♫ dubstep music playing ♫
This was in the pale dublight by Sumana Harihareswara.
Welcome to Passionate Voices, welcome Sumana!
Hi there, Erik! How's it going today?
Good, how are you?
I'm good! It's good to see you!
Good to see you too!
So, for our viewers, a quick summary:
Sumana is a technology manager, a writer, a coder, a community organizer.
Born in New Jersey, moved through Pennsylvania, Missouri,
northern California, before coming to New York, and also has been involved
in open source for a long time. Sumana, what is your passion?
I would say I have two main passions.
One of them is making people laugh. Through stand-up comedy, through
extremely silly web apps, my writing and things like that.
The fanvid that you just saw, for instance.
But the other passion, the one that I spend more time, and certainly have been
spending a lot of my career on, is, I really care a lot about empowering people,
especially marginalized and especially underprivileged peope, using technology.
And sometimes that means working on technology that does that
empowering, such as MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia.
Sometimes it means teaching people how to be better users of technology
through making or leading trainings and tutoring people, mentoring people, and so on.
And sometimes it means helping get lots of different diverse people into
the world of making technology, so we can all empower ourselves.
So, for instance I've been involved in a lot of diversity efforts on different
scales and at different parts of the "pipeline", involved in getting diverse
people of diverse demographics, talents, abilities and backgrounds into open
source software. So we can all make this software together, that we're all
using to improve our own lives.
- So, Sumana, how did you get involved in open source in the first place?
- My origin story is a guy named Seth Schoen.
Seth Schoen is a technologist, currently at the Electronic Freedom .. Frontier
Foundation. Sorry. Like everybody else, I accidentally say freedom when I should
say Frontier. But, back in 1998, when we met, we were both undergraduates at
the University of California at Berkeley. And I was hanging out with nerds.
These were the kinds of geeks who made fun of me because I referred
to individual "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episodes by title instead
of stardate. So, clearly that made me a humanities person. [laughs]
And I, through one of them, met this guy, who was introduced to me partly as:
"He's such a free software zealot, he won't use Windows at all."
And that was Seth Schoen. And Seth introduced me to the
side of open source and free software that's about empowering ourselves
and everybody, by making sure that everybody has control over the
software that we use and that in some sense controls us.
The connection between that and all these other values that I care a lot about,
like everbody having a say, everybody having a fair chance.
And he introduced me, for instance, to Slashdot, which at the time was sort of
the open source New York Times. And which incidentally is, through
a serious of links, the way that I met Leonard Richardson, who is now my
husband, actually, and who has been sort of my partner in a lot of these
endeavors for the past decade plus.
Seth was a fantastic mentor and guide. He was the kind of guy, and still is
absolutely the kind of guy, where, you ask him a question because you
don't have enough information. And it would never even cross his mind to think
of ridiculing you, or using this as an opportunity for a dominance display.
He always thought really deeply about, "Hold on, what do you need to understand
here that you didn't understand, that caused you to ask that question",
and then he would help you build your mental model.
And he was such a gentle teacher to me exactly when I needed it.
And so to me that's what open source is.
He was my role model, not just in terms of trying to live values like freedom,
and free speech, and empowering each other.
And it was very soon after that I switched to Linux, in the late 90s,
which meant that I had to deal with hand configuring PPP and all the rest of it.
But also, he was my guide and my role model in seeing what this world is and
ought to be, in terms of all of us sharing and teaching each other.
And I recently talked to someone else who said that his role model in getting into
open source had been Linus Torvalds. So he had learned to take people down.
He had learned that the way to build yourself is by shouting and others
and being quite rude and snarky to them, because then there will be people who
applaud you for that clever snarkiness.
And I'm very, very grateful that in 1998, that's not who I ran into.
- And where do you think that comes from, that snarkiness that you sometimes find in
open source communities? Do you have a theory around, like, how these behaviors
develop and why people exhibit them?
- I find that basically all the human communities that I've ever been
a part of include some elements of people being competitive, and of people
being nurturing and collaborative.
I think if I look in open source, I can find both of those things.
If I look in the community of people who read and write romance novels --
I've recently started reading romance -- then I would also find that.
If you look in sports, I mean, you'll find that anywhere.
And I think that the Linux kernel community bears very strongly the stamp
of the person who founded it, and who by norm -- conversations are normative.
Part of how we know what is okay to say, is we look at what other people are
saying, right? And we look at what people get praise or punishment for doing.
And I think that's part of what people see.
I think there's also, of course, as I say, pockets and corners, right?
You look at the Python community and you look at how Guido van Rossum has
acted in his capacity as a leader for many, many years.
And overall you're going to see, there is some snark, there is humor.
You watch his keynote from PyCon this year, PyCon North America in Montreal
that just happended last month. And you hear laughter, but it's gentle laughter,
and it's often self-deprecating laughter.
He talked, he spent a tremendous amount of his keynote talking about the reasons
on a genuine, legitimate, understandable psychological level, and sort of a
lifecycle level, why projects go unmaintained and fall into disrepair.
And so he approached that question not from, "Okay, now we need to punish those
people and I'm gonna make fun of those people" kind of a perspective.
But he said, "This is going to happen, this is a natural part of life.
Let us engage in useful conversation, so those tasks can then get taken up by
the next generation." Which seems to me to be a much healthier approach.
And so I think there's some amount of top-down leadership and role models and
what not. I think there's also some element of, it is a simple fact that text online, because
it doesn't bear with it things like body language and oral tone, it is easy for us
as risk-averse creatures, as insecure people, to read even neutral words as
hostile. I ran into this many times myself as a community manager.
People who do code review know it. People who are trying to give written
criticism even to people in a peer writing group or something like that know it.
And we added emoticons to our lives partly in order to help compensate for this.
And I think in that environment, sometimes it's easy to just go with it.
To go with that current, and to go with that flow.
And say, well, if it's going to be read as hostile anyway -- perhaps this even
happens on a subconscious level -- then I may as well hone that.
And there are a lot of people -- I'm actually a little bit jealous
of the people who decided from a young age on the Internet that they would try
playing around with being known through different identities, and hide behind
pseudonyms, and hone their flaming skills and stuff like that.
Because it is a genuinely valuable skill to be able to be rude to somebody
else on the Internet in such a way that other people will applaud you and back
you up. I do not have that skill. And one reason why I don't have that skill is
because I never practiced it. Because from a very young age I decided, everything
that I said on the public Internet, I was going to sign my entire name to.
And from a very young age I knew that was going to be an unusual and unique
calling card, and I would not be hide, I would never be able to say,
"It was that other Sumana Harihareswara who said those terrible things." [laughs]
So I ddn't learn that skill.
And that's one reason why there are kinds of leadership, that no one calls
leadership, generally, that I am not going to be able to do.