
so um
yeah there's there's a lot to do the
open practice library is has been around
for about five years and and i've been
the maintainer for less than one
um
[Music]
the community infrastructure isn't well
defined like we've used gita as our
real-time chat
um
we've got this slack channel there's
this hive or community
comment system on the site itself
so
we don't really have any
clear governance
there's an issue around some questions
around the code of conduct and how we
might tweak that so there's work to do
there so that community infrastructure
piece that you know jono talked about
sort of
so beautifully
yeah just yesterday
and kathy talked about right community's
assistance and some of our systems are a
little bit like clunky or undefined or
hard to access and that's an area that
needs that needs help
and the community processes as well
aren't necessarily well defined like um
how do you if you're out of practice
what happens to it then um you know
we've got a very uh optimistic and
welcoming
approach to accepting uh contributions
uh perfect is the enemy of the good so
we don't expect it to be perfect just
like wikipedia you can start with a stub
start with something and build on it
that's fine but that's not necessarily
as clearly communicated
as it could be
and then the big bits i don't have the
time and i don't have the skills to do
everything
that i want to do there's so much to do
there's so much potential here and and
the community um
that has contributed so far just is just
wonderful but uh how do we how do we
level up you know how do we how do we
really make this um the sort of upstream
that that it it has the potential to be
and that's where i just really want to
put it out there i i need help um and
and i'm hoping that by
sharing this at linux confay u i i might
be able to
recruit a few willing
volunteers
to to help me
do this
so that's the the the guts of sort of
the talk part of it what i wanted to do
so let me now go backwards a little bit
and give you all an opportunity
to um jump into github jump into the
open practice library website itself if
i go right back here and slash learn and
maybe start kind of throwing up
some questions that that we can respond
to
after this session we're either going to
go into the um into the post
post session chat or we might if it's
possible if it's easy we might be able
to set up some video a video chat room
will sort of to be defined we have a
video room betsy is amazing um so if
you're interested in really having a
play and getting you know um getting
your kind of
um hands dirty uh and and have some
questions and see if we can figure some
things out together because um i i i
have some i have some be skills i also
have the ability to break things in new
and interesting ways so um
there are some things that i haven't
been gained to kind of touch and poke i
still don't quite have my head around
exactly how it all hangs together so
that's sort of one of the to be you know
um to do sort of thing um in hub there's
a few little projects and stuff where i
started kind of public putting some of
my um to-do's publicly so yeah we kind
of go through all of that as well how
are we going for time betsy i think i'm
way like i finished my material should i
get it get a read from the room do you
want me to go into some of my webinar
content or do we want to start playing
around with
um github and netlify and twitter and
all that kind of stuff how do how does
the what does the room want next
i can teach
this is my uh other prepared um
presentation and there's lots of stuff
there but it's not sort of
it's really my kind of plan b
do people want to start having does
anyone have any questions at this point
okay before there's a little bit of a
delay
on the stream so they're only just
getting up to you asking the question um
we've got some people saying webinar
content play with the tools i want to
see natalie fee netlafey netlifie demo
netlifi demo the cms demo demo demo
let's do demo
all right okay so i'll just switch to
this tab
and
this is the open practice library for
those of you who haven't hit the link
there it is um learn more is that slash
learn this this is what we say is we
should send people to this page first to
learn more about what the open practice
library is and where it came from
and all of that kind of good stuff um
thank you red hat for being um our kind
of sponsor and um
big contributor to the to the first five
years but i'm hoping um it will it you
know in terms of it being the biggest
contributor start i'm hoping that that
will reduce over time as more people get
involved it's all creative commons and
mobius luke is is the is the upstream
from from the open practice library so
exploring the library itself um
click think
there we go
this has a kind of cute little
interactive component in it that um the
the different phases uh if you click on
them you actually get filter through of
the different um practices that are that
are there
uh and there's a lot of them there's
over 160 practices are in the library
now
the foundation
and these little tabs also these little
buttons sorry also filter through
into those different phases of the work
now
tricky if you know the name of the
practice then you can use this but it's
a filter it's not actually search
so you have to kind of know the name so
there's one that
so actually came up in one of the
sessions today i think liz was talking
about retrospectives and they are so you
know just retrospect and it's filtered
into
these different retrospective practices
i did some fantastic
interviews with some folk last year
which highlighted some of the
kind of glitches and and and tricky bits
around it so there's definitely lots of
issues and we know about some of them
and you know others kind of get
uncovered all the time but uh you know
this this um
you know it's all open right so we want
to we want to try to start to think
about what can we do what can't we do
what are our limitations and constraints
our hosting situation is a little bit
precarious
in some ways
and you know do i need to kind of put
together a you know a case for getting a
more robust kind of hosting
infrastructure behind it yada yada all
of these kinds of things and also the
sort of funding model is a little bit
questionable at the moment it's sort of
all volunteer effort um and there's very
small amounts of costs which are coming
out of people's um pockets at the moment
but it's not a lot so
sort of it's sort of doable so that's um
the site itself
um
this is netlify now i'm already logged
in so it's not gonna take me through the
screenshots that i that i showed but um
you know you can see broadly speaking
this this kanban that i kind of had
there
i can go in so this check-ins one has
been sitting around for a while it's in
draft mode the author hasn't hasn't had
a chance to come back to it yet but this
is the
the content management side of it so
there's a bunch of fields
um
you know check-ins are so you can see
that here and it's sort of this this is
pretty cool it's sort of live
you can sort of see the live update here
on the right
so you literally can very easily hit
improve this practice on any on any
practice and find yourself you know in
this
in this interface um you can save it you
can say no just delete those changes
that was madness
viewer preview and then importantly set
status so you know fiddle around in
draft when you're happy with it put it
to in review
once you've reviewed it with with
someone we would like to sort of have a
collaborative process there then then
you can move it to ready and and then
that's sort of a signal to me as the
maintainer they go yep okay let me have
a look and and merge that in
okay so i'm just going to
pop back
to
here now the other thing is if you are
going to add a new practice for the
first time
you also need to create an author page
for yourself
so i'm going to go in there
and
it's loading all of the entries of all
the authors that we've had contribute
which is awesome
and in new author
this information is not actually um like
it's not a page we don't have a
we don't have a feature at the moment
for having a profile for our authors
that's on the would like to have or in
the sort of the wish list but do put
your name as it would be displayed
as attribution and importantly your
github username because that's how we're
doing
attribution right so they're the two
important bits the rest is completely
optional and not necessary but these two
bits are necessary and then go ahead and
click save
okay
so
let me now jump to
seven ways anyone can contribute to the
open practice library so this is on
opensource.com you can see
published that in in october
and it sort of goes through it's a like
lightweight how to contribute to um
pretty much some of the things that i've
sort of gone over but that's an easy
reference
if you want to have a dig around in
there
and then
let me switch to one of the socials
which is the
twitter
the twitter account for practice library
when i
um started when i was started
took over the maintainership of this
it had um two followers
and i'm i'm pleased to be able to say
we've grown that um 150-fold
to 150 and even even today we've added
four new followers so that's all so this
is one of the ways that i'm going i'm
trying to kind of extend the reach
and grow the community is through
outreach in various ways so twitter is
one i mentioned um instagram as as a to
uh you know
to
to do for the future linkedin wherever
like where people are we need to go to
them and evangelize what we're doing
here and what we're trying to do and see
if people are willing excuse me willing
to contribute so
that's one of the um
one of the ways that i i have some
skills there like i have experience
using twitter but i'm sure there are
other ways and other communities and
other ways to connect that that we
haven't necessarily
explored
so
that is that now you wanted me to maybe
have a little bit of a look at
some of the other material
that i covered so let me just quickly
um
go in here and and really just one
little thing about going back to the to
the very start and this is a bit of a
thank you
to red hat because
um i joined red hat
coming up on three years ago
after um i'd spoken to leslie hawthorne
and and found out about the open
practice library i actually got hired as
an engagement lead and the open practice
library is a little bit like the
upstream
for the open innovation labs which is
where i
you know the the part of red hat that i
work in i'm an engagement lead in the
open innovation labs and i sort of say
like well red hat enterprise linux and
linux linux is upstream to rel
um opl is upstream to labs to our labs
um and it started out as a way of
sharing knowledge in the team members of
of labs and someone said well why aren't
we doing this in the open and that's how
the open practice library was born how
do our the practitioners in our team
share our knowledge in a way that's open
and accessible and invites others to
contribute and and that
that just really ignited my sense of um
community my sen my my passion for for
free and open source software but also
my passion for people and teams and
helping them do their best work so that
that really um
that really f
um how can i say that really like
ignited you know the the potential of
this for me and then you know a couple
of years later to be asked to be the
maintainer
just felt like uh you know how did i
manage to to to score this kind of
moment in my life where i literally feel
like pig in mud and i'm able to you know
participate in this place it's just it's
just extraordinary but now i'm kind of
realizing how out of my depth i am and
how much help i need and so this is
where i'm kind of like raising the you
know sending up the kind of flares and
saying please help um i know there's so
much in common between the open source
community and the agile community but
the connection is so is so tenuous that
i feel like i just need to put out the
call and say hey
you know we've got we can there's so
much we can learn from each other in
terms of our practices let's do it and i
think like liz's talk this morning
really speaks to that
in the world of sre and observability
and
but the people's side of it right it's
not just technology it's also bringing
together these things as the
socio-technical
systems that they are that we can't have
one without the other which comes back
to
the balance of our foundation
of culture and uh and tech together so
yeah that's that's it so let's go to
questions if there are any um if not
then i might go and have a quick break
and see you in the chat shortly so betsy
so we have you we've got um two
questions um so i'll ask them now uh and
then we'll move on
so the first one is do open practice
creators and contributors ever have any
issues with ip for example proprietary
practices going after them over use of
names trademarks etc
we haven't yet and i think we've been
lucky um
our get out of jail free card here is
that
a practice needs to be contributed by a
practitioner
and there's no copyright
um on an idea
right so if you write it in your own
words and from your own experience
and legitimate and give credit and
attribution to where that idea came from
then i think legitimately you can share
it um as fair use and creative commons
but i am not a lawyer and that hasn't
been tested great question
um when practices are superseded what
are the triggers to clean it up how is
that decided oh what an excellent
question uh part of the uh bit that you
know here be dragons and and we don't
necessarily have all the all the
infrastructure and processes that we we
need and that kind of ongoing curation
is one of them it also speaks to one of
the
you know wished for features that we
don't have is a way to curate a list of
you know what is a good starting set of
practices or what's a recipe of
practices these are some of the things
that we'd really like to develop and
curating for
quality popularity
applicability in different scenarios is
also is also an area of future need and
development
okay there's one more questions with
which has received quite a lot of
upvotes and normally i would moderate
out a question like this um but i think
it's actually um
there's probably some things that that
that you could
um
i think it is good to ask you especially
in light of the conversations we've been
having at this conference about
community and burnout and so on uh the
question which is now up to eight up
votes donna how do you remain so awesome
the secret to that is that i'm not
really i'm just pretending
okay
yeah
it's good um
but the but speaking to that the the
bigger intent there is burnout is real
and and you know some of you may have
found me missing in action at various
times and sometimes i have to go do
something else
um i also
really want to acknowledge the amazing
support team my support team of um my
felines who are curiously absent right
now but also some of you know um mr
peter levitink also known as kfuego who
frankly just is he was chief sanity
officer for linuxconfigure 2008 and he
hasn't stopped being my chief sanity
officer um i couldn't do as much as i do
without um you know without without that
so acknowledging the people around you
um taking the time to fit your own mask
before
fitting others um it's really important
so you don't see when i need to go and
be in a in a in a dark room in a quiet
place right you see the lights are on
kind of donna not that the lights are
off donna
yeah and um
yeah support network is so important
whatever species
yeah
yeah it's great to hear um from you
because you are such a
big bright personality that keeps a lot
of the community inspired i think
judging from the chat so you are
appreciated thank you everybody that
that's that's you're gonna make me cry
i'm gonna not cry because it's not cool
but no i'm not even going to say that
because crying's fine actually crying is
really good and if you need to cry then
i wholeheartedly encourage you to do so
where and when and as you you need to
crying is not something to be afraid or
ashamed of
absolutely are there any other questions
uh no that's it so we still
are at um
almost 14 minutes before the end of the
time slot so we're finishing a bit early
but um i think that's
good so there is a um
there is a video oh yes but i do have
that i do have a little bit more
material if people feel like they want a
little bit more but i'm also like really
up for finishing early gives people a
chance to go take a walk
go look at something other than a screen
all that kind of stuff so maybe we could
get a quick read from the from the
comments if people want more stuff or
more posters in the chat real quick
it's going to take a moment because
there is a time delay
we can be mindful
and intentional and breathe in this
moment
uh someone says early is good
someone says more stuff one more thing
one more thing okay that's that's like a
compromise all right someone says we
okay one more and then we'll move to the
discussion
all right cool let me just so i'm using
miro there's one more thing is i would
absolutely love
to
learn about um
an open source alternative
so the one more thing i'm going to do is
is where i think the part of the
intersection of isn't that going to come
in okay it's practice and experiment i'm
just going to zoom in on this part of
the talk and i'll also dig out the link
to where i did this this webinar um and
share that practice and experiment this
is really key to the open practice
library and key to what we do at labs
but also something that the open source
community has done from the beginning
right is
have a go
just start try something make a make a
um you know have a first crack like
linus's very words putting out linux oh
this is just a hobby it's never going to
be big and professional right it's like
start with something and
and lean into the collaborative
potential of what you have started you
don't necessarily have to have all the
answers you only have to have the
beginning
and then the welcome invitation to a
community to come and help make that
better
and and i think that's really sort of
at the heart of open practice library of
open communities and of great technology
that supports humans so
on that note i will um thank you all so
much and please thank betsy for being
our amazing mc
and wrangling i know wrangling me is not
nothing i would ever want to have to do
because i know how much hard work it is
so thank you betsy thank you to the
whole av team and thank you to the whole
lca
infrastructure core crew
incidental accidental as you like it
thank you very much and thank you to all
of you
for spending time with us today
and thank you donna for sharing like
such lovely and interesting things and
inspiring us all
um okay so we have a video chat channel
for follow-up discussion it is called
the open prox open practice library
discussion room you'll find it in the
channels um list in the sidebar it'll be
near the top because the video chat
channels are
up so open practice library discussion
um so
uh and then it is also um
we're going into our lunch break for
this conference or other time zone
appropriate long break um so
sessions will resume
at 1 30 conference time
um so yeah don't have any last words
about the discussion room or anything
um i will get the link for etsy and see
you in there shortly
great
all right bye