Jeff Gallimore

Hey everybody, and welcome to the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2022 in the US. And because we're virtual, many of you are tuning in from all over the world. We're so glad we're all together for the summit.

Gene and the programming committee keep finding incredible stories to share and amazing experts to learn from. We hope you agree as you see the talks from the fantastic line of speakers over the next three days.

But 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. And 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. And just like last year, 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 in Vegas two months ago, or virtual like we have been most of 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 together a lot of what we did the last two years to create a great virtual experience. So the learning and the community are still great.

And 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 the last two years when we've been 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.

So 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 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 to the event.

We'd really appreciate it if everyone edited 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 the speakers.

This is the opportunity you have to ask the amazing speakers questions. And 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, you know, 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 discussion channel in Slack and @mention the speaker during the 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 incredibly valuable and an 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 tracks of the schedule. Just make sure you're asking your question in the right channel.

And if you want to carry on a conversation after the speaker's scheduled talk time, you can take that conversation into the discussion-more channel.

When using Slack, remember alert fatigue is a real thing. So 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 during this time, so the FOMO should be low.

And we have Gather. Again, Gather is our virtual conference venue for the summit. You can walk around in it, interact live with 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 the space.

There's more to share with you about Gather, which I'll be doing after this morning's talk right before we break. Now, let's go through some of the opportunities during that 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. And 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 and 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 also have special birds of a feather sessions on day two and day three of the summit that I'll let you know about right before the morning break on those days.

And 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 chat.

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, 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 Videos 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 to access longer or to share the videos with more people, we've created some options to make it easy to do that. Just 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.

And 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 of 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 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.

Yeah. All right. Fantastic. Thank you so much.

The DevOps Enterprise Summit is brought to you by IT Revolution, the 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.

And we'd also like to say a big thank you to our virtual BFF sponsors.

And thanks to LaunchDarkly for 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 you 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 in your journey. So go talk to them in the Solutions Hub. Just navigate to Solutions Hub in the top-level menu, or you can visit each sponsor with 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 Badges 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.

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.