Communities of Practice

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All right, you're listening to another episode of the CTO Advisor podcast. And, Eudine, I don't know if I've ever had you on a podcast. We have tried on a few occasions, and this is the first time we've actually made it happen. So I'm super excited because this is the first time that we're doing a podcast together, Keith. This is unbelievable. So if you don't recognize the voice, this is someone that I have almost weekly meetings with, Eudine Porter-De Leon. We talk all things community, practice, marketing.

We're both you, Seth Gordon. Seth Gordon is amazing. Best marketing minds, best thinkers of our time, I think. Right. So I wanted to have Eudine on because, one, we're working on a couple of things together, but we're also noticing some of the same trends in the industry. A few weeks ago, I wrote a quick blurb on how communities of practice are changing. And Eudine runs a community group, Tech Level Up. So, Eudine, two things. Let's talk, can you talk about what we've seen over the past, I don't know, two or three years when it comes to communities of practice and what is Tech Level Up?

Yeah, well, just I'll start with Tech Level Up. Tech Level Up is a community-based organization. Really, it's a collective, a whole bunch of really amazing technology practitioners, leaders, and community members who come together, whether it's, you know, at different conferences, whether it's at community meetups, whether it's just, you know, hanging out and getting beers together. And brings all of, a lot of the great energy together to be able to then focus that on different activities that help people move their careers forward.

So it's very much focused on people in the community and helping them move their careers forward. And some of the interesting things that we've seen over the last few years is that there used to be just kind of, there used to be a town square. You know, there's this concept of the town square and used to be a very large town square where you could kind of almost find everyone. Or if they weren't there in the square, you'd find them off one of the little alleyways off of the square.

And it was a really big, boisterous place, and it was all kind of one place. Now there's a whole bunch of smaller town squares, and they're all over the different place. And everyone, someone who's looking to, whether move their career forward or do other activities, isn't really finding everything in that one town square like they used to. Is that kind of your view too, Keith, and how you're seeing it? Yeah, and I don't think it matters if you're talking about these huge communities of the past, whether it's Spiceworks, VMworld, Interopt.

You know, you have these really big, not just shows. I think it's fair to say that they were communities of practice where like-minded or like, or aligned professionals went to talk about their craft. Yes, and they did, and they could find all the people they needed to, they could find all the connections. And those events too, the quote-unquote conferences, weren't really about so much learning the new tech of that particular vendor or wherever they were. A lot of it really was, this is the place where I see the people I need to talk to.

You know, people like us do things like this, that thing that we talk about from Seth Godin that we were mentioning at the top of the show. That's what you did. You went to this conference and you saw those people and you engaged in the activities that you did each year at those particular venues. And that's how you move the conversation forward. That's how you moved your career forward is by doing those things. That's changed. It's not the way, it's not what it used to be anymore.

And I think the thing, one, it's not one single thing has changed. I think there's a lot of contributing factors. The pandemic has forced work from home. We went through three years of there not being events. But even before that, I think we started to see the change impacted by the ask at work. I'm biased. The CTO advisor has this theory or this working model that hybrid cloud is the future, that nothing in IT is really deprecated. Just the other day, I was in a data center in a COLO environment.

I looked inside of this cage and this customer had a HP NetServer, which goes back to the start of my career in the late 90s. The HP has, you know, the NetServer brand hasn't existed for over 20 years now. So at the same time, they had a bunch of VxRail sitting in the next rack, which I'm sure this was a cloud hotel and they had a bunch of connectivity to the public cloud and some public cloud workloads, I'd have to imagine. So the scale of what we are asked to support in our day-to-day has just expanded versus shrinking.

I think that has impacted our communities of practice. Yeah, and you made this prognostication a long time ago. You said hybrid is, you know, that's the future is hybrid. It's not going to be pure this or pure that. It's going to be just like everything else in our lives, whether it's, you know, getting our kids to activities or organizing our day using certain tools and executing. It's always a jumble of things and certain things that you need to have maintaining and running are going to still continue to be there.

I think a lot of people have speculated that Amazon's probably still got just some old tech running, you know, back-end retail purchase database, you know, transactions somewhere just because it works, it's connected and there's no reason to upgrade it or the risk of upgrading it or changing it is just too high. And it is now, like you said, there's not just one thing, one domain, there's so much stuff that's spread out across all these different pieces that have then just proliferated throughout the years that you now have to, you know, have a domain of expertise that potentially dips into various different other places where, you know, normally you had to go before to be able to get what you needed.

And with that, we're not just making assumptions. So we've teamed forces to put out a user survey, a community of practice survey. com forward slash community survey. I think the interesting thing that we're running into, even with the early results, there's no one leading conference. One of the questions that we're asking people, like what is, you know, the conferences that you're going to, and it's all over the place from AWS to open source events to meetups to just everything. I think infiltrating even our social media platforms, one of the aspects that we're asking is, you know, where do you go to meet, to have conversations?

I know that that place is just, it's fragmenting and it's tough to be able to just go drop into one place or go into one platform and get everything that you need. And it's, you kind of go to all these different little places and you have to, you have to make choices, tough choices about where you put your sort of precious time because I don't have any more time than we used to. You've got to go to different places to get what you need for your career, for technology, for, you know, moving your business forward, moving your team forward.

And I think it's interesting what we're getting from people who are taking the survey is really eye-opening. I think there's a lot of good conversations that are going to spin up from this because a lot of people are trying to, they're trying to connect with this audience, they're trying to connect with the fellow people in their community. So it's other people trying to find, you know, the people they used to connect with on a regular basis, or at least some small aggregations of those audiences.

And other, you know, people who are trying to, you know, to motivate or to help, you know, these audiences as well are just, well, where is everybody? What are they doing? Where are they going? And I think there's a lot of really good learnings that are coming out of this. So let's talk about how we're trying to solve the problem, or at least contribute to the solution. How are we making a ruckus? What is the trail map? The V-trail map, for those who haven't been exposed to the experience, is it originally started, I'll make this history very brief.

It originally started at what we called VMworld back in the day. And it went over all of sort of the VMware technology stack and the different people who were sort of the leading people in the community who really had a great domain expertise in that particular tech. And the V-trail map was a digital and physical asset that you could hand someone at the show. And in it, you'd flip through and you'd see their picture, you'd see their Twitter handle, and you'd see a podcast they'd done, or a blog they'd written, or a paper they'd worked on, or a book that they had out.

And you'd be able to not only consume that, but you'd also be able to then reach out to them and say, hey, look, I'm trying to do this thing, this piece of tech, whether it's, you know, working on Horizon, or whether it's working on vCenter. I mean, like, this is sort of a little old school here. And then you'd be able to reach out to them and be able to also know who are the people in the community. Because there's so many people who go to these events who are looking for that connection.

And this was the tool that not only helped them, but also helped other people in the community who were already connected. Because they would say, oh, you got to check this out, check this out. But it was all very anecdotal and tribal. The V-trail map was something you could hand someone else to pull them into the community, to help lift them up, to help move their career forward. And it was a really effective tool, not just for the individual, but also for community members to bring more people into the community.

Now, what it is, it's all not just about in a particular tech stack. It's not just a particular company or a particular solution. Now it's about everything. We're going to be working on one for generative AI and all the different people whose knowledge work or tech work is going to be affected by generative AI. And who are the different people in the community who are doing things who can sort of contextualize it for? What does it mean for my career?

What does that tech mean? And it's not just a guide that sort of gives you information. It's individuals, people who are in the community who have been here for a long time, understand what the audience needs are, what career paths are, and are getting introduced to the technology or giving people context. Well, what does generative AI mean? This is interesting. Like, where do I go? If I want to keep track of it, what blogs do I read? What podcasts can I listen to?

You know, there's a lot of different resources that exist in pockets, you know, tribal pockets. You know, we want to bring it all together and have it be digital because now we're sort of more in the environmental phase of, hey, we can't print out a bunch of copies and hand them to people. We have to just have the scale digitally. So the digital asset, I think there'll be some events where there'll be some Easter eggs where we'll have a few printed copies just like, you know, there'll be sort of collectibles just like we did for those who are collecting all of them who've started collecting all the different b-trail maps throughout the years.

We'll have a few of those sort of hidden and scrolled away somewhere, but I think digital is going to be the way that this scales out. And it's going to be for any event, any topic, whether it's data resiliency or whether it's multi-cloud or whether it's whatever it's going to be, this one's going to be generative AI because it's super exciting and very, very relevant and people are kind of concerned about it. But it can be any topic, you know, activated in any way because of this audience fragmented.

So we have to meet people where they are. We have to scale it out to all these individual, you know, places and platforms. So there you go. That's it in a nutshell and what we're working on. And you've been a great partner to this, Keith, and super excited to be partnering with the CTO advisor on this because I think it's really relevant and I think we really need to get, you know, the b-trail map back in front of people so that we can start connecting people in the community in the way that they're going out and connecting with each other.

Yeah, we're all overwhelmed, whether you're a CTO, CIO, enterprise architect, or you're an engineer. There's just more things to do than we have the capacity to do. And sometimes we need a map to that. Similar to VMworld back in the day, it was overwhelming with 26,000 people at one show. Where do you start? You kind of needed this map and b-trail map was that. We're experimenting with this, with generative AI, a b-trail map to generative AI. And this may, to your point, expand beyond single events, single communities, but just how do I navigate the concept?

So, Udaina, it was really great having you on. We'll have a bunch of stuff in the show notes about where you can find years past b-trail maps so you can get an idea of what the digital piece assets are. If you want to sponsor a b-trail map, you can reach out to us. My DMs are open at CTO Advisor on Twitter. Talk to you next CTO Advisor podcast. Thanks a lot, Udaina. It was great being on the show.