Every other Friday, we host a weekly call to document, share, and respond to current events in open source sustainability.
We have two calls coming up in October:
- Friday, October 7th (TOMORROW) at 16:00 UTC (12 pm ET/5 pm BST) - notes & connection details
- Friday, October 21st at 16:00 UTC (12 pm ET/5 pm BST) - notes & connection details
Here is a summary of all our September calls.
September 9th, 2022
We kicked off the call looking at some potential content theft between remix / solidjs. While this kind of drama is not new in the open source world, we weren’t sure if “content theft” was the right focus for the situation given the MIT license involved.
This study on the importance of non-tech roles in open source highlighted the importance of people commenting and reacting on GitHub for a healthy community. We’d love to see further research on the types of comments – are they people helpfully answering questions? Or simple +1s? We found that being able to step away from a community and still have questions being answered, and newcomers being welcomed made a big difference. Some ideas:
- Have a “welcome brigade” role that asks newcomers “what brought you to this project?
Also reading: Anita’s blog post draft, Why I’m Open-Sourcing an NFT Insider Trading Policy for the Web3 Community
September 23rd, 2022
(AN: I wasn’t here for this call – read the full notes)
This was a design-heavy week for our Sustain Together discussion!
Open Source Design is thinking about what an Open Source Design internship could look like. What does a design internship look like in an open source space? One idea that came up was designing infographics to help others learn about OSS (like Mars Lee’s OSS zines), or helping with documentation.
In other big news, Adobe buys Figma and Penpot gets high up on hacker news! While we’re intrigued to see what Adobe does with Figma, we’re excited to see Penpot get more users and interest. Figma has done great work with Figma education and with accessibility to Africans compared to Adobe.
We’re starting to see more people saying things along the lines of “I will NEVER work with open source programs as they offer no guarantee of support” – another (not ideal!) way to address the issues brought up in Mike McQuaid’s blog Entitlement in Open Source. While the post brought up good points about maintaining projects that you also depend on, from a design perspective you can also sit down with people who do use it. But make sure you don’t only design for the superusers.
Opportunities
- Hacktoberfest is here! A month-long celebration of open-source projects, their maintainers, and the entire community of contributors.
Contributors
Sept 9: @abbycabs @anthonyronda @Anita_Ihuman @brownie Django Skorupa (async)
Sep 23: @Erioldoesdesign Django Skorupa @brownie @anthonyronda @Anita_Ihuman