Lo Etheridge: Human-Centered Federation for Headless CMSs – Episode 165

Content Strategy Insights

Lo Etheridge The arrival of decoupled content architectures and headless CMSs creates a new set of challenges for content modelers, authors, administrators, and others who work with content systems. Lo Etheridge does developer relations for Hygraph, a headless CMS company. Dev rel folks don't typically drive organizational change and stakeholder alignment, but Lo's unique background in social work uniquely prepares them to help customers with the human side of content management. We talked about: Lo's work in senior developer relations at Hygraph, a headless-CMS company their background as a team manager in the social work field and transition into tech how creating content in siloed organizations can limit an organization's visibility of its content assets their description of the role of developer relations how their focus on people and human behavior naturally led to Lo's expansive view of a dev rel role how their work on a team supporting a large university's many WordPress websites led to Lo's approach to empowering content editors and authors the differences in content modeling practices as you move from monolithic CMSs and headless CMSs, in particular the human and organizational challenges that come with this transition how conflict-resolution practices from the social-work world can help align stakeholders in the CMS and content modeling world how conflict can be both a positive and negative dynamic and can even improve collaboration and facilitate change management the role of federation in decoupled architectures how eye-opening and humbling it is for Lo to watch someone use something that they built how decoupled architectures enable smaller, iterative changes and adjustments on the fly opportunities for bottom-up organization change that come with folks collaborating in decoupled systems Lo's encouragement for all involved in content management - developers, managers, editors, and administrators - to work together Lo's bio Lo Etheridge is a Senior Developer Relations Specialist at Hygraph. They focus on developer education around Headless CMS, JS-based frontend and API technologies as well as the dynamic cross-functional relationship between developers and content professionals. Previously, they were lead web developer/programmer analyst and developer relations specialist in private and public higher education sectors. Before transitioning into frontend engineering and digital communications, Lo was a community social worker and public health educator in the field of harm reduction. They are a huge fan of David Lynch, Wu-Tang Clan and plays the theremin! Lo is passionate about digital ethics, community building, transformative justice, collaborative learning, tinkering with the Raspberry Pi motherboard, and making experimental music. Connect with Lo online: Twitter lo dot etheridge at hygraph dot com Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/L4wSDVrkGbc Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 165. The arrival of decoupled technical architectures in general, and in particular the fast-growing adoption headless CMSs, creates a whole new batch of people-management and organizational-change issues. You don't typically look to a software developer for help in such matters, but Lo Etheridge is not your typical developer. Their background in social work and conflict resolution lets Lo bring a unique and constructive perspective to these new challenges. Interview transcript Larry: Hey everyone. Welcome to episode number 165 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really excited to welcome to the show Lo Etheridge. Lo is a lead or senior developer relations person at Hygraph, which is a content federation CMS. Welcome Lo. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you do there at Hygraph. Lo: Great. Hi Larry, thanks for having me. Like Larry said,