Following the Community Leadership Summit (CLS), which I wrote about wrote about here, I spent a couple of days at OSCON.
Monday kicked off by attending Jono Bacon’s Community leadership workshop. I attended one of these a couple years ago, so it was really interesting to see how his advice has evolved with the change in tooling and progress that communities in tech and beyond has changed. I took a lot of notes, but everything I wanted to say here has been summarized by others in a series of great posts on opensource.com:
- 10 top-notch community tools by Jono Bacon
- A guide for community management from Jono Bacon by Nicole C. Engard
- 7 books every community manager should read by Nicole C. Engard
…hopefully no one else went to Powell’s to pick up the recommended books, I cleared them out of a couple of them.
That afternoon Jono joined David Planella of the Community Team at Canonical and Michael Hall, Laura Czajkowski and I of the Ubuntu Community Council to look through our CLS notes and come up with some talking points to discuss with the rest of the Ubuntu community regarding everything from in person events (stronger centralized support of regional Ubucons needed?) to learning what inspires people about the active Ubuntu phone community and how we can make them feel more included in the broader community (and helping them become leaders!). There was also some interesting discussion around the Open Source projects managed by Canonical and expectations for community members with regard to where they can get involved. There are some projects where part time, community contributors are wanted and welcome, and others where it’s simply not realistic due to a variety of factors, from the desire for in-person collaboration (a lot of design and UI stuff) to the new projects with an exceptionally fast pace of development that makes it harder for part time contributors (right now I’m thinking anything related to Snappy). There are improvements that Canonical can make so that even these projects are more welcoming, but adjusting expectations about where contributions are most needed and wanted would be valuable to me. I’m looking forward to discussing these topics and more with the broader Ubuntu community.
Laura, David, Michael, Lyz
Monday night we invited members of the Oregon LoCo out and had an Out of Towners Dinner at Altabira City Tavern, the restaurant on top of the Hotel Eastlund where several of us were staying. Unfortunately the local Kubuntu folks had already cleared out of town for Akademy in Spain, but we were able to meet up with long-time Ubuntu member Dan Trevino, who used to be part of the Florida LoCo with Michael, and who I last saw at Google I/O last year. I enjoyed great food and company.
I wasn’t speaking at OSCON this year, so I attended with an Expo pass and after an amazing breakfast at Mother’s Bistro in downtown Portland with Laura, David and Michael (…and another quick stop at Powell’s), I spent Tuesday afternoon hanging out with various friends who were also attending OSCON. When 5PM rolled around the actual expo hall itself opened, and surprised me with how massive and expensive some of the company booths had become. My last OSCON was in 2013 and I don’t remember the expo hall being quite so extravagant. We’ve sure come a long way.
Still, my favorite part of the expo hall is always the non-profit/open source project/organization area where the more grass-roots tables are. I was able to chat with several people who are really passionate about what they do. As a former Linux Users Group organizer and someone who still does a lot of open source work for free as a hobby, these are my people.
Wednesday was my last morning at OSCON. I did another walk around the expo hall and chatted with several people. I also went by the HP booth and got a picture of myself… with myself. I remain very happy that HP continues to support my career in a way that allows me to work on really interesting open source infrastructure stuff and to travel the world to tell people about it.
My flight took me home Wednesday afternoon and with that my OSCON adventure for 2015 came to a close!
More OSCON and general Portland photos here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157656192137302