David Wedaman
Dr. David Wedaman is an organizational psychologist, developmental coach, and teacher, with backgrounds in higher education, nonprofit administration, and innovative leadership development. His interests include adult development, adaptive change, assessment, collaboration, learning, innovation, decision making, leadership development, systems thinking, and emergent processes. He is an adjunct faculty member in the Organizational and Leadership Psychology Department at William James College. He is certified in Immunity to Change and Lectica adult developmental programs and co-teaches Lectica adult development assessment courses. Recently he has coached at Harvard Business School Executive Education, created an innovative leadership development platform for emerging Food Bank leaders, helped develop a cutting-edge assessment of organizational health for software development communities, and helped resolve interpersonal and structural conflicts in organizational transitions in library and IT contexts.
Session
What makes an open source software community healthy, such that it thrives, endures, and is rewarding to be part of? And how would you assess this? Those are the questions that drive the Open Source Health Factors Project, a 2-year-old research initiative that has emerged from the Sakai LMS open source community.
Our research in the open source and organizational development literatures, coupled with observations and interviews of people working in the Sakai community, led us to identify nine key factors that underpin organizational health. We developed and tested a working assessment of those factors, and are now piloting the assessment in interested open source communities.
Our assessment measures how well we organize to do our work and also looks at things that are often considered “invisible:” the design of the organization as well as cultural and human factors. For example, we look at the way people are treated, we ask whether learning and reflection are supported, we try to determine if it’s safe to say what you think, we ask if the organization is really inclusive, and so on. The essence of the assessment is not so much diagnostic as formative: it’s designed primarily to encourage community members to have meaningful conversations about how their open source project is doing and to reflect on ways they might improve.
Our presentation will briefly recap our research, explain the nine factors we identified, describe our assessment, share the methodology behind it, and describe the kinds of conversations our participating communities have had after using the assessment. Finally, the presentation will include an interactive component. We’ll present a few use cases inspired by the assessment and invite participants, in small teams, to think through how they would approach each case.
Provisional Agenda
- 0:00 Introduction and overview of agenda
- 0:05 Recap of research and description of health factors
- 0:15 Assessment design and methodology
- 0:25 Synthesis of community conversations after using the assessment
- 0:35 Set-up of case study exercise and small-group breakouts
- 0:40 Break-outs to consider one of three brief survey use cases
- 0:55 Facilitated reporting out from small group breakouts
- 1:05 Conclusion and thank yous