Plugging into the corporate backplane (hacking sponsorship for open source projects)
Have you ever thought, "It would be a good idea for our company/school/org to make sponsoring of open source projects something that we just DO"? Then you hit wall after wall, verbal support but no one with budget will open their checkbook and commit to the ideas?
This session covers stories and lessons from a Red Hat community architect who has walked this path several times. Learn to hack the bureacracy, uncover and plug into the corporate backplane, and create something that lives beyond you as champion.
Even in a willing organization, the challenges are likely similar to what you deal with. You have to discern the parts that are unique to your organization, what is typical and how is it typically handled, and how you can align those magnetic particles toward ongoing support for open source software projects.
Speaker Karsten Wade brings a flexible, lightweight model that draws upon experience working bottom-up, top-down, and side-to-side to stitch together sponsorship and recognition from across and outside of Red Hat. From the unconference to the Board room. Karsten takes his model from his experience at Red Hat trying to: get technical writing to happen upstream with the code (Fedora Project); bring in a great friend often mis-perceived as a competitor (CentOS Project); establish sustainable support and processes for community infrastructure ( https://osci.io ); and so on.
Once again Karsten has found himself speaking in third-person about his passion for radically transparent open infrastructure of participation. He is really excited about how modern automation, source control, and other dev/ops practices have made it super-easy and even more fun to participate in free/open source projects in creating and running the infrastructure. Karsten and his team of sysadmins at Red Hat work directly in upstream projects and are members of many communities, most relevant here being https://OpenSourceInfra.org and https://osci.io .