CLSxEurope 2016 Wrap up

The support services Age of Peers delivers for open source and collaborative projects is based on three pillars, being marketing, media relations and community building. Marketing and media are parts of our business that are easily quantifiable, but community is often not in the same category. In delivering services for our clients we often package the three pillars as a unified approach and make sure that community outreach, both internal and external, is an integral part of any marketing and media plans. We were extremely happy to have been able to support CLSxEurope coming to life together with my friends Shelly Coen and Nina Kim.

Sunday October 16, the day prior to OSCON London saw 28 people at the Hilton Metropole in rooms provided by the O’Reilly OSCON organisation. The attendance is actually the expected 50% of 60 registered users you will usually have with.

Getting sponsoring together was actually the hardest part of organising the event. We were extremely happy with Twitter and opensource.com sponsoring with some financial contributions. The communication with O’Reilly was super smooth and their enthusiasm for community leadership is evident.

Dawn Foster explains community from a science fiction perspective

We started with an introduction about how the CLSx events originated from the Community Leadership Summit organised by Jono Bacon, author of The Art of Community. After a round of personal introductions, Nina led the folks into a guided meditation to calm the mind and ground ourselves for a mindful start of the event.

Dawn Foster and J. Manrique Lopez each did a keynote.

Dawn taught the audience some lessons about community from science fiction.

Manrique gave some brief examples of how communities, organizations and companies can take advantage of data analysis to know/measure what’s going on in their groups.

After the keynotes Shelly guided the session planning based on the talk Debby Nicholson did at CLS Austin.

After lunch we had three sessions running simultaneously in four slots. The sessions that I remember best are the ‘How to create a non-technical community’ where the group gave a lot of feedback on community creation and management in general. CLS has mainly attendees from technical projects. Our experience is extremely valuable and just as valid in non-technical communities.

InnerSource was also a topic widely discussed at this CLS. Innersource is the adoption of open source and collaborative processes in companies. The movement was originally started by PayPal, but now sees adoption with many other companies. Walmart and Zalando are good examples of the adoption of these principles.

Shelly, Nina and me were very happy to have organised and hosted this CLS. OSCON Europe will return to Amsterdam next year on November 6 – 8. When things roll like we would want them to roll there will be a CLSxEurope in Amsterdam on November 5, 2017.