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Report from 2010 Community Leadership SummitIt's hardly pertinent to summarize an unconference, because it's all over the map by (lack of) design. Anyway, you don't need me to tell you about the the topics at this year's community leadership summit because you can view the wiki pages for the Saturday and Sunday sessions. What I like each year is the little space we all create for ourselves at CLS in a forlorn corner of an overwhelming, cold conference locale that makes it very hard to feel community. This CLS is the third in a series, and the second to be presented before O'Reilly's Open Source convention, which is why it's in a huge convention center. The one in Portland, Oregon is one of the more pleasant convention centers I've been in but it still makes me feel confined the moment I enter a room and lost whenever I go into a hallway. Despite this, by the second day of CLS we turned the center into our lounge. We even had a little folk music jam. The topics we covered were deep and serious: how to prod established community members to leave room for new ones and encourage their growth, how to involve women and minorities in technical projects, how to raise funds and whom to accept funds from. The conference could also get personal. Talks about fund-raising brought out a lot of personal stories about screw-ups and taking on risk. Like last year, we had well over a hundred people the first day, substantially fewer on the second. An interesting influx of new people provided new energy on the second day, but there was enough continuity to produce the living-room feeling. Most impressive, maybe, was the number of people who came long distances just to spend the weekend here for this summit, without even attending OSCon or staying for other activities in Portland. Most of the topics concerned communities of all types, not just technical communities. But open source definitely ran through the conference. It kind of took over the session I led, Talking to your government. It was an exciting session that attracted about twenty people over the course of just half an hour, about four times as many as the similar session I led last year. The eagerness to make a difference in government policy was evident among the participants. And their commitment has been stimulated, in turn, by recent initiatives in government to release data and issue requests for free software using that data. I pitched the session in a basically non-technical context, as how to get people to work together in groups so that they could respond effectively to open government efforts. Developer communities are of particular importance, I pointed out, because they are the ones creating the new apps the governments want to promote participation. But the same principles apply to everyone who can contribute to policy. The role of developer communities was the theme taken up with the most gusto, and soon we were discussing all the barriers to having government adopt open source software. I reminded the fifteen attendees once that we were drifting away from the theme of community, but I realized that the prospects of open source is what excited them most, and while we lost a couple people, this topic met the needs of the majority. The size of this gathering was comfortable and the experience of the attendees brought many insights, but we could still use a greater diversity and more attendees. As a free conference, it should be attracting a lot of people from communities that could benefit from a better understanding of leadership, and could bring their understanding to us. So let's see even more people next year.
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