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Engaging the Silent Community Members: Insights from AllThingsOpen's Community Leadership Summit

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hey folks! I just wrapped up leading a session at the Community Leadership Summit during AllThingsOpen 2025, and I wanted to share some of the insights that came out of our discussion about engaging silent community members in open source communities.

The Challenge: Vocal Few vs. Silent Community Members

One of the most common patterns we discussed was the classic 80/20 rule in community engagement - where 3-5 vocal members dominate conversations while 20+ others remain on the sidelines. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but it does mean we’re missing out on diverse perspectives and potential contributions.

Community First: Using ChatGPT to Build Strong Open Source Communities

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hey folks, Jonas here writing again! I had a great time last week giving a talk at AllThingsOpen down in Raleigh, NC, and wanted to share some of the discussions I was a part of around AI and open source. For those who don’t know me, I’m the Head of Open Source Community Management over at VMware and I’m also the Executive Director at a non-profit called Hit Save! focused on video game preservation and history.

Building the {code} Team and {code} Community

Wed, 10 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This article originally appeared as a chapter in The Open Organization Workbook and on opensource.com.

No one working in cloud and data centers should be surprised that organizations have changed how they run their IT departments. Applications are written and deployed differently, moving away from monoliths to microservices. Organizations operate their data centers by applying development principles to operations through open source software and community collaboration. Open source software is used heavily in development, testing, and production. In a survey done in 2016, 90% of respondents say open source improves their efficiency, interoperability, and innovation, and 65% of companies are contributing to open source projects.

Assuming positive intent when working across teams

Sun, 30 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This article originally appeared as a chapter in The Open Organization Guide to IT Culture Change and on opensource.com.

When teams in the same organization—or even across organizational boundaries—start to collaborate, they will most likely realize that not all of their goals align. The IT team, for instance, might not have the same criteria for success as the sales team. Different teams have different benchmarks, even if the teams are part of a larger organization (as in the case of relationships between a developer team and an operations team).

How I built an Alternate Reality Game - Part 2: The Chatbot

Mon, 17 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is a multi-part blog series. This is part 2.

As some of you quickly figured out when playing the ARG there’s also a conversational piece to this game, not just a standard puzzle that you solve on your own.

Throughout the ARG you will converse with a chatbot (which I will not name to avoid spoilers) to progress through the game. I got the idea for this last year when playing the outstanding ARG created by Camoflaj called KILLYOURINTERNET (KYI). It was an eye-opening experience and the first ARG that I ever truly finished. So much fun!

How I built an Alternate Reality Game - Part 1: The Why

Wed, 05 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is a multi-part blog series. This is part 1.

2 weeks ago I launched something I’ve been working on for a while - an Alternate Reality Game. For those of you who have never played an ARG before and wondering what I’m on about, read on!

A little back-story; I love puzzles, riddles and mysteries. Of course there’s the satisfaction of solving them, but there’s just something about the journey that’s always been more intriguing to me. It’s fun to learn as I go, test my skills, gain more information, and being engulfed in the story and game mechanics.

Docker's Birthday: The Fourth Kind

Tue, 21 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been involved with and learning from the Docker community for a few years now and it’s been an interesting ride. Going from a small project to widespread use and enterprise support, I have thoroughly enjoyed being a part of the amazing community as a Docker Blogger, Organizer and Captain. This post will share a little of my thoughts on the IRL get-togethers that are the Docker Meetups, with a focus on Docker’s 4th Birthday Party!

Control Sonos with an Amazon Dash Button

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Lately I’ve been tinkering with home automation, and I wanted to see if I could do something smart with an Amazon Dash Button. They do have official IoT versions but the Dash ones are easy to hack into something more useful and are sometimes on sale for $0.99, so it’s definitely worth trying out.

I have a vinyl record player hooked up to my Sonos via line-in, and every now and then when I head over to put on a new record I find that I was playing something else before. So now I have to go get my phone, open the Sonos app and choose the line-in input. That’s not good, I want to be lazy! So enter a the Dash button, a simple device that can help us get rid of pesky apps.

Simple way to build a custom Docker-ready Raspberry Pi image

Fri, 11 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In the past year and a half I’ve seen some really cool things come from people who are passionate about two things: Docker and Raspberry Pi.

There have been contests, showing over 2500 containers running on a RPi 2. We’ve seen some amazing stuff coming out from Hypriot to get up and running with Docker quickly on RPi. And not that long ago, Docker themselves took this more seriously and made Raspbian Jessie an officially supported platform.

Vendor lock-in is real but silly

Tue, 15 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This might come off as a bit of a rant, but the notion of so called vendor lock-in is something I hear constantly in the IT industry and I’m getting tired of it.

TL;DR: Lock-in is just a choice of current state.

Why is it silly?

The concept of vendor lock-in is that if you buy a product you’re locked into that product’s features and functions, and therefore you might be missing out on other interesting things.

Container OS comparison

Wed, 23 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post was previously published on Codeship’s blog, reposted here.

For anyone who’s been following the container community’s rise the past two years (after Solomon Hykes’s famous five-minute presentation at PyCon), you have surely seen many companies and projects spring up, offering really innovative ways of managing your applications.

There are several projects around management, network, storage, logging, monitoring, and more (check out this awesome mind map of the ecosystem). However, I think the most prevalent projects are the ones that make up the base infrastructure of what has or will become your new application environment: the container OSes.

Battle of the Container OSes: CoreOS

Mon, 30 Mar 2015 10:07:24 -0400

This is an ongoing comparison series between different publicly available operating systems focused on running some form of containers, trying to be as objective as possible but I’ll add my own commentary of course. I am not covering the different container technologies such as Docker, Rocket, LXC or others. There are no winners or losers, I leave it up as an exercise to the reader to decide if any of the compared OSes would be useful for them. Got an OS that’s not covered? Leave a comment!

Hello World (again)

Mon, 23 Mar 2015 16:47:56 -0400

It’s time to shake things up a bit. I’ve been blogging over at pureVirtual.eu for 4.5 years (wow, it’s been that long already?), and thought it was time for a refreshing change of scenery. The old blog will still live on and keep serving popular articles on VMware, EMC, Open Source, APIs and other stuff for an indefinite amount of time or until I get bored of paying maintenance.

Why move?

I will continue writing about things that interest me, but since my interests are currently not always aligned to what we started the pureVirtual blog for I wanted to put my thoughts somewhere else.

Résumé

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Contact methods in order of preference:

Summary

20+ years building and leading open source communities at scale — from developer advocacy at Dell to heading global community management for the Tanzu portfolio at VMware, community leadership for Rocky Linux at CIQ and the Cosmos community at VAST Data, and now directing open source programs for Falco at Sysdig. Known for community-first strategy, contributor growth, hands-on workshops, and bridging engineering, marketing, and executive stakeholders. Speaker and practitioner on using AI thoughtfully in community programs with a focus on augmenting teams, not replacing them. Based in Boston, and active in the CNCF and Kubernetes ecosystem.