(00:01) [music] [applause] Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to join us today to talk about what I, as a non-engineer, try to do to collaborate with engineers. I'm Masato Nabeshima from InnerStudio, and I'm a freelancer, and I'm involved in various community and sleeping activities, and I'm also involved in other things, like organizing online events and writing about IT equipment. If you're well known, we'd love to hear from you.
(01:06) I'd be happy to talk to you about some of the things I'd like to talk about. I'd like to start by explaining what I'm not going to talk about today, because I think that the audience that I'm talking to today is pretty much anyone who has a business relationship with a software engineer, and whose technology is driving their business in some way. I'm not going to talk about marketing, public relations and presentation techniques, but I'm sure they'll be useful in community management, where you're working closely with engineers, even if it's not online. The most important thing to remember is that the best way to get the most out of your product or service is to make sure that you are getting the most out of your product or service.
(02:10) The IT applications have become widespread in all areas of the industry, from entertainment to daily necessities, and you probably know that opportunities to get involved with engineers in all kinds of jobs have been increasing. I've heard that engineers and salespeople still don't get along, that engineers and marketers are at odds with each other, and that there's often friction between planners, designers, personnel, and so on. I've had the opportunity to speak with many people in the developer community at developer events such as the Developer's Summit, which Kondo-san is now running, and also at Cloud Native Days, where I get the chance to talk to people in the developer community. I can assure you that the developers and the rest of the community are the acting room biz, and that's the way it should be.
(03:14) I've extracted a few common cases of friction, for example, but I'd like you to do something a bit better, we'll call it the water side. The most important thing to remember is that the customer is not the only one who needs to do the work, but the engineer is the one who needs to do the work. The most important thing to remember is that the best way to get the most out of your product or service is to make sure that you are getting the most out of your product or service. I think they are using different vocabulary.
(04:18) I think that developers and vis-Ã -vis use the same words but with different meanings, and they use words that they don't understand each other. The same word can mean different things to different people, but the culture is different, and there's a different sense of schedule and work, which will come up later, and there's not a lot of talking, which means there's not a lot of communication and knowledge storage and where tasks get done, which can be a source of friction, especially between engineers and non-engineers. (05:21) Rinsho and I were very much involved in the discussion about the schedule.
(05:21) Should we be flexible and change the schedule, or is it a matter of trust, or is it an emotional issue, or is it a matter of trust and we want them to keep their promises, but we need to be flexible and see where we can make changes and how we can respond, and another thing that often comes up is the software side. The cloud can be procured immediately, or can be adapted with a slight change in behaviour, but when real things are involved, it suddenly takes a long time, and it can be very slow and complicated. For example, the developer side uses Slack, and the water side uses email, which I think is a slack term used by many of you here, or the line, which is not so good, but sometimes they use that line. I think it's a bit of a different kind of thing, where you have different places to store knowledge and different tools to manage your tasks.
(06:27) I think it is easier said than done, but it is important to share vocabulary, to increase the number of words we can understand each other, to know each other's culture, to understand each other and to share the same tools. The solution to this is easier said than done, but I think it's a solution that can be seen when the communication knowledge task is carried out in the same place as much as possible. The first thing to do is to start with a system that is easy to work with, in other words, to start with a common set of tools. I'm involved in a project called Cloud Native Days, which, to put it simply, is about containers, rakes, etc.
(The event is about cloud-native technologies, and it's a website with an organizing committee, an organizing committee, a civilization secretariat, sponsors, participants, speakers, and a typical structure. The event was held at the same time as the offline event, but in 2020, in the midst of this abomination, I still have a tremor in my voice, but when people couldn't appear in front of others, Cloud Native Days went fully online, but at that time, conventional event platforms were not so flexible. The event platform was not flexible enough to deliver the user experience that the organizing committee envisioned, so we decided to create an event platform for the organizing committee to deliver the event. The Dreamcast is a tool for managing event participants, chat, and everything else.
(08:37) This is derived from Sega's Dreamcast, but we created the platform by ourselves, and it has continued until now. The main thing was that they were doing it as a business, so if you were Impressbeekwasa, it was a business, but for the community it was not a business. The result of that was that, of course, they were doing it as a business, so if it was an impresario beacon, it was a business, and for the community it was not a business, it was just to promote cloud natives, but when there was a business involved, that was not the case, so it started to have a business project aspect. The first thing we did was to try to eliminate as much fragmentation of communication as possible.
(The first thing we did was to eliminate the division of communication as much as possible. The frequency of regular meetings has increased from once a month to once a week, so that all stakeholders can meet in the same place as much as possible to increase open and direct care. We have also unified knowledge management. At first, the Executive Committee and the Secretariat naturally used different drives and managed knowledge in different ways, but we first introduced a backlog in the Secretariat and gradually tried to unify them. Backlog
(10:47) The Executive Committee Secretariat was using the backlog, but it was difficult for people to see the bank logo, so we asked them where people would see it most often, which was probably the development hub. The task management was then shifted to GitHub.iShoes and everything from repository management to everything else was done on github. But if you're Guitar Herbie Shoes, it's hard if you're just doing the tasks, so now we're using a new tool called Lotion for knowledge and tasks, so we're shifting to that. The most important thing is that you can use the same tools for different tasks, so you can easily distribute the information.
(11:51) In terms of knowledge, it is not good that there is a discrepancy between the internal documents and the documents that are published by the secretariat or sponsors, such as IMPRESS, so once the master is created in markdown format, a system was created to automatically generate PDF files. The system is not very well structured and we would like to improve it, but as a result of increased conversation and common understanding, the examples given here are examples of functional improvements. For example, we can improve the system for communicating with speakers in this way, or we can solve the problem of communicating with sponsors in a systematic way. (12:56) We are now in the same place, so knowledge, tasks and communication are all in the same place.
(12:56) So we're in the same place, we're having more conversations, we're having more shared actions, we're having more shared understandings, and that has led to a better participant experience in the case of this event, where we're working together, we're facing challenges together. The only problem is that the system alone is not always enough to solve the problem, and even if you are the same person at the time, there are still different ways to go about it. In this case, it's a list-device, but even if they are on the same team, there are also stakeholders outside the organisation who are involved in conversations about money and other things, or even the overlapping tsunamis of both sides. I don't know how to say it.
(14:01) In terms of the area where both tsunamis overlap, I'm afraid I'm a little bit out of my depth. For example, when you update a website, an application or a system, you can just add a feature like this, or wait a minute, there's an automated test, and then it's reviewed and checked in staging, and then it's over, and then it's reflected in the environment. There's a difference in the way that you have to go through these steps, so having someone in between, saying, "This is how we're updating the system, so it's going to take this much time, so please let everyone know in advance," makes the exchange between the two much smoother. It's important to have someone who interfaces between the world of bis and fat people in this way.
(The most important thing is to have someone in between who can interface between the bis and dev worlds in this way. I've been trying to learn as much as I can about programming and service operations, even if it's just a little bit, and I've been using Python JavaScript as a language. The most important thing to remember is that the technology is not a commercial one, but it can help you to understand what it is. The most important thing is that the development of the system is not only a matter of skills, but also of priorities, as everyone's time is limited and they have to do other things.
(16:12) There's a lot of priorities that have to be done, so the quickest way to understand is not just to work, but to join a community where you have more opportunities to work with engineers on various occasions and talk to them directly. I think it helps to talk to engineers directly, and when I was actually involved in DevSame, that kind of thing helped me to try to understand engineers, even if I didn't understand them. I think it's good to be part of a community where you can find a contextual overlap with your own interests and your own work. (17:16) marketing ecommerce
If you want to look into a community, you need to contribute in your own way by taking part in it. However, even in the engineering community, there are many things that non-engineers can do, and surprisingly there aren't enough people in these places, so even non-engineers can contribute to the IT community and the engineering community. I'm not sure if it's a problem for you because you're already involved, but I'm sure there are people around you who are on the same team and have the same kind of issues and challenges.
(18:21) And if you are one of those people who are going to have more and more opportunities to work with engineers, why don't you invite them to join the community? I think it's important to share the same tools, share the same knowledge, and increase cross-cultural exchange, but there will always be areas that can't be solved by the tools, so it's important to have someone who can act as a bridge at that time. It is important to understand the world view of engineers in order to make the bridging process smoother. I would like to end today's presentation with a few words.
(19:24) I'm involved in the Cloud Native Days Executive Committee, and we're looking for members for the next Cloud Native Days, which will be held in August in Fukuoka, Japan. The next Cloud Native Days will be held in Fukuoka in August and we're looking for executive committee members. If you're here today and you'd like to contribute to the community and get more involved, please feel free to contact me. I'd like to talk to you about it.
