Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

Tag
Open Source and Free Culture

22 Apr 2015, 12:14 p.m.

How Knowledge Workers Can Learn More About Open Source Tools They Use

Yesterday I spent an hour teaching a woman whose nonprofit wants improvements to their current Drupal setup, especially around content approval workflow and localization. She wanted to understand more about how Drupal works so that …

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18 Apr 2015, 20:54 p.m.

La Con De Python

I spent a good chunk of this month at PyCon in Montréal, watching talks, seeing people I rarely get to see, and working on Mailman. My stay in Montréal felt homey thanks to Jo Walton …

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18 Apr 2015, 12:36 p.m.

New Takes On My Published Writing

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 …

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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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