This is my second time attending OSCON, last year I was here for the last 2 days and this time I’m attending for the first 4. As such, this is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to attend the tutorial days.
The first day I ended up in Jono Bacon’s Community Management Training. I have a considerable amount of experience working with an existing community when it comes to structure, dispute resolution and governance (which means I probably could have skipped the afternoon session!) but I really was seeking some fleshing out of my skills when it comes to getting new contributors working on things.
I’ve worked with a lot of new contributors over the years, but the process has always been very hands on and exhausting for me, a lot of figuring it out as I go and individually catering tasks for specific people as I mentor them directly. Obviously this doesn’t scale, and this year as I’ve been so busy with my new job and wedding I noticed that my communities suffered from my lack of attention to newcomers. What I gained from Jono’s session was the structure for crafting missions and visions, and then a concrete implementation plan, complete with work items, deadlines and success criteria. I’ve loosely done all these things casually over the years but it was always “here’s an idea, who wants to work on it and when do you want to finish it?” that rarely works, and when it does it’s almost always an existing community member who chimes in, if I want a newcomer to do it I need to be more strict about crafting the task and end up doing it individually for individuals (or don’t do it at all when I get busy, apparently!). I think actually having a targeted plan with more concrete things that I organized with my peers in the project will make this whole process take less time and hopefully be more effective and scalable. Now to decide what project to start with, beware! ;)
Monday wrapped up with dinner with OpenStack colleagues.
Tuesday! I went to Service Orchestration In The Cloud With Juju by Jorge Castro and Mark Mims. They did their demos on HP Cloud and Jorge kicked things off by showing the juju web UI running on a server provisioned there. From there they demonstrated the command line tools to do the same things the web interface did in the demo. From there Mark took over to do more in depth examples of configuration, service associations and more – in fact, it dovetails nicely with Dustin Kirkland’s blog post on juju yesterday. I’ll also mention that I was really impressed with the quality checklist that they subject charms in the charm store too, as an example, the one for WordPress. I want this kind of audit for everything.
Juju Web UI – on HP Cloud!
I spent the afternoon catching up with work and email. At 5PM I did a quick loop around the expo hall when it opened, and amusingly got my picture taken with a Princess Leia cardboard cutout at the cPanel booth. I may go back for a more thorough browse later this week. Tomorrow the keynotes and individual sessions kick off!