Community managers are accustomed to meet before OSCON. This year, Community Manager Gathering served this need.

The morning was planned with talks. We had very interesting talks that sparked a lot of conversation, pushing back subsequent talks. We applied the flexibility required of managing communities to our gathering and made the best of our engagement.

The afternoon was planned for unconference sessions. I personally love the unconference format, because it sparks real conversations that are unplanned and very natural.

Talk: Growing a community through diversity and inclusion metrics

Nicole Huesman and I presented a talk on “Growing a community through diversity and inclusion metrics”. We based the talk on our experience working with diversity and inclusion efforts. For me, this was mostly the work in the CHAOSS D&I Working Group and my dissertation work. The slides are available online.

Unconference session: Community Metrics (CHAOSS)

My favorite unconference session was about measuring community health. I facilitated the session and brought in experience from the CHAOSS project.

We discussed the process of defining metrics in the CHAOSS project, specifically the history and how we work in working groups.

We talked about metrics that are used by different participants, specifically sharing the experience that metrics are a tool to telling stories and themselves are meaningless.

The danger we all acknowledge is that metrics can be misused by people who don’t understand a community. A problem with metrics released by CHAOSS may be that these metrics seem endorsed by CHAOSS and people reflect less on whether and in what situations a metric should be used.

Next year

Next year, the Community Leadership Summit may return to OSCON. Or, we may have a second version of the Community Manager Gathering. If anyone is interested in helping with next year’s meeting, please speak out.

Update: Jono Bacon announced that CLS will return in 2020.