Late last year I attended a wonderful leadership session that walked us through closing the book on 2022 and preparing ourselves for the opportunities coming in the new year. There were 30 or so leaders representing a vast array of sectors, and in our opening breakout session we were invited to look at a number…
Category: leadership
The Four Os of Meeting Preparedness*
When we’re working across cultures, sometimes the role of an impartial guide through some facts and feelings is the thing we need most.
Is documentation really a DEI* initiative?
Have you ever stopped to ask why documentation gets created? Those little bits of paper that arrive with your latest online purchase or crammed into that IKEA box, those make sense. They are there to tell you how to use the thing in the box. Their primary function is explanatory, but you could argue that…
Dungeons and Dragons for Team Trainings
If you’re not familiar with Dungeons and Dragons (or table top games in general), the best way to describe it is “collaborative story crafting where a group of characters try to solve problems, save folks in trouble, and survive quests that they uncover along the way”. A colleague of mine, Andrea Middleton, once used a…
To my global community: Start Small
When you don’t know where to start, start small, start with what you know, start with people.
Finding Solid Ground on Day 591 of N*
*where N=unknown I used to think there was nothing more stressful than being in the midst of a stressful thing. When you’re in the middle of something, it’s all raw and electric and the ways out aren’t always a sure bet. In the past nearly 600 days, I’ve learned that there is something more stressful—being…
Books All Leaders Should Read
There are four books that have shaped the way I approach my work. Any time that a volunteer or team member tells me that they are ready to level up their leadership, I recommend some combination of these books. Recommended Reading In case leadership reading isn’t your favorite, here are the quotes that turned my…
Leading at Any Level
The concept of leading at any level comes up frequently and focuses on the idea that leadership isn’t the sole responsibility of those at the top of an organization. This idea happens to fit well with my definition of leadership in general, which is that you are a leader if you have anyone who looks…
Purpose Driven Projects
One of the hardest parts of working in open source projects is figuring out how to incorporate product management. In my experience, product management requires opinionated direction that doesn’t always seem to fit the open source ideals of “good ideas can come from anywhere” or the egalitarian ethos of a do-ocracy. Since any contributor can…
A WordPress Dinner Party
At the top of 2020, I observed my fifth anniversary of being a sponsored contributor to WordPress, and am proud to say I led the first all-women and non-binary release team in our project’s history. When I applied for the position I was an advocate for diversity in technology, and I hoped this was a…