I was recently interviewed by Jennifer Cloer from Story Changes Culture for a newsletter article about my work with the R Consortium and as founder of Random Acts of Tourism.
The piece is called “The Ones Who Build the Stage,” and it frames my career and approach to content and event management perfectly. It also gave me a chance to name something that often sits underneath the work: the strategy, structure, and care required to make ideas visible and meaningful to the right audience.
So much of my career has been spent behind the scenes: shaping messages, building programs, producing events, developing content strategies, and creating platforms where other people can shine. That work is often invisible by design. When it is done well, the focus stays on the speaker, the community, the organization, or the story being told.
But that stage is not going to build itself.
Someone has to understand the audience. Someone needs to shape the narrative. Someone must think about how a website, a newsletter, a conference session, a social post, a panel discussion, and a hallway conversation all connect. Someone has to design the experience so that attention turns into understanding, and understanding turns into action.
That is the throughline of my work.
Creating Value with Words
One idea I shared in the interview is something I believe deeply:
Content is currency.
Content earns attention. It builds trust. It gives people a reason to care, return, participate, and invest.
That is true whether you are building a brand, growing a community, supporting an open-source ecosystem, or producing an event. Good content is not filler. It is the connective tissue between people, ideas, and action.
In my role as executive director of the R Consortium, I see this a lot. Much of my work is building the platform for stories that different audiences can understand and act on. Contributors need to see that their work is valued. Members need to understand how their investment supports the ecosystem. Industry partners need to see why participation matters. The R community needs to know where opportunities exist to contribute, learn, and connect.
The R Consortium supports the global R community through technical collaboration, community programs, industry engagement, grants, working groups, and events. But support is not only financial or operational. It is also narrative.
We help people understand why the work matters.
- Why does open-source need sustained investment?
- Why do technical communities need infrastructure?
- Why do user groups, maintainers, contributors, and industry advocates deserve visibility?
- Why should companies participate in the open-source ecosystems they rely on?
One of the stories I am most interested in telling now is the story of the people behind institutional participation. Organizations do not join communities, sponsor projects, or support open source in the abstract. People make those decisions. People advocate internally. People build the case. People take the risk of saying, “This matters, and we should be part of it.”
Events are Curated Currency
Content strategy becomes most visible when it moves into a live environment.
My work in event management has taught me that once someone gives you their time, especially in person, you have a responsibility to use it well.
Events are not just agendas, rooms, stages, signs, speakers, catering, and logistics. They are a live framework for content to deliver value to your audience.
Every session, transition, visual cue, hallway interaction, and follow-up message either builds momentum or loses it. The job is to create the perfect conditions for people to engage.
That means understanding what the audience needs before they know how to ask for it. It means connecting programming to purpose. It means building experiences that make people feel that showing up is worth it.
A strong event does not begin when the doors open. It starts with the story you tell before anyone arrives. It continues on the keynote stage and in the session rooms. It extends through post-event content, community conversations, newsletters, videos, social media, and the next invitation to participate. The event is not the goal. It is part of a larger ecosystem where audiences trade their money and attention for valuable information and meaningful engagement.
Why This Matters to Random Acts of Tourism
Random Acts of Tourism has always been about curiosity, connection, and the stories that emerge when people and places are seen with fresh eyes.
That same mindset shapes how I approach content and events. Whether the setting is a technical conference, a community program, a corporate event, or a destination story, the goal is the same: understand what people came for, give them something worth paying attention to, and create moments they will carry forward.
Whether I am helping shape a conference, build a content strategy, or tell the story of a technical ecosystem, the work is grounded in the same belief:
People engage when they receive value for their time and money. That value is not created by accident; nor is it created in a vacuum. We need people to design the experience, write the story, produce the moments, maintain the exchange, build the stage, cue the lights, and deliver the show.
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