But I wanted to share my first big post in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. While it’s something I’ve shared before via other platforms, from what I can see it’s still a theme that needs discussion.

Versions in Spanish and Portuguese were given at PyCon Latam 2022, 2022-08-27

I don't usually post the text of talks I've given, but I thought I'd make an exception for this one. This started out as a love letter to the Python community, but ended up with a bit of what I suppose you could call parental concern.

Delivered as the closing keynote of PyCon 2022, Salt Lake City, Utah, 2022-05-01

Good afternoon. I am honored and delighted to be here. Before I say anything else I'd like to note that this is our 20th PyCon, yes, this is number 20, and my 20th PyCon as well, and I like to give my deepest thanks to the organizers, the staff, the volunteers, and of course to all of you, for making it such a joyful return to the world. Thank you all.

I've called this "A Time of Gifts," which is inspired by a little gem of a travel memoir by Patrick Leigh Fermor, who in the early 1930's, after being thrown out of his last year of British public school for not taking it seriously enough, decided to walk from the Netherlands up the Rhine, across Europe, down the Danube and ultimately to Istanbul.1

It took him a couple of years, and the focus of the book is not so much the places and sights he visited, nor the historic events unfolding around him (he crossed Germany and Austria as the Nazis were coming to power, but seems to hardly notice). Rather Fermor is interested in the people he met along the way - boatmen and truck drivers, farmers and shopkeepers, even an occasional aristocrat, whose gifts of food, shelter, and companionship helped sustain him along the way.

For me, and maybe for many of you, my time in this community has been my time of gifts, gifts that have sustained me in many ways on my journey over the past 20 years to various continents, across two genders, through different stages of my life. So that led me to think about how we value and share the gifts of our community and how people have compared open source communities like the Python community to a gift economy.

Here at PyCon I overheard someone say, "In Python people know how open source works." Maybe. But I wonder if that understanding is really the same for everyone. There are a lot of ways to look at communities, and I expect that there will be various different opinions. But I do think it's important for communities to think about and articulate their principles, and I want to present a way of thinking about our community that makes sense to me. Maybe at least it will start some discussion.

I want to be clear that what I'm about to say is purely my own opinion - I stepped away from the PSF board nearly 2 years ago, so please don't blame any of them.

I would argue that, as a community organized around an open source language and ecosystem, we have a gift orientation. The thumbnail definition of this orientation is that people contribute what they can when they can, and in turn share the resources and help contributed by others in the community.2

This style of gift giving or mutual contribution is what we see in our Python communities - some people are contributing code, others documentation, still others the labor to hold community events. All of these gifts are freely given and everyone enjoys the benefits. Right? Sort of like a utopian anarcho-syndicalist commune, or like what the animals had on Animal Farm until the pigs turned into totalitarian dictators.

And I think for many of us who love this community, this is the narrative we turn to, particularly in misty nostalgic moments, which at least old-timers like me experience at every PyCon. But in those moments we tend to forget that things are never quite that simple, that perfect, or that idyllic. As Python, our community, our projects, and our gatherings have grown, things are not so clear. In fact, a lot of people are questioning whether this model of open source powered by gifts is still sustainable.

I suppose part of the problem is that the open source world in general and Python in particular have been almost too successful. Even as we've grown in every aspect, the number of users and their demands has grown exponentially faster. How can such relatively tiny groups of volunteers keep a community and a language used by millions going?

It's easy to find examples of things that go wrong. One issue is burnout on the part of the volunteers who make it work. Many times I've seen what I call "shooting stars", people who burst onto the scene and start contributing to the community, often in multiple ways, showing superhuman amounts of energy and enthusiasm. It seems that only months after their first events, they are organizing other events, teaching courses, contributing code, and more. These newcomers are so successful, so eager to help, that we, as a community, happily give them more and more to do, to the point that old timers like me start wondering, "how can anyone possibly do all of that?"

The answer usually is that they can't, at least not for very long. In those cases, we'll start to notice that they're looking tired, that the enthusiasm is fading even as the workload continues to go up. I've had them take me aside and quietly ask me how to deal with the stress, how to keep all the balls in the air… and when I tell them that the answer is to do less, they never seem to accept it. Oh, you can tell that they'd love to, but by now they don't have time. They have an event to organize, a review or blog post to edit, code to write, planning calls to join.

And after a few months, or a couple of years, maybe, they fade away. Emails go unanswered, deadlines slip, pull requests are ignored, calls are missed, and so on. The demands of all that they were doing, for free, as volunteers, combined with demands of work, the needs of family, etc, have literally sucked all of the energy out of them. The tank is empty and they have no more to give, and the relationship between them and the community is damaged, often irreparably.

I've also seen people who've started slower, and built on their work over the years until they have become key developers, or maintainers, or key community organizers. They've been doing what they do for many years now, usually getting more complaints than praise, and they feel that their work is being taken for granted. In many cases I think they have too much invested emotionally to walk away, but they're tired, and they're wondering how much longer they can hold on.

Sometimes those leaders have given so much more than anyone else that they end up running the project alone. They hold all the credentials, and whenever something needs to be done, everything goes through them. When encouraged to share the load, they tend to explain that they can handle it just fine, and, besides, it's more work to train new people than it is to do the work. Or maybe they feel that they just don't have the knowledge or the time to onboard new people.

On the other side are the people who are eager to join a coding project or community effort and to help out, but who end up being turned away. I've often see people whose sincere, even eager, offers of help end up ignored for a variety of reasons: no one has time to onboard them, the project that they're interested in has enough people involved (they think), they happen to be asking in the wrong place, they're trying to come in at too advanced a level, or any number of things.

If they are trying to do something that they aren't ready for yet, they can be directed towards more appropriate contributions. But often it seems to me that they just fall through the cracks. And in those cases each time they try to get involved and somehow get turned away they are less likely to try again, and we end up losing them.

The end result is that our projects and our community initiatives are at risk of dying as people burn out and are not replaced. So it happens that we often find open source projects abandoned, with unanswered issues, ignored PR's, and out of date dependencies… or initiatives with silent mailing lists, ghost town slacks, and so on. Occasionally one might get revived, but most are simply left behind.

Some even see this as just the way that open source projects work. I was reading an article about the sustainability of open source a couple of weeks ago and a developer/maintainer of several JavaScript projects characterized open source as "a model that relies on people giving more than they can for very little or nothing in return, and hoping that there will be someone to take over the mantle when the previous person burns out."3

That description of how open source works tells me that if we are in fact a gift giving culture (and I believe we are) things are going wrong. We have people giving more than they can sustain and others who are able (barely) to sustain what they give, but feel that they aren't receiving anything in return. I'm sure that feeling is made even worse by seeing companies use their work in place of systems that used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, without acknowledgement, and certainly without giving back even a tiny fraction of the money that they are now saving.

And then there are others who feel that their gifts are being rejected. This last is also serious - in a gift giving culture refusing someone's gift is an insult, it's a way of saying you don't want them in the community. So it's no wonder sometimes we struggle to find new people to take over projects.

So clearly there are challenges we face as an open source community. The question is what do we do about it? What can we do? To my mind the first step is to understand what's going on and what motivations and values are driving people's behavior.

The way you think about something, the narrative you tell yourself, has an impact on how you deal with it, and some ways of thinking about a problem can actually keep you from fixing it. I know from personal experience that sometimes changing, or at least clarifying, your narrative can be an important first step in dealing with a situation better.

So what does drive communities like ours? Why are we here at a conference like this where there is so much talk about community? 20 years ago the most popular explanation, popularized in things like The Cathedral and the Bazaar, was that open source was driven by self interest. Enlightened self interest to a degree, since in practical terms you were more likely to get what you wanted if you were agreeable, but still just self interest. People worked only on what interested them or benefited them, and beyond that the only other motivation was the ego boost you could get from reflecting that you were the one to solve the problem, and everyone interested in the project would know it. In fact even if you were to do something nice, something altruistic, without that ego boost as payback, that was only because you could then get the ego boost of thinking about what a noble person you were. In other words, it was self interest all the way down, no matter what you did.44

Along with this was the belief that enough genially selfish people working to scratch only their particular itches and to boost their own egos would somehow combine to produce the best of all possible worlds for everyone. As you may notice, this view doesn't have room or any notion of community, service, or altruism.

If that's the view you have of how the open source world works, then there is no problem with any of the examples I mentioned above. Rapid burnout and departure? Well, the level of their interest no longer was high enough for them to continue. Or maybe they just didn't achieve enough ego boosts. Either way, no problem. Exhausted volunteers? If they're doing what they want, they'll continue, and when the rewards aren't great enough they'll quit, that's the way it works. Abandoned projects or communities? Well that's what happens when there isn't enough interest. Better learn to deal with it. And those wannabe volunteers, who feel turned away? They must not want it badly enough, or maybe they're just not smart enough or pushy enough to elbow their way in.

Looking back, some of the stuff written 20 years ago along these lines comes off as an adolescent mix of Ayn Rand and liberal capitalism, and it seems mercifully to have fallen out of favor. Not that I can claim the moral high ground. Back in the day, most of us didn't really question notions like these, even though in practice most people actually behaved differently - they didn't actually put ego boosts and self interest ahead of all else.

I suppose we all benefited in some ways from our participation, but there were too many people doing too many generous and altruistic things for self interest to be the only thing, or even the main thing, driving us. But if you'd asked, that's how a lot of us would have explained how open source works.

To my mind that narrative of self interest was damaging to open source communities in general and to the Python community in particular. It incentivizes cowboy coding, flame wars, and fragmentation and discourages collaboration, inclusion, and community building. It's something that we are still struggling to get past 20 years later.

In fact Brett's famous phrase (which I have borrowed so many times), "I came for the language, but I stayed for community" very neatly sums up the way that many of us from the old days have changed our view of what matters in this world of open source and Python.

So that brings me back to the notion of gift giving as essential to our community. Again, if we think of hunter-gatherers, one of the classic examples of a gift culture, if a hunter makes a kill they share the meat with everyone. Sure, they want to eat, so there is an element of self interest in what they do, but they also share with the community. Interestingly in some Inuit cultures it's considered an insult to thank the hunter, since that would imply that they're doing something special. It's not special, it's just what you do.

True, we're not hunter gatherers, but I would argue that this pattern appeals to most of us, to most humans, actually. If you look at how people behave in our community, it's not hard to see the same ethos at work. People who contribute code do so because they can, and because it improves things for everyone. Certainly sometimes the code they give addresses a personal need, but many times it doesn't. Likewise people on the board and event organizers give a lot of labor that doesn't benefit them personally.

In turn, we can (or should be able to) count on sharing the benefits of the community. In addition to the software, it might be support and friendship, or maybe education and skills, or contacts and an increased professional network. I know I've experienced all of those, from being offered a book deal, to making so many friends in different countries, that it has driven my language learning the past few years, to the PyCon 9 years ago when my father died early on Sunday morning, and that evening several people made sure to sit with me so I wouldn't have to be alone.

The interesting thing for me about cultures that rely on gifts is that the process is so vague and messy. There's really no way to determine, say, that sharing one deer is exactly equivalent to, say, a certain number of fish, or apples, or whatever. Likewise, there's also no way to determine that 10 code patches equals one conference talk equals 3 board meetings, or whatever it might be. There's really no way to keep exact tit for tat accounts - what we can all count on is when someone is able, they will make a contribution that all can share. And in turn we will contribute what and when we can.

This messiness is not a bug, it's a feature - not knowing the timing nor the precise value of the contributions actually works to bring people together, since no one can ever say for sure that they are exactly even with anybody else. Instead there is a realization that everyone's fortunes are entangled, that we're all in this together. In other words, mutual contributions, this giving of gifts, is what helps bring people together and create community.

For me, articulating gift giving as what drives our culture, what creates our community, leads me to a couple of things that I think we can do better and that we need to be aware of if we want to preserve our Python community, and if we want it to continue to grow and flourish.

On the individual level. I think that if we consider everyone around us to be contributing to the best of their abilities, to be giving their gifts to the community, we will treat them (and ourselves) differently than if we believe that we're all out for our own self interest and don't really owe anyone a thing.

I would say that understanding that we are all benefiting from the contributions of others makes it easier to appreciate that work, the gifts they are giving. Hopefully it will also prompt us to show that appreciation, something that so many volunteers receive far too little of. And it should also make us a little less critical of others, since we understand that their contribution is a gift, freely given, not an obligation nor a transaction.

As for those shooting stars who rapidly burn themselves out, maybe reflecting on gift giving will help remind them that there is no need for any of us to give more than what we can, that what we can offer at any time is enough, and that in turn we all also will need to receive gifts from others. And maybe, I hope, some of us who've been around will be more inclined to give people who are over committing the gift of reminding them of that.

The mindset that we're a gift giving community may also help us to share the load more, to respect the gifts that others offer, and to give the gift of allowing others to take up some of the tasks we've done.

As I said earlier, rejecting someone's contribution shows a lack of respect - by rejecting their gift we are saying that we don't want them to be part of our community. Keeping that in mind, we need to be sure that there are ways for new and different people to contribute, and we need to give the gift of mentoring and guiding those people.

A part of this is that we also need to hand off leadership generously, give the gift of sharing positions of leadership. This gift benefits the giver as well as the receiver. I'm pretty sure that one reason I've been able to stay an active and involved part of our community across 20 years has been that I have had a deliberate policy to hand off the leadership of any project I've ended up leading to new people after 3-5 years.

In fact, the time to start thinking about and training your successor is as soon as you become a leader. It's not easy at first, it feels like a bit of a loss, but it helps new people grow and keeps the old-timers fresh by letting them do new things. I recommend it highly.

The other area where I think a sense of clarity about what makes our community work is vital is when it comes to money. So far I've deliberately not mentioned the dominant form we have of sharing resources - a market economy with exchanges based on money.

The thing about money, with its tendency towards exact transactions, exactly the opposite of the messiness of gifts, is that it works against connection and community. If you give me something worth $2.52 and I give you $2.52, we both know we're exactly even and the transaction is done. There's no need to continue the relationship. Transactions don't build community.

For that reason, particularly as a community, we need to be very thoughtful about how we deal with money. I'm not naive - in this world we pretty much all need money and I can testify that it's better to have a bit more of it than not enough of it. That's true of for us as individuals, for the PSF as an organization, and in general.

When we ask people to make helping our community a full time job, whether that's managing our community and events, or our infrastructure, or our coding process, those people deserve to be paid fairly, even generously. We also want to make our communities and events more inclusive, and many people need financial help to take part. Likewise, fostering communities around the world takes money, and in the foreseeable future for various reasons things will cost even more.

So clearly we need financial resources to help the community continue to grow and flourish. But I worry about any notion that we should make monetary exchange the driver of either the way that we get financial resources or the way we share them. What I mean by that is that as we confront the many problems around raising money and then using that money on behalf of the community, I think we need to think very carefully about it and be particularly wary of becoming "a business".

I don't have anything at all against business per se, mind you. I've made a living working for businesses and helping them succeed. And I appreciate the support businesses give to our community. But I would argue against our Python communities, the PSF being the leading example, ever acting like a business.

I've worked for several companies over 35 years, and no matter what HR or Marketing would like you to believe, being an employee is not like being in a community of shared contribution with your employer, nor is being a customer. If our contributors become employees, and our sponsors become customers, I believe our community will be diminished, if not destroyed.

I'm probably biased, but I think that so far, the PSF and the Python community have handled this well. The PSF has hired people to support the development of the community and help enable people to contribute more successfully in all areas. Money is spent supporting smaller regional and local groups and helping those communities grow and contribute and financial aid for PyCon and other major conferences also helps people with fewer resources make contributions on the global level.

Sponsorships have been developed which support the PSF generally, with few corporate strings attached. I believe this is the right strategy - as we interact with the business world, we should not try to become a business, but rather we should invite those enterprises to join in our world of free contribution. That means selling those organizations on hard to quantify, often intangible, benefits - a tough sell, but not impossible, and worth the effort.

These are just early days, however. As late stage capitalism becomes harsher, as Python's importance and big tech's power both continue to grow, the tension between a market economy and a community centered around gifts will also grow. In other words, I think it inevitable that there will be more pressure on us to abandon our culture of gifts and free contributions in favor of monetary transactions.

It could be companies trying to buy control over the language and/or community, it could be pressure to treat contributors and volunteers more like employees, or it could be any number of things, but in the coming years there will be many opportunities to sell out our community for one tempting offer or another.

If and when that happens, it will be up to us to decide whether we still want this community to be a place of free contribution and a time of gifts. I certainly know my answer.

Anyway, as promised I’m unveiling something new - separate sections for Spanish and Portuguese versions of my posts.

That’s right, starting today, I’ll be posting versions of at least some of my posts in Spanish and Portuguese. Since these are separate sections you can choose whatever combination of languages you prefer. If, for example you choose only Spanish, then you will be notified only when something is published in the Spanish section.

To select which languages you receive, somewhat confusingly, you need to click the “unsubscribe” link at the button at the bottom of the email, which will let you change the sections you’re subscribed to (or even unsubscribe altogether, if you want to). If you have a Substack account, you can find the same controls in your account settings, I believe. Of course you can always follow the links to the Spanish and Portuguese sections. I was hoping that there would be easier ways to manage this, but it is what it is.

I have to admit that I haven’t yet worked out the details of how the logistics will work for this. I’m assuming that I’ll be able to keep up with the translations with an assist from Google translate and/or other tools, although the translated versions might be delayed a day or two after the English posts come out.

I also haven’t yet decided whether I’ll translate the old posts, not that there are so many of them. My guess is that if things are manageable, I’ll end up translating everything, but we’ll have to see.

To kick off I’ll be simultaneously posting the text of my 2022 PyCon keynote, “A time of gifts” in all three languages. Those will be published soon.

So if you know of people who might be interested in my stories about community, but would be more comfortable with Spanish or Portuguese than English, please share this with them.

And there might be something worth reporting. The EuroPython has been around for over 20 years, even a bit longer than PyCon, making it the oldest community run Python conference in existence. I’ve been attending since 2014, although I’ve missed the 2017 and 2019 editions. I gave keynotes in 2016 and in 2020 and I have served on the Code of Conduct committee multiple times (and again this year).

While EuroPython has been around for some time (in fact, it’s a little bit older than PyCon), the EuroPython Society in the past couple of years has seen an influx of new faces and new energy, and I’m really impressed with their commitment to experiment and improve.

I’m particularly happy to be involved since this year (and last year) EuroPython has partnered with me to hold a Trans*Code event, which will have just finished a few hours before this post goes live. I’ll be writing about Trans*Code at some later point, but for now it’s enough to note that it’s an informal hack day intended to give a welcoming and centering space for trans folk in technology.

Secondly, I’ll be introducing one of the keynote speakers, Sophie Wilson. Sophie was designer of (among other things) the first RISC CPU, which became the ARM line that powers the world’s smart phones and so many other devices.

I know from experience that the combination of trans-Atlantic jet lag and a major conference will probably leave me wiped out (have I mentioned that I’m not as young as I used to be?), so I’ll probably do what I can to have next week’s entry done in advance as well. If all goes according to plan I hope to use that entry to introduce a new feature here.

Ah, that's probably too dramatic. I suppose it was probably like a lot of meetings people endure at work or as organizers - meandering and indecisive, grinding and tedious, and using too much time for too little result.  But at the time it felt like a disaster to me. I think that was because I'd always hated suffering through meetings like that, so the feeling that I had inflicted another one on the world was hard to bear.

It started with EuroPython

It was during my first year on the board. One of the first things a new board does every year is elect officers. As someone new on the board I hadn't really expected to serve as an officer, but EuroPython changed my mind. 

EuroPython entered into it because of a combination of facts. First, in spite of not really conducting business at in person members' meetings, the PSF did in those days hold an official in person members' meeting at EuroPython. When it came time for the board to choose officers, it came out that holding such a meeting required either the board chair or a vice chair to preside. 

In fact at the time that was pretty much the main thing a vice chair was good for - presiding over a meeting if the chair wasn't present. I was in the process of transitioning back to living in Chicago from London, so I was one of two board members planning to attend EuroPython. The bylaws of the PSF allow for more than one vice chair, so it seemed like a good idea that both of us attending EuroPython be selected as vice chairs. 

The two of us did indeed co-preside over a PSF members' meeting at EuroPython that year, although to be honest, it needn't have been an official members' meeting. We talked a little about current projects and plans, we answered questions, and that was about it. It was more an informational talk than a members' meeting and I'm pretty sure anyone on the board could have handled it, but we had fulfilled our vice chair role. 

We had been elected in May, as I recall, and EuroPython was in July, and once it was finished, there was little need for even one vice chair. The board met every two weeks via phone call combined with a slack channel in those days, and months went by routinely with the chair present and in charge. 

Until one day it turned out that the chair couldn't make it to the meeting. We had two vice chairs, and I was new to the board while the other chair had experience, so presiding naturally fell to the senior vice chair. It seemed pretty set that I wouldn't have to worry about running a board meeting in the foreseeable future. 

My turn to chair a meeting

Or so I thought. It turned out that a month or two later BOTH the chair and the other vice chair would be unable to attend the regularly scheduled meeting. With meetings every two weeks there wasn't really much room to move meetings and at the time the board was much more involved in the day to day business of the organization, so the show had to go on. I was up. 

I wasn't particularly worried. Having been a teacher for some 25 years, and then a department head at work after that, being in front of a group of people, either in person or virtually, wasn't scary, so I just assumed everything would be fine.

Narrator: Of course everything wasn't fine. 

It was not a good sign that I was a bit halting and awkward as we went through the minutes of the last meeting and the other administrivia to start the meeting. Then as we meandered through the items on the agenda, things seemed to get worse. And worse. You've probably suffered through something similar to what my meeting became - awkward pauses, inconclusive and irrelevant discussion, no conclusions, things just drifting along, slowly, so slowly. 

In fact, I found myself sweating, all too aware that this meeting was becoming exactly the sort of lingering, indecisive waffling that I had always loathed in meetings led by others over the years. And this time, it was my responsibility, and I seemed to be unable to do anything about it. 

I nominate this as my perfect nightmare - give me falling helplessly, being hopelessly lost, being chased by a monster, or any other horror over being stuck in the limbo of an endless meeting of my own creation. 

Fortunately another board member came to the rescue or we probably would still be stuck in that meeting. They politely started making suggestions, "wouldn't X be a way to handle this situation?" "don't you think we should end discussion on this and vote?" "Shouldn't we move on to the next item?" and so on. It was humiliating to be led by the hand like that, but it was also my  salvation. 

That experience stung a bit, but that was a good thing. I started paying attention not just to the topics discussed in the meetings, but to how the meetings worked.

A second chance

When I was re-elected to the board the next year, I again offered to serve as a vice chair (and was duly selected), again so that we could have a members meeting at EuroPython. And again the resulting meeting was more informational than anything else, but I fulfilled the purpose of my vice chairmanship.

There was a significant change that year, though. Since the former chair did not want to continue as chair, the person who had saved me from twisting in the breeze in that disastrous meeting stepped forward to become the chair of the PSF board. And that’s when my education in running working meetings really began.

While I'd started paying attention at the end of the previous year, this year I really started studying what the chair did as they led our meetings. This chair was particularly efficient at running meetings, so I paid close attention to how they ran meetings and thought a lot about what they did and what preparation they must have done. I was determined not to inflict another awful meeting on my fellow board members if I ended up presiding.

That study soon was put to the test, since about halfway through that year the chair had conflicts that left them increasingly unable to attend meetings. The job of presiding over meetings increasingly fell to me as a now experienced board member, and by the end of the year I was presiding more often than not. 

That gave me the chance to practice what I'd been studying, and to combine it with what I'd learned teaching and leading teams. As I finished that year on the board, I wouldn't claim that my meeting management was perfect, but I never again had to suffer through the slow hell of a meeting where I'd lost control. 

In fact, as the board's term ended the chair encouraged me to run for the board again and to serve as the board chair for the following year. As they said, for the past few months, I'd been filling the role of board chair anyway. I had been thinking that I wouldn't run for the board again, but she and a couple of other board members changed my mind. This was the year where we switched from board members having one year terms, and I was lucky enough to be elected to a 3 year term. That was the start of my time as chair of the PSF. 

Guidelines for presiding over a working meeting

That unfortunate first time experience chairing a PSF meeting had taught me some guidelines for presiding over meetings that I have followed ever since. In the hope that you never find yourself leading a horrible, awful, not very good meeting, here they are:

• Know why there is a meeting. Why is this group of busy people being asked to drop everything to attend this gathering? And no, answers like, "it's Tuesday" or "we haven't had a meeting for a while" aren't good enough. Could this meeting be replaced by an email? If so, then send the !@#$'ing email and give everyone their time back. If there are things to be discussed, decisions to be made, votes to be taken, then do it. Just be clear about it, and have those items on the agenda. 

• Prepare. Someone has to set the agenda, and if that's you that's the first job. After that, read any related documents, message threads, emails, etc. so that you are ready to both participate and guide the discussion. It may even be helpful to have some preliminary chats with others involved, so that you have a game plan to handle particular items.

• Plan what you want to happen. No, that doesn't necessarily mean deciding the exact outcomes in advance, but you can visualize the state of affairs you want after the meeting: a decision made on question A, someone assigned to work on item B, a timetable for discussing complex item C, and so on. If you don't have an idea of what should happen during the meeting, I promise you it won't happen, and you're likely to drift around helplessly.

• Decide what is most important and urgent. Don't leave truly important and urgent items to the end. If you do, you will inevitably use up your time talking about less important and less urgent topics, and run out of time for the important stuff.

• Match the agenda to the meeting time. If you have 3 hours worth of topics to discuss, trying to cover them all in 45 minutes will be doomed to failure. You either need more meetings or (more likely) fewer topics. 

• Manage the time spent on each topic. Use the allotted time well - many times discussing something for twice the time will not make the decision twice as good. Discuss an item as long as necessary, but no longer. While no one wants to cut people off rudely, it's your job to move things along, so don't feel shy about setting a time limit for a topic and sticking to it. If something absolutely requires a lot more discussion than the time allows, either schedule another meeting or get agreement to remove other items from the agenda.

There are lots of ways to follow each one of these points, of course, and some of them may take more practice than others, but even if they're not followed perfectly, these principles will make your meetings better. I promise.  

Have a favorite meeting horror story? A pet peeve you want to get off your chest? Other comments or ideas? Either email me at naomi <AT> naomiceder<DOT>tech or leave a comment.

Many thanks to those who read and reacted to my first story. I seem to be picking up subscribers slowly, but steadily. To be honest, getting subscribers at all is a bit of a surprise, but it’s nice to see, even if it does add a bit to my sense of urgency. Which brings me to my first point this week…

As I work on writing these pieces I am coming to realize that a full piece a week is too ambitious a pace. Yes, it is true that I'm no longer working a regular job, what you might call "retired", but I don't want to be writing all the time. For one thing, getting away from a daily grind is one of the reasons I retired, and for another, I have stuff to do, dammit. 

So my current plan, totally open to modification going forward, is that I'll move to producing a new story every 2 weeks, and on the off weeks, I'll share some easier bits and pieces - reactions to previous stories, reflections, and administrivia (like this).

Reactions

Fortunately for me this week, my story about my first community got some interesting reactions. Many of those came from old friends who were a part of CCAOS and had shared those experiences. Some others came from people who had experiences that contrasted with ours. 

One of the original kids in the club went on to a career in experimental science, and his reaction was that "flying by the seats of our pants (both organizationally and financially)" had been key in equipping him to handle the many challenges of perpetually underfunded research projects, both in terms of constructing apparatus and in dealing with shaky organization. 

I hadn't considered that, but it rings true to me. I have also made my way professionally by being able to handle "a high degree of ambiguity" as one boss put it, and by being able to pull various resources together to solve problems. No doubt that that early experience and its eventual success played a big part in preparing all of us for our future challenges. 

Another old friend recalled how the club had had a feeling of community and home, where geeky  interests were welcomed, not bullied. To me that's the best testimony to what that tiny community meant to me, and what is essential when I think of a true "community". 

Another friend, who was not part of our CCAOS community, told of the opposite experience in her youth, of moving from a church community where she felt some connection, to a different church where there was no one her age and feeling isolated. I find that perspective particularly intriguing. If we as kids had a positive community and have felt its positive influences in the decades since, what sort of challenges do people face if their early experiences with community are not affirming? Or if what one recalls includes a sense of loss?

It seems to me that a consideration of negative experiences of community and their ramifications would be worth discussing in one of these stories, so if anyone would like to share anything about that, either leave me a comment or send me an email at naomi DOT ceder AT gmail DOT com. 

As always, feel free to subscribe if you want to get this in an email:

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And with that, I'll get back to work on my next story. Cheers.

In central Nebraska the summer days would fade slowly, and if there no were storms the sun would take its time merging with the hot and dusty horizon. In the lingering orange twilight you could hear the irrigation pumps in the corn fields nearby, and you could catch a whiff of a freshly mown lawn. As it got darker the bugs would start coming out, mosquitoes of course, but also June bugs buzzing, crickets singing, and fireflies flickering. 

Around the lights there would be moths, but we avoided the lights, moving to the darkest corner of the church parking lot as the sky darkened. Lights were the enemy because at barely 11 years old we were setting up our little telescopes for a night of astronomy. 

Our target might be the moon, an easy target for beginners, or maybe Jupiter, bright and easy to find, with its four largest moons visible to even our puny telescopes, just as they had been to Galileo. Through the better scopes we could see the rings of Saturn and convince ourselves that Mars was indeed red, even though we couldn't make out the “canals” we read so much about in sci-fi stories. As we grew more skilled, we moved on to pursuing the star clusters and hunting the nebulae cataloged by Monsieur Messier centuries before. 

Those are my first memories of my first "community" that was based on a shared interest. We didn't think of it as a "community" then, not in the way I think about communities now. Back then, it was just a club, a bunch of geeky pre-adolescent boys and girls who met with the Methodist minister in the name of astronomy and telescopes and stuff. 

Stars in a summer night

The evening meeting would start in Tap's (as he was known to us, his wife, his parishioners, and the world) office, where we'd discuss whatever space or astronomy news we had and trade opinions on science fiction stories and TV shows (of course, we all watched Star Trek). Occasionally Tap would read us a sci-fi story from the latest (discreetly covered) issue of Playboy. 

Particularly in the summer, those meetings were usually just a way to pass the time until it got dark enough to go outside and set up our little telescopes in the church parking lot to observe the heavens. 

With Tap as a gentle, but unflappable, presence to guide us, we grew, both as a club and into our adolescence. At Tap's suggestion, we soon dubbed ourselves C.C.A.O.S. for the Central City Astronomical Observers Society. It was pronounced "chaos" which delighted all of us and puzzled everyone else. 

We recruited guest speakers, we went on trips to see an actual moon rock and to hear Pete Conrad, the third person to walk on the moon. Tap also booked us a booth at our county fair and with only a little bit of help we decorated and manned it for the duration. We even constructed a mini planetarium and we took turns giving tours of the heavens as projected onto a sky of taped together newsprint. With the donations we raised from that, we bought a mirror grinding kit and committed to grinding the mirror for our own 12 ½" telescope. It was all pretty amazing for a bunch of kids in the middle of the Nebraska plains. 

Losing a leader

Being kids, it never occurred to us that something might happen to change everything. At least it never occurred to us until Tap was reassigned to a different parish an hour's drive away. Tap had convinced the incoming Methodist minister to take over CCAOS, but it was a poor fit. After all, an interest in astronomy was hardly a requirement for being a Methodist minister, and in spite of his good will, we could tell that the new guy didn't really share our passion for astronomy at all. Enthusiasm waned, the telescope project stalled, and meeting attendance got thinner. 

Tap had always kept to the background and encouraged us to do things on our own, so we had taken him a bit for granted. Now we were feeling his absence. We knew that we needed to do something, but what? How do you move on from the loss of a key leader? 

It wouldn't have been surprising if we'd just given up, if we'd each moved on to other activities. You wouldn't really expect much more of some barely teenage kids. In fact, the same thing often happens with adults - when a key leader moves on, no one wants to step into that role. They have too much to do, they feel they don’t know how to take over, they’re waiting for others to come forward, whatever. So people drift away, and many times the group withers away. 

Yet for some reason we didn't give up. As we talked about it, we came to realize that we needed to find a sponsor interested in what we were doing. To our minds, "firing" the Methodist minister meant that we also probably had to find a new place to meet. So we had two problems to solve. 

Finding a leader

We finally decided to approach Jim, our middle school science teacher (by this time we were in our first year of high school. He had taught us eighth and ninth grade physics and earth science, and we had gotten along well with him. A small delegation of us went to his classroom one afternoon and begged him to take over as our sponsor. 

Surprisingly, Jim agreed. We packed up our telescope mirror making stuff rather quickly and set up shop in Jim's basement. Unsurprisingly, the minister was just fine with being fired, so we parted ways with no hard feelings.

The next three years we spent much of our free time in Jim's basement, walking around the mirror grinding stand (an oil drum full of water), taking turns grinding our giant mirror. We also resumed our trips, had observing sessions in the backyard or drove out into the country to set up telescopes literally in corn fields, in both sub-zero winters and Nebraska's hot and humid summers. 

As a club or community we had little hierarchy, no formal dues, and I don't recall a sense of people being shut out. Pretty much everyone got plenty of turns pushing the 20 pound 12" glass disk over the grinding tool, a disk of the same size. At the end of the process, the expert work of ensuring that the curve was "figured" to be optically correct fell to the one club member who'd done it before. (He also did the figuring on the 6" reflector I built at the time, which I still have to this day.) 

We struggled together, led by Jim's experience and knowledge, to solve all of the problems of building a complete telescope and an observatory to house it. Looking back, it should have all been impossible. We were just a bunch of high school kids, with a very limited budget. But somehow an old car axle (the product of a daring daylight raid on a junker in a cow pasture) became a motorized telescope mount; an irrigation pipe became a telescope tube; the fiberglass resin our music teacher used for his hobby of modding Corvettes became a spring loaded mirror mount; and the corner of a corn field sprouted a modest concrete block observatory. And as far as our skills allowed everyone was involved in that work. 

End of the journey

Early in our senior year of school we were enormously proud when we dedicated our observatory, dubbing it the Taplin-Weir observatory, in honor of our two mentors, who were both at the ceremony. Through the rest of that year we experimented with the telescope and astrophotography, finding various bugs in the telescope and observatory and working on fixes. 

In the years after we graduated we slowly drifted away, off to colleges and careers. There were no new members, so as we came home from college less frequently, the telescope saw less and less use. A couple of years after its completion the telescope suffered some misadventures, surviving a fire that wiped out a city block in our little town, then eventually being repaired and re-installed, thanks to the insurance. 

Eventually everyone moved on and with no users (it's safe to say that no one else in that little Nebraska town showed the same interest in astronomy that we did) the telescope and observatory we had built fell into disuse. 

Under-appreciated gifts

While we had no idea at the time, in spirit CCAOS was not so different from some of the tech communities I'm a part of today. We were only kids, true, but what brought us together was an excitement about the latest technology, which at that time was astronomy and the exploration of the moon. 

Through our teen-age years, CCAOS became a source of friendship, sometimes even early romance, and of connections many of us have maintained over almost 50 years. For many of us Jim and his wife Connie (who was our Spanish teacher) became our role models, our advisors, and our friends.

More importantly, our experience in CCAOS showed us what could be achieved by a group of people working together (even a group of kids in the middle of Nebraska) for a sustained period of time. In my case, and I'm pretty for others as well, the notion that surprising things were possible if you tried was a gift I carried into my later life. It gave me the confidence to attempt big projects and keep working on them until they came about. 

Our experience back then also illustrated some truths that I didn't understand at the time, but I've come to appreciate with experience. We saw that having a single leader can mean crisis when that leader has to move on. In our case, our answer was to just replace our single leader with another leader, but at least we had the sense to understand that without that leader we would be doomed. (Spoiler: the theme of leadership succession will feature prominently in the next few stories as well.)

We also saw what ultimately happens to a group when there isn't a steady flow of new members. The original members will eventually drift away, and when that happens, everything ends. 

Given that many communities of adults are still learning these very lessons, I'm not inclined to be too harsh with our teenage selves for failing to deal with those two truths. In fact, it took me a few more experiences and a few decades to assimilate those lessons, which is something I'll talk about in a later installment. 

On the other hand, even though our little observing society eventually collapsed as life happened, it also showed us that communities don't have to last forever to have value. In those days before the Internet just living in a tiny town on the Nebraska prairie was isolating, particularly for kids with interests like ours, so to have a group of like-minded folks to share interests with was a lifeline. 

In the years we were together we formed lasting connections, learned how to be a community, and gained a sense of confidence. Even if it didn't continue after we left, CCAOS served us better than we imagined. That's probably the last lesson our little community taught us, even though we were too young to understand - a community doesn't have to grow or last forever or be perfect to be of value. As long as it brings people together and helps them grow, even a little, a community has done its job.

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The power of stories

Over the past 40 years or so, I've done a lot of teaching, some writing, and a lot of speaking and community organizing. I've learned a lot from the experience (and have the scars to prove it), but one of the most important lessons for me is that stories are powerful. We humans use stories to make sense of our world, to understand how we fit in with those around us, and to deal with both the good and the bad we face in our lives. 

Thirty five years ago as a Latin teacher I could drill my high school students on grammar all day, but what they would remember after they left the classroom were things like a story of the fall of Troy, complete with chalkboard drawings (yeah, I'm that old) where the island of Tenedos looked rather like a flabby whale. I've given a bunch of talks that spelled out the issues facing marginalized people in tech in gory detail with bullet point slides, but what audiences remembered more was me telling my story of facing some of those challenges as a trans woman. 

And so it goes - stories carry information, feeling, and meaning in ways that other forms can not. With the right story, almost anything is within reach. Without the story, nothing seems possible.

I want to share some of those stores

My goal here is to distill and share some of the stories I've gained in the process of belonging to, creating, and caring for communities over the years. I'm most interested in the communities that arise around open source software, the Python language and its ecosystem, but I think these stories apply to communities in general. 

The stories I'll be sharing will be ones I've lived, or witnessed unfolding, or have heard from community members. They will not be made up fables, but they may be anonymized and occasionally the characters and situations may be composites, both to help keep things anonymous and to make the points clearer.  While the situations themselves may not always be flattering, these stories will always be told from a place of love and respect for our communities and the people who create them.

Join me

If you are like me in being interested in what makes tech communities tick, in how we can create them and make them better places, I invite you to join me for a few good yarns about people coming together. If you’re interested, here’s the subscribe button for your convenience:

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My plan is to share a story a week, but that will depend on a few things - the feedback I get, my recollection of times gone by, and how quickly I write things down.

What will it cost?

I’m not doing this for the money, so I can promise you that I won’t be pushing you for a subscription. Fairly soon, I’ll probably turn on donations, so that people who feel inclined can contribute, and I’ll certainly share that when it happens. Otherwise, the content here will be free to read, but for the moment under my copyright (CC licensing is something else that I’ll consider soon).