Grants:TPS/Paulproteus/OSCON and Community Leadership Summit/Report

OSCON and Community Leadership Summit

Description of your participation:

The Community Leadership Summit takes place during the weekend before OSCON. At "CLS", I was thrilled that other attendees proposed the unconference sessions that I would have proposed.

At OSCON, I had the opportunity to give two talks: Quantitative Community Management (revised since Open Source Bridge), and a technical talk about Scrapy. I also spent a great deal of time in the expo hall.

You can find the slides from those talks here:

The Quantitative Community Management talk was greatly benefited by having the chance to talk with Donnie Berkholz at CLS, where he discussed the Bitergia work and his own work on the size of open source communities and its impact on activity, licensing, and hosting.

I was able to discuss Dawn Foster (Puppet Labs, formerly Intel)'s previous work on community metrics with her as well, and learned that the primary purpose of that work was to explain and justify the community to

The weekend of CLS, in personal discussions, I received lukewarm enthusiasm from Jen Mylo (WordPress/Automattic) and a few others when discussing Greenhouse, which is the new contributor tracking tool being worked on at OpenHatch through Google Summer of Code. I also learned from Liz Henry (Mozilla) that other community leaders are using Trello for tracking new contributors, like Ubuntu was doing with their Developer Advisory Team.

I spoke at length with Joe Blaylock (Stanford, EdX) and Britta Gustafson (Cydia, SaurikIT) at the O'Reilly-provided "office hours" after my talk, in which Britta seemed to arrive at a solid idea through which she can enhance the activity level of the Cydia (a free software app) forums, which is to see what the click-through rate would be on an "advertisement" for the Cydia forums from the iPhone app, and then use that to drive as many participants as she wants per month.

I was also able to catch up with Sarah Sharp (Intel) and Kees Cook (Google, ChromeOS) and discuss the latest updates on the Linux kernel community.

What lessons were learned that could help others in similar events?

I was able to publish my slides shortly after my talks, which many of my attendees (and non-attendees who heard about the talks!) asked for.

I mostly already knew this, but it was helpful to see how valuable the "hallway track" is!

I think that I would basically do it all the same. I took written notes by keeping a notepad on my person throughout the conference, and upon return home, collected all the business cards I received, with the goal of following up with people I met within a week or so of the conference.

What impact did your participation have on the Wikimedia Mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

I was able to impress people like Donnie Berkholz (who attended my quantitative community management talk) with the Wikimedia contributor dashboard. My attendance helped drive more participation in the OpenHatch community, which is indirectly linked to Wikimedia's as contributors sometimes flow back and forth.

I convinced Britta to join the #openhatch IRC channel, and this led to a fruitful discussion earlier today on IRC where she contributed to a discussion on that channel about outreach internship opportunities led by Sumana Harihareswara.

I believe that I will be able to discuss the things I learned from Donnie with Quim Gil. Donnie agreed with me that Greenhouse's focus on actionable metrics, rather than overall metrics, is a valuable approach to community management.

Through attendance at the event, I now will pay more attention to the metrics-wg email list, and successfully caused Liz Henry (Mozilla) to join the list as well.

Detail of expenditures:

[1] is a link to documentation of 237.80 USD in coach class airfare expenditure.

Amount underspent/left-over (please specify currency):

0