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.
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"
"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.
== 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. ;-)
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 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 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:
== Intro—Open Source Knowledge Share Booth | RH Summit 2021
Short introduction to the booth and both communities:
= Social media
We started a series of tweets from the @RedHatOpen Twitter account, one for each chapter of the book:
= 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
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.
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.
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.
Original proposal from Evan Leibovitch of Linux Professional Institute:
== 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.
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.
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And that brings us to the end of my first Open Source Way community manager report!
Kind regards,
- Karsten