Sumana

Excised from elsewhere, on trust

2024-01-08T16:19:33Z

I'm writing a blog post over at my name blog about how open source maintainers can think about trusting new co-maintainers, what that trust entails, how to check for trustworthiness, etc. I was writing this bit, and then a friend reminded me that including something about sex in this piece would mean that she could not share it in her starchy workplace. So I'm saving it here instead, and will replace it with an analogy that won't raise as many eyebrows.

...some intake processes concentrate quite a lot on checking for trustworthiness, specifically for the candidate's capacity to be a responsible colleague and take criticism well.....

In the subculture of people who engage in nonmonogamy or other alternative sexual experiences together, "vetting" is sometimes informal, but sometimes groups do require new members to go through a formal process. This Bay Area-based group's application asks whether any existing group members have endorsed the candidate's application, and asks questions like
How do you know when someone consents to an experience you invite them to share with you? What information do you look for and how do you seek it out?
In Bonobo, we understand that people may make mistakes, cross other people's boundaries, or just impact one another without necessarily realizing it. But we also expect that people will own up to their impacts and mistakes, and take responsibility for them. Tell us about a time you crossed someone's boundary and took responsibility for it. What happened, how did you respond when you realized you crossed their boundary, and how did you deal with it after that?

https://www.bonobonetwork.com/apply
vetting, asking them to think about their values (Oakland play application), asking for references,.....

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choosing whether to use particular AI/machine learning tools

2022-12-23T12:45:17Z

I've just written some thoughts on my reflections on the ethics of using Whisper, a new speech-recognition tool that derives its power from machine learning. (The post also has some how-to guidance on how to use it, and examples of how I use it.) Might be interesting to folks here.

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Mastodon and the Fediverse, whiteness and the content notes conversation, etc.

2022-11-16T17:50:06Z

(Please don't share/link to this post super widely as I'm still feeling out how I think about this)

As of this month I'm not posting much to Twitter anymore. I used to post the same stuff on Twitter and on another microblogging platform called Mastodon, and now I'm really just posting on my Mastodon account. I wrote a post about Mastodon and the Fediverse, why I chose the instance I'm on, and why if you're on Mastodon.social you may want to treat that like the general "lobby" that America On-Line chat threw users into when they first joined. A place to start, and then move on from.

Then, today, someone I know asked for context on current conversations happening around whiteness and Mastodon/the Fediverse. Here's what I said (and for right now I'd like folks to not share this post super widely as I'm still feeling out how I think about this):

( context on current conversations happening around whiteness and Mastodon/the Fediverse )

(Please don't share/link to this post super widely as I'm still feeling out how I think about this)

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Stand-up comedy in November

2022-10-19T00:23:24Z

I'll be performing stand-up comedy about technology and the open source industry at two virtual conferences in November: SeaGL and !!Con. I'm developing and rehearsing new material now for these performances. The content will overlap some but won't be the same in the two sets.

More info is at my Cogito, Ergo Sumana blog.

Now's a good time to save the dates!

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Patience and love

2021-04-21T15:27:09Z

As I celebrate my fifteenth wedding anniversary and think about the long durable things we work on, I am thinking about patience.

"Somebody Will". "I am willing to sacrifice something I don't have / For something I won't have / but somebody will someday."

I've been attempting to work on my patience. I'm working on a book which will be the longest document I've ever written, and which will probably go through more and longer editing and revision passes than anything I've ever made. I'm doing this because I see an infrastructural need in free and open source software, and even if this book succeeds it will take years to change the field. The project of FLOSS, itself, trying to liberate people from being programmed by the software we use, is so huge and slow. And that's only one of the wheels against which I want to put my shoulder; there are so many gross, exploitative, destructive systems I want to smite.

I'm sustained by words by Tressie McMillan Cottom:

"You just have to know that they won your lifetime. It doesn’t mean you don’t try or work or whatever but you have to learn to fight for wins you won’t experience. That’s life, I think. That’s what I get from old Black people. You do it because it needs to be done, not because it’s being done for you."

and by João Costa Vargas:

“Once we accept that we are not wanted. Once we accept that we are not loved. It is very liberating. .... once we accept the logic of the runaway slave.... we can begin to do the work of abolition.”

I am loved; the support of loving friends -- like my spouse -- makes it more possible to accept the possibility, the reality, that I/we have opponents and that they do not love me/us. And to plant seeds that I hope the next generation can harvest.

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A tiny retrospective

2019-10-08T12:00:24Z

Pulled up this screen to share a few issues I just filed with a colleague, and noticed one dimension of the contributions I've made to Python packaging over the past few years: https://github.com/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+org%3Apypa+archived%3Afalse+author%3Abrainwane (I think you can only see this when logged in, and possibly not everyone can see it).

48 open issues in the PyPA org, 91 closed.

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Cambrian explosion of discussions about the future of software freedom

2019-09-26T11:35:22Z

In 2009, rydra_wong did the great favor of making link roundups to help people keep track of a distributed conversation happening on lots of people's blogs about a current controversy.

I'd love for someone to take up that kind of work ("linkspam" roundups) or point to something similar, a Pinboard tag or a TagTeam instance/tag/team, to help us all see people writing about the future of open source software licensing. This post by Molly de Blanc and this one by Karl Fogel, for instance.

(Crossposted to Cogito, Ergo Sumana)

Edited 25 November to add: Thank you Audrey Eschright for doing this!

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work and temperament

2019-06-21T16:11:58Z

I'm very grateful right now that I've found/made work that suits me, understanding and explaining and improving complicated systems, mostly in the open. Right now I'm in the middle of a deep understanding-so-I-can-demonstrate task, so I can explain why a particular stalled project matters & is more urgent than some stakeholders realize, and it's rewarding and I'm so happy that I'll be putting the results on a public wiki page so other people can learn from it, not just about this project, but about how a persuasive thing like that can look.

I said in a chat the other day:

and temperamentally, well, you've met me, I seem to, by default, believe that I'm doing the world a disservice if I hoard my wisdom without sharing it. I'm kinda joking but kinda not?
that plus some mild social obliviousness has really served me well in open source, and on that I am not even joking

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Thank you, fans

2019-02-27T14:56:40Z

2 years ago y'all helped me out a lot -- thank you.

As I wrote on my main blog (post syndicated on DW via sumana_feed), two years ago today, I posted here requesting volunteers -- people with a knack for proofreading, 90 free minutes and a tolerable internet connection. 30 people signed up and about 15 of you ended up being able to schedule tutoring sessions with me. I'm grateful and they are too, and I hope other projects replicate what we did. Thank you.

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Please propose narrative, performance, and visual art about programming to my festival!

2019-01-19T10:34:39Z

On May 3rd, 2019, two friends and I are hosting "The Art of Python", a miniature arts festival at PyCon North America 2019 (Cleveland, Ohio), focusing on narrative, performance, and visual art. We intend to encourage and showcase novel art that helps us share our emotionally charged experiences of programming, particularly in Python. We hope that by attending, our audience will discover new aspects of empathy and rapport, and find a different kind of delight and perspective than might otherwise be expected at a large conference.

There's more about this at my co-organizer Erty Seidohl's blog post, including an invitation to also propose your "not-talks" to !!Con.

In short, we are interested in how fictional narrative, visual and performance art, and different presentation formats can make different kinds of teaching and representation possible.

"The Art of Python" is seeking your proposals now and the deadline for submissions is 28 February. And if you've never written a play and want guidance so you can write your first, we'll have a guide up on 1 February to help you!

Thanks to Erty and to Brendan Adkins for co-organizing "The Art of Python" with me! Thanks to PyCon's Hatchery program for new PyCon events, which makes this festival possible! Thanks to Jackie Kazil for the festival name! (My codename was "Spectacle!" which is probably misleading and less accessible.)

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I'll be at OSCON tomorrow

2017-05-10T13:55:40Z

I'm going to OSCON in Austin, Texas to represent Zulip in the Open Source Alley -- would enjoy meeting any Dreamwidth folks there tomorrow! Or if you have free time in Austin Friday in the morning or afternoon, I'd enjoy hanging out.

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"Antitrust" (2001), copyleft, and disruption

2017-04-23T19:32:38Z

I saw Antitrust on an airplane in the summer of 2001. I didn't leave with a high opinion of it; it seemed campy fun.

I found a used DVD at a local thrift shop last weekend, so last night I watched it with my spouse.

It actually holds up better than I predicted on a technobabble level! We freeze-framed a lot and marvelled at how reasonable (mostly) all the command-line stuff was. And as mainstream fiction movies go, I think there still hasn't been a movie that takes the conflict between proprietary and open source software more seriously than Antitrust (I'd welcome corrections on this point).

( details, including spoilers )

At some point in the future I will watch the special features and listen to the commentary. (One of the special features is a music video for the Everclear song that plays at the end of the movie. The music video includes clips from the movie. It's like Everclear made a vid!) I imagine I'll have more thoughts then.

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Help me out: volunteer from home for 90 minutes of English tutoring

2017-02-28T00:06:35Z

Summary: Have 90 minutes, between now and April 3rd, to kindly critique less-English-fluent writers over the internet? I'd love your help.

I work with a lot of non-US-based younger people (often high school or college-aged) who contribute to the open source community over the Internet. Many of them volunteer as coders in the hopes of getting internships that will help them with their careers. The engineering education system in some of these countries, especially India, doesn't help students develop their written English skills very much; many of these students are at a disadvantage in these competitive internship application programs because their written English has poor grammar, phrasing, and punctuation. Every year I see tons of these engineering students applying for internships, and I can see how English issues in their bug reports, commit messages, code comments, application proposals, e-mails, and chat messages make it harder for them to get their ideas across.

Some kind, nonjudgmental help would go a long way for these volunteers. And it'd help level the playing field a bit.

I've successfully run little 90-minute online writing clinics via chat or collaborative document-editing platforms like Google Docs or EtherPad, where 3-4 participants bring short writing samples and I live-edit them and tell the students how to improve. They always get a lot out of it, and I can see the improvement in their writing afterwards. And when I've had time to edit their internship proposals in depth, it's helped them think better about what they actually aim to do.

Today, one of the open source projects I care a lot about, Zulip, got accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code for the second year in a row. I've been contracting as a community coordinator for Zulip for about a year, and I love that it's a project where we nurture new contributors inclusively and have high standards of engineering rigor. (I profiled the maintainer, Tim Abbott, in this post about kind negative code review.) We have dozens of new contributors in our chat who want to work with us, and we'll be getting more between now and the April 3rd application deadline. We won't be able to accept all of them. But they'll all come away from the application process as better engineers, and I'd like for that to include better English skills that'll help them persuade, lead, get better jobs, and have better chances of succeeding as entrepreneurs.

So if you could spare 90 minutes sometime between now and April 3rd, and if you have a knack for proofreading in English and have a tolerable internet connection for web browser-based textual chat, let me know and I can probably set something up that suits your schedule. It's fine if you've never done this before and it's fine if you're not a programmer and don't know programming jargon. I'll set up the "room", and I'll be there and you can backchannel with me. You'll be helping one of the best open source communities I know, and you'll be helping make sure non-G7 voices in STEM get heard and listened to.

Leave a comment below telling me how to contact you and anything you know about your upcoming schedule, and I'll take it from there!

Edited to add: I've set this entry so people without Dreamwidth accounts are able to post comments, and so that only I will be able to see the comments (comments are screened), so you can put your contact info in there and it won't be public. And please feel free to pass this link on to other groups/people who are kind and collaboratively inclined, and repost/publicize it elsewhere!

Edited March 13th to add: I have received several offers of help -- thank you! -- and I'm getting back to everyone who's commented, albeit not always within a day or two. I'm open to more offers, but I might not be able to schedule you till April. And because of the number of offers of help I've gotten, I'm opening up the pool of learners a little bit -- I'm talking with the open source community managers at Mozilla and Wikimedia to let them know that their communities can take advantage of this opportunity, too. Thank you so much.

Edited 27 Feb, 2019 to add: An update and a thank-you.

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a sample Outreachy application

2016-10-05T03:32:36Z

[fake example]

Name:

Samplemana Hariharapplicant

Project idea:

I'm interested in an Outreachy project where I implant parrots
with Zulip clients so they can repeat what I say into my living
room. This would be via an integration that would live in the
zulip/parrot repository (a new GitHub project I would create). I
figure, since you can teach parrots to say things, I want parrots
to speak aloud the traffic in a Zulip channel, so I can get audio
notifications in my living room, and I like hearing the sound of
the words I say, so I also want to be able to get parrots to say
a single user's words (my own), so I'll also implement
user-specific filtering. I only speak English and I don't think I
can manage supporting multiple languages right now but maybe I
will be able to do that towards the end of the 12 weeks.

Deliverables:

* bridge code and tests in the zulip/parrot repo
* documentation in zulip/parrot/docs
* 4 blog posts

Schedule:

November 8-December 6: acquire parrot, acquire cage and food, get
Digital Ocean virtual machine running

Dec 1 [starting early to make up for late December vacation] - Dec 6:
get test frameworks running, including parrot emulator

Dec 7 - Dec 15: write first test and initial functionality and docs
for stream-to-parrot syndication

Dec 15: first blog post

Dec 16 - 24: get initial test, functionality, and docs merged into
trunk, and get started on tests, functionality, and docs for emoji
support

December 25-January 1: vacation

January 2 - 14: finish tests, functionality, and docs for emoji
support, get merged into trunk

Jan 15: second blog post

Jan 16 - 18: set up multiparrot (buy a second parrot, cage, and food)

Jan 19 - Jan 30: write tests, functionality, and docs for
user-specific parrot syndication (each user's posts spoken by a
different parrot), get merged into trunk

Feb 1 - 9: fix bugs and feed bugs to parrot

Feb 10: third blog post

Feb 11 - 28: write user docs about caring for parrot, merge into
trunk; deploy in larger environment with many streams, users, and
parrots, and fix ensuing problems

March 1: fourth blog post

March 2 - 6: buffer time

Pencils down: March 6

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Eeeeee!

2016-03-06T22:32:40Z

I just called up Betsy Leondar-Wright (per the contact info on the Class Matters site) and told her I am gonna give a talk at LibrePlanet inspired by her piece on inessential weirdnesses and she was so jazzed! She probably won't be at my talk but she is so happy for the idea of inessential weirdnesses to be getting out! She might even have some time to look at my draft this week! She is so interested in spreading the word about Friends of Dennis and hearing more about the Birds of a Feather session I held at OSBridge that one time and OMG I feel like bouncing up and down. Eeeeee! Cross-generational and interdisciplinary activist conversation makes me super happy.

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Notes from my FOSDEM talk

2016-02-01T01:27:46Z

"Comparing codes of conduct to copyleft licenses": written notes for a talk by Sumana Harihareswara, delivered in the Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom at FOSDEM, 31 January 2016 in Brussels, Belgium. Slightly better notes, including a photo, are now on my main blog. Video recording arriving around March 2016. Condensed notes available at Anjana Sofia Vakil's blog.

Good afternoon. I'm Sumana Harihareswara, and I represent myself, and my firm Changeset Consulting http://changeset.nyc/ . I'm here to discuss some things we can learn from comparing antiharassment policies, or community codes of conduct, to copyleft software licenses such as the GPL. I'll be laying out some major similarities and differences, especially delving into how these different approaches give us insight about common community attitudes and assumptions. And I'll lay out some lessons we can apply as we consider and advocate various sides of these issues, and potentially to apply to some other topics within free and open source software as well.

My notes will all be available online after this, so you don't have to scramble to write down my brilliant insights, or, more likely, links. And I don't have any slides. If you really need slides, I'm sorry, and if you're like, YES! then just bask in the next twenty-five minutes.

( Text of my notes )

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