Hi everyone, I'm writing with a small report on the productive, inspiring, and energizing meetings the ambassadors held in Raleigh during last week's All Things Open conference. The ambassadors were all over the conference—Laura, Rebecca, and Jono were on a panel together; Chad gave a lightning talk; Jono emceed like the pro that he is; and Laura offered a dynamite session for attendees—but I'll let them all share their experiences successes here. I'd specifically like to offer a recap of our joint workshops devoted to our ambassador community.
The ambassadors met for a multi-hour session on Tuesday, October 25. Many folks in attendance were in fact instrumental in crafting the agenda for that session, which began at 1 p.m. with some introductions and a few opening remarks about the nature of the ambassador community. Laura Hilliger facilitated a lovely activity that involved all of us generating ideas about our collective mission and vision (thanks, Laura!), and then Brook Manville walked us through an exercise that helped us imagine steps we might take to grow our community, evolve our mission, and enhance the contributions we're making to the broader conversation concerning the future of work, management, and leadership from an open perspective (thanks, Brook!). As part of this effort, I presented a brief overview of 1) the goals/metrics we track at Opensource.com, and 2) the materials our community has produced so far (as well as metrics indicating community uptake of those materials). We then joined the Opensource.com community moderators for a joint meeting with Jim Whitehurst, and the ambassadors "reported out" to Jim on some of our community's victories, as well as on some of the challenges that confront us as we move forward and grow. Jim was extremely receptive and offered valuable context for both the _Open Organization_ book and the movement as a whole, much of which (we were pleased to see!) mirrored our own thinking and discussion from earlier in the day. After that session, the ambassadors reconvened to digest the conversation together, and to ruminate a bit further on future plans, paths, and directions. You can read Chad's summary of the day on GitHub at this link: https://github.com/gratipay/inside.gratipay.com/issues/757#issuecomment-256234457 Several critical takeaways emerged from our meeting, and I will do my best to rearticulate them here (relying, of course, on attendees to chime in, keep me honest, and add their perspectives). In general, the community expressed a desire for the following: * Increased editorial focus on "case studies." Several ambassadors and advisers suggested that we need to "broaden the aperture," so to speak, onto new types of stories at Opensource.com—stories about non-Red Hat, non-tech organizations that are successfully utilizing open principles in creative, exciting, and innovative ways. This is especially important for demonstrating the innovative potential open principles portend for organizations of varying sizes and with varying missions. * Increased editorial emphasis in the "business value" of open organizational principles. Ambassadors recognized that leaders in organizations won't respond to "open for open's sake"—that openness in and of itself isn't the "draw" to make large-scale changes. Instead, we (as a community) need to find new ways to stress the concrete benefits of "going open," however they appear in our research. * Greater discussion of and specificity around the concrete _qualities_ of open organizations themselves. What are the characteristics these organizations share? What do they have in common? What are the core values that one "must see" in order to consider an organization an _open_ organization? How does "the open organization" relate to other, similar concepts in the increasingly crowded field of "new management" approaches (holocracy, etc.)? And how do we define these for interested parties? This is part and parcel of a wider attempt to crystallize some conceptualization of open organization that we share and can use for definitional purposes—not necessarily to _exclude_, per se (though this is an inevitable outcome of making distinctions and crafting definitions) but really to better structure discussions about _what_ organizations can _do_ to become more open (what they can begin practicing). * Fresh emphasis on materials for practitioners. While organizational leaders benefit from case studies that help them envision the benefits of going open, practitioners in departments and teams at all levels of an organization need more materials to help them enact those benefits. The ambassador community can be on the lookout for opportunities to offer such materials to organizations with whom they're connected, and report back to the community when they perceive specific needs we might, as a community, come together to address (e.g., by creating tools, assessments, guides, handouts, etc.). * Additional insight into the publishing process at Opensource.com. Ambassadors indicated they'd simply like to know more about how we make editorial decisions at Opensource.com, how we schedule stories for publication, what's "on deck" in the queue, and, in general, how we can make our _own_ community more open. In response to these emerging themes, several action items appeared: * Community members agreed to begin leveraging their personal networks to uncover "case studies" and begin bringing them to Opensource.com. We can use a collective document to perhaps list and maintain a register of such organizations. Additionally, and to aid this effort, we discussed the benefit of generating a shared "interview protocol," a bank of general questions we can use when approaching people for interviews (something to catalyze a conversation!). We'd really like to see this come to fruition. * Community members began discussing ways we could begin inflecting our writing with more emphasis on "business value"—de-emphasizing, perhaps, stories about more abstract principles and toward concrete cases and their outcomes (good or bad!). * Community members will collaborate on a "definition" of open organizations, a shared set of characteristics (or, in Jim's words, "necessary and sufficient conditions") we like to see when considering something an open organization. This emerged as another high-priority project. * Community members will collaborate on building future materials for would-be practitioners in open organizations, folks who request guidance on implementing the principles they're now convinced can help them innovate. The Opensource.com team has ideas on the form(s) these may take. * The Opensource.com editorial team is working on various initiatives to bring greater transparency and participation to the publishing process. * The ambassadors in attendance stressed the need for another in-person meeting to continue the conversation and reconvene to review the work we accomplish post-ATO. On Wednesday, October 26, several ambassadors met with Red Hat CMO Jackie Yeaney to relay these discoveries and to gauge her opinion of them. Jackie's initial response to the directions we'd like to take was enthusiastic and supportive. So this is perhaps becoming more than a "small report," but I would like to end with several questions I believe we face more immediately: * Is the above account/description inclusive of the items we discussed at the meeting? Is anything missing? If so, what? * How can those of us on-hand for the meeting help explain and clarify our discussion and/or intentions to those who weren't? * Where should we begin (in light of that fact that overwhelming consensus at All Things Open seemed to be that we begin taking action to bring about demonstrable results)? How would you prioritize the work? After we've discussed, I'll volunteer to develop a work plan that outlines our priorities, goals, timelines, etc., for the coming months. In sum, friends, it was a dynamite session, and we're very grateful to everyone who not only participated but also invested their time and energy into shaping and executing the event itself. I came away from our meeting with a head swirling full of ideas, directions, and opportunities. I hope other attendees will chime in here to correct anything I've mischaracterized, to add anything I've missed—and to simply keep the excellent conversation going. Sincerely, Bryan _______________________________________________ Openorg-list mailing list Openorg-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/openorg-list
