I just got back from
Ohio LinuxFest, a three-day all-volunteer conference on free and open source software held in Columbus, Ohio. A wonderful group of about 800 people, some from the Midwest, some of whom were from other parts of the country, some of whom were experienced with open source software, and some of whom were new to it, attended. I enjoyed seeing the wide variety of talk topics - from
starting your own business in open source to an entire
workshop devoted to diversity in open source software development. Some of the topics were even a little unexpected - there was a great talk on reaching out to new people through
video games.
I spoke on the
7 Habits of Highly Ineffective Project Managers late in the day on Saturday. Much of the content for the talk was gleaned from experience at Google and managing the
Google Summer of Code project. The audience had some great questions about how to effectively manage upward (to your boss), what sorts of tactics to take when you feel your managers are meddling too much in your project, and how to manage your workflow in an environment where too many tasks are high priority. I’ll be giving
this talk again at
linux.conf.au, which is being held in Brisbane January 24th to 29th next year.
By Carol Smith, Open Source Team
