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Passing The Torch Without Dropping The Ball

A replacement plan is a great resource, even when you’re not being replaced.

A year ago, as the role of OpenStack community manager at Red Hat was moving from one person to another, we started thinking about what needs to be in place to effectively transition a role. More generally, we started thinking about planning, and documenting, for your eventual replacement.

We’ll talk about what worked, what didn’t, and what had unexpected benefits for the larger community.

This presentation helps existing and new community managers take a hard look at their roles within their projects to delegate tasks, encourage future advocates, and facilitate the evolution of their community role.

That is the abstract from DevRelCon London 2018 – and I’m totally SQUEE that it was recorded / transcribed / published in this month’s DevRel Newsletter.

Here are my absolute favorite quotes along with some of my fav images used during the actual talk.

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Who Down With OCP?!?

YEAH YOU KNOW ME!

I went to six conferences in forty eight days and that’s just a bit overwhelming.

I had this abstract idea that it was over the course of the around eight weeks or so but then I looked at the actual dates and pulled it up on a calendar calculator and now I want to vomit.

FORTY. EIGHT. DAYS.

This is in stark contrast to the rest of the year when i didn’t attend ANYTHING.

Wait, no, I did That One Thing – OpenStack Project Team Gathering where I did a ton of interviews and OMG I just realized I have to edit SO MANY VIDEOS.

Aw, crap.

Now, part of the not travelling AT ALL is because I was coming back from maternity leave and didn’t want to travel while the twins were so young and part of the travelling WAY TOO MUCH is because dayum if I didn’t just plan for that so poorly but also I really missed travel and speaking and doing All The Things.

Let’s make 2019 much more balanced and not have entire quarters of no travel NOR have entire quarters of all the travel, mkay?

Also, my partner will kill me, understandably, kthxbye. Cause three kids and one parent is ROUGH.

#OneYearOldTWINS
#FourYearOldBOY
#OneParent
#OW

But first, let’s look back at that travel insanity and Learn The Lessons.

As an aside, I started to write up ALL of the travel reports at once and got completely overwhelmed, so this is ONLY THE FIRST TWO.

Bite sized chunks are bite sized.

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How To Pass The Torch Without Dropping All The Balls

Spoiler Alert: communication is key.

I’m putting together an abstract with a couple of fellow #DevRel liaisons on how we managed to pass (and drop!) responsibility of an open source community. We’ll submit to a couple of upcoming conferences over the next year and see what happens.

Cause you never know until you try.

We’ll talk about the exact tips and tricks we used to get the knowledge WRITTEN DOWN. What’s one thing we learned from each other. What’s one thing we totally dropped the ball on – D’OH!

And a bunch of other brilliant things.

To My Fellow Collaborators,

I’m excited to live with you. And laugh with you.

To cry with you.

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What We’ve Learned So Far

As I’ve been rebuilding this site. In case you hadn’t noticed. I have.

Cause of the hack.

And this is what I’ve learned so far…

Backups Aren’t Necessary UNTIL THEY ARE

If I had been maintaining regular backups (which the hosting company is totally happy to do for just a few euros more per month), it would’ve taken a few short hours (minutes? let’s hope I never find out.) to rebuild. Instead it’s been days. And it’s going to take at least another week to smooth out all the wrinkles.

So now I use Vaultpress, a WordPress plugin that interfaces with Jetpack, for daily backups.

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