Cara Delia, Red Hat | Open Source Summit Europe 2022

This is texturing TV. Hey guys, welcome back. We're at the open source Summit in Dublin.

This is the Europe Edition. We're talking to Cara Delia who's a principal Community manager at red hat for the whole Community. This is a big job, and we're going to talk about what's going on with the community.

What's top of mind Karen? Welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Mike.

We're here in Europe. You cannot walk down the street without somebody talking about sustainability on some form or another. How does sustainability actually impact software developers?

What should they be thinking about? Frankly, you know, they've been writing code for a very long time and some of its possibly more efficient than others. So what should they be thinking about here to kind of help out on this whole issue?

Yeah. Well, so in terms of sustainability just to clarify. We are talking about climates sustainability because there are sustainability elements to projects and to community so keeping a sustainable Community, but in this term, it is around climate change and one of the things that we're doing at red hat so I focus on FSI and sustainability.

One of the things that we're doing at Red Hat is looking at our carbon emissions just as anybody is around the Paris climates view in Paris climate Accord trying to get our to our Net Zero goals Green Computing is certainly a major topic and looking at what data centers are actually You know providing from a carbon footprint and so from a developer standpoint. I think that you know, they're what I try to do is to have people engaged from you know, a social level because you know, this is around ESG predominantly right now. We are able to impact from a red hat standpoint at the E portion of it.

So what we're emitting into the world and but being able to look at our carbon footprint and in the sustainable design of software looking at where they're opportunities to compress loads to automate we have there's a great conversation yesterday with Martin. Sweeney I believe it was from City the good work. He's doing with IBM with Linux 1 so being able to to break down their their time and from a Time standpoint for resources But ultimately for the actual physical resources of being able to admit lessons of the world.

Do you think we'll ever get to the point where I might get a message as I'm building my application in the architecture that I used and someone will send me an alert saying this thing is probably a little more. Heavy than it needs to be in terms of how much processing power and how much electricity it's consuming and I should rethink it a little bit or hear some suggestions to make it more energy efficient. Is that where we're hoping against you?

I do think we're hoping to get to that. I think it will start with suggestions and then it just won't let you develop. There will be a cut off point where it's this is not going to happen.

It does not compute. There may be some folks who still don't buy into the whole notion. So they might bristle a little bit about that, but we'll see how that goes along.

Do you think that the regulations in this space are gonna get tougher and tougher as we go along though? And that seems to be the driving force one way or another plus it seems like large Enterprises are saying, you know, we want to know what your power consumption ratio looks like. Absolutely.

So regulations are this is just the tip of the iceberg. They're predominantly around scope one and two emissions scope three is the fuzzy space. So that is where a lot of the reporting opportunities are going to be in the future and a lot of the regulation is going to be and that is where the beauty of Open Source comes into play because the principles of Open Source being collaborative being Innovative.

So this is not a competition space. This is a Cooperative space and so actually some of the work that I've been doing through OS climate has provided that it's around sustainable Finance. There are other organizations that outside of financial services.

There are a part of this but They're realizing that they are able to work in a Cooperative space because there is this is going to impact their customers but in a positive way and they all need to be impacting their customers in a positive way and through the community actually Red Hat built the data Commons platform because data is a huge consumer of power and also it is going to be what is changing or help to change and to also meets and exceed the regulatory requirements around ESG reporting. So this data Commons platform is industry agnostic in this point. It is being used for financial services, but is you can be used across the board and it's can be for proprietary data where you use a Data Vault or it could be completely open source where you know, you're just getting public data in or you have your public data sets from the organizations.

I do mention the proprietary piece because there's going to be modeling that's associated with this especially around transition risk. By physical risk and so when you're using those in a proprietary natural language processing models, that's a place where you know, that is the secret sauce and so easily could be you know, that takes it out of the Cooperative necessarily so bringing into that Data Vault to be able to you know, still meet those requirements, but also be able to own the risk yourself. Do you think that?

There's a lot of focus on the issue, but it seems to be mostly on the server side of the equation and maybe there's a lot more focus on the storage side of this equation that needs to be thought through because that's where the data resides and maybe that's where there's more opportunity. So is that kind of a fair assessment? Absolutely Fair assessment Quantum Computing.

I mean if you think about date or the server farms and storage Farms, there are many areas of opportunity for being able to decrease the the carbon footprint. So 100% Fair assessment and I do see that the next phase. All right a lot of server people out there right now going I knew it was those storage guys.

It's always that yeah. What else is going on in the community? What's top of mind for you guys?

I'll bring up this issue. There's been a lot of angst. Shall we say about people using open source software but not contributing enough back to the community.

There's a lot of ways to contribute to the community. So how can somebody engage other than you know, writing code? What else?

Can they do? That's a great question, especially in the sustainability area. And for a cross it can be any kind of topic but sustainability is going to be important to be able to have your program managers your education internal education to your to your company to be involved in your projects.

Really. I code has gotten us to where we are. But it is going to be people being able to amplify the value of that code moving forward.

So that's your marketers. That's Tech. I mean, I think every project needs better documentation or can be enhanced and so technical writers, you know, or writing a contributions coming back into into the project and and you know, we hear a lot about impostor syndrome and and that's really unfortunate open source, because truly it is going back to this principles Innovative and collaborative.

And so it needs to be just it needs to be more than just a true technical resource. I mean that is the core of Open Source, but it is that kind of Halo and for Community shall we say the community around the developers helping to amplify the good work that they're doing? It almost seems like a company needs to figure out some set up processes to participate and that would involve I think maybe getting a couple of lawyers involved the same.

This is how we're gonna engage. This is how we're going to work with folks because I mean your individual developers will happily ship code anywhere. Okay, they're like you want to use my code great copy fabulous, but the companies themselves need a more structured approach and I don't think they know how to do that.

So is there a center best practices for setting this up for this level of Engagement? And what should they be thinking about? Well, that's Beauty of ostos Open Source program offices and that's actually where I sit within red hat and in the office of the CTO and part of what we do as an osbo is we educate our customers on how to create it strategy.

Who are your stakeholders What policies do you need internally? What kind of governance do you need? And and also going back to the stakeholders piece is really being able to speak to each of those stakeholder personas to be able to Tie into their key motivators, especially if you're thinking of legal and being in a space of financial services, like I am, you know, who manages the risk and thinking about the regulatory requirements that are needed and also again going back to that.

You know, we don't want to give up our secret sauce. It's being able to lay all that out within the strategy and and red hat is here to help and there are other organizations as well. But we help our customers to be able to create those strategies so that they can have based on their risks Spectrum or risk profile would they can be able to have those that inner the international sourcing essentially policies and procedures as to how to contribute whether technical or not technical you have seen some folks at these things up.

So what is it that you see some people do in that just makes you shake your head and gosh. I wish they'd talk to me first. Um, well, you know that is the the beauty of Open Source is that it's iterative.

And so, you know, it's just having a conversation and and I would say that the strategy piece is key and and making sure that you have across functional stakeholders within that it could be a small group. But at least it starts cross functionally because then you're gonna have better buy-in especially when it's not just a top-down, you know, or the I call it the middle management sandwich and that, you know, CEO and the c-suite or bought in the developers bought in but then the management chain is not necessarily sure how to how to roll this out. Especially when you're dealing with siled organizations.

And so it's being able to have that cross functionality to to get everybody on board. Do we need to train the lawyers every lawyer I ever talk to about anything said don't do that. It's a bad idea.

And in Finos, we have the open source Readiness Sig, which is I am a part of that as well. And we do invite lawyers to that. We've had legal be a part of that and so definitely the training for everyone, you know, it can is invaluable but certainly the legal side.

I think one of the things that companies are overlooking about all this is that developers themselves want to work for places that contribute to open source projects and the best talent is heading in that direction. So this isn't just about something that I should do because it's good for Humanity. It's actually a business proposition because otherwise you're not going to get the best talent.

Absolutely open source, certainly attack attracts and helps to attain a talent especially during this great resignation. And I think we'll see more of it within the great resignation but open source and that is one of the key pieces to the strategies that I was talking about that we we talk about there that we we share with our customers is that developers are wanting to do this they are wanting to be able to openly contribute one of the key pieces and at going back to the legal piece, especially around security and financial services in particular many times. The organizations are not they block it up and or they back get lab and and so one of the pieces that I share is thinking about ways to to mitigate the rest of those are those sites but really it's a best practice to allow it as opposed to Developer having to go onto their own personal device that might not have you know, the updated patch that you had for years, you know for your security policies, but being able to let them and also that is a barrier to entry for developer.

So making sure that they have access to get up is actually in or get lab the key one of the key pieces of letting a developer be able to contribute and that's that can be a rub. And the financial services people especially have to realize that they're now competing with everybody in the world. Not just other Financial Services firms for this talent and a lot of the developers.

I know we're not exactly jumping up and down to go to Jersey City and sitting in office and write Java code. So somebody's gonna have to kind of make this more attractive than it currently is to them. Is there a set of best practices for recruiting developers and onboarding them and those kinds of things that you guys have thought through or somebody in the Linux Foundation maybe or maybe that's an opportunity for some future progress.

Yeah. Well Yeah, we have a lot of times that I hear from our customers is they're going to ansible Fest. They're going to Red Hat Summit.

They're going to other conferences as well. And that's where they're recruiting talents. I'm same at every conference we go.

We always make sure that there is an eye for being able to share their customers. This is somebody that you might you might want to be talking to but you know, in addition to that with the the global pandemic remote work has become you know, so a norm and so you're not necessarily having to go to Jersey City. You're not nearly you're not necessarily having to go to Ohio or Marlow, you know, the physical location is less of a concern and it's more about the contribution piece.

All right. Well folks you heard it here you can be anywhere but if you want it to be somewhere Dublin might be the place to be today because it is kind of gorgeous and it's a great City to hang out in Karen. I want to thank you for being On the show.

Thank you. All right, and with that back to you guys, and we'll be back in about two or three minutes. Take care.