03-18, 12:20–12:50 (Europe/Berlin), Stage 2
In December 2020, the CentOS Project announced the end of life of the CentOS Linux distribution, in favor of the new CentOS Stream distribution. I was the face of that announcement to the community. When you deliver bad news, people get angry. They feel betrayed. They say terrible things and look for someone to blame. Helping them through the process of dealing with the bad news, while keeping your own cool, takes planning, patience, focus, and compassion. Based on the CentOS experience, and other related experiences, we'll talk about how to get through these situations without losing your cool, and how to help your community weather the storm.
Rich is a community architect in the Open Source Program Office, where he has responsibility for the CentOS community. He's been at Red Hat for 8 years, and doing open source things for 20+ years. Rich is the VP of Conferences at the Apache Software Foundation.