Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Some thrown-together thoughts towards a more comprehensive writeup. It's advice on about how to get along better as a new open source participant, based on the fundamental wisdom that you weren't the first person here …
Recently, a couple of programmers asked me for advice on starting and running a new open source project. So, here are some thoughts, assuming you're already a programmer, you haven't led a team before, and …
This year I submitted talks to several tech conferences and got a higher acceptance rate than I had been used to. For instance, this year I will speak for the first time at OSCON and …
Yesterday, at my first LibrePlanet conference, I delivered a somewhat impromptu five-minute lightning talk, "What is maintainership? Or, approaches to filling management skill gaps in free software". I spoke without a script, and what follows …
"What should we stop doing?": written version of a keynote address by Sumana Harihareswara, delivered at the FLOSS Community Metrics Meeting just before FOSDEM, 29 January 2016 in Brussels, Belgium. Slide deck is a 14-page …
In February, while coworking at the Open Internet Tools Project, I got to talking with Gus Andrews about face-to-face tech events. Specifically, when distributed people who make software together have a chance to get together …
Someone in one of my communities was wondering whether we ought to build a new automated tool to give little tasks to newcomers and thus help them turn into future maintainers. I have edited my …
Yesterday I spent an hour teaching a woman whose nonprofit wants improvements to their current Drupal setup, especially around content approval workflow and localization. She wanted to understand more about how Drupal works so that …
So let's assume you want to improve a particular community, and you've already read my earlier pieces, which I am now declaring prerequisites: "Why You Have To Fix Governance To Improve Hospitality", "Hospitality, Jerks, and …
Fundamentally, if you want to make a community hospitable,* you need to work not just on individual rules of conduct, but on governance. This is because the particular people implementing rules of conduct will use …