Leslie Hawthorn

Thanks for coming to the FOSDEM 2023 Community Devroom, let us know what you liked and what we can do to keep the discussions continuing!

Welcome to the FOSDEM Community Devroom, here from the devroom organisers.

Welcoming remarks and housekeeping items from your Community DevRoom 2020 Co-Chairs, Laura Czajkowski, Leslie Hawthorn, and Shirley Bailes

In which Leslie and Laura provide the concluding remarks for the day.

In which Leslie and Laura welcome everyone to the Community DevRoom 2019

In which Leslie and Laura provide the concluding remarks for the day.

We'll do community karaoke using not much but a laptop and the mic in the room. If you have a song you want to karoke, tell us where you can find the music online and come prepared to sing.

Those who do not wish to sing or listen are welcome to use this time to go have lunch.

In which Leslie and Laura welcome everyone to the Community DevRoom 2018

Whilst the mantra of free and open source software communities focuses on transparency and collaboration, community leaders will often find that the most significant conversations are those they have one-to-one and "behind closed doors". As a community leader, one is called upon to be both trusted confidant and change agent, and being effective in both roles simultaneously can be a quite difficult - and deeply humorous - dance. Join Leslie Hawthorn as she explores the nuances of public and private discourse in FOSS projects, using real world examples from her experience interacting with more than 200 communities over the past six years.

Leaders in communities that value openness and transparency are faced with a difficult challenge: people confide in you constantly, but your role as a leader is to promote positive change in your project; change only proceeds where information flows. How does one negotiate the need to maintain trust and harmony in the human sides of our interactions in development communities, while still ensuring that the social problems that may inhibit community progress are mitigated? How does one manage to do all this while keeping one’s commitments to one’s friends and to project values like transparency and openness?

In this talk, Leslie Hawthorn will explore the role of secrets and disclosure in our open development communities. Specifically, she will explore how good leaders know when to discuss secrets, when to remain mum and, in particular, how to tell secrets "the right way". Drawing on six years of experience working with 100s of FOSS communities, she will discuss some of the most contentious and hilarious social problems she’s encountered and how they were addressed, with names and details omitted sufficiently well to keep her own commitments to confidentiality.

When developers talk about scale, they’re thinking numbers of servers, nodes or queries per second. When community minded folk talk about scale, they’re focused on the human and legal infrastructure required to take a project from a small team of 3-4 people to a project serving the needs of tens of developers and hundreds of users. While our toolchains scale well in terms of development, an entirely different infrastructure is required for care and feeding additional participants in your project.

Headed to your annual developer conference and there’s a contentious topic on everyone’s mind? Wondering how to get past the airing of grievances into a useful discussion? In this talk, Lydia Pintscher and Leslie Hawthorn will explore facilitation techniques to use during community wide discussions. Drawing on the principles of open space technology, they will explore several methods for achieving consensus while still having fun, including: Spectragrams, Dot-o-cracy, Post-It Mind mapping. The talk will be accompanied by live demos of each technique. Participants who wish to learn more about the topics to be discussed in advance of the presentation may wish to visit the Aspiration Technology wiki for more details: http://facilitation.aspiration.org.