Community Relations

Jonni Bidwell meets Kara Sowles, Puppet Labs’ Community Manager, to learn about the perils of organising tech events.

- Jonni Bidwell

Kara Sowles is Puppet Labs’ Community Manager, who by lucky coincidence happens to also enjoy making stop-motion movies using actual puppets. We met her at OSCON 2015 to talk about planning tech events, cultural differences, hungry sysadmins and the special importance of community in the tech sector.

Linux Format: Puppet Labs is famed for all kinds of complicated provisioning and cloud conjuring tools, but there’s a lot more to the organisation than making and maintaining software. Tell us about what you do there.

Kara Sowles: I’m Community Manager, which means I help build and support programmes that support the community that we have. And when I say community I mean the whole thing – enterprise users, the thousands of open source users, contributors, people at the company... it’s a really broad definition. In our Community department we work on a lot of different programmes. For example I built a user group programme which we’ve grown from around five user groups to around 50 or 60 right now. These user groups are run by community members and users, but we help support them with resources. We also plan events for contributors and stuff like that as well as travelling and helping to run one-day Puppet Camp events that we do. I also do content selection for those I help a little bit with our main conference. And then I think one of the most important aspects of Community Manager is also working with other teams in the company so that they can better understand the community and they can then tailor their work to be more valuable to that community.

LXF: So we’re at OSCON, which is quite an amazing tech event. A huge amount of work has gone on to get this set up and a huge amount of work is still going on behind the scenes. What’s your take on this event?