Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Several Upcoming Talks
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2016 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
I'm preparing several talks to deliver at open source technology conferences this winter and spring. 
I'll be at FOSDEM in Brussels later this month giving two talks:
- On Friday, January 29th, at the FLOSS Community Metrics Meeting, I'm presenting "What should we stop doing?" The FLOSS community often clamors for stats that would let us automate emotional labor, so we could focus on more valuable work. Is that appropriate? What if we switched our assumptions around and used our metrics to figure out what we're spending time on more generally, and tried to find low-value programming work we could stop doing? What tools would support this, and what scenarios could play out?
- On Sunday, January 31st, I'm speaking in the Legal and Policy Issues "devroom" on comparing codes of conduct to copyleft licenses, expanding on the discussion I started in this Crooked Timber piece last year. What can we learn about our own attitudes towards governance when we look at how and whether we make these different freedom tradeoffs?
In mid-March, I will present "Hidden Features in HTTP" at Great Wide Open in Atlanta, Georgia. This will be pretty similar to "HTTP Can Do That?!", which I presented to a standing-room-only crowd at Open Source Bridge last year. If you're a web developer whose knowledge of HTTP verbs ends around GET and POST, expect news, laughs, and lab reports from wacky experiments.
Right after Great Wide Open, I'll speak on "Inessential Weirdnesses in Free Software" at LibrePlanet in Boston. And then in mid-May, I'll be presenting "Inessential Weirdnesses in Open Source" at OSCON in Austin, Texas. More than a year after I wrote "Inessential Weirdnesses in Open Source" as a tossed-off blog post, I'm pretty dissatisfied with it. I should have more clearly stated my assumptions and audience, and my intent to play around with some vocabulary and what-ifs; I'm unhappy that many people misread it as a "we should eradicate all these things" manifesto. In these talks I aim to clarify and deepen this material. Open source contributors and leaders who are already comfortable with our norms and jargon will learn how to see their own phrasings and tools as outsiders do, including barriers that often slow down new users and contributors, and to make more hospitable experiences during their outreach efforts.
Then in late May I'll make a public appearance or two at WisCon -- the exact nature of which is a surprise!
I'm proud that this year I'll be speaking for the first time at FOSDEM, Great Wide Open, LibrePlanet, and OSCON. I hope my talks and the hallway track help me get the word out about Changeset Consulting to potential clients.
And if you can't make it to any of those conferences, but you'd like to hear more about Changeset and my other activities, check out Andromeda Yelton's one-hour interview with me in her Open Paren video podcast. At 39:29 I emit a huge belly laugh that makes me happy to re-watch and you might like it too.
