Community Leadership Summit 2020

The Community Leadership Summit 2020 brings together community leaders, organizers and managers and the projects and organizations that are interested in growing and empowering a strong community. Leading minds in community management, relations and online collaboration will discuss, debate and continue to refine the art of building an effective and capable community. CLS 2020 will be hosted as part of All Things Open 2020 conference. The event will take place Monday, October 19 over the entire day​ and will feature facilitated sessions and discussions on multiple community-focused topics. As everyone is aware, community is vital to the health and ongoing sustainability of open source. It warrants a stand-alone event and in-depth discussion.

CLS 2020 Panel Moderators

• Nithya Ruff - Comcast
• Guy Martin - OASIS Open
• Jono Bacon - Jono Bacon Consulting
• Mary Thengvall - Camunda
• Amber Graner - Corelight Inc.
• Deb Nicholson - Open Source Initiative
• Samantha Logan - SociallyConstructed.Online
• Van Riper - Google

CLS 2020 Panel Topics

1. Fostering and Mentoring New Community Leaders - ​I​n this discussion we will explore how to identify, foster, and support the success of new community leaders. Not everyone in a community will be a naturally leader, and often great leadership can come from unexpected places. We would love to hear your ideas how to foster leadership, provide guidance, best practice, mentoring, and more. 

2. How to Create a Sustainable Community - Many communities struggle to support themselves, either with enough contributors, or with generating enough money to support infrastructure, travel, merchandise, and other costs. In this session we want to discuss how to build truly sustainable communities. What should we focus on most? How should we generate resources and how do we effectively manage them? 

3. Planning and Running Online and In-Person Events - With the rise of COVID-19, all communities have had to adapt to virtual events. How though, do you run an amazing in-person or virtual event? What kind of content, speakers, facilities, and other elements do you need? How do you coordinate your resources in the most effective way, and what are the landmines we should avoid? This is what we want to dig into in this discussion. 

4. Connecting Community/DevRel Teams to Other Teams - Community and Developer Relations teams have a unique blend of knowledge, and we can only be successful if we interface with other teams such as Marketing, Engineering, Support, and Customer Success well. How do we do this though? How do we build great relationships, solid alliances, share information effectively, and collaborate on projects? 

5. Building Diverse Teams and Projects - Diversity is critical to building amazing communities and open source projects. In this session we want to focus on two key areas: (1) how to build a community of diverse people and skills, and (2) how to enable a community to build a diverse range of projects that solve various problems. 

6. Measuring Community Health - Communities are notoriously difficult ​t​o measure because they combine tangible and intangible value. Possibly the most critical question though is, “Is our community healthy?” In this session we want to dig into what “healthy” means and what we need to measure to truly understand community health.

7. How to Build Amazing Incentives and Rewards - We know that human beings are motivated by incentives and rewards such as recognition, swag, and more, but how do we do it well? In this session we want to share and explore incentives and rewards that work and don’t work, and explore new and interesting ways to encourage active community participation.