Episode 118: Open Source Commons with Cori O’Brien Part 2

This is the second half of our conversation with Cori O’ Brien, senior manager of Open Source Commons at Salesforce.org. Picking up where we left off, we’re going to talk about what their process was like to move to virtual during the pandemic and how they’re translating that into a Zoom experience.

Cori also talks about the many benefits of moving to virtual space, including how they went global and how it helped diversify the community. Not just a bunch of developers in a room building something cool, it takes a team to create a framework for sustainability and spark a new idea that will help you bring your ideas forward.

Show Highlights:

The benefits of moving to virtual
What the transition looks like from virtual to in-person
Moving from virtual sprint to hybrid (in-person + virtuals)
Examples of Sprint projects for people to join
About the animal shelter starter pack

Links:

Episode Transcript

Cori O’Brien:
Sorry, no, we had no idea virtual would work. In fact, we were sure it would not work. We were totally wrong. Oh yeah, we were totally wrong.

Josh Birk:
That is once again Cori O’Brien, senior manager for Open Source 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.

Josh Birk:
Today, we continue our conversation with Cori about Open Source Sprints, part of the Open Source Commons. We’re going to talk a little bit about some of the projects that have come out of there. However, we’re going to pick up where we left off, talking about moving them virtual during the pandemic.

Cori O’Brien:
Yeah, and at the time… I mean, we have to think back, but do you remember two years ago. Would you have joined a two-day virtual conference where you were sitting at your desk for five hours a day working on a team? Probably not.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. It’s a weird pitch, right?

Cori O’Brien:
Yeah.

Josh Birk:
Yeah, because there’s all these different ways to describe it. It’s not really a hackathon, but it’s kind of like a hackathon. It’s not really a conference, but it’s sort of an Unconference. It’s not really a Sprint, but kind of is a Sprint.

Cori O’Brien:
Yeah.

Josh Birk:
But even that, all of those nouns, you think Stickypalooza. You think being in room with people, there’s coffee getting cold on a cafeteria table somewhere.

Josh Birk:
Yeah, so then how is it working now? How did you kind of translate that into a Zoom experience?

Cori O’Brien:
Right. Well, so previously we were going to try the method of, pick your project, show up in the city on the day, and that’s the ballroom table you were going to sit at. The geographic reporting table, or the summit events table, or the NPSP videography table. And you were going to do that work.

Cori O’Brien:
So moving to virtual was terrifying, for one thing. We had no idea if it was going to work, we had no idea if people were going to show up. And my old director, Judy just really said, “You know what, we are going to try it. And if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.”

Cori O’Brien:
But that’s sort of how we’ve always done things is, we get a lot of feedback from our events. We switch things up. We try new ways of Stickypaloozaing. We do all kinds of different things. So why not this, was sort of the way we thought about it.

Cori O’Brien:
We try not to do anything new in a bubble. Absolutely not. So we convened a council of our community. So we said, “Hey, we’re going to try virtual. If you’re curious at all about this, you want to help us plan this, you want to help us figure it out, come on a few calls with us.”

Cori O’Brien:
So we have had maybe 10, 15 members of our community who had Sprinted in person before. And some were like, “No, this is never going to work.” And some were like, “Yeah, it can work. And let’s try it this way.”

Cori O’Brien:
At the end, we kind of came up with a plan that included that sort of pre-thought-out pick-a-project model we were going to go with. We hosted our first one in March 2020. And it was incredible.

Cori O’Brien:
People stuck around the whole time. People were flexible. They could go walk the dog if they needed to. They could go have lunch. So we really just were able to come together as a community in ways we had no idea that we could.

Cori O’Brien:
And in fact, it’s actually helped our community and Sprint events. It’s helped make them global, for one thing. It’s helped diversify the community for another.

Cori O’Brien:
If you can’t afford to fly into the city that we’re hosting it, or take two days off work physically, or have childcare, or you just don’t have the option to go and attend an event. You can now participate, because you’re sitting at your desk.

Cori O’Brien:
So we’ve actually had huge amount of increase in participation. And we actually had, just in the last year, not even the full virtual span, we’ve had over 750 participants from 19 countries.

Josh Birk:
Wow. That’s awesome.

Cori O’Brien:
Yeah. In one year. Yeah.

Josh Birk:
That is awesome. Okay. Two follow-up questions. First of all, my brain is still stuck on Stickypalooza. So did you move to like a Jamboard or some kind of whiteboarding app? Or what was the solution there?

Cori O’Brien:
Yeah, so we actually gave it up to teams and said, “You all have your project. And some of you already have a solution designed, you just needed the days to work on it.”

Josh Birk:
Oh, interesting. Okay.

Cori O’Brien:
“And some of you have a brand new project, and, yes, you need to design a solution. You need to come up with possible solutions.”

Cori O’Brien:
So each of them had access to a Jamboard. Some of them used Miro. And each of them have a number of breakout rooms, so that they can divide up tasks and sort of divide and conquer on the different things.

Josh Birk:
Got it.

Cori O’Brien:
So each project has a leader. Those leaders will tend to pre-organize tasks, will work together and pre-organize the number of rooms they’re going to need.

Cori O’Brien:
Then we sort of let it happen, and things flex and change and we adapt. And sometimes it gets a little chaotic, and it’s awesome.

Josh Birk:
Nice. Okay. So, I’ve asked a lot of people this, I think I’ve even managed to sneak this into somebody else talking about the Open Source Sprints at one time, but let me ask you this.

Josh Birk:
I’m asking, when the organizers have been moving from the in-real-life events to the virtual events. Let’s say six months from now, 100% vaccination, pandemic ends. You have the option to book a conference room in Dallas again. What do you do with the virtual layer?

Cori O’Brien:
So yeah, it’s going to be really exciting to see what happens. 100%, I want to have, our community wants to have, in-person Sprints again.

Cori O’Brien:
I don’t think that there’s a world though when we go back to just in-person Sprints. I think there will absolutely be a combination of in-person and virtual. Whether that means standalone events or some crazy hybrid, I don’t know.

Cori O’Brien:
I once held a chat session where we were trying to come up with ideas of how you could do both. And we were thinking laptops with Zoom rooms, and iPads with Zoom rooms, sitting at a ballroom table and async in Slack.

Cori O’Brien:
So they’re very well could be a hybrid world coming up. But for now, we’re going to test the waters on some in-person ones and continue to do virtuals as we can.

Josh Birk:
Got it. Well, speaking of upcoming ones, we’re kind of taping this at an interesting time because I believe you have a Sprint next week, is that correct?

Cori O’Brien:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yes. On October 20th and 21st.

Josh Birk:
And I was going to say, let’s call out the dates so that when the people of the future are actually listening to the podcast episode, and they’re like, “Oh no. It’s next week.” No, no. It’s already happened.

Josh Birk:
But first of all, it’s just kind of fascinating how much it’s progressed from simple ideas, a project, some people in a room, to 750 people, 19 countries. And I think you said 14 different projects?

Cori O’Brien:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Josh Birk:
What are some of those projects that are going to be talked about next week? Or I should say, the way you’ve described it, projects that are an option for people to join next week.

Cori O’Brien:
So yeah, we have 14 projects and Sprinters have signed up for each one of them. They’re everything from, “Hey, I know how to use the Nonprofit Success Pack, and I want to write scripts and record audio and helped with editing to make how-to videos.” So that’s the NPSP videography team.

Josh Birk:
Okay.

Cori O’Brien:
We have a team called the Data Generation Toolkit, and they’re a community team built up around the .org open source tool Snowfakery. That tool helps seed fake data into Salesforce orgs, so they’re spun up to kind of write recipes for different projects and different products.

Cori O’Brien:
We have a team called Admin Skills and Nonprofit Salesforce Teams. Their goal is to try and help hiring managers and those who are writing job descriptions, understand what kind of skills are needed when you’re hiring your first Salesforce admin, or you’re just hiring in the Salesforce space.

Cori O’Brien:
Trying to clarify what certifications should be required for each role, what kind of training and development paths, and what questions to ask. So it’s just helping the ecosystem hire administrators.

Josh Birk:
Got it.

Cori O’Brien:
And then one of our brand new ones is we have the Declarative Lookup, Roll-up Summaries team, DLRS or Dolores, as some of us may know the name. So they’ve recently joined the Open Source Commons as a community team.

Cori O’Brien:
They won’t be doing any development at this Sprint. There’s another team working the backlog right now. There’s some issues and things they’re going to work on.

Cori O’Brien:
But they’re coming up with a cookbook. So recipes for writing your roll-ups in Dolores and gathering together best practice documentation, instructions, and trying to make the install configure and recipe experience easier for those using the tool.

Josh Birk:
Got it.

Cori O’Brien:
I could go on and on.

Josh Birk:
Well, I was going to say, I eyeballed one… I’m a rescue shelter volunteer. I literally live with a feral cat. He’s probably sleeping in front of my fireplace right now. I think former feral is the tag we have fallen back to. Any details, and I think it’s a new project. Is the animal shelter project new?

Cori O’Brien:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Josh Birk:
Okay. Any details you can give me on that?

Cori O’Brien:
Yeah, that one’s exciting. So the Animal Shelter Starter Pack is actually a Salesforce lab. And it’s been built by Chris Rolfe and Stewart Anderson, who are .org employees. And they submitted it as a Salesforce app, a Lab app.

Cori O’Brien:
And they realize that they want to involve the community more. They want to have the community contribute to it, manage the roadmap, and, in essence, take it over.

Josh Birk:
Got it.

Cori O’Brien:
So we have been going through some internal approvals to make sure that that’s allowed, and okay. And we have approval now. So the Animal Shelter Starter Pack is going to transition officially from a Salesforce Lab out into the community as a Open Source Commons project.

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Cori O’Brien:
And so the goal of the team at the Sprint next week, is to engage with the community and try and find some community members who are willing to take it on. There are some requirements to join the Commons, when you have an app especially, for that sustainable and trust values that we were talking about earlier.

Cori O’Brien:
So they’re going to try and get some people together to take over the app. But it’s really cool, what they’re doing. And there could be some work with integrating it in with Program Management, one of our other open source .org products, and just sort of building those connections. So if you use both at the same time, then they can talk to each other.

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Cori O’Brien:
All kinds of really cool things can happen when you get people together, yeah.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. Well, and I just love this trend, which is I feel relatively recent, and correct me if I’m wrong on that. But like Andy Fawcett was the one who kind of owned Dolores, the DLRS. Now it’s transitioning into a proper Open Source Commons project, and going to have that community love to it. It sounds like you’ve got the animal shelter project. That’s a fascinating evolution from getting people in the room and just talking about one thing.

Cori O’Brien:
Exactly.

Josh Birk:
Do you see more of that? Is that going to be a growing trend for Open Source Commons? Okay.

Cori O’Brien:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, I think so. I think so for sure. Yeah. Because we’re seeing all these opportunities come about now.

Cori O’Brien:
Andy Fawcett, he may have heard of the Commons program before, just because he’s a staff member. But he basically put a call out for help on Twitter, and said, “Oh, you know what? I have been managing this…” With the support of the community. The community had done some work on the app, and definitely for support, there’s a great team who’s been supporting the app in the Trailblazer community for years.

Cori O’Brien:
But he was really a bottleneck. He said, “I’m a bottleneck to new features, to upgrades.” And I mean, if anyone has been an ISV partner building applications, you know you need to have an engineering team and a product manager and testing and UX and dock.

Cori O’Brien:
It’s not just a bunch of developers in a room building something cool. It takes a team. And so he basically raised his hand, and other members of our community pointed him my way and we started having conversations.

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Cori O’Brien:
So it’s a framework for sustainability, so that you can spark a new idea and we’ll help you bring your idea forward. But if you already have an idea, and it’s struggling, or you want help with it, we can adopt it into the program and help you carry it forward.

Cori O’Brien:
So I can see the growth of that happening quite a bit. I get leads all the time. People are saying, “Oh, have you heard of this really cool open source product?”

Cori O’Brien:
And if you’re listening to this, and you have an open source project, and you want help with it, send it my way. I tend to not want to ping people and say, “Hey, your project can use some help.” That’s kind of rude. So I won’t do that.

Josh Birk:
“Tap-tap. Cori, here.”

Cori O’Brien:
Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Cori O’Brien:
But if you ask for help, I will share how you can get it.

Josh Birk:
Got it. Okay. Well, I think that segues great into the next question which is, if people want to learn more. Or they want to learn more about upcoming Sprints, upcoming events. They want to contact you and be like, “Hey, I have this open source thing that I haven’t touched for three months. Would you all like to be interested in it?” Where should they go?

Cori O’Brien:
The best place to probably stay in the loop is either Twitter or LinkedIn. You can reach me on Twitter. And we also have a hashtag for the Sprint event specifically, which is SFDO, Salesforce.org, Sprint.

Josh Birk:
Got it. Okay.

Cori O’Brien:
So you can follow there, and you can search back through there. I’m also in the Trailblazer community and the Power of Us hub, if it’s before December and you’re in the nonprofit space.

Josh Birk:
Got it.

Cori O’Brien:
So the Trailblazer community. And then on LinkedIn, too. Lots of activity happening in all those places.

Josh Birk:
And that’s our show. Now be sure to check out the show notes for this one, because, as we mentioned last week, as we are airing this particular episode, there are some upcoming events, both in April and May in the form of a webinar about Snowfakery, one of my favorite things. It’s all about creating data that you can put into your test orgs.

Josh Birk:
And then also, another Open Source Sprint is coming up in May. So check out for more details on that in the show notes. Now, before we go, I did ask after Cori’s favorite non-technical hobby, and I’ve got two words for you, aurora borealis.

Cori O’Brien:
My favorite non-technical hobby?

Josh Birk:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Cori O’Brien:
Oh man. Just one?

Josh Birk:
I have had people fight me on that. So if you’ve got a couple…

Cori O’Brien:
Honestly, it’s probably traveling.

Josh Birk:
Really?

Cori O’Brien:
And I don’t know, is that considered a hobby or not? But I love traveling.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. I mean the general rule is, if you consider it a hobby, it’s a hobby.

Cori O’Brien:
Okay. [crosstalk 00:15:35]

Josh Birk:
Like I’ve had everything from painting, to cooking, to chess, to video games, which is possibly non-technical. How has the pandemic hit your traveling habits?

Cori O’Brien:
Oh, it’s been the worst.

Josh Birk:
Oh.

Cori O’Brien:
It’s been the worst. I know. We were traveling so much with the different Sprint events, and Dreamforce, and all these other places. We used to host events in both Europe and America. And as a Canadian, it’s always nice to get out, especially when the weather’s cold here, and get out and explore new things.

Cori O’Brien:
But yeah, it’s been rough from that perspective. I haven’t been anywhere. I’m booking my first trip up north to Canada, actually, to go see the Northern Lights. So that’ll be cool.

Josh Birk:
Jealous.

Cori O’Brien:
I know, right? Come up to Canada. The border’s open.

Josh Birk:
Yeah?

Cori O’Brien:
But other than that, I snowshoe. I love snowshoeing.

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Cori O’Brien:
And I am a huge reader. I’m a huge science fiction, fantasy nerd. Absolutely obsessed with space travel. So I read a lot of books too.

Josh Birk:
I want to thank Cori for the great conversation and information. And as always, I want to thank you for listening.

Josh Birk:
Now, 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 have links to your favorite podcast service. Thanks again, everybody. And I’ll talk to you next week.