This is a two-part episode as we go over the Open Source Commons and the Open Source Community Sprint, including the amazing projects that have come out from them. Joining us today is Cori O’ Brien, Senior Manager of Open Source Commons at Salesforce.org.
While Sprint events provide an opportunity for people to come together and improve or build on software, Open Source Commons is the program that encompasses the Sprint events. That includes the training opportunities, mentor-mentorship opportunities, access to tooling and review, and AppExchange. At the heart of Open Source Commons are Community Sprint events where people get to engage directly and work side by side.
Cori’s role is to make sure the Salesforce community has what they need to contribute in whatever way they want to contribute. What started out as “just events” providing space for people to contribute has ultimately become a powerhouse for training and tools to ensure they’re building trust and sustainability.
Show Highlights:
- Cori’s introduction to Salesforce
- Partnering with the Salesforce Labs program
- Sprint vs. Open Source Commons
- Open Source Commons package is free and managed
- Breaking the silos between nonprofit success pack and the education community
- Types of roles for people to participate
- Why running sprint events is a profitable use of time
- The move to virtual
Links:
Episode Transcript
Cori O’Brien:
There was just something special about working with nonprofits, especially small- to medium-size nonprofits. They’re grassroots organizations, and they don’t understand tech in a lot of cases. They don’t have staff that will help them with tech. So I just really got into the space of helping a nonprofit.
Josh Birk:
That is Cori O’Brien, a senior manager of opensource commons over at salesforce.org. I’m Josh Birk, your host for the Salesforce Developer Podcast. And here on the podcast, you’ll hear stories and insights from developers for developers. Today we sit down and talk with Cori for a two-part episode where we’re going to go over the opensource commons and the opensource sprints and some of the projects that have come out from them. But we start, as we often do, with her early years, where she was working for a nonprofit that was going to partner with Salesforce.
Cori O’Brien:
[inaudible 00:00:59] Salesforce partner, we had built an app for the app exchange. And because of that, we had access to the partner portal and a lot of these training resources. And we were using Salesforce at the company. Someone had been hired to implement it for our internal uses. And it was just the coolest thing I had ever seen. I can’t describe it any more than that. It just was like, “Wow, this is so cool.” And I just immediately knew I wanted to learn how to administer it. And the person that we had hired told me, “Yeah, you can. You can get certified.” And so I just did all the free classes I could, and I convinced my company that I really needed to go to Dreamforce, and they sent me, and it was so amazing. And at that time there was a lot of hands-on training sessions. And so just really signed up for every course that I could. Then when Trailhead came out, it was just the be all end all. I was able to just start learning and learning and learning.
Cori O’Brien:
And I got my first certification about 2015 or so through the Amplify program, actually. It’s a nonprofit called amplify from Salesforce community. And I actually won a Salesforce certification exam. And I’m Canadian, so at the time 200 USD was a lot of money, so the fact that I won it was really key to helping me get the confidence and everything together to get certified. So that’s sort of how I got into it. Yeah.
Josh Birk:
Nice, nice. And then what was it like joining salesforce.org?
Cori O’Brien:
Oh man. Dream job. Literally. I know that’s a cliche, but actually #dreamjob, because I had been working with nonprofits and volunteering with nonprofits and… Remember when I told you I convinced them to send me to Dreamforce? Well, at… I think it may have been the very first Dreamforce. We were having breakfast with a customer ,and she had mentioned, “Oh, salesforce.org is starting this new initiative called community sprints, and it’s going to be up in Seattle, and it’s going to be for two days.” And it was like the following month. And the president of my old company… We were having breakfast with this customer, and I looked at him. I’m like, “I got to go. I got to go. It just sounds so awesome.” So that was 2015, and that was the very first community sprint event, as we know it today, the ones that I have in my program today, the very first one. And it was in Seattle, which is just a short distance away from where I am here in Vancouver. So that’s how I got into the sprinting community and the broader .org community.
Josh Birk:
So your first introduction to the sprint was as a partner/customer?
Cori O’Brien:
That’s correct, yeah.
Josh Birk:
Gotcha. Nice, nice. And then you evolved into your role today. And first of all, the whole dream job thing, it’s come up before, and I’ve asked people this next question, and some of the responses I’ve gotten have been simple, like, “Oh, well, I love it.” But more distinctly than that, how would you define your current job?
Cori O’Brien:
Oh, that’s a good question. Well, actually, if we pause for one sec, I would love to just expand a little bit more on your last question, because you had asked more like, how did I get involved? And I talked about how I got involved with the sprinting community, but how did that lead to my actual job?
Cori O’Brien:
So being a part of the community sprint events just taps you into the network of those that are contributing in the .org open source space. So whether you’re a customer, you’re a partner, you’re staff, everyone gathers together and works together to work on projects or build things, contribute things that are important and needed by the community. So as I started attending these events and meeting people in the community, meeting Salesforce staff, I just knew that I just wanted to be a part of that space. It was literally my dream job. And when I just heard about a role where my old director, Judy Stone, who was the Salesforce person in charge of the sprints before me, was hiring. She had been promoted, and she was backfilling for someone to help run the sprint events. And I had worked at my company for 17 years and was like, “This is the role for me. There’s no way I can’t apply for this role.”
Josh Birk:
I love it. That is awesome. That is so awesome. Okay, so that-
Cori O’Brien:
So that was three and a half years ago,
Josh Birk:
Okay, so three and a half years ago. Three and a half years deeply involved in the sprint. So then back to that last question. How would you describe your current role?
Cori O’Brien:
So my current role is to make sure our community has what they need to contribute in whatever way they want to contribute. So when I started, we were doing these sprint events, which are… They’re sort of like two-day workshops, hackathons they’re sometimes called in other circles, where we gather together and we come up with ideas and solutions to problems, and we build things and contribute. It can be code. It can be an app. It can be a document. It can be anything. We contribute everything in the community. And so at the time we were running these events and we were also working with the .org product managers and the developers to take on open source contributions to our open source products. And since then, it sort of evolved into a broader idea of ensuring sustainability and trust in what our community builds. So we’ve taken it from just events and giving the space to contribute to… We’ll give you the space, but we also want to give you training, and we want to give you tools so that what you build is sustainable and trusted.
Cori O’Brien:
We’ve partnered with a lot of different departments internally, most importantly being the Salesforce Labs program, which, as you probably know, gives Salesforce staff the ability to publish a cool app on the app exchange. And so if you were a customer, if you were a team of volunteers, you didn’t have access to that. Unless you were a partner, you don’t have access to publish on the app exchange, or security review is the main element that’s missing there. So we’ve actually partnered with Labs to be able to give community-generated ideas and packages access to the app exchange and security review. So we’re creating trust and we’re creating sustainability where there wasn’t any before.
Josh Birk:
Got it. So I think that leads into my next question. We’re sort of talking about two things today, focusing a lot on sprints, but then there’s the open source commons. So it sounds like sprints are still what they were back in 2015. Changed a little bit in scope, but it’s basically people getting together and trying to improve/build on software. So then is the commons the broader program that includes things like that training and access to Salesforce Labs and not just what’s on the calendar but driving the goals and the software, et cetera?
Cori O’Brien:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So the open source commons is the program that encompasses the sprint events as well as training opportunities, mentor/mentorship opportunities, access to tooling, access to review in app exchange. We like to say that the community sprint events are the heart and the most visible part of the commons. It’s where you’re going to engage directly. It’s where you’re going to work side-by-side with people. But we bring people together as part of the commons, and sprint events are one way we do that. We have Slack groups and Trailblazer groups and councils where we gather people together to give feedback, and then all these other things, like I mentioned, training opportunities and… Mostly for the tools, but lots of other opportunities.
Josh Birk:
Nice. And a clarifying question, because I think this was true back in my days when I tinkered around with Salesforce Labs. Salesforce Labs are intended to be free, and they’re unmanaged packages that exist on the app exchange for people to download and use. Is that description still accurate?
Cori O’Brien:
I think it is. I think it’s accurate. But I’m not sure that they’re all unmanaged, to be honest. We’d have to talk with the Labs team for that. I can speak to the packages that we create as part of the program though.
Josh Birk:
Okay. And those are open source in general?
Cori O’Brien:
Yeah. So an open source commons package is open source and free and managed. We actually prefer managed packages. Yeah. I mean, I think anything you want to deliver into the community, if it can be managed, it can be updated. Bugs can be fixed. And most importantly, the ideas of the people that have installed them can then be incorporated into the package and then distributed to others. It’s easier to do that when it’s a managed [inaudible 00:10:19].
Josh Birk:
Right. I think that came up with my conversation, I think, with Paul, that you want to be able to maintain an application life cycle, which includes things like being able to send out patches and not having to bring down an entire unmanaged package and then reinstall the whole thing all over again.
Cori O’Brien:
Yeah, exactly. And in the early years of our community, actually building packages and applications. Because they’ve been doing this all along. Our community has been building and sharing all along. Now they just have a framework to help them, should they choose to engage with the commons. They don’t have to, obviously. But we did see a lot of unmanaged packages, and you install it one year, and then a year later there’s some really cool new features, because more people have started using it. There’s been suggestions and ideas. You don’t really have a path forward if you’ve installed that in your production org. You have to literally uninstall it all and reinstall it.
Josh Birk:
Patch it up and then put it all back together again. Right. Exactly. Yeah, got it.
Cori O’Brien:
Yeah, yeah.
Josh Birk:
So going back to some of those early years, like that 2015 sprint, when you were having those early conversations about what it was going to be and why you wanted to go, was there a tipping point, do you feel like, where it was like, “This will be so much easier if we can just get people in the same room for two days and just focus on…” And what was the focus there? Was it the Nonprofit Success Pack?
Cori O’Brien:
At the time, yeah. Yes it was, yeah. Yeah, the Nonprofit Success Pack. They were actually called NPSP sprints. Yeah. They were focused on the nonprofit tools that salesforce.org was building. So if you don’t like the documentation, or if the documentation is missing something, or if there’s a bug, or if something like the relationship builder didn’t exist back then, so features and ideas and what’s working, what’s not working. We used to have big Sticky Palooza walls. We called them Sticky Paloozas.
Josh Birk:
I love it.
Cori O’Brien:
Where you would just… It would be a million ideas. And so those events were actually co-hosted by the community and salesforce.org, so there were two hosts, and it was really this partnership of .org and the community coming together. And it was really focused on the Nonprofit Success Pack. And then the education community actually started to do the same thing. And so we had the first one actually hosted at Harvard. Going to get the year wrong. It might be 2016, 2017. But they had an education version. And shortly thereafter, Judy Stone, who was the salesforce.org director at the time, who was managing the program, said, “Okay, let’s bring them together. What would it look like if we brought them together and removed those silos between vertical?” Because there’s no reason why someone who primarily works on an education tool can’t contribute something to a nonprofit tool, especially when you’re talking about technology or user experiences or new features. So that’s when we really brought them together. And I think that was about 2017. Before I started.
Josh Birk:
And I think we can add a shout out here. The person who was like, “Higher education needs that, that was Mr. Corey Snow. Is that accurate?
Cori O’Brien:
Yes. Mr. Cory Snow, AKA the cool Corey. And-
Josh Birk:
Certainly that does not make you the uncool Cori.
Cori O’Brien:
Well, he likes to call me the cool Cori. I like could call him the cool Corey. It’s a battle. Because I’m saying it on the official [crosstalk 00:14:00] podcast, I think I win.
Josh Birk:
On the official Salesforce Developer Podcast.
Cori O’Brien:
I think I win.
Josh Birk:
I think that is a point in your favor for sure. Yep.
Cori O’Brien:
Yeah. He’s the cool Corey. No, yeah. He worked at Harvard before he worked here. And Jace Bryan, who was my partner managing the program until recently, him and Corey ran an event, a sprint event, the first EDA, education data architecture, sprint event at Harvard way back then. Yeah.
Josh Birk:
Nice, nice. Now, you’ve touched on this a little bit, about the different things that people can contribute to, but just to highlight this, I think when we say sprints or even hackathons, people think engineering. They think agile. They think people together arguing points for what software features they’re going to put in. But the sprints welcome a broad range of roles for people to participate, right?
Cori O’Brien:
Oh yes. Oh yeah, yeah. Basically any skill that you have is needed by a team or a project. Yeah. You can be an engineer. You can be an architect. You could be an end user who is just coming into the Salesforce space and learning the tools for the first time. It could be a marketer. It could be a graphic artist. Literally every team needs these different skills and contribution roles on them. We have teams that vary from building an application to coming up with ways to diversify our communities and everywhere in between.
Josh Birk:
Interesting. Well, and that’s the other thing I don’t think we’ve touched too much on. But first, I just kind of want to give y’all a shout out, because somewhere around the years of Trailhead, I was going on this whole like, “I don’t know if we should do hackathons. Hackathons don’t produce real software. What would an anti hackathon look like, that’s actually about building good software over time?” And I’m trying to remember the first person who was like, “Well, have you heard of open source sprints?” And I’m like, “No. Do tell me more.”
Josh Birk:
So I don’t even know if this is actually a question. It’s just, thank you all for creating this, because it’s so much exactly where my mind wanted to be able to have developers and obviously, as you’re saying, even more roles. But just to be able to kind of create that… I just want to throw out the word. Profitable use of time. And I don’t mean that in terms of money, but I mean that in terms of things that are getting enhanced year over year, as opposed to a three-day weekend where people just throw a bunch of software together, and at the third day that judge, and after the fourth day probably nobody ever sees that software again. So literally just like-
Cori O’Brien:
Well, that’s the thing. Well, you are absolutely welcome. And I’ll just say, we’re the shepherds. We are absolutely the shepherds. The community does all the work. The community has the ideas. The community really comes together and mentors each other and shares these experiences with each other. We’re just here to really set up a Zoom, maybe get a ballroom if we can go back to in-person, and coffee and food.
Cori O’Brien:
But that is one thing that we saw, we were seeing. It coincided with going virtual, though. It was in the works anyway. But what we used to do at the events, the sprint events, is get everyone in a room, come up with problem statements, come up with solutions, and then Sticky Palooza it all over the wall, and pick what you want to work on, and then work on it for two days. Awesome. But what we saw happening is, all these amazing ideas were coming up on the wall, teams were working on all these amazing solutions, and then afterwards it would sort of go quietly to bed. And then maybe the next time we had an event, half of those would get re-energized, and the rest would stay in bed. And then we’d have new ideas, but then same cycle. So we were seeing a ton of ideas, but it was becoming harder and harder to get things contributed that were lasting.
Cori O’Brien:
And so like I said, it coincided with the move to virtual, which I think is one of the reasons why we were so successful in converting into virtual over the past couple years.
Josh Birk:
Interesting.
Cori O’Brien:
Yeah. But we started a new plan where when you registered for the event, you picked a project. So we had this backlog of really cool ideas. We were going to ask folks when they registered to pick a project. Name a project. You pick it, and that’s what you’re going to work on when you get there. Now, you wouldn’t be bound to it. You could leave. You could try a different project. You could bounce around. But we were trying to almost curate the list of existing ideas that still hadn’t made it over the finish line. And the goal was to get more work contributed, because the ultimate purpose is help other nonprofits and schools do what they’re trying to do better. And so I don’t know what that would have looked like had we stayed in-person, but it’s-
Josh Birk:
Interesting.
Cori O’Brien:
Yeah. It’s become really a successful model for virtual. And now we have a leader or two or three of each project. And when everyone registers, they have a choice of one of 14 different projects right now. And we can get new projects in. Some projects choose not to participate. So it really helps keep the work going.
Josh Birk:
And that’s our show. Now, Cori and I actually recorded this episode back in October of 2021. Releasing it finally in March of 2022. She wanted me to give a shout-out to a few things that are opening up registration right now, a couple of events. April 6th, they’re going to do a webinar on data generation in Snowfakery. Highly recommend you check that out. And then May 4th and 5th is going to be their next virtual sprint. So check the show notes for links to register and see more information about those events. Check out the episode next week to finish up this interview. We’re going to talk, of course, about Cori’s favorite non-technical hobby, but we’re also going to talk about some of the great projects that have come out from the open source commons, including a favorite of mine that may or may not involve puppies.
Josh Birk:
So thanks again to Cori. Thanks to you for listening. If you want to learn more about this show, head on over to developer.salesforce.com/podcast, where you can hear old episodes, see the show notes and the links to your favorite podcast service. Thanks again, everybody, and I’ll talk to you next week.