It's hard to be consistent with Free/Open Source practices, and it's a particular kind of hard when it's your role in the project to guide other people toward such consistency. In this session we'll share some compassion and then some ideas of how we can actually get together as a community of practice. And then we'll do some practice demos together! In putting energy toward working on our practices together, we center the importance of Open Knowledge sharing and building communities for those and of those whose work includes enabling others to be successful in using and contributing to FOSS. We help ourselves fix our own leaky roofs, make shoes for our own friends and family, and help return time to everyone’s days. To engage in practice in this session, we'll explore a perspective on how to read and use the Open Source Way, the guidebook for community management. Written by a diverse group of more than a dozen FOSS expert practitioners, the guide extrapolates and distills knowledge of not just what to do and how to do it, but also why to do it. The chapters and checklists are ready to use and/or modify, and Karsten will chop and mix them live in the session. How can this help you use the guidebook and practices? Whether you are leading or guiding a Free/Open project, an engineering team, or any group of humans looking to be successful working within FOSS projects, you are facing the need to teach and reteach (and reteach…) the same information and practices. People need to know what to do, how to do it, and where to do it, while you hope you get them to understand a smattering of why it all matters in the short time you have their attention. This practice demo follows 3 steps to take the detailed and specific practices in the guidebook, and remix them to fit your education and practice needs. The contributors you support then have a tool to guide them in successfully creating, building, and maintaining their FOSS projects.
Speakers: Karsten Wade