Increasing the Role of OSCON in Community Education
I recently returned from OSCON. It was, as usual, brilliant. My talk—a part of Business Leadership Day—was well-received, which is always validating. As I perused this year’s schedule I was pleasantly surprised by the number of community-related[1] talks. Nine! Nine talks about community!
My first thought was, “Attention to community! My, but isn’t this an encouraging trend!” This is, of course, an assumption. One data point does not a trend make.
But twelve of them might.
I delved into the OSCON schedules as far back as I could easily access them: 2001. The 2000 and 1999 schedules are undoubtedly available somewhere but seeking them out became a game of diminishing returns so I’ve set them aside.
My results can be found in this Google Spreadsheet, but in summary:
As you can see, the first several years tracked contain no community-related sessions whatsoever. Things pick up a little with a single session in 2005 but then take a large leap to five sessions in 2006. 2007 was lackluster, with only two sessions. But then! 2008! Eleven! Wow… Could it be that Open Source is starting to publicly recognize the value of strengthening its communities? Oh, wait…no, no it’s not. Or at least not consistently, judging by 2009-2011. The community-related sessions in these three years together totalled those in 2008 alone. And then we get to 2012. I exclaim again: Nine sessions! It’s no 2008 but it’s still fairly impressive.
That said, there is definitely not a trend here. But wouldn’t it be nice if there were?
One of the greatest strengths of Open Source is the communities which form to create and support the technologies. While the technologies themselves are undoubtedly very important the communities which build them have been given short shrift. Only 2.875% of all of the talks in this year’s OSCON [2] were at all related with community issues. Considering the undeniable importance of people and community to the success of any Open Source project it would be great to see this percentage start to creep up over the next few years.
Nota Bene: None of this is meant to diminish the work of the people at the Community Leadership Summit, which meets each year immediately before OSCON. It’s a valuable asset to Open Source, but typically it’s attended by those who already understand the importance of community. It necessary to reach a broader audience.
What I would like to see is a gradual increase in community-related sessions at OSCON itself (which by design receives a far higher attendance than CLS) to help raise awareness. Lately there has been a lot of attention given to the importance of things like Codes of Conduct for conferences. I would like to see that attention to the human side of Open Source to get more traction beyond the confines of conference administration, reaching into the communities themselves. OSCON is where Open Source comes to play and to learn, to see and be seen. When a large chunk of the community is lodged within your doors it seems the perfect opportunity to teach those people the meaning of the human side of the community of which they’re a part.
You’re never going to have strong, diverse communities if you don’t start educating everyone what a strong, diverse community is. I wholeheartedly applaud OSCON’s efforts to do so in 2012 and I hope that it continues to carry the flag and leads the charge with more even attention to community matters in future schedules.
Footnotes
[1] By “community-related” I mean talks about building and strengthening communities, not those simply about personnel or project management. [back to reading]</p>
[2] This percentage will, in fact, be smaller. It does not include the sessions from the Education track, which don’t appear on the 2012 OSCON schedule menu. [back to reading]