Charlie Robbins is a CEO. Which means, by his own definition, he’s a boss.

But more importantly, he’s a leader. He leads his company, Nodejitsu, and is a leader in the open source community  around the programming language Node.js.

One of the things that struck me as I watched Charlie’s talk about Open Source is that it was all about leadership – specifically, community leadership – and had almost nothing to do with Open Source.

Here are my notes from watching Charlie’s talk:

• Being a “boss” (a.k.a. leader) means you have to deal with feelings, emotions, politics
• People have dreams and aspirations – ignoring them makes people feel unappreciated
• People make the most important choices in their life outside of their “work”
• When people don’t communicate, things break down. But people have a lot of problems communicating among themselves. Effective leadership helps soothe that pain.
• Ask one question: “What do you need to be successful?”
• Communication isn’t a tree, it’s a “graph” (a.k.a. a network)
• How do you push decisions to the “edges” of the graph?
• Make it possible for anybody to be a leader  – this requires shared responsibility and participation
• “People have problems. You don’t need to solve all of them.”
• Repeated “policing” is a sign that you’ve done something wrong in creating the community as system
• Create a confederation of “rules” that people can operate within
• You need to figure out what people are thinking, sometimes without being able to ask directly
• Be prepared to teach
• Foster communication around what you are doing, and why you are doing it.
• Strength of mind and character will help you through the mistakes
• “The ability to let things which do not matter truly slide” – Tyler Duren
• “When you do things right, people won’t be sure that you’ve done anything at all” – God to Bender in Futurama