Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

Tag
Open Source and Free Culture

17 Feb 2019, 10:53 a.m.

My Open Data Quest, Part ... 11?

On Tuesday night, I attended a committee meeting of the NYC council's Committee on Technology at City Hall (another view) and gave a bit of public comment (video -- my testimony is 02:05:03 till 2:09:11, …

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07 Feb 2019, 8:17 a.m.

Socratic Questioning, Devil's Advocacy, and Conversational Power Tools

"Devil's advocate" was a job. In order for someone to perform the role of Devil's advocate, someone else had to appoint them to that position. And the Devil's advocate performed a bounded task within an …

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07 Feb 2019, 4:49 a.m.

My Recent-ish Government Transparency Efforts

I've put together a page of my past few years of Freedom of Information Law requests and the responses they've garnered. In particular, folks might be interested in the NYC Department of Health and Mental …

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19 Nov 2018, 19:23 p.m.

The Fascination Of Municipal Taxation Software

On January 30, 2018, I attended my local city councilmember's "State of the District" speech. If one of your local officials offers such a speech, I recommend going; it's a structured way to find out …

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16 Oct 2018, 11:22 a.m.

NYC Comptroller Town Hall, And Reflections on Constraint

Last night I suited up and went to a local town hall held by the office of New York City's Comptroller, Scott Stringer. (I am in the fuzzy foreground of the second photo.) After very …

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03 Oct 2018, 17:16 p.m.

Tidelift Is Paying Maintainers And, Potentially, Fixing the Economics of an Industry

As the founder of Changeset Consulting, I keep my eye on consultancies and services in and near my niche, open source leadership, maintainership, and sustainability.* And I've known Luis Villa for years and got to …

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03 Oct 2018, 15:13 p.m.

A Reasonably Fast Way To Construct A Writing Portfolio

Someone in my network wanted guidance in building a professional (often software-related) writing portfolio for the first time -- they want to give other people a portfolio of work they've already done, so that those …

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18 Jul 2018, 18:58 p.m.

Libraries.io and the Infrastructure of Hospitality

So many times in my life in open source tools and platforms, I've run into the following problem: We want to make a breaking change/prioritize work/get feedback. Let's check with our downstreams. How do we …

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12 Apr 2018, 10:29 a.m.

On Online Advice

I'll be speaking on a panel, "Social Media in Theory and Praxis: What is at Stake Now?" at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, in New York, NY, on Wednesday, April 18, …

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11 Apr 2018, 22:17 p.m.

My LWN Story Summarizing PyPI's Overhaul

This coming Monday, April 16th, we plan to flip the switch on the new PyPI and redirect https://pypi.python.org web browser requests and pip install requests so the codebase serving them is Warehouse (which is in …

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