New year, new Opensource.com community manager

Happy New Year. Learn more about what topics we're interested in for 2022.
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Opensource.com

I am privileged to be here at Opensource.com as the new community manager. I'm looking forward to working with existing correspondents and contributors, and also bringing in new contributors and increasing the diversity of thoughts and ideas shared here on Opensource.com.

My open source journey

I moved through several lifetimes before coming into tech and all have shaped me into who I am as a contributor to open source. Here are some of the most impactful experiences of my life so far:

  • My tenure at an aircooled Volkswagen machine shop helped me understand how assumptions around gender can negatively impact the work space.
  • Raising two children who have made it to adulthood and being the youngest of many siblings helped me build my collaborative and interpersonal communication skills.
  • Working as a palliative nurse has given me a deep understanding of basic human rights and how we’re more similar than we think.

I’m also actively involved with the Drupal community. The results:

  • A top contributor to the project 3 years in a row and core mentor empowering contributors on how they can give back to the community beyond code.
  • Inclusion advocate for marginalized and excluded voices - helping lead diverse speaker workshops to empower folks to speak at conferences.
  • Accessibility advocate and a lead organizer of A11yTalks

Accessibility matters

Coming from a background in healthcare, accessibility is extremely important to me. When I first started building websites and discovered that a website could be made accessible but developers, designs, or stakeholders don't have the awareness about leaving some of their content consumers behind, I was astonished. A truly inclusive web is also an accessible web, accessibility is a building block for lowering the barriers to accessing digital assets.

I want to encourage our writers to think about some of these accessibility prompts moving into the new year:

  • How do you incorporate accessibility into your open source project?
  • How do you ensure your tools are accessible to the developers who work on your projects?
  • What did you learn about accessibility this year?
  • Do you maintain any projects that help others with their accessibility needs?
  • What are your favorite accessibility build tools?

Popular writing topics for 2022

Our readers continue to be interested in your open source stories. Think about how you got started with open source software, what your favorite Linux commands are, or what you’re trying to automate. Some of our most popular topics for 2022 include:

Along with all of those rad ideas, I’d love to also broaden the scope of topics to include:

  • CMS comparisons
  • Package management. How are you managing your packages and dependencies? Are you using Violinist?  Or straight-up Composer?
  • Documentation
  • What motivates you to write?
  • What do you love the most about open source?
  • How are your projects lowering the barrier to entering tech?
  • There's always room to hear about your favorite open source project!

End-of-year 2021 stats

2021 was a year for growth and change in many ways. Here are our year-end stats at a glance:

  • 1.5 million monthly readers
  • More than 700 articles published
  • 85 new authors
  • 20 correspondents

Growing open source

Opensource.com exists to promote open source projects, empower open source users, and share the Open Source Way in both life and code. I'm excited at the prospect of expanding the boundaries even further. Whether you're a longtime reader, a sometimes-contributor, or a regular author, feel free to get in touch and share how open source has affected you — and how you've affected open source. After all, sharing is what being open is all about.

Writing resources

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How to write about open source

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AmyJune is an experienced community manager, mentor, public speaker, and inclusion advocate. While her roots are in Drupal, she also contributes regularly to the Linux and Accessibility communities.

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