Submitted by Emily Dunham on Mon, 2014-11-24 16:37
Speaker: 
Emily Dunham
Audience: 
Everyone
Topic: 
Keynote
Tags: 
Foss
community
leadership
Brief description: 
Applying concepts from psychology to accomplish your FOSS community goals.
Short abstract: 

Are you trying to herd cats as a project leader, or simply wondering how to
evaluate a project's culture from the outside before getting involved? This
talk explains some basic models of human motivation and behavior and include
examples of applying them in the world of open­source software. As engineers,
we use simple heuristics and algorithms for solving computer problems every
day, although we rarely use those models to understand human interaction.
Long abstract: 

Compiled by an enthusiastic student of computer science and psychology with
over 7 years' experience in the art of getting volunteers to build cool stuff,
this talk starts by introducing a variety of ways that psychology models human
behavior. It then relates each of them to helpful insights about community
management, software usability, and open-source project and community
leadership.

The advice in this talk is gathered from a variety of experiences including
over 4 years in the robotics community, 2 years as president of a university
Linux Users Group, founding a free DevOps education program, and collaboration
with veterans of all branches of the FOSS community.
Presentation Link: 
Human Hacking (ctrl+c for presenter console)
Message to the reviewers: 

I was approached after giving this talk at the Seattle Gnu/Linux Conference by
a SCALE organizer who asked me to submit it as a keynote. The recordings and
slides from my SeaGL talk are at http://lanyrd.com/2014/seagl/sdfggm/.

I originally got the idea for this talk when mentoring the student who's
taking over from me as president of the OSU Linux Users Group this year. I
realized that a lot of the concepts and approaches that I was describing to
him were things that I'd been able to formalize thanks to my background in
psychology, though many of my peers in engineering either haven't observed or
don't use them. Quantifying the techniques I've actually used to manage
various large and somtimes difficult groups of engineers made me realize that
this handful of relatively simple strategies have contributed greatly to my
own success in the FOSS community.

There's content in this talk for people of all different backgrounds and
aspirations -- I approach the applications of the concepts that I discuss from
both how you can use them as an individual contributor (for instance, to get
better feedback in code reviews) and as a community leader (for instance, to
deal with problematic community members).
Primary contact email address: 
dunhame@onid.oregonstate.edu
Time: 
Monday, November 24, 2014 - 16:15
appropriate for: 
All ages