18: Sumana Harihareswara on sketching, standup, and maintainership

FOSS and Crafts

We're joined by Sumana Harihareswara, a FOSS advocate yes, but also a person of so many other talents! We talk about sketching, standup comedy, and maintainership for the long life of free software projects. (Did you know you can hire Sumana to help on your FOSS project maintainership btw? Sumana runs Changeset Consulting!) We also talk about representation in the FOSS community within the arts (especially narrative arts), and about learning new skills within "no big deal" contexts.

Links:

• Changeset Consulting

• Sumana's LibrePlanet 2017 keynote: Lessons, myths, and lenses: What I wish I'd known in 1998

• Producing Open Source Software

• Vidding and some of its origins in the slideshow form (in particular with Kandy Fong's early works)

• More on fanworks and fan communities and their history at fanlore.org

• Vid: Pipeline by, as it turns out, Sumana Harihareswara!

• Vid: Only a Lad by Laura Shapiro

• Vid: Straightening Up the House by eruthros; also see all this other great commentary!

• The Bug by Ellen Ullman

• Halt and Catch Fire

• The Internet's Own Boy, a film and play about Aaron Swartz, which you can watch here in movie form CORRECTION: Actually Sumana pointed us in the correct direction... the play was Building a Real Boy, a separate thing from the forementioned film!

• Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, and also the critical response Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic by Allison Parrish

• XKCD

• Julia Styles in Ghostwriter

• Software Freedom Conservancy, who is doing a fundraiser right now!

  • Sumana's fundraising vid for Conservancy in 2015

  • Chris's animated ascii art card for Conservancy in 2019 (source code)

• If you're interested in Sumana's upcoming book on long-term maintenance of FOSS projects, you can contact her for more info! UPDATE: Sampler released!