Let's talk: Communication & Consensusing Building in Open-Source

Track:
Community Building, Education, Outreach
Type:
Talk (long session)
Level:
beginner
Room:
Terrace 2A
Start:
10:30 on 17 July 2025
Duration:
45 minutes

Abstract

Open-source communities are often distributed around the world which presents a challenge to fostering effective communication and consensus building among its members. As the project and community grows, the challenges around facilitating effective communication only become more difficult.

Thankfully, there are a myriad of tools and methodologies available to deal with these challenges. During this talk, I will cover three ways both large and small open source communities can tackle these communication issues: project chats and message boards, regular project meetings and project enhancement proposals.

We'll look at a variety of open-source projects in the Python ecosystem to see exactly how they make use of these tools to solve the problem of distributed communication. I'll also share my own personal experiences with the conda package manager project how our community communicates across two continents.