Connecting Islands of Participation

Lessons learned, precepts explained, to set a tone for how we loosely
couple islands in the storm to form a stronger, flexible, sustainable
community of any type. Applicable for programmers, farmers,
activists, and passivists.

I envision this presentation is the one where people nod their heads
throughout, there are "Ah-ha" moments in the audience, people leave
with a story to share, a sense of purpose, and something to do about
it. ;-)

This is a proposal for a keynote. I offer and request as a senior
member of Red Hat's Community Architecture team. Our humble mission
is to enable community, lower barriers to participation, and help set
strategy wherever needed. Due to the remarkable similarity in how
contributor communities are self-organized throughout history, I can
present a comprehensive vision on free and open collaboration through
open source and beyond.

In this keynote, I'll talk to a wide audience about:

* How we turn the meaning and activity from one open collaboration happening on one island and connect that to other islands.

* How this grows the open source and free culture movements. Why it matters. To you personally.

* What are the appropriate levels to set for participation, and how it works to grow a community appropriately and quickly. How to measure, what to measure, what to care about, what to ignore.

* Free culture contributor enablement 101. Music to software to art to writing, it all can build on these lessons learned from each other.

* Examples:

** Celtic jam music => Tennessee Mountain jam music => Bluegrass jam music => ...

** Wikipedia making it easy to form a content community around a specific topic with minimal barriers to editing; vastly successful for 80%+ of the cases

** Fedora Project packaging and distributing thousands of Linux packages

** Linux kernel

I have a vision for this as something accessible by the UTOSC audience
based on what I have heard about, not having attended previous incarnations. If there are families, programmers, business oners, students, grandparents, dogs, and balloons, I think that is about the perfect audience makeup. Pour in some spice, blend for 20 minutes, add questions, and serve.