ambassador blog draft

content/authors/marcel_rd.md

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+---
+name: Marcel Ribeiro-Dantas
+avatar: marcel.jpg
+---
+
+Scientist at [Institut Curie](https://intstitut-curie.org).

content/blog/2020-05-08-dvc-ambassador-program.md.md

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+---
+title: 'Join the DVC Ambassador Program!'
+date: 2020-05-08
+description: |
+  We're launching our ambassador program for people all around the world to get involved in 
+  the DVC community.
+descriptionLong: |
+  We're launching our ambassador program for people all around the world to get involved in 
+  the DVC community.
+picture: 2020-05-08/Ambassador_Header.png
+author: marcel_rd
+commentsUrl: https://discuss.dvc.org/t/new-video-reimagining-devops-for-machine-learning/341
+tags:
+  - Ambassador
+  - Volunteer
+  - Talks
+  - Meetup
+  - Outreach
+---
+
+Software can be everywhere, but developers can’t - that’s why ambassadors, folks
+who do outreach and community building around projects they love, are a key part
+of the open-source community. DVC is starting an ambassador program to help
+people who are passionate about our mission get involved.
+
+What is that mission, exactly? DVC is founded on the principle of engineering
+solutions for making data science and machine learning rigorous and
+reproducible. If this matters to you, too, you might be a good fit for our
+ambassador program!
+
+As an ambassador, you’ll act as a bridge between DVC in your community. There
+are lots of ways to do this, big and small. For example:
+
+- Write a blog post talking about how you use DVC in your projects
+- What about creating a network of DVC users and data scientists in your town?
+  Even though we’re self-isolating now, you can still organize online meetups.
+  [We already did one!](https://tulu.la/events/dvc-virtual-meetup-2020-00032c).
+  We help cover costs to organize meetups.
+- Do you want to talk about DVC at your office, or at a conference? We help
+  speakers develop talks, and we have some discretionary funds for travel on a
+  case-by-case basis.
+- Want to develop a feature for DVC? We welcome contributions to the code base,
+  even if it’s your first pull request ever.
+
+Being an ambassador means getting closer to the team in charge of DVC, but at
+the same time, it means going farther to reach people outside the organization-
+including people who don’t know about DVC yet, people who need some help getting
+started, and people who are already excited about our mission and want to find
+meaningful ways to pitch in.
+
+It’s challenging, no doubt, but being an ambassador can be an amazing
+experience! Before becoming DVC’s first official ambassador, I served as a
+[Fedora ambassador](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Mribeirodantas) for
+several years. I got a lot out of it: I participated in lots of events, made
+friends, and traveled. Every single time I’ve contributed to an open source
+project, I got this nice feeling that it was all worth it. If you agree with the
+core values of the project, a great relationship lies ahead :).
+
+## About Iterative and DVC
+
+DVC got started in 2017 as a personal project by Dmitry Petrov (on May 4,
+[we celebrated our 3rd birthday](https://dvc.org/blog/dvc-3-years-and-1-0-release)).
+In 2018, Dmitry teamed up with his co-founder Ivan Shchenklein to incorporate
+Iterative.ai and grow the project. Currently, Iterative.ai’s flagship project is
+Data Version Control (DVC), an open source version control system for managing
+complex workflows, datasets, and models. Development is ongoing in the core DVC
+project as well as new ventures into
+[MLOps and Continuous Integration & Delivery (CI/CD)](https://dvc.org/blog/reimagining-devops-video)
+for data science. The team is small-and-mighty, with developers, engineers, and
+data scientists on four continents. The open source community is a huge part of
+all Iterative.ai projects; currently, DVC has more than
+[5,000 stars on GitHub](https://github.com/iterative/dvc) and more than 100
+individual contributors!
+
+One of DVC’s main principles is adapting existing software engineering practices
+to machine learning. For example, DVC is built around Git version control: in an
+ML project using DVC, each experiment corresponds to a Git commit. When you
+check out any commit, you’ll see the source code as it was when you made the
+commit- as expected. But, you’ll also see your datasets as they were and the
+exact pipeline of commands you ran in that experiment!
+
+## How to become an ambassador
+
+If you’re interested in becoming an ambassador, send us an email at [email protected]
+with the subject line “I want to be an ambassador!” Please tell us:
+
+- A little about yourself and your professional background
+- Any outreach work you’ve done before
+- What kind of ambassador activities you’d be most interested in participating
+  in
+
+The program is structured to provide a lot of flexibility, so each ambassador
+can do outreach in ways that are personally motivating and enjoyable. There are
+a few guidelines:
+
+- We ask for a one-year commitment
+- We ask ambassadors to contribute four activities per year, about once every
+  three months.
+- For your first contribution, we ask for a blog post- this way, we can
+  collaborate with you to help get all the technical details right. After that,
+  it’s up to you!
+
+## Some ideas to get started
+
+Our official ambassador program is just starting, but our community already has
+a lot of folks making noise. Here are just a few contributions we admire- we
+think they’re pretty cool inspirations for future projects.
+
+### Blogs and tutorials
+
+Shareable blogs are one of our most effective outreach strategies. They give
+visibility to the author _and_ new ways to use DVC, so it's a win-win.
+
+- [Remote training with GitLab-CI and DVC](https://blog.codecentric.de/en/2020/01/remote-training-gitlab-ci-dvc/),
+  by Mercel Mikl and Bert Besser (Bert has also organized a DVC meetup in
+  Berlin)
+- [Creating a solid Data Science development environment](https://towardsdatascience.com/creating-a-solid-data-science-development-environment-60df14ce3a34),
+  by Gabriel dos Santos Goncalves
+- [Continuous Delivery for Machine Learning](https://martinfowler.com/articles/cd4ml.html),
+  by Danilo Sato, Arif Wider, and Christoph Windheuser
+- [Manage your Data Science Project in R](https://mribeirodantas.xyz/blog/index.php/2020/03/05/r-dvc-and-rmarkdown/#more-2952)
+  was my first blog about using DVC in an R project!
+
+### Talks
+
+Community members have presented at events like PyCon, PyData, and local
+meetups.
+
+- [Version control for data science](https://www.slideshare.net/AlessiaMarcolini/version-control-for-data-science),
+  by Alessia Marcolini @ PyCon DE & PyData Berlin
+- [How to easily set up and version control your machine learning pipelines](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUTlqpcmiQw),
+  by Sarah Diot-Girard & Stephanie Bracaloni @ PyData Amsterdam
+- [ML models and dataset versioning](https://speakerdeck.com/kurianbenoy/ml-models-and-dataset-versioning),
+  by Kurian Benoy @ PyCon India
+
+### Code contributions
+
+Our GitHub repository has lots of open discussions about potential features- its
+a goldmine for ways to pitch in. For example:
+
+- [Helge Munk Jacobsen](https://github.com/elgehelge) took on an open issue in
+  our code base about supporting hyperparameter tracking with DVC and made a
+  pull request to add this feature.
+
+- [Vera Sativa](https://github.com/verasativa/) added directory support to the
+  `dvc import-url` function- and she was our 100th contributor, so she won her
+  own
+  [DeeVee the Owl](https://dvc.org/static/78b685e283d679c8ebe518ea17520f6d/75999/odd_with_deevee.png).
+
+If any of this sounds fun to you, please be in touch. We look forward to
+connecting with you!