Rich Bowen has been involved in open source since before we started calling it that. He's a member of the Apache Software Foundation, where he currently serves as a board member and VP Conferences. Rich is an Open Source Strategist at AWS.
Mentoring: Your path to immortality FOSS Backstage 2018 https://youtu.be/FtKE5M2LBWQ
Delivering Bad News: Helping your community through a rough patch FOSS Backstage 2022 https://youtu.be/LcrYunSGTXA
Talk about how to progress from a contributor to a maintainer. Of course this varies greatly from one project to another, but there are some things that are universal ways to earn trust in a project:
- Reviewing PRs/patches
- Testing, and improving, the documentation
- Writing and running tests
- Providing end-user support
Everyone tells you that getting involved in open source projects is easy - just show up, right? But there’s more to it than that, because projects are made of people, and people are complicated. This talk will guide you through some of the ways to effectively earn trust in a project, and progress from user, through contributor, to maintainer.
Discuss why vendor neutrality is good for open source projects, users, and participating companies. Discuss the risks of using, or creating, single-vendor projects. Discuss the difference between vendor-led and vendor-controlled projects.
TBD
- Even if you're the leader, it hurts you, because people will be reluctant to contribute because 1) you're already paying a team to do the work 2) why should I do your work for you for free so that you can charge me to use it and 3) not sure I trust you not to change the license some day.
- Project is always at risk of the dominant company changing their direction, or changing their mind entirely, leaving you holding the bag.
Tips for being more welcoming.
It's an alarmingly common assumption that once you make something open source, "the community" will show up to work on it. The reality is that building community is hard work.
While there's no guaranteed way to grow your project community, there's things you can do to make it more likely that people will show up, get involved, and stick around. Some of these are obvious, while others may be less so.
Open Source Leadership Summit 2023 https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-summit-north-america/program/cfp/
Berlin Buzzwords 2023
- Tell people how to contribute
- Tell people what the path is to being a maintainer
- Welcome each newcomer, individually, in public
- Hand out the keys earlier rather than later
- Recognize that their voice (at least) as important as yours
- ...
For a newbie audience, explain very simply what open source is, and why they should care. Geared primarily to a non-technical, customer-facing audience who needs to know enough to know what to say to customers, and how to understand what customers are saying.
Open source is in everything, and is a huge part of your business, whether or not you are aware of it. Understanding what open source is and how your company interacts with it is critical to earning and keeping customer trust. Just as importantly, being ignorant of open source exposes your company to numerous risks. In this talk, we'll learn what open source is, why you should care, and what are these hidden risks.
AWS MKO - https://w.amazon.com/bin/view/MKO23/Content/
For those of us who already know how important open source is, it can be challenging to persuasively make the case to management, because we assume that everyone already knows the basics. This can work against us, confusing our audience and making us come across as condescending or concerned about irrelevant lofty philosophical points.
In this talk, we take it back to the basics. What does management actually need to know about open source, why it matters, and how to make decisions about consuming open source, contributing to open source, and open sourcing company code?
Open Source Leadership Summit 2023, Vancouver https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-summit-north-america/program/cfp/
FOSS Asia Summit 2023, Singapore
Community Over Code Asia, 2023, Beijing
Airflow Summit 2023, Toronto
The best way to leave a legacy is to mentor others. This talk discusses practical steps that you can implement today to leave that legacy.
FOSS BackStage 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtKE5M2LBWQ
SCaLE 2025
We've all attended - or given - presentations that put the audience to sleep, or at least had most of them playing Candy Crush on their phones. In this presentation, we talk about ways that you can improve your conference presentations by making a few simple changes.
You know the presentations I'm talking about. The slides are 73 lines of 12-point font, and the speaker reads them to you with their back turned. Ok, maybe not that bad. But you want to leave the audience wanting more, and eager to take the next step. Here's a few simple tips for making your conference presentations engaging, rather than soporific.
- Presented at FOSSAsia Summit 2024, Hanoi -- https://eventyay.com/e/55d2a466/session/8800
- SCaLE 2025
Free software arguably started in 1983 with the launch of the GNU project, but of course the concept is older than that. We have, of course, learned a lot in 40 years, and done some amazing things along the way. But while solving really hard technical problems, we seem to keep making the same human mistakes again and again.
This talk will revisit some of these mistakes, and offer suggestions of how we might take steps to break out of some of these patterns.
- SCaLE 2025