Thank you for coming.

So, some of you may already know me, some may not.

So I'm going to give a brief introduction to explain the origins of this talk.

I worked as a software developer for many years and was active in the Perl community,

but I'm talking about 20 years ago.

Since then I moved into academia and I just finished my dissertation on managing episodic

contributors to free Libra and open source software projects.

And what I want to present here is the third paper that came from my dissertation.

And this is not specifically about the Perl community.

It is about a number of different communities trying to find the general practices that

are being used for managing episodic, by which I mean infrequent or occasional contributors.

But there were some members of the Perl community that participated in this research.

So when I first started to prepare this talk, I was hoping that I would actually be able

to go through the research.

However, I'm afraid I'm going to have to give you a bit of an overview because I realize

there's just too much to fit into this talk.

So in a way this is a pitch for you to read the paper, but I'm also happy to talk about

it is just that there are a lot of practices that I cannot possibly go through in 20 minutes.

So what is the source for what I'm presenting?

Well, this was a Delphi study, which is a multi-round study where you pose a question

to some people, you get their responses, you collate the responses from the group and send

them back to all members of the group, and then get them to add on anything that may

have been sparked by seeing other people's responses.

And you repeat this for three rounds normally.

So this study involved 24 community managers representing 22 different communities, and

the people were responsible for all different kinds of roles in the communities.

So they were all community managers, but some were working predominantly with code, some

were working, say, on event organization, and the people represented in total 23 different

countries.

So in the first round, I asked people to explain the problems that they had related to episodic

volunteering.

In the second round, I asked them to rank those problems as well as indicate which ones

were present in their community.

And then I also asked, well, what would you do to address these problems?

And then in the third round, I asked them of the solutions that have been provided,

which ones have you yourself used, and is there any information about these solutions

that you would like to add?

So the solutions took the form of patterns, and so there was the opportunity to give extra

information about the context or about some limitations or about some other related practices.

And I also asked people to say how they would link these practices together in order to

achieve some results.

So I'm going to give you a brief summary of some of the results.

I obviously can't go into it in detail because there were in total 65 different practices

and 16 different problems that were identified in this study.

So as I mentioned, there were 16 different problems, and they broadly fell into these

four categories.

So knowledge exchange involved any problems of either the episodic contributor or the

community manager having insufficient information about the other.

The next was the suitability of episodic contributors for the work, and this was concerns

about whether or not people could actually meaningfully contribute work episodically