Keynote: The Shy Developer Syndrome
Dave Neary • Lyon, France • Keynote

Date: August 22, 2012
Published: August 24, 2012
Announced: unknown

The hardest part of joining an open source project for a professional developer is being completely transparent on a mailing list, and submitting your work to public peer review. When you are used to talking about technical details with your manager and colleagues, writing an email to a mailing list can be very daunting: Am I exposing some confidential information here? Have I made a mistake which someone will criticise? Is this message important enough to make an announcement on a public mailing list?

I call this "Shy Developer Syndrome". Developers used to working in a commercial software development environment can clam up when asked to work in public.

There are some straightforward ways to help experienced developers gain confidence in working in public forums, and gain the respect of their peers in open source projects. This presentation will outline some of the strategies which have worked in the past for me.

Dave is a frequent speaker on GNOME, including accessibility, mobile, community processes and other aspects of the project, Dave used to be a freelance consultant specialising in the relationship between companies and free software communities. He is the former maemo.org docmaster, and product & community manager for the OpenWengo project. Dave recently joined Red Hat to work in the "Open Source and Standards" team.

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