Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
New Takes On My Published Writing
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 So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it!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.
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 you found anything useful in the original post. For instance, can we compare mindshare to other forms of property? And what do we do to legitimately obtain the enthusiastic consent of the governed? Some of them have old or new perspectives on Adria Richards or Linus Torvalds. And about five percent of the comments are gross, hurtful, or laugh-out-loud wrong on multiple axes, e.g., "The FOSS world is not asking for codes of conduct, she is seeking to thrust them upon it." I shall be mining those for use in my stand-up comedy routine at AlterConf in Portland, Oregon in June.
Also, the code4lib Journal asked for me to turn my code4lib keynote from 2014 into an essay, "User Experience is a Social Justice Issue", for their special issue on diversity in library technology. The new article includes some contextual introduction and a retrospective with links to related work by others in the past year. You can comment there.
