00:00Henry: I think we mentioned evangelism in the last episode, so we thought it would be a good idea to go into that topic in more detail. About how evangelism in the faith context might not be that different in open source ‘cause we’re also trying to get people to either do open source as a whole or get involved in your project.
00:22Nadia: I was talking to a friend about this who pointed out that the term evangelism in tech is like evangelism from religion which sounds obvious but I hadn’t really thought of before. That’s kind of weird that we use this term evangelism, which has a religious context to it. So yeah, we’re gonna talk about the relationship between the two.
00:47Henry: Yeah, it is interesting ‘cause I know there are positions.. I’m a dev evangelist or we’re looking for an evangelist for our software.
00:58Nadia: I don’t even know, it’s a term that people are trying to use less now. It seems sort of weird (laughs).
01:08Henry: Yeah, I think so. Maybe before they did an analysis (laughs).
01:14Nadia: Yeah, but anyway we’re gonna talk about what’s maybe not as bad as it sounds (laughs).
01:19Henry: First, in tech for some reason people can be very adamant about what they believe as well and it is pretty obvious in terms of even open source. I was just talking to my friend, and he was saying when he got really into Linux, he really wanted everyone to use Linux instead of Windows and that’s the right moral ethical thing to do, it’s open source. Looking back it’s like, I was pushing that on other people, and that helped him to think about how he evangelizes in terms of his faith as well.
01:59Nadia: Yeah, with programming languages and just tribes in general, people can get very territorial about the technology that they’re most excited about or best product. On the one hand it can come from a good place if you’re just really excited about what you’re using and you wanna tell other people about it, but then where does that line go, where you’re pushing an idea on someone else or not respecting someone else’s views.
02:28Henry: There is an importance in the public sphere where we show people charity and having the civility to be able to talk about those differences versus, “I think you’re a bad person ‘cause you think that this language is better or this editor or this thing and way of doing whatever you’re doing is worse.”
02:53Nadia: So is the difference between evangelism and proselytizing, right? Proselytizing is officially part of Christianity also?
03:03Henry: Even these words have been changed over time and some people might think they’re the same exact thing. Most people would think that proselytizing has a really negative connotation and even recently evangelism does have a negative connotation in the generic sense of the term. But usually I would see proselytizing as more like you’re pushing your beliefs on people and it’s very aggressive. That means you’re coming from a position of I know what’s better for you and everyone, a position of power.
03:43Henry: But then the generic term for evangelism is more, you’re still talking about what you think is good but you’re not necessarily pushing it on anyone. You don’t have this prepackaged answer in terms of arguing with someone but humbly coming before them, presenting something different, and saying that this is what I believe or adhere to and maybe you might wanna consider it.
04:13Nadia: It kind of reminds me of sales tactics, not to make it all business-like or whatever, but people talking about how the best kind of sales is where you don’t just have this prepackaged message that you’re pushing on someone else but you’re letting them come to you or you’re tailoring it to that specific person you’re talking to. It is kind of a sales thing.
04:40Henry: I actually totally think it is (laughs). It’s funny in some ways, people think that religious people are so evangelistic but that’s what all of marketing is about and business is about selling something to someone and convincing them that it’s good. But maybe it’s not. They’re not just intellectually but through a story or through some kind of thing and that’s why when you watch advertisements when you go to the mall, everyone is always convincing you or trying to convince you that something is worth buying or believing in.
05:16Nadia: I think it’s different or I guess when it’s something that feels like a really personal choice to people. I guess that’s where I’ve struggled with it. I think much too like Quakers as far as I know don’t proselytize or at least I went to a Quaker school where there was never any, well, I don’t know, I guess there was never any expectation to convert or, you had to participate and meeting for worship like anyone else but you could, it was expected that you could do that or not be Quaker but I guess in the end, now that I’m thinking about it, it was almost that.
05:48Nadia: Like I still consider myself to live a lot of Quaker values and even though I don’t consider myself to be Quaker. And I guess that kind of comes through just because no one is really aggressively pushing it on you. I guess the point I was originally trying to make is that I think I’m more wary of situations where, yeah my, it’s my personal choice and so I don’t wanna feel like I’m having something being sold to me, which is different from buying, I don’t know, a SaaS product or something.
06:23Nadia: But then I guess where do any of our views and beliefs come from? People are always kind of, I don’t know. I saw something recently that was, I can’t remember what this, it was everyone is doubting someone else’s philosophies or something like that which the most, the people that are most aggressive about their messages it’s not even their own view, it’s someone else’s view. So I guess, I don’t know, there is no really pure person choice anyway. You’re all influenced by someone else.
06:57Henry: Yeah, I guess going back to the business thing, I think what happens is a lot of messages they want it to be personal because it’s like oh, if you buy these, I don’t know, these cloths or this food you’re gonna have a better life kind of thing. So they try to make it as personal as possible sometimes. And I think what you said about not pushing anything is important because we don’t want, at least in faith too, we don’t wanna reduce what we believe in to just the idea and the message. It is a message but it’s not solely what it is and what we’re trying to say is that we don’t wanna kind of extract that way from the reality of just living life and you have to embody what that is too not just, say, those words.
07:50Nadia: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
07:53Henry: And I guess that’s what you’re saying about how it’s kind of, it’s not just one package thing. I think a phrase that a lot of people use is meeting them where they’re at, and I think it’s how do you make that thing contextual to what they’re going through. You can’t really just say the same thing to every person. You wanna listen to them, and maybe that’s probably most of the work that you have to be doing instead of talking all the time.
08:25Nadia: I think in the end if someone didn’t convert I guess I don’t really know the right ter- I don’t mean that literally, I just mean if someone didn’t come over to your way of thinking would you think of that as failure in the end or is it? I’m trying to extend this analogy further to advertising I guess where there is brand advertising and then there is advertising with the intent to make someone buy something and sometime, Coca-Cola does brand advertising or they’re not literally trying to sell you Coca-Cola in the moment but they’re selling you this warm fuzzy feeling so that whenever you think of Coke, you just think of these fizzy little bubbles and happiness and whatever.
09:02Nadia: And that’s kind of the point of it and I wonder if there is an analogy there with just personal lifestyles and, I don’t know, it’s not necessarily about making someone be what you are, but it’s more about seeing what your lifestyle is like if that makes sense?
09:23Henry: Yeah, no, that definitely makes sense. I don’t know if it’s I think it’s pretty similar because, yeah, I don’t think you can expect you’re gonna talk to someone and then that moment they’re gonna believe in what you believe or say you talked to someone about doing open source and then suddenly they wanna do it. I think it’s i- yeah we’re asking for a certain level of commitment, and it is pretty personal I think. I don’t know if it’s, it’s you can talk to a whole group of people about something but your ge- you’re message is so generic, it won’t really make sense to them.
09:59Henry: And so I think I mentioned this before even talking about spiritual health. It’s like you wanna walk with those people, through whatever they’re going through, and it’s like it takes time. I don’t know if it’s really about making them have good feelings per se but, yeah, I think it’s kind of over time it’s like oh, this is a viable option for me to look into.
10:26Nadia: I feel like this kind of relates the idea of what, the idea of just learning in public with open source or everything you’re doing you put it out in the public, because you never really know who’s gonna see it and who’s gonna, who it might affect and it just makes more sense that you might as well do it publicly versus privately which is in itself I think a form of evangelism, even if it’s not evangelism towards doing open source but it’s evangelism towards whatever it is you’re putting out into the world or for yourself, for your reputation or whatever. But yeah, why do we default to public and they think it’s that, it’s that idea that you’re trying to live by example or, I don’t know, show something.
11:11Henry: No, yeah, I like that. I think it’s living in the public is kind of, it’s not just where you’re saying we’re just trying to convince them with the open source but maybe it’s more we’re trying to convince them of the values behind open source. So maybe they don’t code or they don’t know anything about open source but they’re like oh, in my field, yeah, maybe is research or something else you’re like oh, I wanna make what I’m doing open as well. I think that’s really valuable because then people can kind of take what that is, and take it to where they have a lot more knowledge than we do.
11:48Nadia: It is funny. I mean open source in particular, I mean it start as a software thing but you hear people sort of misusing the term but just applying to everything that means open.
11:57Henry: Yeah.
11:58Nadia: Which is not necessarily maybe ideal but, but it does speak to the idea that the concept of open source is so powerful that it kind of spreads to these other places. It’s been fine for me to consider over the fa- past couple of years ‘cause I didn’t come into open source but, then I was just sort of reading around and studying it, and at this point I feel like it’s really seeped into I think about working in general and I, it took me a little while, a couple of years to realize oh, this thing has actually changed me without intending to kind of somewhat, I guess, like Quaker school.
12:36Nadia: Where it’s not like I was intending to ever really contribute or do anything or whatever, but now I think of it almost like it’s just a really deeply held belief of mine now that everything I do I need to put into public or record somehow or have up somewhere. And yeah and just a lot of other things from, from open source. So I feel like those values kind of seep in unintentionally if you spend enough time around it.
13:06Henry: Yeah, I think it kind of shows the value and I guess almost power of habits and things that we do day-to-day. And yeah, I think a lot of, I guess you would say effective evangelism might come from not kind of telling people and not even just leaving it out but your own personal reflection on what you believe. It’s like if you don’t actually truly believe it yourself and live it out, then how are you gonna be able to show or convince that in anyone else? And I think one of the … And that, if you think about that it’s you’re gonna come from a place of humility because you realize that I know I’m not what these values are and I’m trying to work towards that, and I think it’s when people see it being lived out, then people are more willing to wanna chat about it or even ask about that.
14:13Nadia: Yeah, and ultimately I guess the decision falls on them which is maybe the important difference between … I mean in the end it’s always someone’s decision but I feel like that makes it kind of different from evangelism versus proselytizing where it feels like proselytizing is like an intent to convert whereas evangelism is like in the end it’s kind of like up to that person if they are inspired by what you’re doing and wanna learn more or wanna like, I don’t know, yeah, explore it.
14:44Nadia: But it’s not, no one is aggressively trying to tell you to do something. It’s, it’s like anything else where if I spend ti- enough time around any of my friends or coworkers or whatever, you start to just be changed by them. That’s just more subtle I guess.
15:03Henry: Yeah, yeah, maybe, yeah, you still have the intent for that, it’s just that you understand that obviously everyone’s their own person and you wanna respect that they, that they aren’t that. You don’t, you’re not forcing anything on anyone, and I think doing it in that way, it’s kind of you’re putting yourself out there and so it is a I think the posture that we wanna have with evangelism is basically being venerable and I think a lot of times the best thing you can do is just tell your story, which is why testimony is so important in faith but also I think in open source.
15:43Henry: I think about all the talks I’ve given which I’ve none of them have been that technical per se but just sharing about oh how I got started in doing open source, starting from not knowing anything about it and then somehow becoming a maintainer and I think it’s oh, people realize that you’re not that special that they could have had that happen to them too or they can relate to your struggles or whatever that is.
16:12Nadia: Yeah, I was thinking about this, in relation to community values. We’re talking about as an individual but also sort of how does a community embody values and how does, yeah, how does the community collectively evangelize I guess. And I was thinking about this open source survey we did at GitHub I think two years ago now and one of the things we had found- we were sort of randomly sampling people on GitHub who were on open source repositories about their behavior and things they witnessed and one of the things that came out of it was a lot of people had witnessed a negative interaction on a project and that made them not wanna participate.
16:58Nadia: And I guess the insight being that it’s not even about whether you’re … It wasn’t even about whether someone did something negative to you but even if you witnessed a negative interaction happen, it would make people wanna leave. And the takeaway for me on that was it’s really important for a community to act as though everyone is watching because you don’ know who might have stumbled upon your project and was thinking about contributing and then they saw something and then it just put them off and then they left.
17:29Nadia: And yeah I guess it’s, it goes back to this idea of it’s not even about who you’re directly interacting with but it’s about living through example or, yeah just being em- embodying whatever it is you wanna embody all the time when people are watching or when you’re in public and people will pick up on that and choose to sort of engage or not engage.
17:56Henry: Yeah, that is too real (laughs). I feel that so much in, well, both in my faith and in open source because I think the problem is you know that’s true but then that also may lead to a sense of anxiousness ‘cause you know that everyone’s watching. And that’s just the issue with doing anything in public, and even as people of faith, you’re called to, yeah, it says in the Bible that we’re called to be ambassadors for Christ and witnesses. I think those are good words to explain that it’s not what we believe or our story but it’s God’s story of how we should act and we shouldn’t, cater to in necessarily, dumb it down kind of thing but represent what that is and we can’t compromise on that either.
“We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.” - 2 Corinthians 5:20
18:51Henry: And that’s what makes it so hard because it’s so easy for you to just say things right, but to live it out is different and I don’t, yeah, I wanna be a person of integrity and to not be a hypocrite but what you said, anyone that says they are part of your group and they do something quote, bad or wrong and then it makes the trust and all of it worse for everyone. And so when you see people calling out maintainers or saying they’re bad and all that stuff, you feel really bad ‘cause you know that it’s not just that person getting mad or that person feeling bad but everyone that sees him, that could be so many people.
19:38Nadia: I feel like everybody, even outside of open source, outside of religion whatever, I mean we’re all living in very like increasingly public lives, whether you know it or not (laughs). And so it is a lot of pressure to be like well, sometimes people slip up or sometimes you don’t wanna always be thinking about like, you know, what happens if someone puts this on the internet (laughs) and, and I’m suddenly like the center of attention and I didn’t want to be. And so, I mean I guess there is sort of like a two-way relationship there too right, of like what do you expect the other person to believe about you or like is it okay to be fallible sometimes, is it okay to make mistakes?
20:19Nadia: I feel like with evangelism what I was talking about like what you’re sort of projecting out to others but like what’s the experience of the person receiving it and like what are the expectations for their behavior and like how they should engage with you if that makes sense.
20:35Henry: Yeah, I think that’s where posture of just listing to people is so important. If you go in, yeah, I think it’s you go into it expecting certain things out of a person, so then maybe that’s why you’re so aggressive on saying these things ‘cause you know they’re gonna respond a certain way. And so if you don’t have that assumption, then you’ll probably not, you’re not gonna bring up all these things immediately ‘cause it’s not, that’s just not relevant to getting to know them or having a relationship with this person at all.
21:07Henry: It’s kind of just, yeah, I don’t, there’s no, it’s kin- if I was gonna bring someone to church I’m not gonna just ask them immediately right. That I have no reason to do that, but it’s just how do you get to know this person, what they’re dealing with, all that stuff, and just being able to and it’s so much harder ‘cause you have to actually know what’s going on with them. And a lot of times yeah, maybe you don’t have to do anything. It’s kind of just the right timing I think.
21:40Nadia: Yeah. It seems to me that we’re always more forgiving of people who show some level of realness or vulnerability. Kind of going back to what you were just saying about the posture being vulnerability and I was trying to think, I think people are much more gleeful to take someone down when there is someone who’s been espousing very strict values or just really aggressively pushing their ideas or something.
22:10Nadia: I don’t know if we find some sort of scandal about a conservative politician and that’s, we just love to see them go down. But I think coming at it, coming at everything in life from that position of vulnerability, it that almost helps create those contracts between you and the people that you interact with, where if you’re coming at it from I’m not perfect and I don’t know everything, and I’m just sort of being open and listening to you and asking you to listen, then people are just much more forgiving I think. Just kind of interesting.
22:50Henry: Yeah, I think it’s important because I don’t think coming off as self righteous that kind of thing is definitely not gonna bring anything helpful, and even what you’re saying about, yeah, when people do something bad, it’s so easy for us especially now ‘cause everything is public and instant, that it’s so easy for us to just say oh, this person is so bad and it makes us feel like we’re so much better, and I think it has this weird negative effect where the more bad things happen or that people do, you think yourself that you’re not capable of doing that either.
23:31Nadia: Weird, isn’t it?
23:33Henry: Yeah.
23:33Nadia: It becomes a sort of like downward spiral into, I don’t know. It maybe goes back to what I was saying about the witnessing community interactions, like when you feel like that behavior is okay then you kind of engage more deeply in that negative behavior and then it kind of spirals down which I think makes it all the more important that people try to go higher instead of lower.
23:54Henry: Yeah, I know sort of the whole mob mentality of oh, this person sucks so I’m gonna also say they suck and then you’re not ever looking at yourself to see if you’re, they, having those same behaviors and it actually reminds me of that quote from Batman about how, what was it, you die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. I think that’s pretty applicable in a lot of areas.
“You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” - Harvey Dent, The Dark Knight
24:30Nadia: Work (laughs). I guess I was just wondering, I mean I just kind of, this may be a cheesy thought but just everyone in some sense is evangelizing something, right and so it was sort of odd to me I guess that religious evangelism gets a bad rep. I think maybe because there are people who have done it in more extreme ways that is not desirable, but in the end sort of I guess the way we described it, it doesn’t seem any different to me than how anyone is trying to live their life and be a positive example for others, right? Is there some other piece of it that I’m missing or is it really just no different from any other kind of evangelism?
25:19Henry: I guess I would say there is, yes and no. I think some people would say it is different because we’re talking about something that is ultimate, right. Which is something that you commit yourself to which your whole life should be based around. But in another sense I would say no because a lot of the things that we believe and want people to believe are things that are of ultimate concern, that do matter in the long run. And I think in a lot of ways things that we think are insignificant, small whatever things that happen in our lives, they do affect us in a big way.
26:00Henry: And so it’s kind of just saying that these small, little, I don’t know, pieces of information or habits, those things change us in a way that helps us think about what the purpose of life is or how do we deal with suffering or what does it mean to be happy and stuff like that. Another thing was, in evangelism, a lot of times if you are not having that, doing the listening first, you will probably use your own terminology, that they probably won’t- that they don’t understand and so especially in Christianity we’ll say a lot of things that people might not get at all, especially now where it’s kind of we’re in this post Christian world where maybe before you’re oh, we talk about, just grace and mercy and sin and all these words, sanctification.
27:00Henry: All these things and then if you say that now people have either they don’t know what it is or they have a different picture of what that is. And so it’s important to be able to talk to people in a way that it’s just normal language. And I think that important espe- even in open source, where we’ll say all these things like Git and all that and they’re like what is that, right.
27:21Henry: And so I think it’s good for us ‘cause it helps us to understand more deeply what this is actually about. I know I’ve been talking a lot with my friends that they’re like oh, ‘cause what happens is you meet someone new and they’ll be like, “What do you do?” And now, it was so easier before ‘cause I just say, “Oh, I work at this company” like Adobe or something and now it’s, “Oh, do you have your own start up or a young company or what is that?” So I be like, “Oh yeah, I do open source” and then you go into this whole thing trying to explain what that means, and try to find different analogies a lot.
27:57Nadia: I’m so unfortunate ‘cause yeah, I mean I, it goes back to the friends where I avoid jargon in general I think but even the term open source sounds jargony and it’s really hard to avoid. It’s, it’s kind of hard to ex- I found it’s hard to explain what open source is or what I work on to someone who does not know anything about software. So I’ll usually talk about doing it in public, yeah, it’s collectively created among a bunch of different people all over but it’s really hard to explain it.
28:35Nadia: And I, I’ve never, I, I really like to, I really do like not like the term open source for this reason. I just think it sounds so jargony and it’s so like, I don’t know. I just, I think it just like puts people off ‘cause it’s just … Even if you work in software, even if you are familiar with open source, I think if you say that you work on open source stuff people still have this preconceived notion of what that is and like I don’t like that either, because the term means a lot of different things to different people and yeah I, I really struggle with that of like finding the right, the right way to talk about what I do or what I’m interested in. I try to go as long as possible without using the term open source, unless I’m lazy and then I just kind of say it.
29:23Henry: (laughs) That’s so funny.
29:23Nadia: Yeah.
29:26Henry: Yeah, I think I end up just saying oh, it’s the opposite of closed source and I have to say what source is and source code and I’ll probably use an analogy of Wikipedia, ‘cause people know what that is. So it’s kind of based on what I think they know or they’ve told me. Even actually if there is someone from church I’ll actually just say, I’ll talk about how it’s a community, and people are doing volunteer work and they’re giving away for free kind of thing. It is funny that people end up asking oh, how do you make money and then we can go into that.
30:01Nadia: I think it’s the cultural part that I struggle with of I can, I could explain what it is but not necessarily what it means and then that sounds maybe sometimes worse to talk to people in software versus outside of software about it because they do just have an idea of what it culturally means to do open source and the weird part I guess is there is just such a wide range. For some people they assume it’s super, I don’t know, hippy stuff, and then some people would assume it is very corporate thing ‘cause that’s the open source project they know and everyone just have a different idea of what it means and so it’s, I think I hesitate to talk about ‘cause I’m just not sure what that other, what’s going on in that other person’s head when I say it and then once I say it I feel like I can’t unsay it or change it. It’s actually similar now working for a company in, the crypto space that-
30:53Henry: Hmm.
30:54Nadia: … I really try not to use that word unless I’m feeling lazy and then sure whatever, but I don’t like that that sets of so many different ideas in someone’s head about what it means or what kind of company it is or what I do and, yeah, it’s hard to kind of have control of that message or story I guess. And I imagine it’s similar for … I am actually surprised at how many open source developers are open about their faith publicly because I feel like if I were a Christian I would worry about people just, if you say that then just they’re putting on a lot of assumptions about who you are or what you care about or, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know if you-
31:40Henry: Oh, I totally agree (laughs) everything that you said.
31:44Nadia: Especially it’s not and I mean ‘cause you’re in New York know, right and I don’t know maybe it was different, where you grew up or something but, yeah, I don’t know any religious people in my life really in San Francisco, and urban places. So it’s even harder to, being religious at all is one thing and then another thing to kind of say you’re Christian or anything like that.
32:06Henry: Yeah, no, that’s definitely a issue, and that why I’m so encouraged that we’re doing this podcast I guess (laughing) in the first place.
32:14Nadia: We can talk about it here.
32:16Henry: Yeah, I think that’s part of a really good, it’s oh, we’re talking about all these terms for open source. Christianity, if you say you’re a Christian it means so many things, and so that’s same thing. I think people actually don’t say that as much. They won’t they’re Christian, they’ll say some other form of what that, oh, I follow Jesus or something (laughs) ‘cause it says something different. Or a lot of people they don’t, yeah, and even there is evangelicalism, being evangelical which is more of a political thing and so you probably don’t wanna say that either ‘cause it’s that says certain things about or stereotype about what you believe or who you are as a person, right people just start judging you on those kind of things, yeah.
33:01Nadia: That makes the whole evangelism thing even harder than it looks. You almost don’t even wanna … If it, if it’s hard to even talk about being the thing much less I don’t know everything else that comes with it, it just seems, seems very difficult.
33:17Henry: Yeah, I think it just changes based on the time. You know, maybe like 500 years ago, you could say that and everyone was Christian or whatever everyone was religious.
33:27Nadia: Yeah, if you weren’t though.
33:28Henry: Yeah, it would be weird if you weren’t guess and then now it’s almost like the opposite and it’s only perceived as pretty negative. So it’s just a different situation to be in.
33:39Nadia: Thanks for listening. If you’d like to continue the conversation, you can find us on Twitter at @left_pad or @nayafia or on our website hopeinsource.com.