Episode 220: FOSSY 2023 with Angie Byron

6 snips

Feb 16, 2024

Angie Byron, Director of Community at Aiven, discusses overseeing 11 open source projects, prioritizing tasks by impact, and using a 'start at the end' goal-setting exercise. She highlights challenges of transparency in open source projects and the importance of involving community members. The podcast also delves into strategies for corporate involvement in open source, decision-making processes, and promoting meetups for learning about technologies like Kafka and Postgres.

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INSIGHT

Prioritize Impact in Community Management

Prioritize community work by potential impact to use your time effectively.
Focus on initiatives that expand global reach and community ownership, not just centralized control.

ADVICE

Start with the End in Mind

Use the "start at the end" exercise to set clear, collective goals.
Involve your team early to ensure ownership and alignment on success metrics.

ADVICE

Score Initiatives to Maintain Focus

Score potential initiatives against multiple strategic criteria to decide priorities.
Pass on tasks not fitting your goals to appropriate teams to maintain focus.

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Guest

Angie Byron

Panelist

Richard Littauer

Show Notes

Hello and welcome to Sustain! Richard is in Portland at FOSSY, the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference that is held by the Software Freedom Conservancy. In this episode, we’re joined by Angie Byron, the Director of Community at Aiven, a leading open source data platform. Angie brings us insights from her role overseeing 11 open source projects, explaining how they provide managed services and security updates for several data projects, and highlighting the importance of prioritizing by impact. She also gives us a peek into their “start at the end” exercise used for goal setting and talks about the challenges of transparency and confidentiality in open source projects. Tune in now and download this episode to hear more!

[00:00:39] Angie explains that Aiven is an open source data platform that provides managed services and security updates for several open source data projects such as Apache Kafka, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, and Grafana.

[00:01:30] Angie shares that she’s the Director of Community at Aiven and has been there for a couple of months. She talks about her role as a meta community manager, overseeing 11 open source projects with a small team.

[00:02:32] There’s a discussion by Angie on the importance of prioritizing by impact and empowering community members, and she explains the “start at the end” exercise she uses for setting their goals, and she explains using the Open Practice Library, which is a division of Red Hat.

[00:07:17] Richard asks about the challenges of balancing transparency and confidentiality in open source projects. Angie shares that they’re working on a public-facing version of a roadmap with an ideation system.

[00:08:23] Angie discusses three main goals of their work: increasing revenue, reducing costs, and mitigating risk.

[00:09:59] Angie explains that she internalizes achievement by helping others grow, thrive, and accomplish their goals, with her success and that of her team tied to the success of others.

[00:11:24] Find out where you can learn more about Aiven’s community efforts, and where you can learn more about Angie online.

Credits

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

Special Guest: Angie Byron.

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