Meet the Community DevRoom Speakers (vol. 2)

In case you missed it, you may enjoy our first speaker interview post, featuring Deb Nicholson and Mike McQuaid.

Laura and I are continuing our speaker interview series with the FOSDEM Community DevRoom speakers on why they submitted their particular talk, thoughts on their ideal audience members and what else they plan to see at the conference.

We hope to see you in the Community DevRoom in Building K, room K.4.601 from 10:30 to 19:00 on Saturday, 3 February. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to attend.

Brian Proffitt on Media 101 for Communities

Brian Proffitt

When responding to my interview questions, Brian said he submitted his talk because “You told me to and I fear the wrath of Leslie and Laura?” I’d utterly discount this response if he and I were not co-workers on Red Hat’s Open Source and Standards team, where he is our Principal Community Analyst. (And let that serve as your full disclosure notice, too. We share a team IRC channel. This may be where I bugged him to submit.)

In all seriousness, we’re fortunate to have Brian speak to us on how to best publicize information about our FOSS projects – he’s a former technology journalist, an adjunct instructor at University of Notre Dame and an expert in community metrics. He’ll be sharing words of wisdom about using both social media and traditional media, which “is still a valuable way to reach many people with your project message. I wanted to give people a reminder course about why and how projects can interact with media.”

Brian notes that one of the most important lessons from his talk will be that “the story we want to tell as project members and the story the media has to tell are often different.” Fortunately, you’ll walk away from his talk understanding how to align your messages with the needs reporters have when writing their stories – win, win!

In addition to his time in the Community DevRoom, Brian will also be conducting interviews with community folks at FOSDEM along with my other wonderful colleague, Rich Bowen. If you have the opportunity, please do chat with them all things FOSS. Or, as Brian says, “So don’t run away if you see us.”

Have I mentioned the joys of Brian’s acerbic wit lately? They are manifold. You can enjoy said acerbic wit anytime by following Brian on Twitter: @TheTechScribe

Jeremy Garcia on
Your Open Source Community Metrics Should Be Tracking More than Just Code

Jeremy Garcia

I’ve known Jeremy from community land for a long time, but I think we first met at SoCal Linux Expo. Or perhaps somewhere else entirely. For those of you who do not know Jeremy, he is the founder of the amazing community resource LinuxQuestions.org and spends his day job time as the Open Source Program Lead at Datadog.

Jeremy’s talk will focus on an open source Contributor Relationship Management System, a project that allows you to get better insights into your community of contributors. As Jeremy says, “open source ecosystems are really about people,” and he submitted this presentation to help all of us better connect with the humans in our various projects. (I will admit that I saw a demo of the project from Jeremy and his colleague, Ilan Rabinovitch, at last year’s Open Source Summit in Prague. I may have described it as the Holy Grail.)

When asked how his talk can help attendees, Jeremy let us know that “if you’re interested in measuring your community, we have a fresh take (and burgeoning project) that goes beyond just tracking code. Understanding that open source ecosystems are really about people is vital if you want to foster sustainable growth. If you’re interested in learning more about this philosophy and project, you should attend.”

Last but not least, you may want to consider attending just to congratulate Jeremy on his first FOSDEM. He’s been in the FOSS world for years, but has never before had the opportunity to attend the conference.

You can follow Jeremy on Twitter: @linuxquestions

More Speakers to Follow

I’ll publish additional interviews tomorrow, along with links to interviews happening on Laura’s blog. Stay tuned ….