There are lots of people milling about and plenty of work to do, but we don't have a boss paying us to show up and meet the deadlines, so how do we get things done? Open source communities provide rich resources and energy while, at the same time, presenting organizational challenges. Directing the efforts of volunteers towards a common goal, managing conflict and coordinating people with various skills and goals, is a community contribution in and of itself. Everyone who gets much of anything done in the open source world practices some level of cat herding.

We'll look at ways to get open source volunteers to function as a team, moving towards common goals, particularly around "unsexy" tasks like documentation. We'll talk about barriers, politics, dealing with "those disruptive people," incentives and enabling collaboration. Really, we'll be talking about human beings through the lens of getting work done in an open source project.