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Rarely I participate in non-technical events in computer science because I get bored easily if the topic does not interest me like marketing stuff.
The Community Leadership Summit Italy is the exception to the rule.
I knew the event since the first edition in February in Milan but the trip and the dates they were against me.
The second edition of 2016 has been in Rome at Luiss Enlabs where as WordPress Rome meetup often organize our meetings and we have my work office.
So my presence would be much easier in fact I participated in the Call for papers with 3 talk.
What is the CLSX
The Community Leadership Summit is an event dedicated to national or local communities leaders to exchange tips, ideas and methodologies.
So for me it was the right area to talk about the Coaching for the open source community.
Due to my experience in Mozilla, WordPress and other community roles where is the charisma to make the leader and not old age in the project or the curriculum I could give some advice.
The experience is part of the charism but with experience I mean to have made things not only have attended.
In short, an active role to justify their own experience.
Agenda
The event had several talk by the code of conduct of the community that is important and how to vitalize the dead community.
These two were the talk previous to mine and I could easily connect to the mine because in the end the leader has to act in a certain way in a community and then there are the basic rules including recruitment and the rules self.
The next talks was about how to create a community and how to help the other groups.
Simply rules and tips from the experience of others who have passed that have proven over time that works.
The afternoon unfortunately I had to leave to attend the Postehack (we won by the way) but there will be another post for this.
Coaching
My talk was for the first time after years devoted to something that was not about to programming.
I must admit that I had a little bit of anxiety because I would be on stage to talk about something different but it is important in my life as a member of several communities.
At the same time I was not sure that the argument was clear and interesting being something that from my point of view, when I discovered it, it was something for a psychologist.
Instead coaching is a practice that serves to strengthen and make people discover their own abilities and to use them for a common good.
My slides are available as usual but I hope shortly to be published also the recording video (in Italian).
In just 23 minutes I was unable to show the video that you should see:
Besides being perfect to get into the spirit of open source it is also used to get into the spirit of community collaboration.
The title can be misleading because there is open source community and outside of computer science communities exist but the rules are the same being the community, thanks to the open source spirit and its philosophy, a place where people work together for the same order voluntarily.
What I learned
By now I’m used to working with national community who have local branches such as Mozilla or WordPress but I never expected such a large presence of GDG, CoderDojo and dotNet meetups.
I expected a presence of national community leaders instead there was a very high presence of local leaders who have problems and necessities different than national ones.
The advantage in my case was that I had experienced even in local reality to the mentioned community, and more.
The speaking to these realities has enabled me to discover new information for CoderDojo (I’m picking the one in my town) and other realities in Rome.
Questions during my talk were:
- How to manage time: In my case I exploit so much the time during the events being already invested time I try to make the most of the effect human contact that online is difficult
- Open the decisions at everyone: Initially it is preferable to make a selection but ask to the members more proactive a participation of them serves to make more transparent the community itself and open up new opportunities as well as living as community
A funny detail is that the first time I received many photos and tweets of my talk, perhaps demonstrating that the subject has received some interest.
I suggest you attend the next if you are interested in these issues not only for the talk but also for people.
