A talk on June 7th, hiring, 5 ways projects get stuck, & more

Hi, newsletter subscribers! Thanks for being interested in Changeset Consulting and my open source project management work and writing.

Today I’ll invite you to an upcoming talk, share some recent writing, list a few useful new tools and resources, and publicize some places hiring people to do open source.

(For prettier formatting, view as HTML or see the archived version on the web at https://buttondown.email/Changeset .)

Upstream talk on June 7th

On Tuesday, June 7th, I’m speaking at Upstream Live on “Cadence shear: Managing rhythm and tempo mismatches in participation” in open source projects. I’ll discuss how to deal with this kind of friction in teams mixing paid and volunteer contributors, or different paid teams collaborating in a consortium, etc. The talk is prerecorded; attend live to participate in Q&A. Registration is free!

Review your volunteer chores on June 21

June 21st is the next Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day: Every solstice, take inventory of your volunteer responsibilities. Check with yourself, and end the commitments you need to end – maybe by taking a break, or by rotating it on to someone else, or by sunsetting a project.

New resources for maintainers, users, & more

Earlier this year I ran several maintainer skills workshops sponsored by Open Source Collective. I’m developing resource documents based on those sessions, and the first one’s gone live: How to attract corporate sponsors for funding for open source projects. I’ll link to more in future newsletters.

I’ve updated my Resources page while overhauling the Changeset website (worked with Areaweb, which was great). We also created an overview of the 5 main ways open source projects get stuck.

A few recent blog posts:

• Contribution metrics are messy and here’s an example. I frequently notice questions like “how many contributors does this open source project have?” or “how much contribution is this project getting?” Those aren’t simple questions.
• Nurturing volunteers: a shortcut + an event template. Here are suggestions to help volunteers get oriented. One is “Career Hour” to introduce learners to other projects and positions. The other is “Live Tour As First Draft”: giving an informal presentation to extract tacit knowledge from your brain. How should you structure it? What story do you set out to tell? I’ve found three main ways to approach this: historical, organizational, and experiential.
• Management book recommendations.
• PDFtk, qpdf, And Dealing With Password-Protected PDFs. I used to use PDFtk for rearranging and concatenating PDFs, but I’m switching to qpdf because it can deal with password protection better for recently created files.
• “How Do I Accommodate This Person?” Ask JAN. How can you better accommodate this disabled employee, contractor, volunteer, friend, or self? The Job Accommodation Network is a fantastic site to get your ideas flowing.

Tools and advice

Signal-boosting others’ work:

• Detect the microarchitecture of your machine and print it out in a reasonably readable way with the archspec package.
• Phabricator has reached end-of-life. Need help migrating from Phabricator to GitLab or GitHub? Open Tech Strategies has built an open source tool & process for cross-forge conversion.
• If you like “here’s how I maintain/overhauled/released this chunk of software” reports, especially open source stuff that a bunch of people depend on, and you aren’t reading Will Kahn-Greene, I believe you are missing out.
• How to run a good virtual event.
• Notebooksharing.space is meant to be “the fastest way to share your Jupyter/R notebook with someone else!”
• Running an open source funding effort? Mozilla Open Source Support (on hiatus since 2020) has a new program impact evaluation summary with lessons to share.

Hiring

Signal-boosting some organizations that are hiring people to work on open source software:

• Freedom of the Press Foundation is hiring a software developer and a part-time education consultant
• Open Tech Strategies is “hiring full-stack web developers for free software/open source/libre work! These are part-time contract positions, but note that for many of our contractors this is their main or even only gig.”
• Quansight is hiring for a PyData maintainer, a Pandas maintainer, and more
• BeeWare is hiring an engineer

Best wishes, as always. If you’d like to ask for my availability to work on your projects, or invite me to speak, please reply to this mail or contact me in the Fediverse – I’m on Mastodon as @brainwane@social.coop.

-Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset Consulting