J.K. Rowling has an ability to see a story and bring it to life through powerful methods of storytelling. But what you might not have guessed is that open source and J,K. Rowling both have something in common. The importance of storytelling in open source projects and communities is as important as some of Rowling's famous characters in Harry Potter. Finding ways to derive the story of a project community from lines of code, commit messages, and IRC conversations is a challenging but worthwhile task.

In this session, speaker Justin W. Flory introduces the role of storytelling in open source projects and how to best uncover that narrative. There are a variety of tools available to project communities to help them extract data to perform an analysis and mix of methods you can use regardless of what data you have available. Justin pulls from his experience as one of the founding members of the Fedora Community Operations team, working with team members with backgrounds in writing and data analysis, and the editor-in-chief of the Fedora Magazine.

By the end of the session, audience members will understand the role of crafting the story of their open source project and how it motivates the community, what methods are available for writing this story, and what the outcome of focusing on storytelling results in.