From behind the monitor: Communication challenges in open source projects

About 90% of communication is non-verbal (body language) but communication in open source projects is mostly on-line - exactly how does this work?

Success on open source projects depends on effective communication. Whether you are submitting patches upstream to a maintainer to accept, or communicating at work with your peers, your boss, or a project lead, how you communicate is as important as what you say.

This presentation will address communication challenges specific to free and open source software projects. These include:

• Lack of face to face interaction
• Spanning different cultures and geographical locations
• People who have differing levels of knowledge
• Dealing with conflict (consider HALT)
  • Hold back, hold off
  • Analyze: Avoid jumping to conclusions, taking sides, escalating the issue
  • Listen for the real problems
  • Think it through before you respond

This session will give you some food for thought on ways to improve communications on open source projects.

Slides

Download the From behind the monitor slides (PDF, 189KB)

Date and time

14:30–15:20, Tuesday 29th January 2008, LinuxChix miniconf

Speaker biography

Adaora Onyia is currently a program manager with Hewlett-Packard in the Open Source & Linux Organization and has been managing open source projects for 8 and a half years. During this time Adaora has had the opportunity to see how important effective communication is to the success of open source projects. Adaora’s educational background is in electrical engineering and computer science. She is also a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) with an advanced project management certificate from Stanford University. In her spare time Adaora is working to develop project management courses that will be offered on-line to the open source community.