Assholes are Killing Your Project

Donnie Berkholz (RedMonk), Leslie Hawthorn (Red Hat)
Community
Location: F151
Average rating: ****.
(4.38, 13 ratings)

The strength of your community is the best predictor of your project’s long-term viability. What happens when that community is gradually infiltrated by assholes, who infect everyone else with their constant negativity and personal attacks? Although someone may be a valuable technical contributor, that person will never contribute as much to the project as the many others who are scared away and demotivated.

This talk will teach you about the dramatic impact assholes are having on your organization today and will show you how you can begin to repair it.

Photo of Donnie Berkholz

Donnie Berkholz

RedMonk

Donnie is an IT industry analyst at RedMonk as well as an open-source developer and leader of Gentoo Linux. He brings a strong quantitative and analytical background as a Ph.D.-trained scientist to bear on software development and community management.

Photo of Leslie Hawthorn

Leslie Hawthorn

Red Hat

An internationally known community manager, speaker and author, Leslie Hawthorn has over 10 years experience in high tech project management, marketing and public relations. In March 2012 she joined Red Hat, Inc., where she is responsible for Community Action & Impact on the company’s Open Source and Standards team. Prior to Red Hat, she served as Outreach Manager at Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab and as a Program Manager for Google’s Open Source Team, where she managed the Google Summer of Code Program, created the contest now known as Google Code In and launched the company’s Open Source Developer Blog.

When not focusing on all things open source and community at Red Hat, Leslie is in the “save the world business” and works on side projects that make the world a better place. She was recently invited to be a member of ConvergeUS’ 2012 Council of Innovation Advisers, a mentor for The Outercurve Foundation and a Scout for Mozilla’s WebFWD program. She also serves as a Board Member/Advisor to the following organizations: CASH Music, the Humanitarian FOSS Project, the Sahana Software Foundation and the Technology Innovation Management Review.

Leslie lives in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A. with her two cats. She enjoys organic gardening, cooking for her four housemates and working on the occasional craft project. She harkens back to her days at U.C. Berkeley now and again by indulging in an evening’s read of Medieval English Literature (but you can keep your Geoffrey Chaucer; William Langland for the win!). You can follow her adventures on Twitter or her blog at http://hawthornlandings.org

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Comments

Picture of Christopher Neugebauer
07/27/2012 9:43pm PDT

Sad that Leslie wasn’t there, but the talk was great, backed up with data, and plenty of insight.

Picture of Shane Curcuru
07/20/2012 4:51pm PDT

Sorry I missed it! Can you compare and contrast with the Poisonous People talk?

Also, is there a good directory of these kinds of resources: i.e. not just community etiquette and how to find good community, but how a community-governed group can effectively police the poisonous people that sometimes show up?

06/18/2012 12:57pm PDT

Heyla, I am more then interested in your talk. Great the two of you teamed up. I am currently being sued by a company (I used to be co-owner) for my community work. I would be interested to know how you think the Board of an open source project should respond. Currently they don’t want to get involved as it is personally against me. As community manager for the project I feel the board should speak up.

I guess we will also meet at CLS, right?

gRTz ben

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