Hello, everyone, I'm Mia, I'm a software engineer based in Project Republic, and I've been a member of the Czech Python community for years.
All these years, I've been wondering why do we actually contribute, especially people like software engineers who write code in their daily jobs, which is very different from contributing to communities and organizing events.
So, I went around and asked a few of my colleagues and all of them said, well, it's good for networking.
But actually, I don't think it's only networking because it's good for networking to participate in events, to go there, to talk to people and everything.
But when you're organizing something, it takes so much of time and I'm pretty sure there are way more reasons why do we actually contribute.
So, I'm here today to talk about communities and about the question, why do we actually contribute?
But before we deep dive into it, let's start with the Czech Python community.
Let me tell you something about our community, who we are, what do we do and similar.
So, the Czech Python community started gradually. First, we had meat tops, workshops, sprains, hackathones, micro conferences, so these are very small events.
Then, after it, we decided to create a multi-day multi-track conferences, which is something which is harder to organize.
And at the end, we decided to house an international conference. So, if we have a look at the timeline, we can see that the community started in 2011, when we started with pivot, which is our Python meetups, then we had filetis, which are workshops.
Then, after two years, we had a conference, then these events spread out to smaller cities.
At the end, we had Euro Python 2023 that arrived to Prague.
Some facts, the reason why we started with these new tabs, a long time ago, is because the community wanted to bring the Euro Python to Prague.
But if you want to host an international big conference, you have to have local community.
And so, it happened after 12 years of meetups and events and everything that a big international conference came to Prague.
Now, let's talk about each of these types of events. Just for you to have some sort of idea of what everything we have there.
So, meetup, our meetups are usually held once a month in a pub. Here, you can see how does it look like.
So, we have projector, we have some talks, we have people sitting there drinking, talking, eating.
Last year, we had one edition of filetis. So, I brought a cake with Python logo.
And on the last set, you can see one of our traditions we have, which is every meetup at 11pm. We drink shots.
This green one is called Galena. It's a check drink, which if you ask 10 people, they like it.
9 people would tell it's terrible because it is like mouthwash.
That one person who says it's amazing, it's me because it says mouthwash.
But we have this tradition that even though everyone has these drinks, everyone drinks shots.
And we also have juice. So, you can see here that because it is orange, this is juice because lots of people are abstinence.
And I think this is super important if you have any traditions that you are inclusive.
So, if someone is for example abstinence, they don't feel like they're an outsider.
And everyone is taking shots and happy and they're sitting somewhere along in the corner.
So, we have always some juice and we have alcohol.
So, so far, in the Czech Republic, we've had 527 meetups, which is quite a lot.
We have currently 18 organiser and these meetups are in six cities.
Apart from, before we also have Pytata, which is a similar meetup, but it's related to data.
The difference is that it's held a few times a year instead of every month.
And it's held in companies so you can see it looks a bit more fancy.
People are dressed a bit nicer.
There's even cocktails and wine and similar things.
And there's always some networking afterwards.
We also have workshop.
We have Pytata's Pytata's International Group that is helping women get into tech.
So, this workshop is working a way that you have a room with someone explaining things.
And you have tutorials.
And if you get stuck, you can ask for a question.
And we've had over 120 courses in 60 cities and between 1,000 and 1,500 participants.
And one of the last things about Pytata is which you realize after many years is that
Among our current organizers of events, we have lots of Pytata's who went through the course.
And they liked it. They liked the community.
So they decided to contribute back.
So now they're organizing the courses themselves to teach other people.
And also contributing to our events.
Sometimes some people ask like, but why do you have workshops for beginners?
Or why do you have workshops specifically for the last representative groups or anything?
And I heard about a very nice metaphor.
And which is that basically what this courses offer is there.
They're laying if you want to imagine if you want to merge into a highway.
And everyone is going super fast and everything.
And you are maybe not a good driver.
You're maybe afraid.
You're maybe not experienced.
So the idea is if you have an additional laying, which could help you to merge,
then you would feel more safe there because you have space for yourself.
And also others might also feel safe.
Interesting about Pytata is actually that all materials are open source and therefore free.
So if you go to web, you can find there lots of materials.
And I was actually surprised because there are lots of contributors.
But they are 70 contributors, which I think is a huge number.
70 people contributing to documents to various guides for beginners, for Pytata's.
So I think this is really amazing.
Apart from that, one of the things you can also do, which is the relatively new thing,
is you can organize a micro conference.
So we had five Pytata last year that we won this year as well.
And the way it works is that there are shorter talks.
So they are 10 minutes long.
So something like that can talk.
So you have lots of talks and you have Pytata in between.
So last year we had the first edition and I was very surprised that most people said that they would really like to attend it.
So I started wondering, but actually, why did people like it so much?
And I stumbled across a blog where a person, a senior developer, said,
So unlike other events, I watched and listened to everything.
If I wasn't interested, I knew it would only last for 10 minutes, so it was fine.
And because of that, I ended up seeing a lot of interesting things that I probably wouldn't have noticed otherwise.
At home, I went through the recordings and reminded myself of what I saw and what I learned.
And I actually learned something.
And I think this is very nice because very often if you're a very senior person,
very experienced what, for you lots of talks maybe are not interesting,
but then if they're long and maybe you would rather go outside talk to people or something else,
but when they're only 10 minutes you're there and just because you're there,
you'll learn about way more things or things that you're not really maybe interested into about these things.
This things might be very interesting, so Python pieces one of my favorite events,
as you can see in my t-shirt.
We also have sprints, sprints are a very nice event.
It's in a summer house, two to three days long,
and our thing about sprints is that everyone contributes.
So someone helps with documentation, someone washes dishes, someone cooks,
but it's a very community, a lot of events where basically people just gather together
and just work on community things.
And in the evenings, we usually have a long fire and people around singing and playing instruments
and just talking together, so this is one of the very nice things that you can also organize.
We have a big Python conference, in 2023, when there was last edition,
we had around 600 participants, which is quite a lot, and three official tracks and one on conference track.
And apart from talks and workshops, you can expect we also had lots of events.
So these were 3D printers, this was social event, where we also had board game nights.
And the last thing is hosting an international conference in 2023 in 2024.
We hosted Euro Python, which is one of the biggest European Python conferences.
So it has around almost 1500 participants, lots of speakers, not as big as fast as them though.
But it's one of the biggest Python conferences, and we also had lots of events and workshops for public.
And here you can see how it looks like during social events.
So what are some things that you should pay attention to, for example,
want to contribute to the community, organize event, or something similar, and something which is not very obvious.
So the first thing to think about is what kind of community do you have?
And this is very important, because people often read some articles about communities,
or talk to different community people, but different communities,
how different they have different mechanisms and principles how they work.
So you can have a consumer community, where people just like consume some materials to create, whatever.
Then you can have champion, where actually you want to have some brand of ambassadors, so people who talk about your brand.
And then you can have color collaborator, which is open source projects, for example, Django, where everyone contributes.
And I think this is something which is not very obvious, at least it was never obvious to me,
because I'm not a professional community manager, and this is important because different communities work in different ways.
So make sure that when you're talking to different people, that you're really talking about the same kind of community.
One very important thing is about sharing the load, and this is also something which was not very obvious to me,
because I always thought like, well, when I want to leave, I would just leave, and someone will pick it up.
Well, actually, that's not really how it works.
So if you want to leave, make sure that you always have people around you.
And this is an important thing right at the beginning, once you enter the community, and you take some responsibility,
make sure that you have some people around you, because if you don't have what will happen is that when you want to leave,
you will not be able to leave, because you will feel sorry for just abounding the project.
But sometimes it's very hard to find people, and I have an experience with wanting to get rid of one project,
I've been working on for a long time, but it's very hard because it's very hard to find someone.
It's a process that can take even months to find someone else.
So I think it's super important to think about if you decide to take some responsibility,
that you have some people who would be able to take over in case you want to leave because it's not that easy.
One of the important things to think about is managing expectations, and I found one great article.
It's very long, so I warmly recommend you reading it, and it's about setting expectations for open source participation.
And what did I like the most goes like this?
As soon as you start demanding or expecting something from open source, you have stopped viewing it as it was intended.
And that distortion can be poisonous.
When I choose to donate my precious time to open source, I do it voluntarily as a nice thing that I enjoy doing.
I didn't do it because so much demanded it of me, and the instant I feel that my time is not appropriate.
I appreciate it as the gift that it is.
I stop enjoying doing open source.
And when someone stops enjoying their contributions to open source, they burn out and quit.
And I think this is very important when we are talking about doing anything in our free time,
that basically people cannot demand things from you because you're doing it in your free time.
And it's also important when you're talking to different people, also to understand if they work it in free time,
they do it just because they enjoy doing it.
I think the author said in the article that open source basically is a series of kindness,
where each thing is a gift and kindness.
And this is important because very often in communities, everyone is a volunteer.
So you are a volunteer, but so are other organizers and so are the speakers.
And this is sometimes also not very obvious that other speakers are volunteers as well,
because sometimes they might be some frictions between those, but essentially in open source communities,
or at least the ones I'm part of, and everyone is a volunteer and it's important to keep that always in mind.
What are the driving principles behind communities?
Well, there is a really nice article about this one.
I will share this last video later, but basically they said that for people to feel appreciated, valued,
there is a scarf model, so it says that a person needs to have a statue,
so to know who are they, are they a contributor, maintainer, what exactly is their role.
It has some certainty. People don't like when something is uncertain, people don't like when they're supposed to do something,
they don't know what to do.
Autonomy, everyone likes to have some freedom, they take responsibility to make freedom to make their own decisions.
Relateness, that means that if you have multiple projects, people will probably pick the project or the topic that they relate the most to.
And fairness, which is obvious that everyone wants to be fairly treated.
One of the very important things to think about is documentation.
The check by the community has a great documentation, which was built long time ago,
and you have their things like from how to run an event, the things like how to pay for something or similar.
We also recently built a documentation for Python PITSA, and this is very nice,
because as an organizer, you don't have to be involved anymore, so you write a documentation,
and it scales really great, because then you can send it to 10 people, and you don't have to talk to each of these people.
And what you can also do is just to have a template, so they can, for example, copy-based it.
Part of community are people, basically, and it's important to think about a culture and how to do it.
So there was an experiment where they took groups of people who work really well,
and they took one person who had a role to play.
And there was the jerk, this was like this very arrogant person that one likes to work with,
the slacker who was a person just talking, but not doing anything,
and the donor who was a person always complaining.
So there wanted to find out if you have one person like this,
and you have let's say a group of 10 people who work really well,
how much will their performance go down.
So if it's out of 10 people, one person like this, is it like 10% or how does it relate?
And they found out that actually just one person can reduce the group's performance to 30 to 40%,
which is actually a lot.
This is related to the missing star metaphor, so this means basically that,
imagine if you're going down the stairs, and there's one stair missing.
And we've all been in groups where there's a special person who needs to be managed.
Everyone knows their different.
People don't address it, don't tell that person, hey, you behave in a wrong way, this is not okay.
But everyone will tell, hey, he's special.
Like be careful, don't tell him this, don't tell him that, just ignore him.
And I think this is a big problem because then what happens is that actually,
it can ruin the whole group and what often happens is that people just decide to leave because of one person.
So even though it's one person, be very careful because one person can ruin the whole group if you ignore it.
They did a marshmallow experiment, which is a really interesting thing.
They took a group of CEOs in the group of kids, and they gave them 20 pieces of Uncle Spaghetti,
one yard of string, one yard of transparent tape, and one standard size marshmallow.
And they told them that they have to build a sculpture as though it's possible.
And it happens that actually kids built as 66 centimeters in average tall sculpture while CEOs build 25.
And then they said, okay, CEOs maybe they're not the smartest people.
So let's maybe start taking students.
So they took low students, and they had the same result.
And they said, okay, let's maybe take different kind of students or executives or whatever.
And it happens that actually kids are always better.
And so they were observing them and trying to figure out why it happens.
And they realized that is because kids just play an experiment.
And they don't think about social interactions.
They don't think, oh, this is bad, but actually, if I say this, this person will get offended.
Is it my place who is the leader here?
What am I supposed to do?
Kids were just playing and doing whatever they wanted.
And with adults, they realized that actually with adults, lots of mental energy is used on figuring out what are you supposed to do in a group.
So are you able to criticize someone?
How are you supposed to say?
So they don't get offended.
What if you disagree with something?
What if you have an idea?
Will it look like a fool if you say something?
Is it a good idea to say something?
Should you be silent?
What should you do?
But this is not how kids work.
And this is why they're on average more experienced here.
So we talked about communities, what kind of communities are there?
Can we, what are some important things been working with them?
But the question is, why actually do we really get involved?
So I came across a very nice model which says that human connection has three layers.
So we have correlationships which are relationship with our partner or partners and our closest friends.
Then we have a close relationship which is with our friends, colleagues and extended family members.
But then we also have casual relationship which is our broader community,
Aquarintance and members of organizations we contribute to.
How much of these you need?
It's very, it's very individual.
Some people have lots of people there surrounded with.
Some people just have a few friends.
But it's important that you have some relationship because we are humans and that's how we are wired.
So what happens if they're not there?
I came across a really interesting book from a person called Vivek Mercy.
They are a surgeon, the US and they were wandering.
What is the leading cause of ill health in the US?
This was studied for the US but I think it would be the same for all Western countries.
And what one would think is maybe alcoholism or obesity or opioid crisis or all these things.
You know, you read newspapers and everything.
However, they realized in their studies that is actually loneliness.
Which is something which is also not very obvious.
So intimate or emotional loneliness is the longing for a close confounded or intimate partner.
Someone with whom you share deep mutual bond of affection and trust.
Relational or social loneliness is the yearning for quality of friendships and social companionship and support.
Collective loneliness is the hunger for a network or community people who share your sense of purpose and interest.
These three dimensions together reflect the full range of high quality social connections that human needs in order to thrive.
The lack of relationships in any of three dimensions make us lonely, which helps to explain why we may have a support.
We may have a support in marriage yet.
We lonely for friends and community.
And this is related to muscles hierarchy of needs which all of you for sure know.
Who are basically we have a need for love and belonging and self esteem.
So according to muscle, human possess an effective need for a sense of belonging and acceptance and most social groups.
Regardless of whether these groups are large or small.
Being a part of a group is crucial regardless if it's work, sports, friends or family.
The sense of belonging is being comfortable with and connection to others that results from receiving acceptance, respect and love.
For example, some large social groups may include clubs, co-workers, religious groups, professional organizations, sports teams, gangs or online communities.
Which is very interesting actually they put together being send religious groups.
But I think I really can relate to this one and I think that lots of people do contribute to communities because it helps them to feel to belong somewhere.
And there's one very interesting observation I've seen that actually in many countries, lots of people contribute to communities and open-source communities are actually foreigners.
It kind of makes sense because if you move across the planet and you leave your family and everything behind, you do want to feel as a part of something as a part of some group contributing to something.
So apart from these, one of the reasons why people contribute is to learn new skills.
So some of the skills that I've developed over these years are creative skills, writing skills, communication skills, organizational skills, leadership skills, building mental resilience.
And the thing that I left at the very end because I think this is the lowest priority for most people is networking.
I think networking is very important, lots of people do it for networking as well, but I think this is definitely not the leading cause why do people contribute so much to communities because as said,
if you want to network, it's way more useful if you just go to an event, just talk to people rather than if you spend hundreds of hours into organizing it.
So these were my reasons, but I believe that everyone has different reasons for that.
And it happens that I filmed a video during the last conference, and I would like to show you what you might call it, say,
why do they contribute to communities if I will be able to open it.
There are subs, you might not hear, but there are subs here.
The sound doesn't work.
Okay, okay, so let me read it, sorry, I did not let it work, so hello, my name is Zhang Gong.
I'm from Rattis, I'm a Syvakem, one of the organizers of Pikes of Syvakem.
The past I worked along with open data, open education, open source software, open access and scientific publications.
So basically all things open.
The Python community is all about openness and sharing, and that's why I find it so attractive.
My name is Catalina Surtma, I'm a pilot, organizer, but now here in the Czech Republic.
I do it because I love the smiles of the people.
I'm young people, I'm one of the organizers of data,
Pragme tabs, and why do I do it?
Because I love combining a very interesting field with the people, and especially in their free time.
Because in their free time, they are the best.
Hello, I'm Sana, I'm a machine learning engineer in Prague, and I like contributing because there's literally no limits.
You're welcomed by everyone, and you could be the next speaker at the next spike.
Hello, I'm Hanzai Yavarek, and for many years I volunteer for Czech Python community.
And I do it because first I want you to learn more about Python, then I love community.
The people, and I got a lot of stuff back from the people, and a lot of opportunities.
And now I do it because I want people to be able to learn programming easily and have it accessible.
Hello, everyone.
We need to bring a clue.
We need to.
You're a type.
Okay.
But there are many more wonderful stories that you.
Yes.
Yes. So if you would like to see it, you can find it on YouTube.
Unfortunately, we have to finish.
So thank you for your attention.