Engaging the Community With Kindness, Sincerity, and Gratitude

This talk will explore one developer’s decades-long journey of involvement in various forms including his community building efforts. We’ll cover some good practices, things to avoid, and encourage audience participation to discuss different perspectives on the topic.

Transcript

1. Engaging the Community with Kindness, Sincerity, and Gratitude
2. “Programming is iterative. So is life” -@Aimee_Knight
3. <Obligatory />
4. [0]: Hello, World or, A Portrait of the Nerd as a Young Nerd
5. Early Community Exposure
6. [1]: The Long, Dark Teatime for the Nerd Who Does Not Particularly Enjoy Tea
7. [1] A Word About Culture
8. [2]: In Which I Discover that User Groups and Conferences are Actually A Thing
10. [3]: The Person Who Does the Things? May Be You.
11. Adventures
12. TL;DR: I Don’t Know How These Work
13. Why do we seek community?
14. Psychological Safety
15. Exclusivity offers safety.
16. Taken to extremes? Starts to smell like gatekeeping.
17. Inclusion is more important.
18. Exposure
19. You can’t be What you can’t see
20. Find five people in this room who are just like you
22. How Are We Different From Other Professions? Other Communities?
23. Do it exactly my way. Until you find a better one. Then let’s all do it that way.
24. HOW = WHAT = WHY* * Where ‘=’ can be read as “is frequently as important as”
26. Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.
28. A young man leaves his home in the company of criminals and changes his religion. Shortly after joining a terrorist group he destroys a construction site, killing thousands. He meets his estranged father and rejects an offer to join the family business. He ultimately turns down a job offer from his dad’s employer before murdering the boss and witnessing his father’s demise shortly thereafter.
30. An altruist works to address the issues of large scale overpopulation and unsustainably rapid resource consumption through a significant investment of time and at great personal cost.
32. Understand Your Own Motivations (and own them)
33. Dealing With “That Guy” And Other Inevitable Perils
34. True Helpful Inspiring Necessary Kind
35. “Show respect to people who don’t even deserve it; not as a reflection of their character, but as a reflection of yours.” -Dave Willis
36. Start as small as you want to
37. “If you share something and it helps even one other person, it was the right thing at the right time”
38. On Moderation: “You can’t just go to conferences every month and be gone all the time at user groups” -Branden’s Wife
39. Awesome Stories are Awesome
41. What’s Your Story? <div> This space intentionally left blank </div>
42. Thanks for coming! Questions? Comments? More Stories? @BrandenSchwartz www.brandenschwartz.com