In cooperation with Gawain Lynch, I organized and hosted an event in our office at the Wibautstraat in Amsterdam. The purpose of the event was to bring a group of Open Source maintainers together and have interesting discussions about open source and related topics.
I got to know Gawain on GitHub on a discussion section for maintainers. The concept of a maintainerati event wasn’t new, GitHub has organized and hosted such events in the past. But this was the first time such an event was organized and hosted outside of GitHub. GitHub helped set up a website, I created an eventbrite page and invited all open source maintainers I personally knew.
Serge helped by stepping forward as an initial host and explained the “Open Space” concept. The atmosphere was really fun and cooperative. After the introduction by Serge we were discussing the topics we wanted to talk about surprisingly quickly. We were learning from each other, some practical advice, some technical stuff, but a lot of what we talked about was about soft-skill topics. Such as, how to build a community, human-interaction and some discussions went full-on philosophical. Here’s a list of the topics we talked about: Technical Debt, Get contributors, Project roadmap, Workflow, Documentation, Code reviews, Enterprise vs OSS, Code standards, Knowledge Exchange, Work-Life balance, Monorepo vs Multirepo, Financing OSS.
I’m super excited how this event turned out! And all the participants have expressed that they found the day meaningful and fun, and were looking forward to a repeat!
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