Randy Fay – coaxed everybody to move to the front of the room.
Community conversation: burnout, what can the community do help people avoid burnout.
A well-studied clinical condition, not a fad! Important scholarly work done: exhaustion, cynicism, ineffectiveness. (o hai n’hood assoc!)
causes: feeling overloaded, lacking control over what we do, not being rewarded, breakdown in community, not being treated fairly, dealing with conflicting values.
rewards: giving attribution, pats on the back…but easy to find people who feel ignored (which is the open source version of reward?)
“family problems” – at tense times, “it’s all going to hell” — and it didn’t. making personal statements on twitter, inflamatory comments on drupal.org, etc.
lack of boundaries with professional projects vs hobbyist.
slide of 12 stages of burnout.
individual solutions.
“real interconnectedness in a local community” which is hilarious for me, because that’s where I’m actually experiencing burnout. I think my 4e (D&D) game is my alternative/outlet for that.
burnout is NOT an individual problem, but an organizational problem.
specific things that Drupal does that make things work
calls out Dave Reid – has created 87 modules – module creators automatically become module maintainers. Even Dave has a limit. what do we do about that problem?
no explicit way to step down from a lot of responsibilities: no natural way, just guilt and overwhelmedness. “abandoned module hopper” -
“what’s wrong with assigning to abandoned”
“adopt-a-module”
not just name change – realizing that we have to promote people taking over and giving up responsibilities.
“there’s a process for adopting humans” (audience comment)
figuring out how to mentor and helping people to grow
you have to step away for people to feel comfortable stepping in
audience member – traveling is a universal way to “break the chain of misery” – also, finding a good psychologist. It really was my therapist who helped me work through that I needed to step away from friends of the library and recognize that I felt better after having done it. (because I’ve been going through whole life burnout, really)
tarpits – things that are not sustainable and will never work – not just module maintainership – docs team, good steps towards sustainability – project application process. sometimes you just can’t work harder.
organizational development – audience member’s wife does that professionally. no position for a documentation lead, for example, on modules. interesting idea: not having to be a co-maintainer to contribute to a module.
things that we do right!
don’t forget the risks for not trusting newbies.
time-limited responsibilities – reminds me of the n’hood association board – knowing that I have a term, and that it has an end point, is really helpful.
dude, I think greggles just trolled randy’s definition of bikeshedding. hilarity.
no way to resolve disagreements, is that what he’s talking about? to some extent.
