Thank you for reading this, I appreciate your attention and will only take a few minutes of it. In short, issues in my personal life are making it hard for me to pay attention to the Open Source Way project in the ways it needs, such as creating a community governance, shepherding the guidebook’s 2.1 release, and doing more publicity as a community. Now is a time when we really need your help, both to shape and to motivate the project. Will you add your voice to this email-forum thread?
Read on for more of the background, if you wish.
Since the Open Source Way 2.0 guidebook was released in Dec 2020 and announced in April 2021, my actions for the Open Source Way project have been based on our own suggested practices: I went looking for users.
While I was giving talks (at Upstream 2021, at DevConf US 2021, at Open Source Summit Seattle 2021) and attending events where I talked with a LOT of people (KubeCon NA 2021 and All Things Open 2021) , several of you have been writing chapters and thinking of printed versions for a 2.1 release. In fact, a few people I met at conferences in the Autumn of 2021 were interested in writing content for the 2.1 release.
There was a clear rise in interest, and it became common to meet people who were familiar with the guidebook, had read it, or even distributed it to other people. And even as I was turning my attention toward a fascinating new project, I was hopeful about keeping the slower velocity toward the 2.1 release.
But while all of this was happening, issues with and illnesses of people in my personal life were brewing and stewing. Some of these I’ve been open about, such as the passing of my Father in Dec 2021 after 18 months of lung cancer treatment made ultimately unsuccessful by the effects of COVID-19 on the medical system and his inability to get timely and safe treatments. Other issues long predate the 2020s, with some elements coming out in my Twitter feed of #DharmaBuddies meditations, but ultimately some of the issues with the biggest impacts on me are still an ongoing story and not ready to be told.
I’m also coming up on my first year of working with medication to treat ADD and cPTSD. One of the things it does is give me the capacity to take care of myself, especially when it’s hardest to do so. I’ve found that I do best on days when I can follow a routine that includes two to three hours of specific elements at the very start of my day, including yoga, meditation, and exercise in an unhurried way. That gives me the best daily chance for “being able to”—meaning without those daily elements, I am more disabled and more likely to fall into unhealthy patterns.
So in all that, a main reason I’ve been so absent this year is I’m actually taking care of myself. And I’ve tried to keep some key people appraised about what is happening with me. Which now includes all of you, my community of open source practitioners who care. I have had so much support these last few years, there are people there for me wherever I turn. And I’ve been able to be there for other people in more and more meaningful ways. I so appreciative all of you, thank you.
If you’ve made it this far, I will invite you once more to bring your voice and participation to this thread. Regardless, I look forward to seeing each of you and hopefully working together again in the future.