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When Lisa-Marie Namphy helped establish the SF Bay Cloud Native Containers User Group around a decade ago, it was the first-ever OpenStack user group, but the focus has since expanded to encompass many technologies and use cases across the cloud native ecosystem. While one meeting may help developers troubleshoot issues in Kubernetes, the next may introduce a new project or explain an emerging technology such as Database as a Service (DBaaS).
Listening to the community and evolving alongside its needs has helped Namphy grow the group into one of the world’s largest Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) user groups. She constantly asks herself what topics will provide the most value to group members: “If it’s going to solve a problem the community might have, I think it’s going to be a really interesting talk,” Namphy says.
Tune in to this episode of Open at Intel podcast as Namphy shares the secret to growing communities, how to balance corporate and community interests, and tips for corporate sponsors looking to get more involved.
Listen to the full episode here. This conversation has been edited and condensed for brevity and clarity.
Katherine Druckman: Will you please introduce yourself and tell us what you do in the open source community?
Lisa-Marie Namphy: I’m a CNCF ambassador. I also run a large user group in the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s been called many things over the years. It started out as the first ever OpenStack meetup group, and then we morphed it more into an open infra group because we were talking about Docker, then Kubernetes, and applications that people are running in this cloud -native ecosystem. So we changed it to a group on cloud native containers. We’re lucky with our user group because we’re in the Bay Area, and we get a lot of technology that starts there. I’ve had the opportunity to run the first ever meetups for Istio, Zuul, Kata Containers, and Numaproj.
There isn’t really one title that fits everything I do. Developer relations (DevRel) can include a lot of roles, such as developer advocate, community architect, community manager, technical evangelist, or principal product evangelist. I used to host meetups at HP when I was working there, so it was convenient that I had space to host OpenStack meetups for all those years, but it wasn’t something that I was ever paid to do, as with so many of us in the community. If my name gets mentioned, it’s because I’ve been doing this a really long time, and I’ve always tried to bring a component of teaching and mentoring into it. It’s been a little bit of a nights and weekends job because that’s how open source is. We all wear multiple hats.
The Recipe for Growth
Katherine Druckman: What’s your advice for organizing and growing community events? How do you get people plugged in and coming back?
Lisa-Marie Namphy: For me, the secret has always been content and community. I really care who the presenter is and what they’re going to talk about. I make sure that whatever we’re showcasing is interesting and educational. If someone is just trying to become famous, or their talk comes from a place of self-interest, I’m not going to pick that person. We want somebody who’s super passionate about technology. We lean on open source because it’s better for the community. You don’t want a parade of commercials going across the stage; people need to learn something from the talks. That doesn’t mean we don’t want vendors to come and give presentations. But I think vendors get enough great branding for themselves just by hosting events, giving away swag, and doing a quick, five-minute lightning talk.
Consistency is also good. We try to meet at the same time every month. At HP, we used to do two meetups a month, one more technical meetup for contributors and one more educational meetup for the community to come together. So be really clear and consistent about the content that you’re trying to put out there. If it’s a meetup around a technology like Kubernetes, that’s kind of more open because there are a lot of areas you can go with that. If it’s just one small project, you shouldn’t really expect to have hundreds and thousands of people there at first. In the beginning, we sometimes had 12 people in the room. We used to be able to meet in coffee shops.
Katherine Druckman: That can be valuable. I enjoy a dozen or so people geeking out and solving problems.
Lisa-Marie Namphy: Which is kind of what’s going to happen anyway even when we started having 50 people, it was still the same 12 of us standing in the parking lot continuing the conversation because it’s interesting. If you’re not passionate about the subject, it’s going to be impossible to build a community. You’ll burn out quickly. You have to be passionate about the technology, the teaching aspect of it, or bringing information to the community. In my case, I love showcasing end user stories.
For a while, we were really focused on technology and building projects, but it took a while to get a Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA). So how are we going to train folks? What about the architects who are going to be using this stuff and implementing it in their businesses? So just trying to bridge that gap, trying to close that final mile is how we ended up growing our community to over 7 thousand people.
The Dance between Education and Promotion
Katherine Druckman: There’s a delicate balance between bringing value to the community without trying to sell them something. Do you have any advice for maintaining that balance?
Lisa-Marie Namphy: You’ll always need sponsors for the venue and food, otherwise you may have to start charging the community, and you don’t want to do that; this should be free and available. If you’re a vendor, you can bring swag, but being there is so valuable. Just come and be part of our community and have those conversations. There’s always half an hour of networking before and after meetups, and that’s your chance to engage. If you’re consistently part of the community, people appreciate that. When someone comes to me and asks if they can do a presentation, if they’ve been part of our community and have been attending consistently, I’m much more likely to say yes.
We really appreciate vendors and sponsors. If someone puts all that money in for the food, then yeah, do a lightning talk. I gave away a lot of T-shirts from the last company that I was at, and I’d say, “Everybody who took a T-shirt, if you want to know a little bit about that bug on your shirt, I’ll tell you.” I’d share five minutes about what it is, and that’s enough. People are happy to accommodate that, and they want the swag and the food.
Big Data, Big Opportunities
Katherine Druckman: What are you excited about in the open source community?
Lisa-Marie Namphy: Big data. Databases are not boring anymore—how you store, access, and look at data and just all the different kind of things around data and queries that go against real-time data. There are new companies coming out like Apache Flink that are partnering with companies like Redpanda. How are companies going to start solving these queries for millions and billions of transactions per second in real time? There’s just so much that still needs to be solved alongside large language models (LLMs), and data is only getting bigger and more unstructured.
Security is another area I’m interested in. Government regulations are being introduced, and we’re starting to see things in the news about corporations being held accountable to the point where executives may go to prison. How we tackle these security problems is another really interesting conversation we need to have.
How to Measure Success
Katherine Druckman: Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you wanted to talk about?
Lisa-Marie Namphy: One thing I encourage DevRel people to think about—even if you’re doing DevRel for open source communities—is how you’re going to measure what you’re doing. Even as a community manager, you need your goals to be clear, whether your goals are community growth, diversity, or getting enough writers. Developer relations is difficult to measure because you go to a show like KubeCon, and it’s not as simple as counting the number of badge scans and leads. People say you can’t measure it, but that’s absolutely not true. People have written really good books on how to measure it, such as Mary Thengvall’s The Business Value of Developer Relations and Jono Bacon’s The Art of Community. There are social media metrics that seem like vanity metrics, but maybe they’re not. You can use social media to help build your community and figure out when people start following you.
If you’re doing DevRel at a company, you have to align your goals with the company’s goals in order to get funding for your programs. How are you going to show the ROI of your programs? Maybe you’re running or hosting meetups, doing hackathons, or many other things that get the brand out there. If you have a serverless version you want people to try, make a UTM for your meetups so you know your meetup resulted in eight people trying your tool. You can track these things. Create a baseline and check in with yourself. Don’t make your metrics the same metrics used to measure the marketing or sales teams. These are very different metrics, but they do eventually become part of the revenue stream. There are great tools now, like Common Room, that are really helping DevRel folks.
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About the Author
Katherine Druckman, Open Source Evangelist, Intel
Katherine Druckman, an Intel open source evangelist, hosts the podcasts Open at Intel, Reality 2.0, and FLOSS Weekly. A security and privacy advocate, software engineer, and former digital director of Linux Journal, she’s a longtime champion of open source and open standards.
Lisa-Marie Namphy, Developer Advocate and Community Architect
Lisa-Marie Namphy is a CNCF Ambassador with 20+ years of experience, primarily at cloud-native, analytics, and enterprise software companies and start-ups. Lisa organizes and runs the SF Bay Cloud Native Containers User Group (one of the world’s largest CNCF user groups), personally hosting meetups for the past 10 years. Prior to that, Lisa led marketing, open source, and developer advocacy teams across Portworx, HPE, and HP Software. Lisa is an advocate and frequent speaker for diversity and inclusion initiatives and open source technology, a writer, and an avid sports fan and loves wine and dogs.