The Secret to Keeping Your Community Strong for Decades

This repo contains the slides and files used for the talk.

Talk Description

Open source software communities, as well as the individuals and the companies that form them, are constantly evolving. Come learn about how the Fedora community grows, evolving its governance, mission and community while staying true to its values for over a decade. In this talk, we’ll use real-life examples of community members who have become involved in Fedora, how we empower people to grow their local communities and how we bring them together globally. We’ll cover real examples that communities are faced with and the processes they’ve evolved to deal with them, from encouraging diversity to managing regional budgets to onboarding new contributors.

Note: This talk description was written and coordinated by Stormy Peters while I was on vacation. I am grateful for her help and for pushing me to do a talk I would normally have had on my “must attend!” list.

Slides and Source Files

  • slides.revealjs - this used reveal-js which I no longer use. As of 7 May 2020 you can only review the input file.

Speaker Bios

Brian Exelbierd

Brian (bex) Exelbierd is the Fedora Community Action and Impact Coordinator on behalf of the Open Source and Standards team at Red Hat. At Red Hat, Brian has worked as a technical writer, software engineer, content strategist and now as an Open Source community manager. Brian spends his day enabling the Fedora community by clearing roadblocks and easing the way for the community to do great things. Before Red Hat, Brian worked with the University of Delaware as the Director of Graduate and Executive Programs in the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics and as a Budget Analyst. Brian’s background in software engineering stretches back years before his university work and includes stints at small, medium, large and governmental organizations. “Glue Code” is how a lot of Brian’s projects could be described. These are projects that fill in the interstitial spaces between large systems and provide continuity and ease of use. Follow him on Twitter @bexelbie or via his blog at www.winglemeyer.org.