Greg Sutcliffe
Greg Sutcliffe has been participating in open source communities for almost two decades, and is currently a Senior Sysadmin for Fedora. Before that, he was Community Architect and Data Scientist for Ansible, and Community Architect for Foreman.
In addition to the technical side of communities, he's also interested in the structure of communities, how people interact, and how communities achieve their aims. He's also interested in community data, and how we can use that to understand communities through a different view. He also wishes people wouldn't take averages of things they shouldn't.
@gwmngilfen:fedora.im
Sessions
Fedora has been using DIscourse for some while, but it has many clever little features that people are often unaware of. In this session, we'll go over some many of these, and go over any challenges people may be having with Discourse as well.
As a nearly 10-year user of Discourse (I started using it in 2016, and became an admin for the first time in 2017) I've learned a lot about what is possible with the platform, as well as having some insights as to what it does well for the moderators and admins as well as the day-to-day users. Ask me anything on Discourse, and we'll dig into it!
As community leaders (or even as group leaders within a larger community), we try to make decisions that will lead to the type of community we're trying to foster. We tend to think about this is the same way that we would construct a building (often we call ourselves architects!), but humans are not bricks, and don't always react in rational ways.
In this talk, we'll look at some of the problems we have to confront when designing communities, including:
- How can we get people to contribute to specific tasks/efforts
- How do we motivate & recognise contribution
- How do we encourage the right behaviour and norms, and deal with those who break the rules
- How do we integrate newcomers with our existing members
Drawing on evidence from the literature of psychology, sociology, and economics, we can learn more about how to design around these questions. Many of the results are known from experience to community managers and architects, but other results are not so obvious, and some are completely counter-intuitive. We'll go into detail on a handful, and provide some further reading material for those who want to explore more.
This talk is aimed at new and existing community leaders, and hopes to leave them better informed about some of the choices and pitfalls in front of them when working in their own groups.