Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

Tag
Advice

15 Oct 2016, 13:55 p.m.

New Zine "Playing With Python: Two of My Favorite Lenses"

MergeSort, the feminist maker meetup I co-organize, had a table at Maker Faire earlier this month. Last year we'd given away (and taught people how to cut and fold) a few of my zines, and …

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12 Oct 2016, 11:00 a.m.

Rough Notes for New FLOSS Contributors On The Scientific Method and Usable History

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 …

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04 Aug 2016, 15:51 p.m.

Advice on Starting And Running A New Open Source Project

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 …

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29 Mar 2016, 20:01 p.m.

Tips To Increase Your Conference Talk Acceptance Rate

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 …

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21 Mar 2016, 16:58 p.m.

What Is Maintainership?

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 …

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19 Feb 2016, 17:50 p.m.

What Should We Stop Doing? (FLOSS Community Metrics Meeting keynote)

"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 …

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16 Sep 2015, 13:03 p.m.

Software In Person

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 …

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09 Aug 2015, 22:52 p.m.

How To Improve Bus Factor In Your Open Source Project

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 …

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22 Apr 2015, 12:14 p.m.

How Knowledge Workers Can Learn More About Open Source Tools They Use

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 …

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24 Dec 2014, 23:48 p.m.

Good And Bad Signs For Community Change, And Some Leadership Styles

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 …

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