Conference – Megan Jonas

Social Media for Open Source Communities

Posted by Megan Jonas On November 16, 2015

This is the final post in a series of nine posts on the All Things Open 2015 conference I attended in Raleigh in mid-October. For more information on the conference, along with videos and slides from the presenters, check out the conference website.

For a community that prides itself on “openness” and “collaboration,” the open source community does not always readily embrace social media as a means to promote their projects and get people involved.

Rikki Endsley, from OpenSource.com, gave a quick rundown of best practices for all social media, and some of the key platforms in particular.

For those of us that do this for a living, her tips were not groundbreaking, but it’s always nice to get a quick refresher course on what we should be doing to promote our projects.

Her key takeaways were:

Send out Relevant, Interesting, Accurate Information
Know who your audience is
Craft your text
Use hashtags
Avoid PR Speak
Numbers do well
Ask questions
Images are very important
Retweet, Respond, Reshare, Reply

I think even experience social media professionals can use this refresher course from time to time, and it was an excellent way to talk about how Open Source communities can get out of their small bubble and welcome more people in, which was, after all, the point of the conference.

Open Government Data

Posted by Megan Jonas On November 13, 2015

This is the eighth in a series of nine posts on the All Things Open 2015 conference I attended in Raleigh in mid-October. For more information on the conference, along with videos and slides from the presenters, check out the conference website.

In what was probably the most interesting session I attended in my two days at the conference, I listened to Mark Headd of Accela, Inc., talk about the issues with open government data, and how governments can really embrace the spirit of open data laws, vs. just adhering to the letter of the law.

This is the area in which I have the most experience, having worked and trained as a journalist and with the Code for Asheville brigade over the past year, and I found his perspective on the subject interesting and informative.

He advocates for eight principles of open government data:

Complete
Primary
Timely
Accessible
Machine Readable
Non-Discriminatory
Non-Proprietary
License Free

Citing data.gov and the 18F project of the federal government as models for open data, he noted that the culture change in the halls of government can be the biggest barrier to open data.

Most of all, though, he noted that the best way to encourage open data at any government level is to use it. That’s where local journalists and code communities come in. Build something useful and the government will see that their efforts to open their data and make it machine readable and timely are important to the people they serve, and the people who use the thing you build will understand why open government data is important as well.

Community Without Code

Posted by Megan Jonas On November 11, 2015

This is the seventh in a series of nine posts on the All Things Open 2015 conference I attended in Raleigh in mid-October. For more information on the conference, along with videos and slides from the presenters, check out the conference website.

In the final session on the first day, I attended a speech about how to contribute to the open source community without being a coder. This was not exactly what the speaker talked about, but it was interesting anyway.

He spoke in completely plain language about contributing to any open source project, including what first timers needed to know about GitHub. In addition, he recommended that non-coders use social media and blogs to promote projects that work, and that meetups and conferences were great ways to get involved.

If I have one criticism of the conference, it was that their “101” track still supposed that we were all hard-core back end developers with massive experience in the open source community. Hopefully next year, they’ll take the “101” idea to the next level and encourage speakers to develop sessions for those of us who really are beginners.

Can Design be Hostile?

Posted by Megan Jonas On November 9, 2015

This is the sixth in a series of nine posts on the All Things Open 2015 conference I attended in Raleigh in mid-October. For more information on the conference, along with videos and slides from the presenters, check out the conference website.

Sometimes when you’re at a conference, you go to a session where you think you’re getting one thing, and what you get is totally different. This is that session.

Hostile Design, a talk given by Shopify Lead UX Designer Cynthia Savard Saucier, was one I was looking forward to. In her session preview, she used the phrase “bad design can kill” and I thought she was going to talk about how poorly designed sites and projects can be painful to use (metaphorical pain here).

Her actual presentation… more of a tirade really… was about how a company’s clever promotion or user experience can actually hurt people (not metaphorical pain here) and how the poor design of her building’s evacuation alarm would lead us all to burn in a fire (not metaphorical fire here). Having trouble following her line of thought? So was I.

But there were a couple of key takeaways that I can get behind.

She started off with “the best designs don’t require instructions.” That is something I’ve been preaching for many years when it comes to web design. I had a client once who wanted instructional overlays for new users. Instead, I advocated for using standard web icons with tooltips, along with a simplified user experience.

The other thing I loved was the explanation of Dark Patterns, which are essentially web practices designed to trick a user into doing something that is in the company’s best interest, but not necessarily the user (Savard Saucier would be so mad about my repeated use of ‘user’ but that is what I do…). An example of this is opt-out email signups on checkout forms, or opt-out subscription services on a free trial signup.

This is the kind of hostile design that I’d originally thought of, and one that we can actually effect change on.

Open Source is Ugly

Posted by Megan Jonas On November 6, 2015

This is the fifth in a series of nine posts on the All Things Open 2015 conference I attended in Raleigh in mid-October. For more information on the conference, along with videos and slides from the presenters, check out the conference website.

One of the themes of the design track at All Things Digital this year was how to add design to Open Source projects. Apparently, design has not been a priority for Open Source in the past, but is becoming an important part of a lot of projects.

The session called Open Source is Ugly on the UX/UI track gave a good overview of why design is important for projects. All projects have users. Sometimes these are the general public, but often in Open Source, these are internal, or specific users, like developers who work in a specific technology, or users who are already using another project that can be extended.

For this reason, developers often don’t think about design as a top priority, but user experience is very important, from Branding to User Interface.

This speaker, Garth Braithwaite from Adobe, talked about choosing a styling platform, integrating design to your project, and giving developers a crash course in design using free online tools, which I plan to check out soon.

You can check those tools out here: Speakerdeck

(Garth and I, incidentally, had a very funny twitter interaction the next day about why my four hour drive should take precedent over the after party. You can check that out and follow me onhere.)

Women in Code

Posted by Megan Jonas On November 4, 2015

This is the fourth in a series of nine posts on the All Things Open 2015 conference I attended in Raleigh in mid-October. For more information on the conference, along with videos and slides from the presenters, check out the conference website.

One of the unofficial themes of the conference this year was how to ensure that women, non-cis-gendered people, and people of color feel comfortable in the open source community or the code community at large. There was a fantastic documentary film shown the first day called Code: Debugging the Gender Gap followed by a panel discussion.

The film shows women of all ages, from small children to women who were pioneers in the industry. It talked a little bit about how to improve all parts of the pipeline, from encouraging girls to stay in STEM education paths to making the work environment more welcoming to non-male employees.

As a woman in tech myself, albeit on a more female-friendly side (marketing, advertising, and journalism all tend to skew female), I have felt like an outsider at some conferences and jobs, and am likely a product of the world that says that girls shouldn’t love math and science (I still love you Science!!).

I also feel like my public school system did not encourage computer science as a career path, possibly because when I graduated High School, it was just beginning to be a growth area for jobs.

I am encouraged, though, by the prevalence of this conversation among technology industry groups and conferences. I felt totally welcomed at the All Things Open conference, and felt like the speakers and keynotes represented a wealth of diversity in the industry. Hopefully that will continue to grown in the future.

Conference Notes: All Things Open 2015

Posted by Megan Jonas On October 28, 2015

Last week, I attended my first All Things Open conference. The conference focuses on Open Source software and includes speakers from major industry players like IBM, Microsoft and Red Hat.

This conference was a reach for me. I am not a backend developer and know very little about server-side technology or app development. But it was an important reach for me for a few reasons.

First, working from home means not having people to bounce ideas off of and not having those informal conversations that allow you to get new ideas and see cool things that other people are working on in person. Conferences can fill some of those holes for me.

Second, while contributing to open source software can seem intimidating (WordPress is Open Source), it shouldn’t be. The community is overall supportive of new people joining projects and wants to find new ways to include people who believe in the mission of open source.

Third, and possibly most importantly, spending time with people who are passionate about what they do, whether it’s the same thing I do, or something completely different, is energizing and regenerative. I came home from this conference convinced that I can build that app, finish this project and do something new.

For more on what I learned at the conference, check back in a couple of days.

This is the first in a series of nine posts on the All Things Open 2015 conference I attended in Raleigh in mid-October. For more information on the conference, along with videos and slides from the presenters, check out the conference website.