User:Sumanah/OSCON report

Before OSCON, I went to Community Leadership Summit, where I connected with many people who do jobs like mine. This was quite welcome. We talked about things like:

• facilitating international collaboration. Timezones and languages and so on.
• How to include volunteers better when you're doing lots of Agile sprint-y stuff and in-person meetings that not everyone can attend.
• How to facilitate and lead software quality assurance that the community does.

And then at OSCON, I did a lot of schmoozing, including at a few women's networking meetups. I also participated in two Birds of a Feather sessions, one around humanitarian FOSS (helping plan a new potential SocialCoding4Good initiative), and another around wikis. I learned that an English composition teacher has his students use MediaWiki to input their work! Then he edits it and they use the diff as a teaching tool. Nifty.

Some useful OSCON sessions (the sessions have some links to notes):

• Mistakes Were Made - everyone loves stories of failures!
• How Not To Release Software - ditto. Also included the phrase "death sprint" for when Agile goes wrong.
• FLOSS community metrics
• Meghan Gill's lessons seeding a FLOSS community. She gave tips on putting together user groups from far away.
• Event Planning for Geeks, which introduced me to an event planning handbook for open source events.
• Lessons from the Java.net migration. Hudson-Jenkins fork was partly over a missed email! Also, make emails short, as short as will fit on one screen without scrolling.
• Karen Sandler reminding us about freedom and medical devices - inspiring.

I made connections in the Drupal, WordPress, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Sphinx, education, PHP, quantified self, OpenStreetMap, MySQL, MariaDB, and wiki communities. I got lots of good ideas, particularly from the CLS and OSCON sessions mentioned above. I passed out a great deal of recruiting material. I met some volunteers whom I am encouraging. And I helped improve, and then recorded, Roan and Trevor's talk on ResourceLoader. Thanks for the trip, WMF!