Healthy Minds in a Healthy Community




Open source communities attract and boast passionate, idealistic people, and many of us invest copious amounts of time and effort to contribute to our projects and support our communities. This underlying emotional attachment can make us more vulnerable to elevated stress, burnout and conflicts. And then there are those of us who also manage mental illness.

More often than not, we suffer these struggles in silence, feeling (and fearing) that we’re alone in our trouble. Here, our communities can make a huge difference, by building a positive and safe environment where we can blossom and support ourselves and our peers, and feel included.

This talk will take a look at open-source communities through the eyes of various mental well-being issues and struggles, show various things that some communities already do. With this, we hope to support and inspire more communities to help foster healthy minds in a healthy environment.

Speaker

sasha-romijn

Sasha Romijn

 
Sasha is the co-founder and CTO of a small Python/Django development company in Amsterdam. She is deeply involved in the community around Django, a popular Python web framework, chair of the Dutch ...