Schedule

Please find the full schedule below. Please remember: a large part of CLS is an unconference, so where you see Unconfrence listed below, these are sessions driven by attendees.

The Community Leadership Summit is FREE to attend, but we appreciate if you can register so we can get an idea of numbers.

Fri 13th July 2018

Friday night informal gathering – 7.00 pm – 9.00 pm – Kell’s Irish Pub, 112 SW 2nd Ave, Portland, OR 97204 – food and drinks will be available for purchase.

Sat 14th July 2018

8am Doors Open – Registration and check-in. Registration table / lobby outside main stage room.
9.00am

Jono Bacon – Introduction and Keynote

A warm welcome to the Community Leadership Summit 2018 from founder, Jono Bacon, and a short keynote outlining the pressing opportunities and challenges that face community leadership this year and how we can work together to have a global impact in communities.
9.30am

Kara Sowles, Puppet – The Departmental Lens: Community Management Across Team Lines

A Community Manager can fall in nearly any department in a company – from Support to Engineering to Marketing to HR to Business Development and beyond. How does the leader that signs the checks shape the team? I’ll reflect on my experiences rolling like a lost marble, from department to department – and finding community’s ability to bridge the departmental divide.

Todd Lewis, All Things Open & Open Source 101

TBA

Danese Cooper, Head of Open Source @ PayPal

TBA

Jeremy Garcia, DataDog

TBA

TBA  
10.30am Break / Networking
10.45am Unconference talk submissions and voting
11:30am Break / Networking
11:45am Breakout / Unconference Session #1

Handling Big Changes – Deb Nicholson, Software Freedom Conservancy

Whether it’s a new executive director, a major license change, or jettisoning old tactics and habits… change is daunting, but maybe we can make it a little less painful. Let’s swap stories and resources for dealing with big changes.

Marketing Open Source – Deirdre Straughan, Amazon Web Services

How can we use marketing tools and techniques to help our projects compete successfully for attention and resources? This discussion should include the vital role of a healthy community in winning users and contributors.

Preventing Presentation Paralysis – Arnie Rowland, Westwood Consulting

Improve your confidence; present with authority. Pick up tips about preparing and presenting technical material. Learn techniques to better understand and match the audience’s expectations to your goals. Leave with an improved sense of possibility!
12:30pm Lunch / Networking
2.00pm Breakout / Unconference Session #2

Growing Healthy Communities, Inside The Firewall – Shilla Saebi, Comcast

Community collaboration, and active participation matters, even if it’s inside the firewall. As open source software is embraced by organizations, we are starting to look at more than just the technical aspect of open source projects. Building a community is vital because it provides support to the individuals who are working together on the same project. It brings a sense of unity, and can be made possible through processes such as communication, inter-group relations, tools, and networking. Starting the base for a vibrant community is not always easy or straightforward and is often not the first thing engineers and developers are thinking about. I will discuss practical tips on how to change an organization’s mindset towards embracing inner source and inclusiveness, inner-community building, and how to find resources to start contributing. I will jump into an example of a project we have piloted through our inner source program, and discuss the techniques, the tools, and the practices needed to get started and make an impact!

Creating a Maker Culture in a Software Company – Jennifer Jiang, Capital One

How do you create spaces for software developer to use hardware and maker tools like 3d printers, laser cutter, and other maker tools? What is the value of having these creative spaces? What is necessary to train and maintain these spaces?
2.45pm Break / networking
3.00pm Breakout / Unconference Session #3

Psychological Safety in Communities: Strategies for Better Engagement – Guy Martin, Autodesk

Research from Professor Amy Edmondson on how psychological safety affects team dynamics has an important role to play in communities, especially when leadership can be flexible/dynamic and potentially changing. The goal of this keynote is to give a brief overview of the research, but the bulk of the talk will be strategies to apply this research in support of better engagement in communities of all kinds.

Code of Conduct Enforcement – Kate Mancuso, Mozilla

We’ll be leading an open discussion of Code of Conduct enforcement processes. How do you create an enforcement structure? Who should be doing the enforcement? When do we need to think in terms of systems defense or community education instead?

Creating good documentation – Andy Oram, O’Reilly Media / FLOSS Manuals

Nearly every project–and especially software project–depends on documentation and other training materials, such as video tutorials. Documentation is key to recruiting new community members as well as improving the skills of current members.
3:45pm GROUP PHOTO  
4:00pm Breakout / Unconference Session #4

How to optimize real-time communication in OSS and Community – Corey Hulen, MatterMost

While email threads, comments on pull requests and IRC have been the norm for communication between developer and open source communities, real-time messaging is becoming increasingly popular. Let’s discuss the good, bad and best practices of chat.

Transforming Support Communities – Jeremy Meiss, Auth0

Support communities often are meant to do Q&A, and think that a developer community will just happen or form. But what happens when that’s not the case? How do you transform from a support community to a developer community?

Where do Community Managers retire? – Stefano Maffulli, Scality

What’s a career path for a community manager? It will be an interactive session starting with a short presentation of my personal struggle to establish a career in open source community management, a look at other colleague’s stories and yours.
4.45pm Day 1 Closing – Wrap Up & Thank You’s  
7.00pm-9.00pm Evening Networking Social Saturday night event – Spirit of 77, 500 NE Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, Portland, OR 97232 – there will be drinks and heavy appetizers provided.

Sun 15th July 2018

 

8am Doors Open – Registration and check-in. Registration table / lobby outside main stage room.
9.00am

Welcome and Overview – Jono Bacon
9.15am

Jorge Castro, Heptio

Our developers are more productive than ever. Fancy distributed systems, excellent bug trackers, containers, cloud, and all sorts of supporting tools are enabling developers to move faster and more efficiently. But what about the supporting structures? Are they able to meet this enormous expansion of OSS projects? Community management continues to be a high touch field that feels more like a concierge than it does an SRE. Are there any lessons we can learn from this explosion of distributed and immutable systems? Or are we doomed to forever be non-scalable human beings while developers continue to move up the productivity ladder? In this talk, I’ll explore some lessons I have learned from moving to a huge OSS project, and how a small team of community managers manages to keep the concierge-like service level to our developers while applying devops/SRE principles to our work. This talk is targeted towards people who work in OSS projects, perhaps covering multiple vendors, and will concentrate on the relationships between community managers and their developers, mentorship programs, building a kickass developer experience, and all sorts of “soft” things. Kubernetes is unique since it is so large and has an almost inexplicable velocity, but I will distill down our lessons learned to something that can be applicable to any project. The talk will also explore lessons learned from trying to apply things that worked in one project that don’t necessarily work in other projects.

Nithy Ruff, Comcast

I say stick to organic for the food you eat or perhaps the cotton you wear. For your open source project, give it all the nurturing and planned care that it needs. Many purists and idealogs may say that projects should grow on their own merit. That good code will naturally see people attracted to it and will be adopted, used and flourish. My argument is that, even good code needs a nudge, care and a push. It needs a champion and an idea of who the target audience is and what we want the community to be. It starts with a vision, an intent and a plan. I will share a 5-point plan for growing your community and still keeping the healthiness of organic eating.

Raymond Paik, GitLab

Today metrics are prevalent in many open source communities. In this session, there will be a brief talk on pitfalls of metrics and a discussion on “metrics dos and don’ts” in open source communities.

Scott Hansleman, Microsoft
10:30am Break / Networking
10:45am Unconference talk submissions and voting
11:30am Break / Networking
11:45am Breakout / Unconference session #1

The Maintenance Mode Concept – Matt Broberg, Sensu

We are used to slowdowns before a big push forward: the code freeze before every software release and maintenance mode before a deployment. What options are there for community managers when they need to step back and reevaluate? This is the story of a community that was wildly successful without much structure that hit a plateau. As the community manager, working with our top contributors, I announced a “Maintenance Mode,” giving us all permission to rethink how we manage the community from top to bottom. We’ve since come out of Maintenance Mode with clearer contributor guidelines, better coding practices and a stronger communication structure. I believe that you too can benefit from a Maintenance Mode. We will learn how to identify if you need one, how to communicate it to your community, and how to know when you’re ready to come out of it. The emphasis throughout will be on finding patterns of communication that will allow your community to resolve challenges going forward as opposed to fixing all the things right now. Giving this process a name gives your contributors the space to relax and gives you permission to experiment. You and your community will both come out of the experience healthier than you went into it.

Beyond Fiscal Sponsors – Michael Downey, United Nations Foundation

You may have heard about fiscal sponsors to help with community tasks such as managing money and other “back office needs”. Every fiscal sponsor’s different in what they offer, but what services & resources are missing from the current offerings?

Asking for time and/or money – Cat Allman, Google

I’ve evaluated 1000s of requests for $ and personal engagement since 1998. Learn from my experience and each other! Bring a laptop with your site or sponsorship pitch and I’ll give you real time feedback on what is working and what can be improved.
12:30pm Lunch / Networking
2:00pm Breakout / Unconference Session #2

Establishing Metrics that Matter for Diversity & Inclusion – Emma Irwin, Mozilla; Sean Goggins, University of Missouri; Nicole Huesman, Intel; Daniel Izquierdo Cortazar, Bitergia; Anita Sarma, Oregon State University

The Nth Pull Request: Encouraging Intermediate Contributors – Sage Sharp, Otter Tech

Many open source communities focus on creating beginner-level onboarding resources & first pull requests. How can open source community members encourage intermediate contributors who need larger projects & help understanding complex project details?

Open Source Educational Outreach and Student Engagement – Remy DeCausemaker – Open Source Program Manager, Twitter

Got something to share with CLS? A success story? A cautionary tale? A slick demo to show off? A pitch for a new project or event? Lessons learned from another CLS session? Whether a veteran or a first-timers, sign up for a 10 minute block and share.
2:45pm Break / Networking
3:00pm Breakout / Unconference Session #3

Nurturing Global Meetups – Mike Jang, ForgeRock, Write the Docs

Many of us work with communities on a larger scale. Some of us sustain these communities through Meetups. I hope we can share lessons learned / best practices.

There’s No Place Like Home: How Do We Provide Organizational Homes to FLOSS Communities? – Bradley Kuhn, Software Freedom Conservancy

FLOSS initiatives usually need an organizational home. There are many trade-offs in deciding how to chose or create one, and projects’ needs differ greatly. Let’s explore what organizational homes should do in this session.

Tools, techniques, approaches – how to manage conflict – George DeMet, Palantir.net

Technology communities in general and open source projects in particular frequently suffer from a lack of diversity, with low participation rates by women, people of color, and other marginalized populations who are frequently targets of harassment and abuse. This session will talk about the tools and techniques and approaches used by various open source communities to help support and maintain friendly environments for large and diverse groups of contributors from around the world. We’ll discuss how these communities manage conflicts and the various challenges they’ve faced while working to help keep their projects welcoming and inclusive places that support positive participation by all.
3:45pm Break / Networking
4:00pm Breakout / Unconference session #4 TBA
4:45pm Closing Wrap Up & Thank You’s – Jono Bacon