Accidental Ambassadors: Open Source as Diplomatic Work
MCLD 2002 | Sun 09 Aug 2:25 p.m.–2:45 p.m.
Presented by
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Laura Langdon
@https://hachyderm.io/@LauraLangdon
https://lauralangdon.io
Laura Langdon is the Community Manager for the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) network of the University of California. With a focus on the humans in tech communities, Laura is passionate about documentation, diversity and inclusion across all axes, and social responsibility. Working to connect people within the UC open source community to one another and to the greater world of open source, her responsibilities include planning meetups, helping to connect aspiring contributors with projects and vice versa, and creating educational materials about OSS workflows.
Laura has previous experience as a developer advocate at Suborbital Software Systems (acquired by F5), and previously as a math lecturer at CSU East Bay. In her free time, Laura enjoys recreational research, knitting, and optimizing all the things.
Laura Langdon
@https://hachyderm.io/@LauraLangdon
https://lauralangdon.io
Laura Langdon is the Community Manager for the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) network of the University of California. With a focus on the humans in tech communities, Laura is passionate about documentation, diversity and inclusion across all axes, and social responsibility. Working to connect people within the UC open source community to one another and to the greater world of open source, her responsibilities include planning meetups, helping to connect aspiring contributors with projects and vice versa, and creating educational materials about OSS workflows.
Laura has previous experience as a developer advocate at Suborbital Software Systems (acquired by F5), and previously as a math lecturer at CSU East Bay. In her free time, Laura enjoys recreational research, knitting, and optimizing all the things.
Abstract
Before specialization split scholarship into disciplines, philosophers were also scientists and mathematicians. As community manager of the UC Open Source Program Office (OSPO) Network, I'm watching open source begin to undo some of that siloing.
The campus OSPO meetups bring together sociologists, historians, computer scientists, mathematicians, IT staff, librarians, and administrators. The United Nations' Open Source Week brought together OSPOs from tech, the automotive industry, and government; physical infrastructure builders; and the UN's Digital Public Goods Alliance. People who would not otherwise be in the same conversations are finding each other because they all touch open source.
This is diplomatic work. Open source practitioners are ambassadors: between maintainers and contributors, between projects and their funders, between the open source world and the wider one increasingly dependent upon it. Once we recognize the position we occupy we can step into the ambassador role on purpose, stewarding our projects, our communities, and our practice of diplomacy so that what open source has been doing accidentally, we do deliberately.
Before specialization split scholarship into disciplines, philosophers were also scientists and mathematicians. As community manager of the UC Open Source Program Office (OSPO) Network, I'm watching open source begin to undo some of that siloing.
The campus OSPO meetups bring together sociologists, historians, computer scientists, mathematicians, IT staff, librarians, and administrators. The United Nations' Open Source Week brought together OSPOs from tech, the automotive industry, and government; physical infrastructure builders; and the UN's Digital Public Goods Alliance. People who would not otherwise be in the same conversations are finding each other because they all touch open source.
This is diplomatic work. Open source practitioners are ambassadors: between maintainers and contributors, between projects and their funders, between the open source world and the wider one increasingly dependent upon it. Once we recognize the position we occupy we can step into the ambassador role on purpose, stewarding our projects, our communities, and our practice of diplomacy so that what open source has been doing accidentally, we do deliberately.