Switching Open Source Communities: How to Stay Authentic to Yourself and Find Hidden Benefit In Your New Role

The new reality requires extreme flexibility. Many people might be switching open source communities these days stepping in their new roles. The pandemic might bring you to where you would never expected to be. What if you need to start working for a competing vendor and become an advocate of a totally different technology ecosystem? “Just do it” would answer many of your questions, but not all of them. Ethical issues related to integrity, practical failures related to lack of knowledge, the inability to use background info accumulated previously would become factors preventing you from success. In our talk, we will combine practical advice from a community manager who moved from MySQL to PostgreSQL environment, with recent findings from academic research in community management. We’ll talk about practical techniques to transform a good community professional into a person of high trust. We will discuss ways to build your community not only around vendors, projects or technologies, but also around yourself, as an inspiring community professional. Finally, we’ll speak about scientifically based ways of building trust in a new community, and leveraging the old ties in the ethical and constructive way.