Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

Tag
Advice

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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02 Nov 2015, 6:53 a.m.

Ways to Toss Your Stuff in NYC

I've been on a house-cleanout kick recently. Thus I am grateful for the New York City Compost Project, this list of food banks & food pantries in New York City, SAFE (Solvents, Automotive, Flammables, and …

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02 Oct 2015, 18:01 p.m.

Preserving Your Old Art Or Activist Videotapes

These notes on a panel about digital preservation of fanvids spurred me to note down some links in a comment, and I figured it was worth publicizing further here. I myself put vids on Critical …

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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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21 Dec 2014, 22:10 p.m.

Why You Have To Fix Governance To Improve Hospitality

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 …

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26 Sep 2014, 19:17 p.m.

The Continuing Adventures (Transitioning From Intern To Volunteer)

By now dozens of women have stepped into open source via Outreach Program for Women, a paid internship program administered by the GNOME Foundation. I recently asked several of them whether they had been able …

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