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

May 19, 2023

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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.

Credits

Produced by Richard Littauer
Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound
Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound

Special Guest: Lisa Caywood.

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