Jeff Gallimore

Hey, everybody, and welcome to the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2022 in Europe. Because we're virtual, many of you are tuning in from around the world.

We're so glad we're all together for the summit. Gene and the programming committee keep raising the bar for every summit to make it the best programming yet, and they're quite chuffed because they think they've done it again. We hope you agree as you see the talks from the fantastic lineup of speakers over the next three days.

At most conferences, those talks are primarily one-way sharing from the speaker to you in the audience. We all know we can get a ton of value from two-way interactions and two-way sharing, and we want to create those kinds of opportunities for interactions between you and the speakers and between you and each other. We want to create this kind of experience for you whether we're together in person, like we have been in the past, or together virtually like we are now.

Let me run through some of those opportunities, but I need to set the stage first.

Prior to the event in 2020, we've always gotten together in person. Just like last year and the year before, this year we're not doing that. We're virtual. But we still have a lot of the same things that make the DevOps Enterprise Summit great, whether we're in person like we were prior to 2020 or virtual like we were the last two years.

We have great speakers. We have great attendees. We have great sponsors. We have great networking opportunities. We're interacting through Slack. We have a code of conduct. We're bringing a lot of what we did last year to create a great virtual experience, so the learning and the community are still great.

Because we're always learning and improving, some things are going to be different from when we've been together in person and even from last year when we were virtual. We have new opportunities to interact with speakers and attendees and sponsors that we've been honing for the last two years while we've been virtual, and we think we have another great summit experience in store for you.

As you can see right now, we'll be watching the talks primarily through our browser and interacting with others primarily through Slack. Let me show you how to get around the event in your browser and in Slack.

For watching the talks in your browser, navigate to Watch in the top-level menu for the event website. You can see the talks happening right now on the schedule. Or you can navigate to Schedule in the top-level menu, find the talks you want to watch, and click on Watch to watch them.

We're also interacting in Slack. Many of us use Slack for our daily work, especially these days. So we're going to use Slack for what we use it for in our daily work. We're going to engage with speakers, sponsors, and each other, both during and after the conference, and the Slack workspace is going to continue on beyond the conference.

You can get on board at this link on the slide, or you can go to Network in the top-level menu for the event website.

There are some important Slack channels you should be paying attention to, and I'll explain each of these as we go through the orientation of the event.

We'd really appreciate it if everyone would edit their Slack profile to include more information about yourself: name, image, organization, title, pronouns, whatever you feel comfortable sharing with this community to help us learn a little more about you. It will improve your experience and the experience of everyone else by making things just a little more human.

Now, let's talk about engaging with speakers.

This is the opportunity you have to ask the amazing speakers some questions. Because we're virtual, we get to do something a little bit different. In a physical event, when we're getting together in person, the speakers on stage are speaking. In our case, the speakers will be available in Slack during their scheduled presentation time, so you can post your questions in the corresponding Ask the Speaker channel in Slack and @ mention the speaker during their presentation. If you have thoughts on a question someone else asked, please contribute.

We've heard from many attendees that this kind of interaction with speakers and other attendees is an incredibly valuable and engaging part of their summit experience. So please, share your voice in Slack.

We have different Slack channels corresponding to the different programming tracks on the schedule. We have one channel for the plenary talks, and we have one channel for each of the four tracks in the schedule. Just make sure you're asking your question in the right channel.

If you want to carry on a conversation after the speaker's scheduled time, you can take that conversation into the Ask the Speaker More channel.

When using Slack, remember, alert fatigue is a real thing. Please be considerate of your fellow attendees and the important messages they might need to see from their teams. So please, don't use @here or @channel.

We have some terrific networking opportunities. We have a block of networking time each of the three days for you to interact with speakers and with other attendees. There are no talks and no other programming during this time, so the FOMO should be low.

We have Gather again this year. Gather is our virtual conference venue for the summit. You can walk around in it, interact live with the sponsors, speakers, and other attendees, and even play some games in there. You can enter the Gather space by navigating to Gather in the top-level menu for the event or by checking out the Gather channel in Slack.

Thank you to LaunchDarkly for sponsoring this space. There's more to share with you about Gather, which I'll be doing after the morning's talks right before we break.

Now, let's go through the opportunities during the networking time.

We're holding Birds of a Feather sessions each day of the summit. These are sessions for you to find and interact with other attendees who share similar interests.

The way to join a Birds of a Feather conversation is to enter the Gather virtual space and head to the Birds of a Feather room. I'll show you how to get there in just a moment. When you're in the room, just move to the area that has the topic you're interested in joining.

You can also join the Birds of a Feather Slack channels for topics that interest you. Each of those channels starts with BOF. Post in Slack during and after the session. After the Birds of a Feather session ends, there's nothing that says you have to stop the conversation.

To get to the Birds of a Feather room, go into Gather, head over to the right side of the virtual space, just go through the door marked by the arrow, and you'll be in the room where all the discussions are happening.

Gather provides a remarkably similar virtual experience to the in-person Birds of a Feather sessions. If you want to engage and contribute, great. If you want to watch and listen, great. If you want to discreetly disengage to go do something else, you can do that, too.

We have four different Birds of a Feather sessions on all three days, so there should be something that interests you. We'll also have one special Birds of a Feather session each day that I'll let you know about right before the break each morning.

You can always just hang out at the Dockside Bar right in the middle of the Gather virtual space. You never know who might be there and what conversations you'll have. So stop by, have a chinwag.

For those of you who have been to other conferences and events, you might be familiar with the law of mobility. The law of mobility says this: if you find yourself in a place where you're neither learning nor contributing, maybe like this person, then you should respectfully navigate to find a place where you can.

You can access the videos for all the talks through the video library. Just navigate to Library in the top-level menu. The videos of the plenary talks are available after they air. The videos of the breakout talks are actually available right now.

You have personal access to the video library for seven days as part of your registration. If you want access longer or to share the videos with more people, we've created some options to make it easy to do that. Check out Slack for more info.

We also have the session slides available. Just find the talk you want in the video library, and then click on the link to the slides to get them. Easy peasy.

Because we're all part of the same community, we should treat each other well, regardless of whether we're in person or virtual. We want everyone to have an amazing time here at the summit, and our code of conduct reflects that.

We've posted the code of conduct in Slack, but let me give you the gist. Listen well when someone else is sharing. Share well when you have something to say. Respect everyone at all times, and speak up if you see something or hear something that isn't consistent with the environment we want for this community. If you have any issues, email help@itrevolution.com or direct message me, Jeff Gallimore, in Slack.

Now, I'd like to enlist all your support in creating the kind of harassment-free environment we want for this community. I mentioned that we've posted the code of conduct in Slack, so I'm going to give you a few seconds to go into the summit info channel in Slack, find that code of conduct post, and then just please give it your favorite emoji to indicate your support. I'll give you a few seconds to do that.

All right. Fantastic. Thank you so much.

The DevOps Enterprise Summit is brought to you by IT Revolution, same people who bring us our favorite books like "The Phoenix Project," "The Unicorn Project," "The DevOps Handbook," and "Accelerate."

A huge thanks to our premier sponsor, LaunchDarkly. We'd also like to say a big thank you to our virtual BFF sponsors, our virtual good friend sponsors, and also our media sponsor who is getting the word out about this terrific community.

Thanks to LaunchDarkly for also sponsoring the 2022 DevOps Enterprise Journal. The journal is a collection of white papers tackling some of the biggest challenges facing this community, and it's a terrific resource. Visit the LaunchDarkly booth to get your free download.

The thank yous to our sponsors are genuine. This event doesn't happen without their support. The incredible people in the DevOps Enterprise community, you, are why we have so many awesome sponsors who want to help you on your journey. So go talk to them in the virtual expo hall. Just navigate to Expo in the top-level menu where you can visit each sponsor at their booth. They're ready to help you.

So find a sponsor and thank them for being a friend, because who among us couldn't use a little help from our friends?

Finally, we have some fun games to play. Navigate to Games in the top-level menu of the website to learn more about them. In addition to being fun, you can also win stuff.

If you need any help or have any questions, you can post in the summit help channel in Slack. You can email help@itrevolution.com, or if all else fails, you can direct message me, Jeff Gallimore, in Slack.

Whew. Okay. That's it. We hope you have an amazing time at the summit. Gene, let me hand it back to you to introduce the DevOps Enterprise Summit's first talk.