Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

Tag
Open Source and Free Culture

09 Jun 2022, 11:00 a.m.

Some Upcoming Availability: Talks And Coaching

For once, I have no upcoming public talks scheduled. Now's a good time to invite me to present or do stand-up comedy at your event or organization, or guest on your podcast, or to give …

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07 Jun 2022, 11:40 a.m.

Managing Cadence Shear: My Upstream 2022 Talk

This post has the script and video for “Cadence shear: Managing rhythm and tempo mismatches in participation”, a 25-minute talk I delivered/will deliver at 2:30pm EDT on June 7th, 2022 as part of Upstream. It …

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06 Jun 2022, 14:30 p.m.

My Upstream Talk Tomorrow: Cadence Shear

My 25-minute talk "Cadence shear: Managing rhythm and tempo mismatches in participation" is in 1 day: 2:30-3pm EDT on Tuesday, June 7th, as part of Upstream 2022. Registration is free and the conference is online. …

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13 May 2022, 16:00 p.m.

Contribution Metrics Are Messy: An Example

I frequently notice folks asking or answering questions like "how many contributors does this open source project have?" or "how much contribution is this project getting?" Here's an example of why those aren't simple questions.ffmpeg …

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05 May 2022, 13:00 p.m.

PDFtk, qpdf, And Dealing With Password-Protected PDFs

I slice, dice, and transform documents often enough that I rely frequently on pandoc and pdftk. I often use pandoc to turn Markdown, HTML, wiki syntax, reStructuredText, etc. into each other or into LibreOffice, MS …

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02 May 2022, 16:00 p.m.

"I want to start contributing to open source": My (Current) Advice

Want to become a better programmer? Join the Recurse Center! In the virtual PyCon hallway track, a newcomer to the industry said he'd like to get into contributing to open source, and asked for my …

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21 Apr 2022, 12:15 p.m.

Nurturing Volunteers: A Shortcut And An Event Template

A few suggestions to help you nurture volunteers in your projects. (Expanded from some advice I recently gave Ms. Boba, founder of BobaBoard -- she's a coaching client of mine.)Live Tour As First Draft: Extract …

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30 Nov 2021, 10:14 a.m.

Sign Up Now For Free Maintainer Skills Workshops

Maintainers of open source projects often need help learning how to address issues such as "how do we recruit and promote project members?", "what do we spend our money on?", and "how do I finally …

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24 Nov 2021, 9:48 a.m.

Health Insurance & Retirement Plans For Open Source Maintainers

This is huge. The Open Collective Foundation has just announced: "OCF now offers employment options to initiative workers—with health insurance!" As that page says: "Initiatives fiscally hosted by OCF can have employees, with access to …

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03 Jul 2021, 16:45 p.m.

Researching The Leadership Gap for Legacy Projects

I've given a lot of conference talks recently. As part of the PyCon US Maintainers' Summit in May, I delivered an eight-minute talk, "Researching the leadership gap for legacy projects". The video is now available, …

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