Looking Back; Looking Forward

by Bridget Kromhout, Yvo van Doorn, Matt Stratton - 01 November, 2020

In January 2015, Bridget Kromhout stepped up as the leader of the devopsdays core team, invited by founder Patrick Debois to replace him after he led devopsdays from 2009-2014. Bridget had organized devopsdays Minneapolis in July 2014, and was now ready to help streamline and improve processes to help other cities get started.

Over the next five years, Bridget scaled the organizing team up, adding core team members who could onboard and mentor new city teams, and seeking out core team members from communities and regions not previously represented. She added organizer chat tooling, creating connections among a community of organizers that enhanced the existing connections between the core team and each local city team. She introduced structure to allow core organizers to participate as active, advisory, or emeritus. She worked with Matt Stratton to re-implement the website and add new tooling which made easier for many people to update the site. And she wrote, edited, and expanded guidelines for cities running their first devopsdays event. Clear documentation helps open source projects grow, and this community effort is no different, doubling the number of cities year over year.

With the global pandemic, the conference landscape has shifted with a new focus on online events. This is a great time for new vision and leadership, so Bridget is moving to an advisory role, and the organization is evolving once again. Devopsdays will now have two co-chairs, with the initial co-chairs being core organizers Yvo van Doorn and Matt Stratton, both longtime members of the devopsdays community. Yvo and Matt commence their co-chair terms on 1 November 2020, and they are creating new processes for the ongoing sustainability of the devopsdays organization.

Devopsdays is a globally-distributed system co-created by the local communities of practice in every area. While our events may look different in response to circumstances, our communities remain closely-connected and cooperative. Let’s work together with our incoming leadership to make everyone’s experience better!