Google Summer of Code has wrapped up, and while I plan to write about my experience, and the awesome work of the WordPress participants, the greatest part of it for me was experiencing a little bit of what Leslie does.

Leslie’s title is “Program Manager – Open Source” for Google. Leslie is the first contact for all the people participating in Google Summer of Code, and I mean all 2500 of us. All of us with our diverse backgrounds, experiences and expectations. She answers all of our questions fairly and thoroughly, and ensures that items get done and the students get paid.

There is no way I can explain how involved a job that is, or how wonderfully she does it, but I’m sure everyone that participated in GSoC shares my admiration.

“Tasks” that she achieves include: “building communities, creating space for creativity and connection to manifest, [and] taking care of mundane and arcane details so that others can focus on executing to a grander vision”.

She really does! She makes it sound easy and look easy, but it isn’t. This is the heart of any successful enterprise, and the inability to be successful at these is the disease that kills many of them. She writes it beautifully:

I find myself spending time with individuals from many open source projects with wildly divergent aims and methodologies, but without exception the healthiest ones are those who place a high value on contribution of any kind, not just in the creation of code. Among these folks, I find my efforts are accorded the highest of respect and I am treated as an equal, if not as a goddess, for the simple things I do each day: bringing people together, providing structure and organization, understanding pragmatic but often overlooked details, communicating effectively with people from diverse backgrounds and helping them to work most effectively with one another. Some may call that mothering. I’d call it social engineering.

With WordPress, Flock, IBM, and every software development company or community that I’ve participated in, a significant number of the members seem to only understand the value of the code created. The irony is that amazing code alone has never sold a product or influenced society.

Leslie has the skill, energy and patience to herd the geeks to make the products more than the code.

Why does she do it? The same question that I ask myself regularly, and her answer is generally the same as mine, “an effort to be the change I wish to see in the world”.

I asked her if you could elaborate on this a little for me, she replied:

I do this job for love. For the love of getting things done, for the love of helping others, and the love of helping others create things that will be of widest benefit and greatest use. I do it because I constantly see that the people in the open source community that I interact with are working towards higher goals, be it serving of personal creativity through scratching one’s own itch or creating useful tools that others can enjoy freely. I do it because it’s the right thing to do.

She definitely should be proud to be known as “Google’s geek herder”. Thank you Leslie for inspiring me!

PS. Be sure to read the rest of her excellent essay (one more link to it) and the others in the O’Reilly’s Women in Technology series.