Sumana

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.....

(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)

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.