Episode 120: FOSS Backstage 2022 with Rich Bowen & Paul Berschick

May 13, 2022

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Guests

Rich Bowen | Paul Berschick

Panelist

Richard Littauer

Show Notes

Hello and welcome to Sustain! On this episode, Richard is at the FOSS Backstage 2022 that is held in Berlin every year. This conference focuses on open source sustainability. He had the opportunity to interview people who were there in-person and talk about software sustainability, what they hope to find in FOSS Backstage, talks they did, and a bunch of other good stuff. Our first guest is Richard Bowen, who’s been doing open source stuff for over twenty years, most recently at Red Hat, and just started working at AWS in the open source group. We also have another guest, Paul Berschick, who is one of the organizers of FOSS Backstage, and does Open Source Events at Plain Schwarz. Go ahead and download this episode now to find out more!

[00:00:58] Rich tells us what he’s doing now since leaving Red Hat.

[00:02:13] We hear about Rich’s talk he did on, “Delivering Bad News: Helping your community through a rough patch.”

[00:04:45] Rich shares his thoughts on what happens when incentives don’t align.

[00:07:40] If you want a great read, Rich tells us a fantastic book to look into called, The Art of Community: Seven Principles of Belonging by Charles Vogl, as well as sharing advice to hang out with other Community Managers and to listen to his talk if you want to learn something.

[00:10:25] How does Rich sees the role of Community Managers going and how does he think of community?

[00:14:25] Find out where you can follow Rich online.

[00:15:47] We now have Paul Berschick joining us and he tells us about Plain Schwarz.

[00:17:02] Paul explains how much FOSS Backstage has grown since 2018, including the pandemic and how that changed.

[00:21:35] How is Paul working to recreate and enable the amazing connections that he makes with people through FOSS Backstage for people who are remote?

[00:25:28] Richard wonders how Paul has noticed, given his place of an event organizer, that his particular clientele influences how he builds these spaces, and if it changes how he views things because he does open source stuff.

[00:27:52] Paul shares how he feels he’s helping the ecosystem as a whole besides just having a one-off conference.

[00:30:47] Does Paul feel FOSS Backstage could do better at accessing the rest of the long tail open source developers?

[00:33:31] Paul shares ideas with having satellite events in other places where there’s a more diverse listenership and how would that work.

[00:35:24] Find out where you can follow Paul online.

Credits

Produced by Richard Littauer and Charlotte Tienes
Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound
Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound

Special Guests: Paul Berschick and Rich Bowen.

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Episode 120: FOSS Backstage 2022 with Rich Bowen & Paul Berschick

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