Categories: sumana | Management and Leadership
# 09 Nov 2012, 08:36AM: Mission:
I decided to transcribe the speech in which newly reelected US President Barack Obama thanks his campaign staff and reflects on his own experience as a community organizer. I hope this helps nonnative English speakers and the Deaf. (.srt file available for download even! I'm not sure how to tell YouTube to use this instead of its superlatively awful automatic captions.) But I really just wanted to get his words right so I could talk about them.
In June 2008, the new Democratic Presidential candidate, Barack Obama, gave a speech to his campaign staff that Leonard and I watched. I was a project manager at a webdev shop, thinking about what "politics" means and admiring Obama's campaign for its "transparency, trust, boldness, and long-term investment and empowerment of non-bosses". I thought about Obama's viral leadership model: he doesn't just want to be that kind of leader, he wants to make you that kind of leader. And I loved the audacity of only doing effective things.
Four years and change later, I've become more and more like his audience, and like him. I became a community organizer, albeit in open source rather than electoral politics. I work to train contributors to mentor each other and to run events. I argue that we shouldn't do ineffective things, even if they're tradition. And in his 2008 speech, when he says:
Now everybody is counting on you, not just me. I know that's a heavy weight. But also what a magnificent position to find yourself in, where the whole country is counting on you to change it, for the better. Those moments don't come around very often....
he might as well be talking to me, about the stress and the opportunity of working for Wikimedia.
"And the work that I did in those communities changed me much more than I changed the communities," Obama says. That is the virtue of doing this work not in pairs, as missionaries do, but alone, as Genly Ai does in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness:
Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual; it is personal, it is both more and less than political. Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou.
I also loved his explanation, "And it taught me something about how I handled disappointment, and what it meant to work hard on a common endeavor. And I grew up. I became a man during that process." What a tremendously hopeful conception of masculinity and adulthood, to be say that "I became a man" by growing a disciplined empathy.
And here my thoughts go in too many directions to capture: how contributors get ignored if we aren't The Right Sort, and how we fight back (and David Brooks, surprisingly, captures a useful nuance); you can no longer diss women and get away scot-free in national US politics; maturity, sustainability, and self-soothing; "I am here because of Ashley."
But back to the thank-you speech: let me excerpt the most moving part.
You know, I try to picture myself when I was your age. And I first moved to Chicago at the age of 25, and I had this vague inkling
about making a difference. I didn't really know how to do it. I didn't have a structure. And there wasn't a presidential campaign at the time that I could attach myself to. Well, Reagan had just been reelected.
[laughter]
And was incredibly popular. And so I, I came to Chicago knowing that somehow, I wanted to make sure that my life attached itself to helping kids get a great education, or helping people living in, in poverty to get decent jobs and be able to work and have dignity. To make sure that people didn't have to go to the emergency room to get healthcare. And, you know, I ended up being a community organizer out in the South Side of Chicago with some, a group of churches who were willing to hire me. And I didn't know at all what I was doing....
And so when I come here and I look at all of you, what comes to mind is: it's not that you guys actually remind me of myself. It's the fact that you are so much better than I was.
[scattered laughter]
In so many ways! You're, you're smarter and you're better organized. And, you, uh, you're more effective. And so I'm absolutely confident that all of you are gonna do just amazing things in your lives. And you'll be what Bobby Kennedy called the ripples of hope that come out when you throw a stone in a lake. That's gonna be you!
You know, I'm just looking around the room and I'm thinking: wherever you guys end up ... you're just gonna do great things!
And, and that's why even before last night's results, I felt that the work that I had done, um, in running for office, had come full circle.
[Obama's voice chokes with emotion]
Because what you guys have done means that the work that I'm doing is important. And I'm really proud of that. I'm really proud of all of you.
[Obama tears up]
For the first time, I saw famously cool, self-controlled Barack Obama tear up. This is what gets at him, in his bones: empowerment.
I should check in again in another four years, and ask how I'm measuring up.
# 19 Jun 2012, 06:17AM: Conference Seasoning:
You know you're traveling too much when you completely stop updating the "where I'm going to be" feeds (example).
Regardless: I'll be in San Francisco starting late today, and then in Portland on Monday the 25th, the day before I give the opening keynote address at Open Source Bridge. My tentative title: "Be Bold."
Wikimedians are giving several other talks during the conference:
The Wikimedia Foundation is also sponsoring the Friday unconference day, and will host a hacking table that day as well as (I hope) the Tuesday "Hacker Lounge Project/Community Night."
Then, I'll be in Washington, DC, July 10th-15th for Wikimania, especially the pre-conference Hackathon. I'm happy to announce that WMF is partnering with OpenHatch to make the pre-Wikimania hackathon even more useful. OpenHatch is planning and running the novice-focused half of the event, with trainings and projects to help people learn how to hack Wikimedia technology.
I'm leading at least two talks at Wikimania:
I say "at least two" because who knows whether folks will rope me into moderating a panel, or doing some stand-up comedy.
# (1) 19 Jun 2012, 05:54AM: Challenge:
Wikimedia Foundation is hiring a leader for volunteer software testing. I have ideas on what this person should do and how to do it* -- indeed, this position reports to me -- but more than that, I have ideas about what kind of person I need to find.
I need someone who has skills in open source contribution, who gets the wiki and open source way. Even if the person lives in San Francisco -- which they don't have to -- they have to collaborate well remotely, with volunteers and other colleagues. And I seek someone who has the focus and analytical skill one needs to test software, and the hospitable and generous temperament one needs to encourage and teach newbies.
I've been bookmarking lists of suggestions for ways to test, like You Are Not Done Yet and Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names and its sequel on time. We've already started running online events for new testers. If talking like this is scratching an itch for you, even if you've never had a job title as a software tester, please apply. At least we'll have an interesting conversation.
* Had I worlds enough and time, I would start a retraining school that turned underpaid copyeditors into versatile and sought-after software testers. Proofreaders can already follow instructions and communicate effectively and deploy critical thinking skills while nitpicking, so they just need some guidance in learning some domain knowledge. (One of the great benefits of the modern technology industry is that it provides productive and lucrative channels for pedantry.) I do not have the time to do this for profit, but perhaps my Engineering Community Team can use this kind of arbitrage to recruit and train volunteers, give them some skills to put on their résumés, and get some more quality assurance.
# (5) 23 May 2012, 11:45PM: A Local Maximum:
By the way, I got promoted. It's quite an honor.
Wikimedia Foundation's new Engineering Community Team, which I lead, is a renaming of the TL;DR group. We've written a draft summary of our goals for July 2012-June 2013. There's so much to be done! (Of course, we're hiring.)
In open source, we share our vulnerabilities and our milestones, so of course my boss announced my promotion to a public mailing list. I was surprised and delighted when colleagues and contributors in my community responded to that announcement with congratulations, privately and publicly. It is as though they believe I am doing a good job! Take that, impostor syndrome.
I'm thinking about the thirty years of influences that got me here. As a teen, I volunteered for the Peace and Justice Network of San Joaquin County, and met my mentor John Morearty, whom I saw this past weekend. Before I knew Sam Hatch, and before I knew Seth Schoen, even, I knew John, a teacher who took his values seriously and was always ready to teach. He led volunteer communities that aimed for inclusiveness and viral change. He modeled grit, open-mindedness, and compassion, and I saw in his example that another world was possible, another mode of being. He wrote a fascinating memoir that you should check out, if you like twisty life stories.
John had twin sons, Mike and Brian. I got to meet Mike on Sunday. On Monday he got write access to Wikimedia Labs, Git, and Gerrit. I find this confluence pleasant yet dizzying, like the bushels of jasmine in John's garden. There's so much to be done, and the abundance of my world may yet provide. As John reminded me this weekend, we cannot build the new systems we need; we must cultivate them.
# 26 Mar 2012, 05:53PM: Announcements and Reading:
I'll be keynoting the Open Source Bridge conference this year (late June, Portland, Oregon, USA). It's an honor to be asked to give a keynote address to this exciting and inspiring conference.
"<body> <img> -- the anxiety of learning and how I am beating it" is my newest post at Geek Feminism.
Enjoyed in the last several weeks: Naomi Kritzer's "Scrap Dragon," a short story in the January/February issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. "Recognizing Gabe: un cuento de hadas," a short story in Strange Horizons by Alberto Yáñez. "Things Greater than Love" by Kate Bachus, another story in Strange Horizons. Past Lies, a graphic novel by Christina Weir, Christopher Mitten, and Nunzio DeFilippis.
# (1) 10 Jul 2011, 01:22AM: "Learn Tech Management" Essay/Notes:
Final notes, including an audio recording and an edited & annotated transcript, for my standing-room-only talk "Learn Tech Management in 45 Minutes" from this year's Open Source Bridge.
And I wanna also tell you that I am gonna talk a little bit about kind of managing up and managing down, but really more of what I'm talking about is managing up, because I think a lot of us have had at least some experience of managing other people and helping them understand what to do, but managing up is where it gets all mysterious, and people wear suits, and they talk about terms we don't understand.
And I think of this as kind of harm reduction. This talk that I'm giving right now. It's a little bit of the gentle art of self defense. Because, you know, you might be an engineer who has to deal with management and fight for your project, or you might want to take leadership of your open source project, and you might want to write proposals for what people should do or why they should give you a grant. Or you might accidentally turn into a manager at your firm. It might be foisted upon you.
And so I hope that some of the stuff in this talk will take you from, like, 0th percentile up somewhere else, and give you a bunch of keywords that you can look up on Wikipedia, the world's free, open source encyclopedia.
Subheaders include "Why do projects fail?", "Evil list", "Suit-friendly presentations", "Lenses", and "Q&A about measuring intangibles".
Much thanks to Christie Koehler for getting me that audio, and to Mirabai Knight of StenoKnight CART Services for transcribing my talk. Thanks to Reid Beels for the CC BY-NC-SA photo.
# (2) 29 Jun 2011, 07:01PM: Open Source Bridge 2011:
I had a wonderful time at this year's Open Source Bridge conference. Last year at OSBridge, I presented "The Second Step: HOWTO encourage open source work at for-profits" and had a great time. So this year I spoke on technology management, with the fairly ambitious title "Learn Tech Management in 45 Minutes". Addie Beseda reported such a high turnout that people were standing in the hall outside the door listening to the talk, which blows my mind. Audio and polished notes coming soon; slides & nearly complete notes available now.
Because we released MediaWiki 1.17.0 (after 11 months of development and review!) while I was in Portland, I also led an unconference session on "What's new in MediaWiki 1.17 and How You Can Help". People volunteered to help us with PostgreSQL support, testing, design ideas, bug triage, the parser, and more. And I got to talk about the new release with Ward Cunningham, who invented the wiki. That has got to be a Sumana career highlight.
I also performed some geeky stand-up comedy, and people liked that. So that's nice.
Sessions I attended:
-
DNSSEC @ Mozilla -- way over my head, which is fine.
- A Dozen Databases in 45 Minutes -- I found this very useful in helping me understand, among other things, why one would privilege availability over consistency. Thanks to speaker Eric Redmond for some memorable metaphors.
- Drupal Distributions, an Open Source Product Model made me think about the danger of fragmenting sub-communities within a larger FLOSS community.
- The open source communities panel -- I did not pay enough attention to this, as I was finishing up work on my talk. I do remember some people disagreeing about qualitative versus quantitative release management decisions and about how to recruit and mentor new participants; sadly I don't have any useful recollections.
Selena Deckelmann led "How to Ask for Money", which I think many people will find useful. Some of their lessons: "Find a fundraising mentor," "Hire a graphic designer", "Your network is bigger than you think," "Ask again anyway," and "Do what you say you'll do. And if you don't, communicate why - now."
- Dawn Foster's fantastic "Online Community Metrics: Tips and Techniques for Measuring Participation" was -- to all the community managers in the room -- worth the price of admission on its own. Hit the slides (per her blog post) for great pointers to MeeGo's statistics, MLStats for mailing list analysis, irssistats for IRC analysis, and more. And I have some additional notes at the talk's OSB wiki page.
- The Birds of a Feather session for Google Summer of Code proved educational; students, alumni, mentors, projects' administrators, and Google's GSoC administrators discussed challenges and opportunities. I learned that GSoC organizational administrators can email Carol Smith at Google to request possible travel stipends for their GSoC students to attend conferences, and possibly to look at previous mentors' evaluations to decide whether to keep them another year. Also, FLOSS projects report great success with the tactic of requiring applicants to do small tasks to prove they're serious and to set up those students to succeed, and mentors and org admins did not seem to think that this would unfairly weight admissions towards students who were already going to go into open source anyway.
"Snooze, the Totally RESTful Language": hilarious, because Markus Roberts led it. My dents from the session:
- # In Markus Roberts's #osb11 talk "Snooze, the Totally RESTful Language". Leonard, you never told me REST was a meaningless acronym. BETRAYAL
- # Demo fail. "Anyone here have a laptop?" "What, you want me to go to localhost *for* you?" #osb11
- # "I think there's a market for this, especially if we convince people that there is one." ... "Are you incepting?" #osb11
- # Markus is now just riffing on soaking up consumer surplus, Bitcoin, NoSQL, pig Latin, & the joy of boundaries. #osb11
- Elizabeth Naramore spoke on technical debt (slides). One item that really struck me is her experience that sometimes chipping away at little tech debts won't get you the momentum & buy-in you need. You need a big thought-provoking goal.
- "Inviting Contributors to Open Source Webdev through Virtualization" by Les Orchard told me that not just Dreamwidth, not just Wikimedia, but also Bugzilla and addons.mozilla.org are trying this concept. Four makes a trend! I hope they all compare notes. I also learned of a tool to sanitize real data dumps, to get useful test databases that community developers can use.
In between, I saw new friends and old, talked up MediaWiki, told people about the zillion open positions for which Wikimedia Foundation is hiring, played Dance Dance Revolution, ate great food, and enjoyed the inimitable atmosphere of a great conference.
A few ego-stroking notes: Open Source Bridge's Melissa Chavez also interviewed me for an eight-minute video. And, with Asheesh Laroia and Igal Koshevoy, I was named one of three Open Source Citizens by the conference organizers. Thank you for the honor; I will wear my scarf with pride!
(Thanks to the Wikimedia Foundation for the plane flight, to the conference for letting me in free as a speaker, and to my friends Brendan and Kara for hosting me. Thanks to Reid Beels and John Parker for their photos, which are CC BY-NC-SA. Thanks also to Josh Triplett for his photo.)
# 23 Jun 2011, 10:12AM: Learn Tech Management In Probably Fewer Than 45 Minutes:
I've put up slides and pretty rough notes from the talk I gave yesterday at Open Source Bridge, Learn Tech Management in 45 Minutes. I quote Langdon Winner and then Marx & Engels, summarize the efficient markets hypothesis as "we're not stupid," and give a list of spin tactics you can use to get or keep budget for a project. Audio & nicer notes to come soon.
# (1) 09 Jun 2011, 02:04PM: Portland and San Francisco Travel This Month:
I'm going to be in San Francisco next week for in-person collaboration with my Wikimedia colleagues. Then, June 19-25, I'm at the Open Source Bridge conference, presenting Learn Tech Management In 45 Minutes.
It took me two years to get a master's in tech management. I save you $40K and give you the short version.
Managing innovation, intellectual property and employment law, corporate finance, building a business plan — my master’s degree in technology management gave me some grounding in a bunch of suit stuff. I’ll teach you a little of each of these, plus insights from my management experience and fish-out-of-water anecdotes. Aspiring executives welcome; ties optional.
It would be lovely to have time to hang out with acquaintances and friends in either location; contact me!
# (5) 03 May 2011, 10:40AM: New Job, New Email Address:
As of this month, I'm a full-time contractor for the Wikimedia Foundation, serving as Volunteer Development Coordinator. My boss at WMF, Rob Lanphier, has just posted a welcome note that makes me sound all fancy.
In case you were wondering about my other clients from earlier this year: my paid work on GNOME Marketing, for the launch of GNOME 3.0, has ended, and I've also ended my work as fundraising coordinator for QuestionCopyright.org (passing it on to someone who has more time and relevant experience).
It might be disorienting to only have one job! I shall probably get used to it.
# (1) 01 May 2011, 09:45PM: PICC 2011:
My performance at the Professional IT Community Conference went all right. Consistent light laughter, some long belly laughs and several bits of applause. Sheeri Cabral and Tom Limoncelli really hit it out of the park on Slideshow Karaoke (best practices). Thanks to The League of Professional System Administrators for inviting me, and especially to Matt Simmons and William Bilancio for organizing my attendance and appearance.
A few things I recommended at PICC:
# 11 Apr 2011, 03:38PM: GNOME Contractor Status Update: Launch Week & Next Steps:
(Also posted to marketing-list.)
My last email, on April 1st, mentioned that "my main TODOs today, this weekend, and early next week are to follow up on press contacts, the eReleases blast, and GNOME Journal." So I did that; that day, I got the eReleases press release out, and it went to more than a thousand publications. And then here's a list of what I did last week on GNOME:
- Corralled answers for journalists. A few journalists asked me followup questions after the press release, so I got answers from other GNOME people, wrote answers, replied to the reporters via email and phone, and put these answers on the wiki (Talking Points).
- Managed the GNOME Journal launch. Nagged the last few authors, edited articles for content and style, uploaded them, fought with Textpattern, continued planning to move us to WordPress, and sent out the publication announcement. I'd still love for people to continue publicizing this, since there are many interesting nuggets that I haven't seen picked up by the larger press.
- (Started planning the next two issues of GNOME Journal, including hopes for a 3.x roadmap article in case anyone wants to write it.)
- Did a teensy bit of web testing and feedback regarding gnome3.org. Great job!
- Went to the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. There, I talked up GNOME 3 to reporters and other interested Linux folks, and made contact with some KDE people and started talking about publicity for the upcoming desktop summit. It sounds like we should be working to drum up attendance now, by planning special events, trumpeting rare speakers, and publicizing the unique benefits of attending GUADEC & the Desktop Summit.
- Attended the marketing/PR training at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit (thanks for setting it up, Dave!). I sure did learn a lot, from strategies for resource-constrained projects (build relationships with five key reporters) to tips for being interviewed. I will link to Cloer's slides and add my notes when she puts them up.
Undone: I didn't put tasks in Bugzilla because they were moving too fast and I was in San Francisco, many timezones away from Allan in Bangalore, and couldn't coordinate effectively. Lesson for next time: do it early if we're going to do it at all. Similarly for setting up interviews with key GNOME developers; I dropped the ball there.
Now that we've launched, I talked with Allan about how to best use the rest of our contracts (we're booked to work on GNOME till the end of April). We think our priorities for the rest of April are:
(a) reach out to not-so-news-driven (more in-depth-reporting) journalists about aspects of the release that didn't get covered on launch day -- once we get some bites, prep developers who have volunteered, and get them interviewed
(b) write up lessons learned & ideas for next time
(c) infrastructure building & maintenance: update the wiki, consolidate audiovisual and textual resources, and otherwise help prep for future marketing, including press releases, talking points, etc. for the launches of GNOME 3 within distributions that will come out in the next weeks & months
So I'm going to make some progress on each of those this week. Specifically, I aim to reach out to two reporters, braindump a few lessons learned privately, and confer with Allan Day and Vincent Untz about resource consolidation. And I'm planning on pushing GNOME Journal's next issue forward, in collaboration with Paul Cutler, but that's not part of my contract since it's not GNOME 3-specific. :-)
# (3) 01 Apr 2011, 04:21PM: GNOME 3 Marketing: A Snapshot:
The story of this week, for me and GNOME marketing, is primarily the story of a press release. I collected quotes, revised it in response to feedback on marketing-list, added press contacts to our CiviCRM installation and emailed the press release to them (at least twenty contacts, with more to come). It should show up tomorrow on gnome.org once the "we're delaying six months" April Fool's press release runs its course. We're now getting responses from interested journalists and I'll be answering their questions and helping them set up interviews with some key developers.
Also, I heard a success story from another open source marketer about ereleases, so I plan on editing the press release down to 500 words and paying $200 (the nonprofit rate) for their press release publicity service this afternoon.
By the way, in a previous status report I mentioned looking into Collabtive. It's terrible and I won't make us use it. For tasks involving responding to press contacts, we are using CiviCRM. I will be checking with Allan after the hackfest to see whether the remaining tasks would benefit from being placed in Bugzilla; I had aimed to do that before I fell ill.
This week we also had the second User Day. I did not publicize it as far ahead of time as I wish I had, but we did get some participation and answer some users' questions. Thanks to all the hosts!
After a discussion with Sri and Diego, I added "Approaches That Work" to the GNOME 3.0 talking points. If you need to talk with a skeptic about GNOME 3, we're hoping you can get some ideas, tips, and answers to common skepticisms there.
I also did some nagging, editing, writing, and organizing around GNOME Journal's GNOME 3 issue, which we hope to put out this weekend.
So my main TODOs today, this weekend, and early next week are to follow up on press contacts, the ereleases blast, and GNOME Journal. Thanks to everyone in Bangalore who's at the hackfest and working on the release!
# (2) 22 Mar 2011, 08:45PM: A Slightly Disjointed (Due To A Five-Day Cold) Musing On Open Source, Fear, Motivation, And Witnessing:
I was introducing C. to a set of QuestionCopyright friends and acquaintances, and they were joking about indoctrinating her, and she was curious to hear what free culture is all about. So she wondered why I reflexively suggested that the others wait a bit, tell her next time.
They did give C. the introductory spiel, and conversation was pleasant and edifying, and nothing terribly awkward ensued. She has developed a substantial interest of her own, now, in the theory and practice of free culture. But why did I have that reflex? I felt around for it and grasped something. It makes it harder, I said, once you know these things and care about them. Becoming a free culture/free software person is like becoming a vegan.
No, G. replied -- at least people know what vegans are.
We happy few.
Here I was, a fulltime free culture/free software consultant, feeling an unaccustomed reluctance to give someone else the sunglasses, to witness.
There are self-constraining ideologies like veganity or chastity that modern society at least theoretically understands, even if some cohorts scoff. Then there are the practices that always require an introduction. When I explain how I met Leonard, I often start with the thirty-second "what is open source" explanation, because it's all of a piece. But my "what is open source" intro focuses on pragmatism -- many eyes making bugs shallow -- rather than free software values.
I think I'm a moderate sort of open source gal, an ovo-lacto vegetarian. There's an iBook running Mac OS tucked off in a drawer, and all these Linux boxen in our house surely have nonfree binaries driving bits of hardware. No Facebook but I surely use many cloud services that violate the Franklin Street Statement. I hang out with copyright abolitionists, Debian users, and other free culture/free software folks who make me feel namby-pamby. And then I go to dinner with someone who makes me feel like a Jain. Or I find myself saying, as I said a week ago, that developing on a closed platform is like trying to fall in love with someone who won't talk to you.
Our love is part of what energizes us, moves us to act. In FLOSS, volunteers do things for two basic reasons: either because we enjoy doing them for their own sake, or because the task needs doing and we want to do our bit. We see some goal the task will help us reach, or fear an outcome the task will help us prevent. [By the way, it's useful to have experienced that, because it's useful to assume those two as the means of persuasion whether my colleague's paid or not. As a leader, I should either set up tasks people will genuinely enjoy (and get the scutwork out of the way), or help my colleagues see a straight line from the task to a glorious future. Show them how what we're doing leads to something they want. This is my pet theory of How To Lead Knowledge Workers and your mileage may vary.] And -- as a zillion social scientists will tell you -- even if we momentarily burn out on caring about a goal for its own sake, we don't want to let the team down. We don't want to let our buddies down.
As we were talking about GNOME marketing, Andreas once asked me what I found special, what personally spoke to me about GNOME. I rambled: object code is compiled from source code, but the source code is compiled, too -- compiled from people, from time, from love. Every time I look at my desktop, every feature and every bug comes from someone, someone with a name and a face, and sometimes I can even remember. Hey, I remember when she added that feature to Empathy. Oh, right, I know he's working on that bug. It's like all of Planet GNOME is helping me out, every day. It's like my whole community's right there, on my desktop, every time I open the laptop lid.
I don't want to keep my friends blissfully ignorant of this. Is there a more loving human impulse than the joy of sharing? I'm sorry, C. I'm sorry I was afraid of making your life harder. I remembered the local minimum and forgot the greater maxima awaiting you. Why keep us a "happy few" when we can be an ecstatic many? And yes, it's harder, to learn our principles and try to walk this path alone -- but the whole point of our principles is that our multitude, our diversity, our union, our communion is far richer and more sustaining than individual hoarding ever could be.
# (5) 02 Mar 2011, 04:54AM: Wikimedia:
Now that my new bosses have told the world: yes, I'm also now consulting for the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that supports Wikipedia and other free knowledge initiatives. To grossly simplify, I'm coordinating software development (mostly MediaWiki improvement) that isn't by WMF staffers, primarily concentrating on the upcoming Berlin hackathon and this year's Google Summer of Code participation.
Thank you, nostalgia: in December, I was looking up my old high school classmate Christine Moellenberndt, and discovered she was a new hire, then looked at the current job openings, and applied.
I told my mom about it and it went something like:
"Mom, I'm working for the nonprofit that does Wikipedia! ... No, not them, they're different. Wikipedia is a big free encyclopedia that's online for anyone to use. Wikileaks is a ... well, they're a bunch of people who like to get and publicize secrets -- anyway, that's not us."
And no, this holiday season my photogenic face will not be on banner ads entreating you to give. As far as I know.
# (1) 26 Feb 2011, 09:52AM: Careering:
Since I last mentioned my career, I have turned into a consultant. I have a few gigs; let me tell you about two of my clients.
QuestionCopyright.org is a nonprofit that aims "to educate the public about the history of copyright, and to promote methods of distribution that do not depend on restricting people from making copies." I'm QCO's Fundraising Coordinator, meaning that I write and coordinate grant proposals. I also write a tiny bit for the QCO website. Case in point: "Three glimpses: Transformative work, public domain music, and ethics".
The GNOME Foundation, the nonprofit that supports the GNOME desktop, has hired me as one of two contractors to manage marketing for the launch of GNOME 3.0. Allan Day and I will be (to oversimplify) ensuring that Linux users know what's new in this release and why it's awesome.
More on those and my other work when I can!
# (3) 01 Feb 2011, 08:47AM: When Am I Ever Going To Have To Use This?:
Yesterday, while negotiating with potential clients, I used:
- You know, standard reading, writing, and interpersonal speaking skills (many courses, school newspaper, speech & debate, Academic Decathlon)
- Basic algebra to work out some price quotes (elementary school math classes)
- US and world geography (K-12, history classes)
- The wheelbarrow anecdote from Benjamin Franklin's autobiography to make a point about open source contributions as a marketing tool (eleventh grade American Literature)
- Political science concepts of authority and legitimacy, in determining a client's needs regarding open source leadership (college)
- Knowledge of Unix-style design (started in college, especially at the Open Computing Facility)
- The innovation S-curve, and cautionary tales of platforms that never got uptake from customers and vendors (master's in tech management)
All that school comes in handy sometimes!
# (7) 23 Aug 2010, 09:45PM: Two Tips On Convincing Managers & Executives To Invest In Your Technology Projects:
From a years-old job-advice email to a friend. The sort of knowledge that Rachel Chalmers or Karl Fogel finds obvious but that some of us still haven't quite integrated into our day-to-day communications and long-term strategies:
You need to be able to express your suggestions to your boss in terms of financial incentives and losses.
A few things I've picked up during a recent class in "Technology in the Business Environment" (when I was doing the master's in tech management at Columbia):
I) Management focuses on the things that drive the organization (directly making money), and tends to ignore things that support the organization's drivers. If you're directly making money, lowering the cost of producing the product/service, increasing management's control, increasing product quality, increasing the knowledge available to an important decisonmaker, or improving customer service, you can describe your work as a driver. Can you find a way to describe your high-level TODOs in one of those ways?
II) Here's a model of management's priorities for technology investment. The higher up this list you can get, the more attention you can grab from management.
- Revenue. Guaranteeing a financial return. Not just cutting costs, but actually MAKING money from customers.
- Increasing scarce productivity. If the demand for a product exceeds the supply, then this is attractive. [1 and 2 indicate that the company is growing, and interested in the future. A good sign!]
- Cutting costs. More popular in a struggling company.
- Competitive advantage -- this means the company is already behind its competitors and has lost first-mover advantage.
- Tech for the sake of tech -- pizzazz and leadership.
So can you explain "creating system-monitoring scripts, streamlining processes, and installing and configuring new programs on the server" so that they're way up on that list?
Let's say a system-monitoring script would take your service from 95% uptime to 99.9% uptime. That's #2. Maybe one of the high-level tasks you do will make it possible for your company to serve twenty units instead of fifteen (#2) or even start a whole new line of products (#1). But "It's more elegant/technically correct" is #5.
I welcome comments, tips, examples, disagreement, and cake.
# 24 Jun 2010, 03:40PM: The Second Step: HOWTO encourage open source work at for-profits:
At the excellent Open Source Bridge conference earlier this month, people seemed to enjoy my talk. The one-liner:
Even at pro-FLOSS businesses, logistical obstacles and incentive problems get in the way of giving back. I’ll show you how to fix that.
My session notes are now available. If you were there, please feel free to clarify them and add your notes or links to your notes elsewhere.
The very short version: a company does not upstream its patches, even though it should for long-term practical reasons, because of problems in four general categories. The company might lack a FLOSS culture. There might be legal confusion about what employees are allowed to do, and how to get permission. The project management workflow and timelines might not allow time for proper engineering. And the external project might have a terrible UI for new contributors.
Once you abstract these categories away from the specific problem of accidentally hoarded code rotting away, you see that they also apply to other problems of the type "I really know I should be doing foo but haven't gotten around to it."
I also added notes from my lightning talk on Thoughtcrime Experiments, in which I inadvertently invented a new social media marketing technique.
# (1) 10 May 2010, 10:29AM: GNOME & Conference Planning & Writing:
I'm back in New York City. Big priorities this week include:
- Preparing to move to a bigger apartment here in Astoria
- Getting the GNOME 3.0 launch marketing machine up and running
- Organizing the late May release of GNOME Journal
Preparing my Open Source Bridge talk, The Second Step: HOWTO encourage open source work at for-profits.Even at pro-FLOSS businesses, logistical obstacles and incentive problems get in the way of giving back. I show you how to fix that. (Business track, date & time TBA)
- WisCon prep. I'm helping with food for the vid party and I'm speaking on four panels:
-
Let's Create an Online Business Model That Works. I'm moderating this one: Sat, 10:30-11:45 pm with Jennifer K. Stevenson and an anonymous participant. What makes Facebook games very, very profitable, while online SF/F magazines are usually struggling? If the money from subscribers and from advertisers isn't enough, then where does the money come from? Is the word "magazine" holding some of these ventures back? Let's put our collective knowledge of fandom, web 2.0 and visions of the future together and see if we can't come up with something great.
- Must Pleasures Be Guilty?, Sun, 10:00-11:15 am with Vito Excalibur, Lesley Hall, Sumana Harihareswara, John O'Neill, and Sonya Taaffe. Why are we ashamed of the books we love? Critical acclaim recognizes some SF/F as serious literature, works one might recommend to a non-genre reader who thought it was all talking squid and ray-guns in space, to demonstrate what the genre can do. But are these the books you love and reread over and over again, especially when feeling low? And if not, why not? What is the difference between love and admiration? And why is pleasure so often constructed as "guilty" or embarrassing to admit?
- Once Upon a Time, Sun, 1:00-2:15 pm with
Vylar Kaftan, Terry Bisson, Richard Chwedyk, Sumana Harihareswara, and Ellen Klages. Pro writers use the card game "Once Upon a Time" to tell half-baked fairy tales for laughs. Find out what happens when four panelists play tug-of-war on a story, trying to bend it towards wildly different endings.
- Facebook and Its Discontents, Sun, 4:00-5:15 pm with Cat T. Rambo, Kater Cheek, Sumana Harihareswara, Penny Hill, and Alena McNamara. Have your friends abandoned their blogs and LiveJournals for Facebook? How does writing on our friends' walls differ from commenting on their posts? How do you navigate privacy on a system that forbids anonymity? Is "liking" someone's update the same as commenting "This!"
- Submitting a couple OSSPAC talks
- Figuring out other GNOME stuff like GUADEC attendance and applying for Foundation membership
- Wouldn't it be nice if I finished blogging the marketing hackfest and QuahogCon sometime this week? It would.
# (2) 05 Feb 2010, 11:48PM: Another Change:
I'm no longer working with Collabora Ltd.
In the first several months after I joined Collabora in April 2009, I served as lead project manager, got the new website up, and started putting some new project management processes into place, especially in research and development. Then I shifted to personnel management, and created and began implementing a performance assessment system. All the while I gardened the wiki, aggregated and edited weekly internal reports to keep the company on the same page, blogged about our work, and generally gave people the information and the nagging they needed to make informed decisions. (In retrospect, I played facilitator, historian, and journalist a lot, plus mentor to 50+ Collaborans.)
Collabora's a different place than it was ten months ago; I helped move them from a startup to an enterprise footing. Management structures change as needs and capabilities become apparent, so the directors and new hires (including the awesome Martin Barrett) will carry this work forward, and I offer them my best wishes. I'm happy to talk more in detail about what I did at Collabora, especially if you're interested in what I can do for your organization.
In the near future, I'm taking some time to relax and take care of existing obligations before I incur new ones. Then, starting in late February or early March, I'll be volunteering fulltime on some open source/free culture projects for several months. I haven't yet decided which ones, or in what capacity, so feel free to recruit me.
# 22 Nov 2009, 10:29PM: Career Analysis Stuff:
You might be interested in my analysis of my career history in a longish Crooked Timber comment.
I'm very glad that I had so many different work experiences before making irrevocable choices, and that I delayed grad school till I had a specific purpose.
Tonight I thought a little about loyalty to one's workplace in a comment on Venkatesh Rao's thought-provoking business management post.
Loyalty to an organization? Identifying with an organization? For a fairly smart hard worker, who actually believes in the stated goals of the organization, it's fairly seductive, especially if they conflate their specific subcommunity with the institution as a whole.
I learned via Mel Chua that Gerald Weinberg, whose work has influenced my industry and my career profoundly, is very ill. My thoughts are with him.
# (1) 25 Sep 2009, 08:49AM: We Already Know The Title Of His Management Tips Book:
I used to watch Project Runway identifying with the contestants. Now I watch and think, "Tim Gunn is really good at phrasing criticism in a way that's likely to get across to the designer. I want to be that kind of manager."
# (1) 12 Sep 2009, 06:25PM: Wintour Guide:
I watched and enjoyed The September Issue with Elisa (who pseudoblogs as The Mad Fashionista and with whom I watch Project Runway). Some brief thoughts:
The September Issue is an office comedy ("comedy" in the sense that no one dies and the issue successfully comes out). And it's a portrait of a power couple. Editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and creative director Grace Coddington have worked together for decades, each admiring the other's talents but fairly relentless in the battle to pursue her own artistic vision. The creative tension between forward-looking Wintour and history-mining Coddington drives Vogue and the film. This film passes the Bechdel Test by leaps and bounds. It's lovely to watch unapologetically powerful women and learn how they use their power.
Coddington is marvelously resourceful in using any leverage or opportunities she finds. She gives lots of forthright-seeming interviews to the documentarians, so she gets to appear quite a lot in the film (contrast Wintour, whose famous reserve only goes away when she's at home with her daughter). Coddington asks Wintour for a larger budget for a project in front of the camera crew, and later grins that Wintour is more lenient on funds when she's on camera. And, most mischieviously, she gets the cameraman to appear in an inventive photo shoot for Vogue, and explicitly tells us that capturing and using him on film is a bit of revenge. Subverting their gaze and getting a witty, pretty spread is a nice twofer.
The film chronicles the development of the 2007 September issue of Vogue, which explains why everyone in the film is acting like the economy's fine. But even two years ago, was Vogue setting trends and making waves? Coddington credits Wintour with integrating celebrity culture into fashion culture faster than other mags did, but seventy years ago film stars' fashion choices got copycatted all over. Current events in fashion don't get discussed much, either; The September Issue doesn't mention blogs, or Project Runway, or Lucky, or counterfeit goods.
But there is a historical subtext in the film, a subtext that comes closest to the surface when Coddington stands motionless before elaborate Versailles gardens. The gardens are expensive and elaborate and required not just a wealthy patron but an entire edifice to support them (Si Newhouse is to Wintour as Wintour is to Coddington). Each photo shoot that Coddington orchestrates is as beautiful as a blossom. But any individual fashion that Coddington captures in her Vogue spreads is as ephemeral as a blossom. The gardens are still there, and still magnificent, and what are you doing that will last centuries?
Sherwood Anderson writes in Winesburg, Ohio of thoughts of mortality: "He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun." I reread bits of Winesburg the other day, and remembered that the really scary thing about that last image is the sun's betrayal.
Coddington calls herself a romantic. She loves old gardens and 1920s styles. And she remembers what got shot for a previous issue but didn't run, and notices when Wintour cuts a few spreads from the coming issue that represent USD$50,000 worth of work. She must know that she works for an enormous, ridiculous edifice. She must know that it's unsustainable, that her art form requires resources that only monarchies and this historically anomalous corporate media system can bring to bear. Anna and Coddington and Condé Nast are in a symbiosis to perpetuate a grand, dying art.
"High fashion" is a niche, like opera, regimented gardens, country dancing, &c., and getting niche-ier. Wintour says fashion is about what's next; does she know? The September Issue doesn't say.
# 03 Aug 2008, 10:33PM: Log:
L. Sprague de Camp's entertaining Lest Darkness Fall moves really fast. This is probably true even if you haven't just read a 900-page Neal Stephenson novel. I nearly mentioned Lest Darkness Fall in my brain candy recommendations to danah boyd, but fear it's not trashy enough.
William Ball's A Sense of Direction is fantastic and as soon as I return it to the library you should check it out. As I suspected, it has a mix of great inside baseball on directing plays (e.g., three pages on how to structure and practice curtain calls so that actors don't get their egos in a twist) and transferable advice on managing creative folk.
We learn in threes. The first step of learning is discovering; the second step of learning is testing; and the third step of learning is pattern-setting.
The actor will learn to relinquish his fear when he sees that the director never causes another actor to be frightened.
...a question from an actor is not a question. A question from an actor is an innocent bid to draw the director's attention to something unresolved. When the actor asks a question, a wise director doesn't answer the question. The answer to the question is not in the director; the answer to the question is in the actor. Answer the question by asking another question. Allow the actor to resolve the difficulty. He already has the best answer in mind before he asks the question.
Always begin rehearsal on time. There are some directors who like to gossip and joke and waste the first ten or twelve minutes. This awakens a sense of sloppiness in the actor and gives him the feeling that the work is not important.
For future reference, I'm also a fan of advice on pp 58-59, 66, 102-104, and 108 of the 1984 edition.
This weekend (among other activities) I went to a fun party, watched a lot of Babylon 5, saw a friend's wife and new baby, read the de Camp, ate Leonard's excellent sour cherry cobbler, walked around a lot, filed a bug or two on Miro, and rented movies to foist on my fellow jurors this last week of grand jury duty. All this and I still spent hours dinking around on the Web. So there, anxieties!
# 30 Jul 2006, 08:30PM: Marissa Mayer & I Both Use Pine:
Over the past week I've been to three different tech-related meetsup. I went to an EFF-NYC group, I helped host the Fog Creek open house, and I visited the Joel On Software discussion forum meetup in lieu of my traditional Saturday night SKP visit. It'll be a good yield if I get two lasting friends out of the whole trilogy. Today I played the hermit, rereading America: The Book and bits of Jane Eyre in between working on my column and playing Tetris with my husband.
I've spent half a year with Fog Creek now, and I know its strengths and weaknesses almost as well as I know my own. I've just downloaded a bunch of Audiofile songs and the music makes me pensive. I'm wondering what it'll take for me to become an IT leader with soul and cred.
Do I have to be a tall blue-eyed blonde with patents in artificial intelligence? Is it that or Fiorinadom? Is it possible to feel like a completely lost pioneer and a cliché sellout at the same time? That sort of thing.
By the way, the Joel on Software jobs board has been hopping lately, and my boss has been blogging at unusually high volume.
Anyway, back to my columns. One is about times I've been truly happy. I think the other is about practice, craftsmanship, and the tradeoffs one makes to live a satisfying life. But I'm not sure yet.
[Main] 
Cogito, Ergo Sumana by Sumana Harihareswara is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available by emailing the author at sumanah@panix.com.
Then, I'll be in Washington, DC, July 10th-15th for Wikimania, especially the pre-conference Hackathon. I'm happy to announce that WMF is partnering with OpenHatch to make the pre-Wikimania hackathon even more useful. OpenHatch is planning and running the novice-focused half of the event, with trainings and projects to help people learn how to hack Wikimedia technology.
