Archive for the ‘Speaking’ Category

Posted on March 12, 2010 - by jono

Unwrapping The Community Manager at OSBC in San Francisco

I just wanted to let you good people of the Internet know that I will be delivering a brand new talk entitled Unwrapping The Community Manager at OSBC in San Francisco at 11.40am on Thu 18th March 2010.

In the presentation I will be deconstructing the role of community manager and discussing:

• who needs a community manager?
• what does the role involve?
• where should he/she report?
• what are requirements for improving the opportunity for success?
• what are the risks?

I will also be sharing my experiences working with Ubuntu and other organizations. I hope to see some of you there!

Posted on August 11, 2009 - by jono

Not Going to Ohio Linux Fest Despite It Rocking Hard

Last year I keynoted Ohio Linux Fest. For a number of years I had been building up to going along, but every time I was set to make plans another commitment got in the way of going. I talked about this in my new book:

Like many folks, I have had the good fortune and opportunity to do my fair share of travel to conferences as part of my work. As a result, I have been able to experience many of the conferences I once dreamed of attending, but there were still some I never quite had a chance to get to.

One such show was Ohio Linux Fest, a mid-sized community-run conference devoted to all things Linux and open source. I had always heard great things about the show from a member of my team and members of the community, but for some reason the Fates always conspired against me and I was busy every time the show was scheduled: I was either traveling, in meetings, on vacation, or otherwise unable to get out to Ohio. Back in early 2008, though, I received an email about the show inviting me to speak. Knowing full well that something was going to get in the way at some point in the future, I slam-dunked the dates into my calendar with a little note next to them:

MAKE IT HAPPEN THIS TIME.

I responded to the email expressing interest, and the organizers kindly offered me the keynote speech. Somewhat flattered at the invitation, I happily accepted.

I wish I had done the same this year. I was all set to go along but unfortunately I am not going to be able to attend. This is not because it is anything less than an awesome show, in fact it is in my list of shows that I prioritize to get along to each year, but unfortunately circumstances mean that I am busy that weekend.

So instead I just wanted to encourage you good people to go along. It is well thought out, well structured, has great content, great exhibitors, and with the exception of one of the organizers mis-intentionally planting a boot in the wedding vegetables, I had a fun and productive time at the show.

So, go here to check it out and be in Ohio on from 25th – 27th Sep. Rock and roll!

Posted on July 29, 2009 - by jono

Burnout Presentation Slides

Recently I have delivering a presentation about the 12-stages of burnout at a few conferences and it seems to have been really useful to people. The presentation talks through the progressively worse stages and how to identify the symptoms and protect against them spiralling out of control. A bunch of folks have asked for the slides so I wanted to put them online. You can grab them here.

Also, a few weeks back I recorded a video going through the different stages with my ultra-low-tech approach to slides. You can watch it here – this should give you a gist of the talk and the core information in it.

Remember, the solution to burnout is to keep an eye out for each other in our communities. I got your back, dude!

Posted on June 13, 2009 - by jono

Community Leadership Summit Update

A while back I announced the Community Leadership Summit 2009 in San Jose on the 18th and 19th July 2009. Well, I think it is time for lil’ update on what is shaping up to be a rocking event.

The aim of the summit is get community managers, leaders and organizers together to discuss, debate and share ideas on building great community in a vendor-neutral environment. The event is entirely free (although I ask everyone to go and register and it takes place the weekend immediately before OSCON, in the same venue: the San Jose McEnery Convention Center. Details of how to get there are here.

Since I announced the event, the response has been stunning and over 150 people have registered with a fantastic and diverse range of contributors signed up to attend. You can see this awesome list of attendees here.

The the aim and purpose of the event to provide an open, transparent and vendor-neutral environment for discussion, and I have been really keen to make sure this is an unconference (an event in which an empty schedule is available at the start of the event, and attendees can go and add topics). The reason for this is to ensure the sessions are as diverse as possible and not merely what I think we should discuss. The openness of the scheduling means that anyone can add a session that they think would be of interest to the other attendees.

If you are coming along and interested in running a session, feel free to discuss it on this wiki page with the other attendees: you may find some other people who would like to help with the session. Speaking of the wiki, we also have rideshare, roomshare and other pages springing up to make attending the event as easy and enjoyable as possible.

I have another update on the event half-penned, but I will send that over in the coming week. Stay tuned, and go and register! I hope to see you there!

Posted on April 14, 2009 - by jono

First Videocast Tomorrow

Quick note: tomorrow (Wed 15th April) at 11am Pacific I will be doing my first real live video cast here discussing various topics including Ubuntu, the Jaunty release, Art Of Community and the Community Leadership Summit.

I will also be fielding your community questions in the video cast: you can ask them in the chat channel that is on that page. Hope to see you there!

Posted on April 12, 2009 - by jono

Community Leadership Summit 2009

Just a quick message to let you all know that today I announced the Community Leadership Summit 2009 on the 18th and 19th July 2009 in San Jose, California. The event takes place the weekend before OSCON in the same venue: the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.

The goal is simple: if those passionate about building great communities can get together to compare notes and discuss and debate these topics, we will all benefit from better communities.

The summit gathers together community managers, leaders and organizers as well as the projects, organizations, commercial vendors, ISVs and others who have an interest in building a strong and enabled community. The purpose of the event is to get everyone together to talk about the many nuances of building strong and effective community, such as governance, creating collaborative environments, conflict resolution, transparency, open infrastructure, social networking, commercial investment in community, engineering vs. marketing approaches to community leadership and more.

The event is very much a summit: it’s primary focus is around discussion. It will be run in the style of an unconference; a clear and open schedule in which attendees can volunteer sessions and engage with other attendees. This will ensure the summit packs in a healthy chunk of diversity, covering a wide range of topics and perspectives. In addition to the discussions the summit will feature some scheduled presentations, panel discussions and social events.

The event is entirely free, but you need to pre-register here. You can read more about the event at www.communityleadershipsummit.com.

In its first day day many community managers have signed up to attend such as Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier (OpenSuSE Community Manager – Novell), Dave Neary (GNOME Foundation Board Member – Neary Consulting), Brian Proffitt (Community Manager – Linux Foundation), David “Lefty” Schlesinger (Linux Foundation Mobile Advisory Board, GNOME Foundation), Karsten Wade – (Fedora Community Leader – Red Hat) and John Mark Walker (Community Manager – Collab.net). Rock and roll.

Posted on March 19, 2009 - by jono

Quickies

Working like an animal right now, hence little in the way of blogging. I am microblogging where I can though on my Twitter and my identi.ca feeds (using the excellent Gwibber).

Some real quick links before I get back to the grind-stone:

• I recently did two interviews, one with OSTATIC and one with LinuxQuestions.
• Now is the time to start getting your Jaunty Release Party organized! See the current list of parties here and find out how to organize your own here!
• UDS Sponsorship results will be forthcoming over the next week or so.
• I will be participating in a panel at the Linux Collaboration Summit from the 8th – 10th April.

And quick thoughts:

• Snow-mobiling is incredible fun. Tahoe is beautiful.
• I am back in England and in London from the 19th – 25th April. Fancy meeting up?
• Jaunty is rocking. Upgrade and report bugs!
• Brainstorm report to focus ideas around Karmic is coming. Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase results are coming!

Posted on February 19, 2009 - by jono

Stick To ‘Em

This weekend I am heading over to Los Angeles for SCALE. In addition to speaking, attending the Ubuntu Global Bug Jam and generally catching up with people, I plan on hunting out some stickers to cover this bad boy with:

Some of you will be familiar with how utterly plastered my previous laptop was. Now that the poor blighter has been decommissioned, I need to claw back some laptop credibility and get this fella up to par. If any of you are going to SCALE and have some cool stickers you want to lob in my general direction, that would be wonderful!

Posted on January 22, 2009 - by jono

Attending SCALE

Where are you going to be at 1.30pm on Sat 21st Feb 2009?

I know where I will be. I will be speaking at the always excellent SoCal Linux Expo in Los Angeles. There I will be delivering my talk Building Belonging, exploring the underlying recipe behind behind what makes great community and babbling on about many of the concepts that my team have used as part of the Ubuntu community. The presentation takes a fun and anecdote laden tour-de-force of community in a way that any community can implement. Be there or be square!

SCALE is a fantastic conference and well worth the trip to the city of angels. I am looking forward to seeing everyone there again!

Posted on October 15, 2008 - by jono

Ohio Linuxfest = Great

In my talk I asked how many people use Ubuntu. This was the result. Wow.

A few days ago I headed to Columbus, Ohio to take part in Ohio Linuxfest. I was there to provide the closing keynote – a new presentation that I have been thinking a lot about recently called Building Belonging.

OLF is an excellent, excellent event. A great range of speakers, exhibitors and an excellent attendance (1000+) provided a very loose, fun, but informative atmosphere. The organisers knew what they were doing, were running on fumes for much of the time, and were 100% committed to making OLF kick arse. And you know what, it really did. They have pulled off a stunning event there, and attending shows like OLF gets me really buzzed up.

I arrived on Thursday evening, Jorge picked me up from the airport and we headed out with some of the organisers. Jorge and I then spent Friday working, and Friday night we hit the pre-party. I woke up a little tender on Saturday after an evening of Jaegerbombs with the OLF organisers, The Linux Link Tech Show guys, some Ubuntu folks and some other people. I ran through my slides one more time and then headed to the show. Did a videocast interview, interview with The Linux Link Tech Show, lunch with Debra from Prentice Hall and then back for a book signing alongside Mad Dog. I always find signing books a little weird – not sure why, it just feels weird – people like Stephen King should be signing books, not me.

Throughout the day I had some really interesting conversations. The Ohio Ubuntu LoCo team did an excellent job, the Ubuntu BOF went really well, I caught up with Zonker from OpenSuSE and Paul from Fedora, chatted with Mad Dog for a while, met the Dual Core guys and talked Severed Fifth, talked to some guys about community growth in less-tech-orientated areas, and many more.

A little later it was keynote time. The room was huge. Really. Damn. Huge. There was a great turn-out, the audience were fun, and they seemed really receptive to my message. The core of my presentation was exploring the concept of belonging – how we can build communities that are truly participatory with a real feeling of engagement and association. I explored the different elements involved in building belonging – associational life, a gift economy which builds social capital, and exploring how to build a sense of belonging, beginning with teams. As an added bonus (!), on the Friday night when hanging out with the Linux Link Tech Show guys, Dan decided to moon me, so I took a snap of the horror show with my camera. I was all set to get the photo off my phone and include it in the talk, but Bluetooth decided to throw a hissy-fit. So, in the presentation I got Dan up on the podium to re-create that magical moment, and the audience lapped it up. Fortunately for us all, the magic was captured and uploaded to YouTube.

That night there was the after-party and for extra amusement we organised an Open Source Dance Off. It was quite possibly, the most amusing thing I have ever seen. It involved nixternal from Kubuntu, Greg from the CC, Kevin from Forsight and a bunch of other guys. Kevin won. Rich was gutted. I have never, ever seen anyone in my life move like Rich Johnson. It is the pure, unfiltered definition of the statement “what he lacked in rhythm he made up for in enthusiasm“. Methinks this may be replicated at UDS.

So, all in all, a great show. Thanks to the organisers, to everyone who was so kind to me there, and I will be back next year for sure.