Blog Entry

Photograph by Sebastian Bergmann.

This week’s Barnstar is Leslie Hawthorn, geek herder extraordinaire and manager of Google’s Summer of Code program, which pays college students stipends to work on open source projects. Unless you’re a core contributor to an active open source software project, you may not have heard of Leslie, but if you search the Internet, you will find endless praise for her. My friend, Lloyd Budd, chief bug finder of WordPress and a barnstar in his own right, wrote a wonderful tribute to Leslie a few years ago.

I wrote my own tribute to Leslie after Google first sponsored an event I co-organized, the FLOSS Usability Sprints, which brought together developers, usability practitioners, and users to improve the usability of open source projects. Leslie is a great community-builder, in part because of her incredible warmth and in part because she simply does her job and does it well.

Leslie understands community, and she brings an even greater depth of understanding to open source communities — lessons we can draw from how they work, such as the importance of mentorship, and how the impact of these lessons can go well beyond the field of computer science.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 59:35 — 54.6MB)

Categories: Barnstars