ben van 't ende

I am a community manager, consultant and coach. I currently work as community strategist for Age of Peers and as TYPO3 consultant for MaxServ. I share people skills and personal innovation in an open environment.

[benvantende]

Play To Innovate At T3CON14 Berlin

Two days to go until my presentation about innovation. I did a first tweet out about my workshop and got some interesting feedback on work and fun:

"Work has got to be play or it doesn't work." - Ray Bradbury

Robert Weißgraeber replies: "why should we limit ourselves?"

It made me think of what work, fun and especially play means to me.

No Games

Someone asked me if my presentation is about gamification. Well it is not at all. I am actually not a gamer. My attention span does not allow me to play board games or games like this. 

What playing means to me is to creatively work towards an end result. I could play domino's by myself for very long stretches only to admire the combination of dots or play with Lego for days on end when I was a lot younger.

Domino by Adrià Ariste Santacreu

So 'Play To Innovate' is based in the old adagio 'Play To Win', which is not about the game, but about the result. While this is only about 'win', the innovation game is a win-win-win. It is about the goal, the experience and about you as a person innovating yourself.

I am also looking to do the presentation in an informative and innovative way. Honestly I was never to fond of preparing presentations with slides that cost me hours to get together before I even had the text. It will also be an exploration for myself to see what I like and where I feel comfortable with. 

I will try to deal with it in a fail proof way and Inspect and Adapt where necessary for a next iteration.

Join me on Friday in the AOE room from 11:15 - 12:00 to 'Play To Innovate'.

[benvantende]

How To Remove Fear From Your Development

Scott Hanselman writes on his blog about Fear Driven Development that "... fear can have developers worried about making mistakes".

In this time of collaborative working, the importance of training people skills and transforming I into WE, it is refreshing to look back on what we actually come from and how hard kicking the fear habit is and sometimes unavoidable.

At Inspiring Conference in the beginning of this year I held a small opening talk about the importance of people skills and how that is a skill that needs to be trained, just as you need to train your muscles to become strong and flexible.

The most important part of my opening speech was how individuals in a community choose to lead. If taking leadership meets resistance, maybe because of the nature of the community or organisation, you can lead change by taking small steps. It is not about managing by fear, but it takes courage to be yourself.

Sebastian Bergmann, PHP consultant, talked about the Driven Developer at that same Inspiring Conference. Although the talk was technical by nature the word 'human' was brought up numerous times from human-readable code to developers as humans. When hearing about Behaviour Driven Development and the many forms of DD there actually are I dreamt of Values Driven Development as a DD form where we develop from perspectives of sharing and coding for the good of the world.

What Scott perfectly shows is that Fear Driven Development seems, at times, unavoidable because we might be stuck with an organisational structure that just does not allow for change.

Another thing that is prevalent in probably most software projects is fear of code.

Perhaps the code is older (legacy code) but more likely it's just not fully understood. It mostly works, but folks are afraid that a small change to the code could cost unpredictable side-effects.

The best way to overcome these fears is to tackle organisational and code issues one step at a time, celebrating every small victory with your team and 'leading by example'.

Leading by example means converting the criticism into encouragement of participating in your effort, because leading is nothing else then enabling others to shine in your community, organisation or process. 

At the end of his article Scott asks for other flavors of Fear Driven Development. There are undoubtedly a lot of factors that fuel fear. The first thing that comes to my mind however is fear that prevents development.

Innovation, like leadership, takes courage, but also brings a lot of joy when you see progress. Letting go of fear and embracing what you already have (developed) provides a solid basis for innovation and thinking out-of-the-box.

10 ways to get innovating

Read how others do it

Take a course

Read a book you would normally never read

Ask a child

Paint a picture

Write something

Get up at 5:20 in the morning

Meditate

Accept who you are

Assume everything you know is wrong

[benvantende]

Appreciate everything, everyday, most of the time.

"The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness." - Dalai Lama

Appreciation is at the heart of an Open Source community and the basis for living life in general. Appreciation is a motivator, a heart-warmer and the essence to connecting to other humans.

We easily take things for granted and it is our perception of what is good that sometimes needs to be calibrated. At this particular time of writing with the War on Gaza and the downing of MH17 appreciation seems far and in between. It is at times like this we neglect the small things that come to us. A smile from a passer-by, a helping hand from your neighbour or a touch on the shoulder from someone you actually do not even know.

Our own efforts are sometimes so central to the goals we need and want to achieve that someone that is not with us can only be against us. Taking a different perspective can make anyone a helping hand in achieving your goals.

Some things I have learned that can provide a different perspective and open you up to appreciation:

Take a break, a deep breath, a pause. it gives you calm and distance to have a look what actually is going on around you.

Assume best intent. People most often do their best according to their motivation, even though that might not be your motivation

Eat good food in small amounts. Having to digest a lot of food draws away your energy and makes you grumpy.

Start your day with some quiet time. Your dreams can be quite disturbing and will make you get up in a chaotic state at times. These 5 to 10 minutes can be a perfect time to plan your day. If you are on the right track yourself this will leave you with time to appreciate your surroundings.

Workout! Seek competition with yourself not with others.

Community

As a community manager, working for the TYPO3 community, I do talks and presentation at events about communication, innovation. In my daily work I realise how important it is to appreciate people for what they do.

On the one hand the big size of the community makes things go unrecognized and on the other hand the bazaar nature of the community does not always align with the competitive nature of the companies that implement our content  management system for big projects that have the most important communication channel, their website, based on our software.

Everyone deserves a towel

Preparing talks, especially long ones, can be a nerve-wrecking experience, going over your notes the night before, getting little sleep and being nervous before your talk.

For last month's Developer Days of the TYPO3 community I came up with the idea to shower the community with appreciation. I prepared 20 towels with embroidered on it "member of the TYPO3 community" with our orange project logo clearly visible.

For the opening of the Developer Days I hooked up community members that have been in the TYPO3 community for a long time already with totally new comers. Getting the new comers to the front is difficult. They are not new for nothing. With some nice words and to the point questions I was able to get ten pairs together. Their only mission was to connect and act as TYPO3 buddies and tweet pics with the hastag #t3buddies.

I feel very comfortable doing something like this. The payoff is immediately there. People connect, have fun and communicate. Isn't that what community is about?

For the closing part of the event I came up with a similar idea, but then I made the ceremony even easier. People were just asked to give a towel to someone they appreciate. This started incredibly slow, showing how shy people are to show their appreciation. As momentum built people came up to the front of the audience in rapid succession and I was out of towels in no time.

"Everyone deserves a towel" - Karsten Dambekalns

Then all of a sudden I heard someone in the back say: 'Everyone deserves a towel'. I felt a bit embarrassed not having enough towels for everyone. On the other hand it also made me realise that appreciation is not a bulk thing, but something we do on an individual basis. You as an individual let someone else know you appreciate them. There is gerat power in there.

No matter in what community you are, because basically we all are in a community one way or the other, look around you and you will see a lot to be thankful for of despite shit going on around you.

On a daily basis think of something you are grateful for or thank someone you appreciate! It will make life a lot lighter.

[benvantende]

I miss her

[benvantende]

Going to CMS Africa

Strathmore University, is a leading University in Nairobi, Kenya, whose mission is to provide all-round quality education in an atmosphere of freedom and responsibility; excellence in teaching, research and scholarship; ethical and social development; and service to society. On Friday March 7 and 8 the university partners with CMS Africa to organise the CMS Africa Summit.

The event is organised to create awareness on various Open Source CMS's. Africa businesses have concerns on how Open Source CMS's are implemented and maintained. Delivery of websites is not adequate enough and installations are left with gaping security holes. Those vulnerablities are also a threat to e-commerce in the region. Without proper education in this field Open Source CMS's will not gain the necessary acceptance. 

Oduor Jagero, the Lead at CMS Africa says,

It's an opportunity for people involved in Open Source to meet experts and founders of these CMSs. It's also an opportunity to exchange contacts, learn from each other, and take your business to the next level.

As community manager I have been travelling to a number of European countries and to the US, but this looks like a whole different ballgame to me. It is very hard to make an estimation on how to work in that area.

I see two different challenges. One how to promote, educate and to gain acceptance for TYPO3 that I represent. Of course the same values apply as we always use as TYPO3 being an Enterprise Content Management and the many high level features that make it stand out from the competition.

Another one is the challenge of spreading Open Source and the collaborative nature of how we work as communities. To maintain the conversation seems extremely important in the light of the issues mentioned earlier. Through the past years communities have become increasingly important throughout the world, partly also due to the world wide recession. I see this on a local level in the Netherlands, but our communication tools also enable us to create communities that interact on global scale.

I hope to find out how we can create this link to the African continent for our OS CMS's and to provide our tools as a medium to communicate and interact also on an economic level enabling easy access to create virtual market places for everyone.

[wisdom2conference]

Wisdom 2.0 2014: Eckhart Tolle Explains Who You Really Are

Eckhart Tolle, bestselling author of The Power of Now and A New Earth, gave a “meditative lecture” at Wisdom 2.0, leading us on a journey inward that enabled us to experience who we really are.

"It’s an amazing thing, this present moment," he began. "But it’s usually overlooked. When you think of the future, it can never arrive in the future. It can only arrive at the present moment." He emphasized that the present is all we have, and outlined the following process we can use to get to the experience of that present moment.

Read More

[benvantende]

Reach out and be inclusive

Meg Ford writes in her article on opensource.com how communication styles needs to shift in order to emphasize inclusion. Meg is a member of the GNOME community, which is quite active with their Outreach Program for Women. I attended Karen Sandler’s (Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation) session at OSCON 2013 about this topic. Also at the Community Leadership Summit the topic is prevailing.

Davis Eaves called women in open source the canary in the coal mine in an article dating back to 2009 already and explains how this isn’t just about women and how social capital drives an open source community. Being inviting and reaching out to women is one way to create diversity. Diversity is on a much broader level and is about people who think different, have a different skin colour than ours or have a different sexual orientation than ours.

Diversity happens on a meta level many communities tend to set aside as not being essential to reach their ‘goals’. That meta level is about culture and an openness to listen to others and gain other perspectives.

This year is about innovation for me. I write about it and submitted a proposal for OSCON 2014 called ‘Play To Innovate’. For me innovation start within and is all about opening your mind to the perspective of others. First innovate yourself, before innovating anytihng else. The more diverse the input you can innovate.

Lack diversity might make contributions difficult, because people do not feel welcome, everything is just to linear. There are people out there in your community that can contribute to your project. Make sure they feel welcome and included.

Creating diversity is one thing to give of that signal. Reach out and be inclusive. Shy no-one not even trolls. They might even turn into contributors.

[benvantende]

Loss

Two years ago my father died after a period of weakness and failing health. I did not cry, I felt the sadness deep inside. Letting go of one of your parents is one of the things in life that has a big impact and is very meaningful. I had let go of many attachments and consolidated the fact that the relationship with my father was coming to an end in a foreseeable future. There were no more issues standing between us and there was peace and acceptance in our conversation as we had established the true meaning of our relationship.

“It might seem sad, but we are forced to reinvent our lives when a loved one dies, and in this reinvention is opportunity. Which I think is beautiful.” – Leo Babauta

With my father’s passing away I felt part of his responsibilities transferred to me. I had lost the person that provided a listening ear, wisdom and understanding.  What would take its place? Losing my role as a son seemed most significant.

Besides all memories stored in the mind there are also a lot of physical things to let go of when losing a parent. For days I was going through all the stuff my father collected in his life, which was not too much as he led an orderly and remarkably frugal existence, rooted in growing up in wartime Holland.

In a suitcase I found a collection of diplomas, certificates and the likes, most in beautiful 50-ties design. For my father this was his life and the purpose of this was probably that someone would read his life from that, as a timeline of life events. For me it almost meant no more than a stack of papers that are beautiful to see, but definitely does not make up the life of someone. For me experiencing life is so much more important than giving it the solid form of papers. That collection showed me I was holding on to things that might end up as collectibles.

I made a lot of music and wrote poems and texts in the 80-ies and 90-ies. I had a box full of cassettes I recorded over the years and started to digitize. I spent quite some evenings alone or with friends, with or without beers, listening to these old recordings and revelling in feelings of times gone by. The box of cassettes, my copybooks of writing were central points in my life waiting to be digitized. Too much quality to let go of I imagined.

The memories kept me in a comfortable place and did not bring me any progress. Is it me in these recordings, is it me in these writings? These were things from the past and actually taking up space and keeping me from doing stuff now I realised.

I delivered my memories in a box to the local recycle centre and my copybooks went to the waste paper.

I now have piano lessons and write these articles. What was in the box and in the copybooks was an excellent foundation and letting go delivered the reality of now writing and playing piano.

Will you let go to progress?

[benvantende]

Letting go

Control as a centralised power hub or force in itself rarely is something that is sustainable in the long run.

I had planned a post on letting go for a long time already. The line above was living in my tumblr drafts folder for a few months waiting to become this article. The challenge of everyday writing is getting more interesting and more challenging. This is my fourth post. The first ones were not that easy, but they kind of waiting in my drafts folder almost done to be sent. This post takes some more work i seems, but keeping at it will definitely make posting easier as we progress.

I really like the awareness that is coming with the writing everyday challenge and I am looking for ways to integrate it better in my life and the only way that seems to work is to upscaling discipline and creating writing habits. Writing stuff makes you pay attention to what is going on around you and think about the significance of events. The very small can easily become a realisation and significant.

A year ago I changed some habits. I quit smoking, got up early, meditate every morning, do regular sports of sorts. I achieved this by visualising what I wanted to become. Years ago I imagined myself walking with my two white shepherds early in the morning when everyone was still asleep. It did not happen overnight though, but by keeping the vision and the focus things happen in a seemingly natural way.

Visualising the writing challenge and wanting to write on a daily basis works the same. This morning I sit and procrastinate not knowing what to write, but then letting go of the pressure makes words flow out of the keyboard. It is just like James Altucher writes on Quora: “Some days I can't think of what to write. But I stare at the screen and write whatever I want. Nobody can stop me.“.

Procrastinating is a habit that made me feel guilty, having the eternal feeling nothing gets done, making me feel stressed and upset. I was always a master in putting everything of to the last minute. Finishing things in the last minute with a stressed feeling gives half baked results and not something to be really satisfied.

Just visualise what is important for you today and all distractions, unanswered mails, will lose importance, so you can focus.

Pause and go!

[benvantende]

I Enable

I have always considered community manager the wrong term for the job we, community managers, do in an open source community. A ‘manager’ or a ‘leader’ for that matter can be considered the one person that leads a team or gives direction to a group. Outside of open source this usually works well.  

Community management as I have experienced from a marketing or commercial point of view acts as an interface between managers of a company and aims to protect and maintain the assets and market value of a company. In the Netherlands I visited  a community manager meeting where I was a bit overwhelmed with the conclusion I was the only one present from an open source community. Without a doubt we had a lot in common, but I did not experience the spark of crazy devotion to a project as I have seen in the TYPO3 community or for that matter in any other open source community.

I recently got confronted with a demand for clearly stating my opinion on a certain topic. Our community, like most other communities, is a vibrant place to live in and like in real life we have conflicts that heat up and can incinerate whole forum threads with a fire storm. A good dose of cynicism and well meant trolling is part of community and often only shows the concern or dedication community members have for the project. While I am by no means without opinion and find myself easily triggered into an emotional debate I do take a healthy distance from certain topics concerning our community and rather act as a guide then to explicitly state my opinion.

In a community like ours, that is without a benevolent dictator for life, agreement comes through consensus and coming to a consensus takes time. It often does not make sense pushing certain topics and the community is ready to find consensus when it is ready.

Opinions on leadership vary wildly. My favourite interpretation is the supporting one. Support is a style of leadership in which the leader trusts his community, but needs to motivate them to complete a task. So much for what comes along with the “manager/leader” title and is often interpreted like acting ‘like a boss’ and calling the shots.

While thinking about how I got started I recall how the TYPO3 Association, as it was some five years ago, recognized the need for someone that has the ‘Big Picture’. The community had grown so big and there were many different individual and team efforts started without any central communication. When I first started on a budget four years ago, in my ignorance, I coined my job product management. Something did not feel right and after a lot of googling the internetz I found the likes of Jono Bacon (community manager for Ubuntu - Canonical) and that there is something like a community manager.

Still the term manager did not feel right to me the past years. That’s when it dawned on me, I’m not a leader or manager, I’m an enabler. I connect people in the community, remove bottlenecks or other obstructions and ‘enable’ community members to get their initiative, group or team going.

Calling it enabler also makes it a lot easier for other community members to relate to and be an enabler themselves helping community members do the thing they love. The more I think about it, the more I love it. it removes the formality from the manager title and sets focus on what the true heart of the TYPO3 community is, ‘Inspiring People To Share’.

Our community is already great with the recent developments growing into a family of products under the umbrella of the TYPO3 project and we have a bright future ahead of us with all the experience we have ingrained in our community. Some people / initiatives just need that one little push, that pad on the shoulder or that acknowledgement of being ‘Member of the TYPO3 Community’ to go for it.

That is something I love doing, finding motivated people, being open, listening, connecting community members to each other and the nice thing is that we can do that anywhere, anytime.

As a community we have a huge potential just waiting to be uncovered. We just need to be ready to listen and pay attention.

[benvantende]

Start Light

The most important thing I learned over the years in the sessions with my coach Ravi Chabbra is to step back and observe. I wrote about this a while back in my post called Pause.

A pause enables you to regain control of your day.

I found it very beneficial to start the day with a pause as well. You might wake up from your sleep with an undefined feeling caused by your dreams or your unconscious mind. I could sometimes wake up with a feeling that influences me all day.

While I practise daily meditation every morning now, I started with sitting on the edge of my bed for a few minutes.

When you wake up, first sit on the edge of your bed and ask yourself, "What is the most important thing I will do today? What is the best use of this day?" Just quietly sit for a few minutes and let the thoughts come to you and just observe.

Take a deep breath and smile. You are ready to start your day!

[benvantende]

Fear, Failure and Innovation

Today I start a 50 day article challenge. One article a day for the coming 50 days. I challenge myself, to get fluent in writing and to learn how to quickly get stuff to the internet about what is on my mind without procrastinating.

Innovation is a topic that caught my interest this past year as a tool to progress development in not only software, but also in ones personal life. I am taking the challenge without being fully prepared, also realising that one can never be prepared and that taking a step is the start of a journey. A journey that might fail, but knowing that failure is a potential foundation for a new adventure.

Preceding the TYPO3 Eastern European mini-conference in Cluj-Napoca a few weeks ago I did a presentation at the Babes-Bolyai University about Open Source communities. I am at ease with the topic and words flowed easily. After the presentation I got feedback that I was a good example of how to do a presentation. How awesome is that! It is a quick win when you can do stuff like this and people admire you for doing a great presentation.

I also submitted a presentation for T3EE itself about innovation. I really felt I needed to something in this direction also to be able to educate the TYPO3 community about what is involved in innovation and how it can benefit the development of software in the TYPO3 project. Innovation is also fun. Challenging yourself to thing different.

I prepared this presentation for several days getting info from several sids and preparing some nice slides. Because I was not to familiar on the topics I decided to do it more open discussion style.

My talk was called "Disrupt TYPO3: Thinking the Unthinkable"

I was far more tense then for the previously mentioned presentation. I got very good feedback about how people deal with innovation in their company. I also failed, because I was short on words describing the processes surrounding the path that leads to the innovative, disruptive mindset.

This failure will be a good foundation, however, for my next presentation about Innovation for an audience without an open discussion next time at for instance CeBIT or FOSDEM.

Let the challenge begin!

[benvantende]

It's my first TYPO3 Con and I am very excited to be here. The community is incredibly welcoming, the technical content top notch and I'm having a great time learning from other community leaders like Brian Teeman and Vitaly Friedman from Smashing Magazine. Many thanks to Ben van 't Ende for inviting me to be a part of this event!

Leslie Hawthorn on the TYPO3 conference and the TYPO3 community

[benvantende]

Pause

I have taken on the habit of meditating every morning for about ten minutes. I start the day with a solid foundation and with a smile. During the day I take a pause and enjoy a good tea, coffee or a small walk. These are the moments when you get in tune with yourself again and do not let your work take over your day. 

A pause provides a good way to step back and evaluate what you have done. 

We press the play button when we wake up and are on our devices until we go to sleep. We do have a pause button too.

There is a time to work hard and a time to reflect. If you do not pause things will all mix up leaving you no room.

When will you pause?

[rasmusskjoldan]

(Hint: If you don’t care to read too much, there are some screenshots of TYPO3 Neos UI sketches at the bottom of this post)

Here it goes, my long’ish initial conclusions about the WYSIWYG inline, in-page, in-place editing debate. Lengthy as it is, it’s actually an extremely compact, short...

[benvantende]

Diversify, reach out and go beyond

The second day of CLS carried on with the same energy as Day one started. I got inspired by the talks of the first day and submitted a session called 'Measuring Community Management'. I am community manager for quite a few years now in the TYPO3 project, an OS Enterprise CMS very popular in Europe. My job started as required by the growth of the community and the consequent need of someone having the bigger picture of the project. Our governance structure changed last year and we now have an Expert Advisory Board deciding about the budgets also influenced by members of the TYPO3 Association. I set some goals and I report back to the EAB besides the monthly community reports I am already doing for a long time. As I find my job quite re-active I wanted to discuss how others set goals, do reporting and manage expectations. There was a fine mixed crowd of around 15 people that joined me for my session and were very engaged in providing feedback on the topic to each other.

In the session it turned out obvious that solid metrics depend on solid goals and that benefits of engaged community management show themselves by activity on twitter, blog posts, activity on mailing lists and forums. Increasing engagement in the community helps to increase awareness and knowledge and education.  

Concerning community management we are still in the phase before it hits mainstream and the set of tools and best practices is not defined by far and also depends a lot on the varying kinds of communities, whether company driven or fully volunteer-driven. Especially in the latter case outcomes may vary as effort is based on spare time of those involved. Nonetheless this is largely a matter of setting expectations and should be based on retrospectives, inspecting and adapting those expectations in a scrum like fashion. Especially in community driven projects it is essential to keep one's finger on the project's pulse. 

Every year, the art and science of community management is becoming more predictable.

said  Jono Bacon, the Community Leadership Summit lead organizer.

Organizer Jono Bacon

One subject that was stuck to my retina and/or eardrum at CLS and at OSCON was community diversity and strongly connected to that outreach, which forms the basis of sustainable communities. Karen Sandler of the Gnome Foundation addressed the topic of diversity mainly from the female perspective with some examples from the Outreach Program for Women, Laura Powers of the CODE2040 initiative showed how today's minorities in the US will be majorities in 2040 and how CODE2040 creates awareness, and opportunities for top minority engineering talent today preparing for 2040. Europe is most likely to follow that trend. 

One of the most inspiring keynotes of OSCON was by Mark Hinkle (Open Citrix). Mark talked about the Open Prosthetics Project, which produces useful innovations and shares the designs. It is a good example of taking the principles of Open Source to other worlds. The motto of the TYPO3 project, I represent, is 'Inspiring People to Share' and it is on my mind for years already to take this further than the software we are working on. 

A personal highlight for me were the yoga classes by Sherry Montgomery (@pdxyogini). Obviously not meant for everybody but I recommend yoga to everyone as it is a prefect way to find some more balance, lose your ego and gain loads of energy. LOL. I also could never have imagined to get up at 6 o 'clock for yoga class, but it works for me now!!

Articles on the Community Leadership Summit 2013:

Andy Oram (O'Reilly) - http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/07/community-leadership-summit-tracks-the-forces-that-spread-ideas.html

Jason Hibbits (opensource.com) - https://opensource.com/life/13/7/community-leadership-summit-2013

Steve Holden - http://holdenweb.blogspot.com/2013/07/oscon-community-leadership-summit.html

[benvantende]

Mindful ways

Community management is a mindful business. It is not so much the management, which I always feel reluctant to utter and rather replace by a term like enabler. Managers have been and are responsible for destroying a lot of enthusiasm and dedication and as such is a layer we can do without in a lot of cases. It is the community aspect that prevails here.

Session sheet CLS

The Community Leadership Summit started this Saturday. In it's fifth incarnation things went smoother then ever and the session sheet was filled fast. 

Mindfulness is something you hear more and more being applied in leadership be it in Open Source companies or for profit ones. The first session I visited is about dealing with negative feedback. Every community has it ups and downs and the dark periods always seem to be more visible then the sunny periods. Concerning negative feedback it was mentioned to empower complainers to solve their own complaints. Not leave it on the desk as one of the attendants mentioned. It is not always possible to get the complainers in, but we have to do our utmost to find possibilities for that as most negative feedback is really given by people who are very passionate about your project. Of course the troll subject was put in the table and luckily most attendants agree that getting into '/ignore' mode is best in these cases. There is no arguing with a troll as I have found out during the years. A healthy community has deep roots and a community like the TYPO3 community, I live and work in for years now, is very resilient and through it's social foundation always bounces back in it's original 'Inspiring People to Share' mode.

Van Riper explained a bit, in his session, how he uses mindfulness at Google. His session started with a breathing exercise. In the discussion a mindful leaders main characteristic is empathy. Empathy itself is a skill you can learn, but empathy can also go to far. Mindfulness is about treating people according to their needs. People's happiness in the workplace is very important for functioning in the team. Cool stuff that Van approached without getting to esoteric.