Joshua Wilson
Joshua Wilson is Longsight’s Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. He leads client relations, business operations, product development, and strategic planning. He has been a leader in academic technology for more than a decade, serving most recently as Associate CIO for Academic Technology at Brandeis University. Josh established the Brandeis MakerLab, a winner of multiple awards at World MakerFaire. Josh has served for more than a decade on the management team for the nationwide MISO Survey, which measures the effectiveness of IT and libraries at more than 150 higher education institutions. Josh chairs the Sakai Community’s Marketing Team, leads the development of Sakai’s 3-year roadmap, and serves on Sakai’s Project Management Committee.
Sessions
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