OCTO Speaker Series #9: Sumana Harihareswara

[idan]

Hello everyone! Welcome to the ninth installment of the OCTO Speaker Series, featuring Sumana Harihareswara! (brainwane on twitter & github)

Be kind and thoughtful — we take our code of conduct seriously.

[idan]

You talked about overview / "monitoring" tools — I've struggled with my GH notifications for years, everyone loves to dunk on notifications in a goldilocks kind of way, too many, too noisy, not the right abstraction. You're talking about notifications that are on a different scale — cutting across tooling, helping me get a sense for what the community wants.

• It sounds like this is something one step removed from a GitHub because it looks at other sources of information. What are those other sources of information?
• You highlighted "what's active right now" — I'd love to talk a little more about the lens. Why is "what's active" so important? This also implies a one-way signal, from various contributors to maintainers. What about the opposite direction? Is transmitting thoughts from maintainers to contributors important?

[brainwane]

I replied to this a bit during the Q&A which is now available as part of the talk transcript!

[idan]

The story you described around the new contributor persona, "Paula", and apprenticeship
What would that look like at scale? Wave a magic wand, you get to edit reality, what's different in that timeline, where there's an apprenticeship model? Who helps people find apprentices and apprenticeships?

One of the problems that many maintainers face is lots of noise — "Hi I want to contribute to this project" is a common refrain, but there's no way to sort out the folks that actually have commitment from the people who are just dabbling. Without passing judgment about how people contribute, maintainers are people too, and the minutes they spend cultivating new contributors are an opportunity cost, they can't be in two conversations at once, they can't be reviewing PRs while holding someone's hand.

Is this a submarine ask around "onboarding classes" for open-source? That's how this works in business, I suppose?

[brainwane]

I discussed this a bit during our live Q&A and the transcript is now available!

[idan]

You keep coming back to this tooling being built into the forge, like a GitHub.
If they are built into the platform, then is the fitness of that thing about satisfying "most" users?
If they aren't built into the platform, who owns it? Is it just another open-source project?
How do we not end up with the XKCD problem of "now we have 15 standards"?

[brainwane]

We got to talk about this a bit during our live Q&A and that transcript is now available!