Al Nelson
What Roleplaying Games Can Teach Us About Open Source Communities
In games, a valuable team is made up of characters with varied talents and skills. They need to be adaptable, to communicate, and most of all, to work together. As a team, they can accomplish even the most intimidating quests. It's time we took this mentality to the open source community.
Roleplaying games can teach us a lot about diversity and working as a team if we dig a little deeper. In such games, players take on the role of a fantasy character and participate in quests and adventures with a group of other players. During this talk, I will take popular fantasy classes and relate them to the variety of people who contribute to open source communities every day.
Just like a roleplaying party would fail with only type of character, open source needs the unsung heroes: the technical writers, the artists, the testers—to make the project a reality. By building our 'party' around diverse interests and welcoming newcomers with open arms, open source communities can prosper.
Speaker Bio
Al Nelson is a writer of both code and words and finds joy in combining the two. They write documentation for Alpine Data Labs by day and tell stories through novels and games by night.