Doing research for my Grow an Organization by Planting Volunteers at SCALE, I ran across Dirk Riehle’s article on the Five Stages of Open Source Volunteering. The whole article is worth a read but I thought I’d call out the open communication piece. He says to support a distributed community and to engage new volunteers, open […]
In order to grow your volunteer community, you must work in the open Read More »
The world lost a great math teacher this week. Mimi Geier not only loved math, she loved teaching math and delighted in watching kids discover solutions. If I had a picture to share here, it would be of Ms. Geier with a grin on her face, holding out a piece of chalk so that a student
Mimi Geier, a great math teacher Read More »
I was writing a post about why you must work in the open to get more volunteers and I ended up writing this post about why I don’t work in the open. The Good So I think there are some very valid reasons for not working in the open: Personal. Not all projects are open
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of why I don’t always work in the open Read More »
Traditionally, open source software has relied primarily on asynchronous communication. While there are probably quite a few synchronous conversations on irc, most project discussions and decisions will happen on asynchronous channels like mailing lists, bug tracking tools and blogs. I think there’s another reason for this. Synchronous communication is difficult for an open source project. For
Kids on Computers is planning a trip to the Huajuapan de Leon, Mexico area in June. If you can, please join us! If you can’t, please consider donating to help the labs we’ll be working on. Most of us will be going down for a week or so. There are travel stipends available for those
Use your vacation to do good in exotic locations Read More »
“Where there is no competition, there is no market. This is why start-ups who “have no competition” have trouble engaging partners and making sales.” – Geoffrey Moore, Escape Velocity Open source projects often shy away from competition. They value collaboration and leveraging existing solutions. But competition is good for more than making you run faster.
Your competition helps explain who you are Read More »
I recently listened to a talk by Michael Lopp about how to be a great manager. During his talk, he stressed the importance of hallway conversations. Hallway conversations are informal conversations about projects, goals and status. As Shez says, they are great for bouncing ideas off people you might not normally interact with and just
How to have hallway conversations when you can’t see the hallway Read More »
When I told the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors that I was leaving my job as executive director, I told them my number one priority was to hire my replacement. Before I was hired, the GNOME Foundation went through a long period without an executive director and I wanted to make sure that didn’t happen
How to hire an Executive Director Read More »
High context cultures value personal relationships over process. You have to know someone before you can trust them and work with them. They also tend to be less explicit and rely more on tone of voice, gestures and even status to communicate. Typically Asian countries are more high context than Western countries. Think Korea and
Does open source exclude high context cultures? Read More »
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few weeks talking about why we have so few women in open source and web development and how to encourage more women to join. (I even got to spend an awesome afternoon with a bunch of girls. I was supposed to be mentoring them but they
The secret to my success in a field of men? All my friends. My guy friends. Read More »