2026-09-25 –, 5053.2 (Kleiner B-IT Raum)
FOSS projects are often focused on technical work. However, what brings people together is rarely just technical, and very often strongly related to our emotions and ways of seeing the world. Unfortunately, we get a lot less training on communication and emotions than we get on writing kernel drivers or learning Rust. The goal of this worshop is to take a bit of time to try to collectively work in those tasks.
We will practice to 2 kind of exercises:
- Listening experience: in small groups, one person will try to explain the situation where a conflict is happening. Another person will be taking notes to try to identify "facts spoken out", and a third one just listening. After the situation and the feelings have been explained, the person listening will try to reproduce what the first person said. The goal is to show to each other how our own listening and biases interfere with communication. We will rotate with the goal of everybody having a try at each of the different positions.
- Appreciation work: in order to reduce conflicts and create a welcoming environment, appreciation of our own work, and the work of others is critical. In this exercise we will work on expressing that appreciation. By working individually, we will try to identify what we do, that benefits collectively the projects we work. We will then create small groups and do the same with appreciating others' work. Eventually we will be all together and express that to the group
I am a member of the postmarketOS project, which has been years working on postmarketOS governance challenges. As part of that work, I have communicated extensively with members of the Alpine community, and see the success of Alpine part of our own success.