I found an interesting list of possible Head of Community interview questions:
My answers:
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What community are you a part of today as a member?—Church choir. I sang in choir as a boy and teenager. Then I spent a huge portion of my life not being a part of choir. (I do sing the parts in hymns as a congregant if I know the parts or if there’s a hymnal. I do pretty well sight reading.) About 15 years ago I joined the church choir again when my Bible study group broke up. Choir became a central part of my life through many tough years. Unfortunately our church canceled the choir program last year. After about 6 months I realized I couldn’t not have a choir anymore, so we changed churches. I’ve never been a leader; just a tenor.[1]
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What’s still running that you built and no longer touch?— Biblical Hermeneutics Stack Exchange started my career in community management. I was a beta member of Stack Overflow and stopped using the site a few years later. Then I came back to the network because I had some gardening questions I wanted answered. And then I discovered a site built for the sort of Bible study I enjoy.[2] After getting the site up and running, I joined the company, which meant I didn’t have the time to dedicate to this one small site among the many I had responsibility for. It still gets about 2 and a half questions a day, for which I’m extremely proud despite having no involvement with the site in many years.
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Tell me about a time you made someone you felt zero connection with feel like they belonged.—In a literal sense, this never happens. We all have a connection whether we want to or not. But taking the spirit of the question, I’ll mention an example from the Bible study site. I take a scientific approach to Bible study[3] and it fit well with the community we’d built.
One of our early active contributors used an ancient method of hermeneutics that, well, required a mystical connection to the text. It worked by finding hidden symbolism and special knowledge from outside of the text. I didn’t care for his answers. But I also believed his voice should be heard. Since I wasn’t the only one annoyed, I had defend this user’s answering style in the broader community. It meant going back to a higher purpose (gathering answers to questions about the Bible) and putting aside my personal preferences. I also had to talk with him in chat to help him adjust his answering style to be less abrasive to people who didn’t agree with him.
Unfortunately he didn’t stick around after a few years. I’m grateful for his answers, but he never became a part of the group. Maybe this isn’t an ideal example, afterall. But sometimes you can’t force people to feel a sense of belonging.
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What do you notice about your community that the average person overlooks?—I give a State of the OpenSSL Community presentation twice a year. One thing that struck me last time was that a huge number of people use an outdated version of our software. It’s strange to people who are most active in the community because many of the most exciting new features, such as post-quantum cryptography, only come in more recent versions. New and exciting is fun to talk about, but the group of people who rely on our software just want tried and true.
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What do you wish more people noticed about you?—Good question! There’s a concept in hacker culture of the Bozo bit. Why it’s called that would require going deep into how computers work. But the essence of the idea is when you realize someone is a Bozo, AKA a clown, you can safely ignore them. It’s not something you want to do to a teammate, but it’s kinda necessary to function on a larger social group, such as the internet. I suspect a lot of people who know me believe I never flip the Bozo bit on internet idiots.
It’s true I take a lot longer to ignore people who don’t seem to get along with others (see the previous answer), but that’s because I prefer to test the theory that someone is a Bozo rather than trust my own judgment about others (which is often poor). What I’ve found is that when you treat a people with honesty, firmness, and grace, they respond according to their nature. Bozos act like Bozos. Trust the process!
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Sell me on the last thing you couldn’t stop telling people about.—The last thing was a board game my employer is publishing: Post-Quantum Trails. I love that we are doing it and the game is very well done.
That said, I always love to plug Structured Procrastination when people give me half a chance. It’s especially useful to mention in the context of me practicing it. You see, there are a bunch of things that need to be done and I should be working on them. Instead I’m writing answers to interview questions when I have no intention of changing jobs.[4] I think may people believe that the argument John Perry makes is a joke, but I have found it quite useful in my life.
My explanation of the concept is that we can’t by shear effort of will become non-procrastinators. But we can, via careful self-deception, flip procrastination (judo-like) into a virtue. By pretending that tasks (which actually can be delayed) must be done by such and such a time, it will mean our instinct to procrastinate will motivate us to do (seemingly) less pressing tasks that we might otherwise avoid doing. To people who don’t have the personality structured procrastination describes, this seems unworkable. But for me (and others like me) it really is the key to productivity.
Actually a bass for most of my time in choir, but my choir director convinced me to switch a few years ago. I suspect I’m really a baritone, but most choirs don’t have that part. ↩︎
Yes this is a thing. And yes, I’m a Christian who believes the Bible is an authoritative source for understanding the world. I’m not as conflicted as you might imagine. ↩︎
Note to co-workers: I am getting to the things I’ve promised to do. This is all part of the process! ↩︎