Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

Tag
Maintainership book

11 Oct 2024, 12:00 p.m.

Double Standards And Volunteer Behavior

A fictional example:You're in a volunteer group that does a public service chore, like sprucing up a local park or maintaining a health information website. It's been around for many years. Most people treat each …

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24 Apr 2024, 11:42 a.m.

Model UX Research & Design Docs for Command-Line Open Source

If you work on open source software, especially command-line tools, I want you to know about newly available research reports and design guidance, and a user research HOWTO, that you can pick up and reuse.The …

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08 Feb 2024, 13:00 p.m.

Whether And How To Trust A New Maintainer

How should we think about trust when it comes to adding new maintainers to a project? Another way of saying that is: if I'm an existing project maintainer, considering whether to entrust you with co-maintainership, …

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03 Jan 2024, 11:20 a.m.

Some Diversity Advice I Give

Colleagues ask me for advice on diversifying their hiring pipelines, recruiting and retaining volunteer contributors, and addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in marketing to and taking care of their users. Here are a few …

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14 Nov 2023, 10:45 a.m.

Going From Proprietary To FLOSS Product Management

Someone asked me for pointers on doing product management (and, to a lesser extent, project management) in Free/Libre Open Source Projects for the first time, after many years of experience in proprietary software. I basically …

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07 Nov 2023, 23:45 p.m.

Set Contributor Expectations To Reduce Ghosting

Let's say you're a maintainer who's just received a new contribution. A new contributor has submitted a patch/pull request. And the fundamental idea of it is one you like, but the diff itself will require …

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21 Aug 2023, 11:35 a.m.

User Support, Equanimity, And Potential Cross-Project Tools and Practices in Open Source

I met David Lord at this year's PyCon, talking about maintainer burnout and how to make projects more resilient. Since then, we've been chatting regularly to help us develop material for our respective writing projects. …

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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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07 Jun 2021, 17:28 p.m.

Sidestepping the PR Bottleneck: Four Non-Dev Ways To Support Your Upstreams

This is the textual version of my June 7 2021 online talk at Upstream Live: "Sidestepping the PR Bottleneck: Four Non-Dev Ways To Support Your Upstreams", 23 minutes. Video is now up. Intro Hi, I’m …

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22 Mar 2021, 21:09 p.m.

A Spec For A Sandboxed Open Source Project Environment

I'm writing a book on maintaining legacy open source projects to help teach people vital skills. Right now, as far as I know, there's no textbook or course you can work through to learn skills …

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