Episode 177: Lisa Caywood from RedHat's OSPO on working with code communities

Guest Lisa Caywood Panelists Richard Littauer | Amanda Casari Show
Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about
sustaining open source for the long haul. We’re very excited for
our guest today! Joining us is Lisa Caywood, who’s the Senior
Principal Community Architect at Red Hat OSPO, and has a podcast
about cheese, which we’ll learn a little more about. Today, our
discussion revolves around managing open source communities,
determining their strategic value, and gracefully ending
relationships when necessary. We’ll also hear about telco
industry’s shift towards open source code, and the importance of
community health and strategic alignment with Red Hat’s objectives
in deciding whether to continue investing in a particular
community. Also, there’s a discussion on the challenges of managing
relationships between corporations and open source projects.
Download this episode to hear much more! [00:01:32] Lisa shares
that Red Hat’s OSPO focuses on outbound open source engagement,
ensuring healthy and well-governed communities, and advising on
engagement strategies. She tells us what a Senior Principal
Community Architect does. [00:04:04] Lisa emphasizes the importance
of community health and strategic alignment with Red Hat’s
objectives in deciding whether to continue investing in a
particular community. [00:05:59] The discussion revolves around
managing open source communities. [00:08:15] We hear the challenges
of parting ways with communities, and Lisa offers insights into
managing both individual and corporate transitions. [00:15:06] Lisa
explains the challenges of managing relationships between
corporations and open source projects. [00:17:30] One key issue is
how to communicate with project leaders about sponsorship or
support, which requires a nuanced approached. [00:19:37] Networking
and telco are discussed as examples of industries where open source
communities play a crucial role. Lisa touches on the need for
projects to address interoperability pain points and ensure the
different pieces of the stack are able to talk to each other in a
cohesive way. [00:22:31] Lisa discusses the telco industry’s shift
towards open source code, with AT&T leading the way bringing a
big chunk of their proprietary project into the open source world,
and she mentions the ONAP project. [00:27:02] The scale of projects
and problems being tackled in the telco industry is talked about
since it’s so exciting to Lisa, who has always been a big-picture
person. [00:31:30] Lisa talks about when leaving a community, it’s
important to document and take the knowledge and mindset shift
towards open source with you to the next community. [00:32:37] Find
out about Lisa’s podcast and where you can follow her on the web,
Quotes [00:07:13] “The individual has to decide it’s time to leave,
but the company also to decide it’s time to leave. Those are two
different levels of how to say goodbye.” [00:09:39] “If you’re an
individual who’s coming to the project leadership with a proposal
or a plan for how you hand things off to other people, is the best
thing you can do.” [00:16:06] “It’s more how do I address the
feeling and continue to make the sale. That’s a different
personality and different skillset.” [00:20:02] “It took a long
time for Kubernetes to understand that there’s a little wire on a
diagram that connects your apps and that helps different components
talk to each other and that’s called the network. You need to
include networking people in your community to make this all work
and it eventually got there.” [00:21:44] “The number one thing that
keep telcos awake at night is I can’t have anything break. The
conversations that we have with these companies span many different
communities because we’re not talking about one single type of
technology.” [00:23:49] “We’re all moving towards the same basic
model. We’re all going to be doing 80% of this stuff, so let’s
figure it out together.” [00:26:02] “The scale of Chinese telcos
dwarfs AT&T in terms of number of users.” [00:30:56] “As a
software person in a hardware company, you’re always the odd duck
out.” [00:32:05] “It’s important not just as individuals, but as a
company to be conscious of what you’ve learned in a community,
perhaps documented that these are the useful things that we got
from working in this community. Let’s make sure we take that with
us into our next community so we can take the best things forward.”
Spotlight [00:34:03] Amanda’s spotlight is a research paper,
Name-based demographic inference and the unequal distribution of
misrecognition (2023). [00:34:56] Richard’s spotlight is the Master
and Commander series. [00:35:21] Lisa’s spotlight is Christina
Warinner, who looked at gut microbiomes of nomadic herds in
Mongolia, which helps from a cheesemaking perspective. Links
SustainOSS (https://sustainoss.org/) SustainOSS Twitter
(https://twitter.com/SustainOSS?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor)
SustainOSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/)
podcast@sustainoss.org (mailto:podcast@sustainoss.org) SustainOSS
Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/tags/sustainoss) Richard Littauer
Twitter
(https://twitter.com/richlitt?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor)
Amanda Casari Twitter
(https://twitter.com/amcasari?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor)
Lisa Caywood Twitter (https://twitter.com/RealLisaC) Red Hat
(https://www.redhat.com/en) Into the Curdverse Podcast
(https://intothecurdverse.com/) Into the Curdverse Twitter
(https://twitter.com/curdverse) ONAP
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ONAP) Name-based demographic
inference and the unequal distribution of misrecognition
(https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01587-9) Master and
Commander by Patrick O’Brian
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_and_Commander) What Bacterial
Cultures Reveal About Ours by Virginia Gewin
(https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/dairying-history-microbes/)
Credits Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/)
Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound
(https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr
Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guest:
Lisa Caywood.