Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
My Crooked Timber guest post on codes of conduct, freedom, governance, contracts, and copyleft software licenses has attracted over 200 comments. Many of them are thoughtful and interesting, and worth at least a skim if …
The social sciences group blog Crooked Timber has published my guest post, "Codes of conduct and the trade-offs of copyleft". A lot of open stuff -- such as the Wikimedia/Wikipedia and Linux projects -- are …
In technology (as in many communities), capitalism makes it hard for us to understand what we're good at. A few source texts, and then a sketch of some contours. The "No true Scotsman" fallacy. Shweta …
I am starting to hack on Mailman, per my plan for early 2015 -- and along the way, I'm also learning how to use Launchpad and Bazaar. Mailman To quote maintainer Barry Warsaw's architectural overview, …
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 …
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 …
I've had two different conversations recently with feminist women who want to start their own tech startups. Even though I have never done that, it turns out that I had things to tell them that …
When I tell people about grants they could get to help them work on open source/open culture stuff, sometimes they are surprised because they didn't know such grants existed. Here are some of them! Grants …
Larger, older open source projects have more people, more getting-started resources for new contributors, more name recognition, and sometimes more money to spend. (Examples: the Linux kernel, MediaWiki (the software behind Wikipedia, part of Wikimedia), …