Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

22 May 2015, 10:48 a.m.

Missing Women in FLOSS Philosophy, and Borrowing Models from Fandom

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2015 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

I've arrived in Madison for WisCon! And just in time for WisCon:

I have a blog post up (in two parts) focusing on the frameworks that we free software/open source folks often take for granted, what might have been erased from our FLOSS intellectual heritage due to sexism, what FLOSS might look like under a different approach, and what practices and perspectives we might borrow from the fan fiction/fanvidding realm of speculative fiction and media fandom.

Part 1 is up at Crooked Timber as the guest post "Where are the women in the history of open source?" Part 2 is up at Geek Feminism as "What if free and open source software were more like fandom?"

Please feel free to comment at CT or GF.