John Jeremiah, Candance Byrdsong Williams, & Jessica Reeder- Moderated track intro

Welcome to Virtual GitLab Commit 2020. Thank you for joining us today and it's going to be a fantastic day of insight-sharing and collaboration. My name is John Jeremiah, and I lead our Product Marketing team, and I'm really honored to be joined with several other awesome co-hosts for today's mainstage.

I'm Candace Byrdsong-Williams, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging manager here at GitLab. Hi, I'm Jessica Reeder, All Remote Campaign Manager at GitLab. Thanks, Candace and Jessica!

This is going to be fantastic. And Commit is a celebration. It's a celebration as much as it is a conference.

It's an opportunity for all of us to come together and to share; to share our lessons learned, to share our best practices. It's really an opportunity for us to celebrate our successes and to teach each other about what works, what doesn't, so we can all be more successful in the future. Commit, it's about a community and it's about how we welcome each other and we work together to solve real world Devops challenges.

Commit is bringing different people together. In fact, there's over one hundred twenty different countries represented in today's conference of attendees who are here joining all of us together to learn. And it's about how we learn to to implement better Devops transformations.

How can we change the culture from the way it was to a way in the future where security is part of the Devops lifecycle, which is really where it belongs. It's about us learning tips and tricks from each other so we can get the most value out of GitLab. It's about how we can learn about becoming a contributor to make GitLab better, or connecting with partners and others who have built solutions who can help us achieve better ways of working.

It's about learning how to work remotely in a distributed way. The way we work at GitLab. It's about learning how to apply Devops practices and solutions in every setting and every place, from public sector to large organizations and small.

Ultimately, GitLab Commit is about you, and it's about providing you an opportunity to connect, to learn from each other. And with that, I want to go ahead and pause for a moment to explore and ask Candace to explain a little bit about our theme. Our theme today is "You Belong Here".

Candace, you explain a little bit about that theme? Absolutely. And thanks, John.

As you stated, our theme for today is "you belong here". We chose this thing because it really reflects the core of who we are at GitLab as a community of contributors, developers, and leaders who are shaping and transforming the industry. Our core values GitLab are: collaboration, results, efficiency, diversity, inclusion and belonging, iteration, and transparency.

Because of these, we welcome contributions from everyone inside the company, in the community, and at large. We wanted to Commit to truly reflect those values into the spirit of open source development and of an open source community. When we planned Commit, we try to find stories and sessions that would celebrate the diversity of how we work, who we are, and the different challenges that people are solving.