Laurel Ruma

Laurel Ruma is a Strategic Content Director at O'Reilly Media. She's had many roles at O'Reilly, including Director of Talent and Acquisitions, Gov 2.0 Evangelist, editor, and chair for a number of conferences, such as Cultivate, Gov 2.0 Expo, Where 2.0, and OSCON Java. She is the co-editor of Open Government, O'Reilly Media, 2010.

Lead with merit and be rewarded with success

Michael Lopp on the concept of merit badges for leaders.

Girl Scout Sash with Badges," by Steve Snodgrass on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license

Attend Cultivate, September 28 to 29 in New York, NY. Cultivate is our conference looking at the challenges facing modern management and aiming to train a new generation of business leaders who understand the relationship between corporate culture and corporate prosperity.

At our Cultivate conference in July, Michael Lopp had a fantastic session on “Leadership: By the Numbers,” which was a bit like leadership fundamentals that you may have forgotten or never knew. However, he also had a few slides in his presentation that were meant to be a brief tangent from his primary talk, but they grabbed my attention immediately. Lopp always has fantastic stories and pearls of wisdom from the hard-won experiences in his career like “Busy is a bug, not a feature.” But before he launched into his “Vegetable Talk” on how being a good manager is really basic—like vegetables—he explored the idea of having merit badges for leaders. Read more…

We’re releasing the files for O’Reilly’s Open Government book

A #PDFtribute to Aaron Swartz.

I’ve read many eloquent eulogies from people who knew Aaron Swartz better than I did, but he was also a Foo and contributor to Open Government. So, we’re doing our part at O’Reilly Media to honor Aaron by posting the Open Government book files for free for anyone to download, read and share.

The files are posted on the O’Reilly Media GitHub account as PDF, Mobi, and EPUB files for now. There is a movement on the Internet (#PDFtribute) to memorialize Aaron by posting research and other material for the world to access, and we’re glad to be able to do this.

You can find the book here: github.com/oreillymedia/open_government

Daniel Lathrop, my co-editor on Open Government, says “I think this is an important way to remember Aaron and everything he has done for the world.” We at O’Reilly echo Daniel’s sentiment.