May 2021 community manager report (with a bit of April thrown in)
by Karsten Wade
Hi all,
Starting in mid-April after the formal announcement of the 2.0 release, I
switched my focus toward attracting users (readers) to the guide and
community. Here are those outreach activities, finishing with the list of
things that need all of our attention and my actions.
*ToC*
* Events
* Talks
* Videos
* Social media
* Cross-stream work
* Needs attention
Sorry for the length of this report, a lot has built up in the last six
weeks. Unless there are objections, I would like to start doing a shorter,
weekly report. Then you all will know what is happening as it's happening!
= Events
== Red Hat Summit 27, 28 April 2021
Our community's first formal expo show appearance was at the Red Hat Summit
virtual conference, as part of the Community Central section in the virtual
expo hall. We shared a booth area with other "Open Knowledge Sharing"
projects, the Open Organization and Patternfly.
Our part of the booth, the videos, and the one-sheet PDF "handout" were
shared with the Open Organization (http://theopenorganization.org/), as
Bryan Berenshausen and I felt it made a good fit, and helped carry the Open
Source Way in on the Open Org's existing coattails of Red Hat Summits past.
https://github.com/theopensourceway/theproject/blob/main/marketing/collat...
In the videos section below are links to the videos we had at the joint
booth.
= Talks
I'm working on a common presentation deck, with a minimal viable product
(MVP) version for the first upcoming talk at Upstream. It is focused 90% on
attracting users (readers), but the ease of contributing comes up often.
This deck is available for anyone to use when talking about the Open Source
Way. I intend to use it as the starting point for whatever talks are
accepted this year. Improvements will go back into the canonical template.
Link coming soon.
== Accepted - Upstream 7 June
"Community management guidebook: the Open Source Way 2.0"
11:30 AM - 11:55 AM EST
https://upstream.live/speaker-2021/karsten-wade
"Upstream is a one-day celebration of open source, the developers who use
it, and the maintainers who make it."
I'm giving a presentation on how the guidebook can help in creating and
sustaining an open source community. The session is recorded and I'll be
live in the session chat for Q&A with attendees.
Registration is no-cost, and there are incentives (a viewing party kit) for
organizations that sign up more than 10 attendees.
https://upstream.live
== Submitted / Submitting
These are all submissions I have made or am about to make for upcoming
conferences this year. If you would like to submit a talk somewhere about
the Open Source Way, let me know how I can help! If you have suggestions
for other conferences I should submit to, let me know. ;-)
=== All Things Open (ATO) 18, 19 October—https://www.allthingsopen.org/
ATO is a hybrid virtual/in-person event in Raleigh, NC, describing itself
as, "A universe of events and platforms focused on open source, open tech
and the open web."
=== DevConf.US (02, 03 September)—https://www.devconf.info/us/
DevConf.US is a no-cost virtual event sponsored by Red Hat with a
particular emphasis on including students, new graduates, and people who
are new to attending and speaking at technology conferences.
=== OSPOCon (27-29 September)—https://events.linuxfoundation.org/ospocon/
OSPOCon is a hybrid virtual/in-person event in Seattle, WA, billed as, "An
event for those working in open source program offices in organizations
that rely on open source technologies to learn and share best practices,
experiences and tooling to overcome challenges they face."
= Videos
While we're working on video ideas for this project—more on this below in
"Needs attention"—here are a few produced for the Red Hat Summit in April.
== Open Knowledge Roundtable - Red Hat Summit April 2021
A handful of authors from the Open Organization and the Open Source Way
discuss the benefits of sharing knowledge in an open source way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTjhqdW7fjk
== Intro—Open Source Knowledge Share Booth | RH Summit 2021
Short introduction to the booth and both communities:
https://youtu.be/T6h-TiDbCFE
= Social media
We started a series of tweets from the @RedHatOpen Twitter account, one for
each chapter of the book:
https://twitter.com/hashtag/OpenSourceWay?src=hashtag_click&f=live
= Cross-stream work
There are a growing number of projects providing canonical sources for
content useful for practitioners of the open source way. We can handle this
in multiple ways in future versions of the guidebook and other OSW content
repositories. One is to link out to other content as a reference. Another
is to pull in some or all of the content for our own treatment of the
practices.
The efforts I am working with in this cross-stream fashion are IEEE SA OPEN
and the Inclusive Naming Initiative, both explained below. I chose these
two projects because they are new and interesting and are working on
solutions not already addressed in the Open Source Way. And honestly, they
are around topics and principles I have a strong personal interest in, from
projects that can use the skills and expertise I already have.
== IEEE SA OPEN
https://saopen.ieee.org/
https://opensource.ieee.org/
Still in its opening moves, IEEE SA OPEN provides a 100% free/open source
software development and hosting platform for open source software,
hardware, and content projects. The vision is an open source development
platform with IEEE SA OPEN tools and processes wired directly into GitLab
CE and other similarly 100% open source software.
I am participating in this project around two core ideas:
1. What are the gaps in our guidebook?
The proof in our guidebook and growing body of best practices is in how
they work when applied to an actual project, new or existing. IEEE SA OPEN
was a newly announced project at the same time as the 2.0 content was
finished in Dec 2020, and I joined in as a chance to see the guidebook in
action.
This inquiry involves lightly mapping IEEE SA OPEN processes to OSW
practices. Through my involvement in the Community Advisory Group (CAG) I
am helping advise new projects and collaborating on creating and rolling
out processes.
Any gaps I identify will come back to the Open Source Way as either chapter
ideas or actual content to merge into new or existing chapters, as was done
by Andy Oram for the 2.0 release.
https://opensource.ieee.org/community-advisory-group
2. What ideas and content do we want to reference from or merge into the
Open Source Way?
One sub-group is focused on documentation, especially as to how it can be
built into and curated through the automation on the platform. For example,
a new project would have to create, draft, and complete key documents such
as governance and a README, with the templates and processes wired into the
GitLab platform.
The first document we are working on there is the template and process for
a Community Handbook Toolkit. A Community Handbook is a document that has
all the information and instructions a contributor needs to do anything
within the community. When something is missing from the Community
Handbook, it is that contributor's responsibility to document the answer
back into the Community Handbook once they have figured it out.
https://opensource.ieee.org/community-advisory-group/documentation-curati...
Another new sub-group I am working with is "Open Community Development
Models", which plans to help open source projects on the platform decide
which archetypes, governance, license, and so on to adopt.
https://opensource.ieee.org/community-advisory-group/open-comm-dev-models
Original proposal from Evan Leibovitch of Linux Professional Institute:
https://opensource.ieee.org/community-advisory-group/open-comm-dev-models...
== Inclusive Naming Initiative
I jumped into this project partially out of work I have been doing inside
Red Hat for the last few years with an internal working group focused on
language. The opportunity I saw for the Open Source Way guidebook and
community of practice is having a direct connection with the Inclusive
Naming Initiative (INI) to help community managers deal with the often
difficult situations these types of changes.
The INI has fast become the central place where a number of companies are
collaborating on a common set of non-inclusive terms and words used in IT,
and processes for replacing them in open source projects. For example, this
includes defining a set of replacement terms to use for where
"master/slave" is used in IT. By collaborating across many organizations
such as the Akamai, BMC, Cisco, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, IBM,
Linux Foundation, Red Hat, SDDI, Splunk, and VMWare
1. List of words/terms and replacements
This is the nerdy word-person work stream that attracted me. The group is
collating initial lists from everyone's contributions toward making the
first release of a list of terms/words with replacements. This effort
includes defining the criteria for adding a word or term to the list, and
other related parts of the process.
https://github.com/inclusivenaming/org/tree/main/ws-language
https://github.com/inclusivenaming/org/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+labe...
2. Helping open source projects use the INI output
This work stream is focused on tools and processes to help open source
projects wanting to make changes to the words and terms in their own
projects.
For the Open Source Way, this is the other side of the pipeline we would
establish into our project. For example, if we want to pull the latest list
of terms and replacement recommendations as an appendix of the future
versions of the guidebook. It is also the tooling and interfaces we'd be
recommending to OSW readers.
It is also an opportunity to see the intersection between this work stream
and the recommendations and practices from the OSW guidebook. This work
stream is going to produce documentation, for example, that might be
informed by existing OSW materials.
= Needs attention
== Governance
I have a task to draft up a proposed year-one governance. I think I'm stuck
because I don't know what model all of us want.
Any input here would help, just a seed to get started.
We have open questions about processes, the 2.1 release, and so forth. We
should make these decisions as a group within a new governance.
== 2.1 version
We have some chapters in progress, others proposed but no one assigned, and
no roadmap or schedule for the 2.1 release.
Is anyone interested in being the release leader to wrangle that version?
If someone takes that role, it will free me up to do some writing, as well
as starting on the lexicon work.
== Printed books
This idea and request has come up a few times. We should do this!
A few of us have been in side discussions with a design intern at Red Hat
around some book cover ideas. We hope to bring those discussions to this
list soon.
Our friends in the Open Org use Lulu for print on demand, and I'm in favor
of that approach but haven't done much research otherwise. One of the
reasons they use Lulu is it's the only print on demand publisher that makes
it easy to charge $0 for a work (just print and shipping costs.) That makes
it easier to work with through Red Hat, who could handle the business
vendor relationship for us.
== Meetups
As another aspect of our community of practice, we discussed having regular
(monthly?) meetups to hear from a presenter on a topic around community
management, and to discuss practices in general.
Who would like to work with me on scheduling and publicizing these?
== Video interviews
One of the ideas to start up after the release is a series of interviews
with people across the open source ecosystem, to generate stories for the
guidebook and our wider story repository.
The idea, as suggested by Shaun McCance, is to interview people who may not
have time to write for the guidebook. Ideally they have read some or all of
the guidebook, and then share some stories from their own experiences that
relate to the principles and practices in the guidebook.
Those videos can be edited into content for our use, and in particular the
stories can be written out, edited, and tagged for the practices they are
associated with. Then those stories can be available to integrate in future
versions of the guidebook while adding to our ongoing pool of stories that
tell the why of the open source way.
------------------------
And that brings us to the end of my first Open Source Way community manager
report!
Kind regards,
- Karsten
--
Karsten Wade [he/him/his] | Senior Community Architect | @quaid
Red Hat Open Source Program Office (OSPO) : @redhatopen
The Open Source Way : https://theopensourceway.org
Operate First : https://operate-first.cloud
3 years, 5 months
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