Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

Tag
Open Source and Free Culture

10 Apr 2015, 23:10 p.m.

Crooked Timber Guest Post on FLOSS Licenses and Codes of Conduct

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 …

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13 Jan 2015, 14:39 p.m.

Unlocking The Funhouse (Mirror)

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 …

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02 Jan 2015, 16:12 p.m.

Hacking on Mailman using Launchpad and Bazaar

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, …

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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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10 Aug 2014, 19:34 p.m.

Resources For Starting Your Own Thing

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 …

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30 Jul 2014, 11:47 a.m.

Here Are Some Grants You Could Apply For

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 …

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03 Jun 2014, 8:39 a.m.

Choosing Older Or Younger Open Source Projects To Work On

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), …

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31 Mar 2014, 13:10 p.m.

UX Is A Social Justice Issue

On March 25th, I had the honour of addressing the Code4Lib conference as their opening keynote speaker. My topic: "User Experience Is A Social Justice Issue".   ....Maybe another way of thinking about it is, …

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