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♫ dubstep music playing ♫

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This was in the pale dublight 
by Sumana Harihareswara.

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Welcome to Passionate Voices, 
welcome Sumana!

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Hi there, Erik!
How's it going today?

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Good, how are you?

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I'm good! It's good to see you!

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Good to see you too!

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So, for our viewers, 
a quick summary:

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Sumana is a technology manager,
a writer, a coder, a community organizer.

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Born in New Jersey, moved
through Pennsylvania, Missouri,

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northern California, before coming to
New York, and also has been involved

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in open source for a long time.
Sumana, what is your passion?

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I would say I have two main passions.

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One of them is making people laugh.
Through stand-up comedy, through

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extremely silly web apps, my writing
and things like that.

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The fanvid that you just saw, for 
instance.

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But the other passion, the one that I
spend more time, and certainly have been

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spending a lot of my career on, is, I
really care a lot about empowering people,

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especially marginalized and especially
underprivileged peope, using technology.

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And sometimes that means
working on technology that does that

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empowering, such as MediaWiki,
the software behind Wikipedia.

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Sometimes it means teaching people
how to be better users of technology

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through making or leading trainings and
tutoring people, mentoring people, and so on.

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And sometimes it means helping get 
lots of different diverse people into

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the world of making technology,
so we can all empower ourselves.

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So, for instance I've been involved in
a lot of diversity efforts on different

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scales and at different parts of the 
"pipeline", involved in getting diverse

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people of diverse demographics, talents,
abilities and backgrounds into open

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source software. So we can all make 
this software together, that we're all

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using to improve our own lives.

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- So, Sumana, how did you get involved
in open source in the first place?

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- My origin story is a guy named Seth 
Schoen.

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Seth Schoen is a technologist, currently
at the Electronic Freedom .. Frontier

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Foundation. Sorry. Like everybody else,
I accidentally say freedom when I should

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say Frontier. But, back in 1998, when we
met, we were both undergraduates at

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the University of California at Berkeley.
And I was hanging out with nerds.

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These were the kinds of geeks who
made fun of me because I referred

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to individual "Star Trek: The Next 
Generation" episodes by title instead

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of stardate. So, clearly that made me a
humanities person. [laughs]

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And I, through one of them, met this guy,
who was introduced to me partly as:

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"He's such a free software zealot, he
won't use Windows at all."

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And that was Seth Schoen.
And Seth introduced me to the

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side of open source and free software
that's about empowering ourselves

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and everybody, by making sure
that everybody has control over the

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software that we use and that in some
sense controls us.

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The connection between that and all these
other values that I care a lot about,

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like everbody having a say, everybody
having a fair chance.

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And he introduced me, for instance, to
Slashdot, which at the time was sort of

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the open source New York Times.
And which incidentally is, through

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a serious of links, the way that I met
Leonard Richardson, who is now my

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husband, actually, and who has been
sort of my partner in a lot of these

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endeavors for the past decade plus.

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Seth was a fantastic mentor and guide.
He was the kind of guy, and still is

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absolutely the kind of guy, where,
you ask him a question because you

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don't have enough information. And it
would never even cross his mind to think

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of ridiculing you, or using this as an
opportunity for a dominance display.

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He always thought really deeply about,
"Hold on, what do you need to understand

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here that you didn't understand, that
caused you to ask that question",

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and then he would help you build your
mental model.

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And he was such a gentle teacher to me
exactly when I needed it.

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And so to me that's what open source is.

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He was my role model, not just in terms
of trying to live values like freedom,

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and free speech, and empowering each
other.

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And it was very soon after that 
I switched to Linux, in the late 90s,

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which meant that I had to deal with hand
configuring PPP and all the rest of it.

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But also, he was my guide and my role
model in seeing what this world is and

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ought to be, in terms of all of us 
sharing and teaching each other.

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And I recently talked to someone else who
said that his role model in getting into

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open source had been Linus Torvalds.
So he had learned to take people down.

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He had learned that the way to build 
yourself is by shouting and others

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and being quite rude and snarky to them,
because then there will be people who

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applaud you for that clever snarkiness.

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And I'm very, very grateful that in 1998,
that's not who I ran into.

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- And where do you think that comes from,
that snarkiness that you sometimes find in

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open source communities? Do you have a
theory around, like, how these behaviors

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develop and why people exhibit them?

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- I find that basically all the human
communities that I've ever been

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a part of include some elements of
people being competitive, and of people

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being nurturing and collaborative.

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I think if I look in open source,
I can find both of those things.

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If I look in the community of people
who read and write romance novels --

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I've recently started reading romance --
then I would also find that.

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If you look in sports, I mean, you'll find
that anywhere.

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And I think that the Linux kernel
community bears very strongly the stamp

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of the person who founded it, and who
by norm -- conversations are normative.

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Part of how we know what is okay to say,
is we look at what other people are

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saying, right? And we look at what people
get praise or punishment for doing.

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And I think that's part of what people 
see.

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I think there's also, of course, as I say,
pockets and corners, right?

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You look at the Python community and
you look at how Guido van Rossum has

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acted in his capacity as a leader for
many, many years.

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And overall you're going to see, there
is some snark, there is humor.

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You watch his keynote from PyCon this
year, PyCon North America in Montreal

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that just happended last month. And you
hear laughter, but it's gentle laughter,

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and it's often self-deprecating laughter.

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He talked, he spent a tremendous amount
of his keynote talking about the reasons

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on a genuine, legitimate, understandable
psychological level, and sort of a

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lifecycle level, why projects go
unmaintained and fall into disrepair.

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And so he approached that question not
from, "Okay, now we need to punish those

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people and I'm gonna make fun of those
people" kind of a perspective.

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But he said, "This is going to happen,
this is a natural part of life.

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Let us engage in useful conversation,
so those tasks can then get taken up by

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the next generation." Which seems to me
to be a much healthier approach.

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And so I think there's some amount of
top-down leadership and role models and

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what not. I think there's also some element
of, it is a simple fact that text online, because

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it doesn't bear with it things like body
language and oral tone, it is easy for us

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as risk-averse creatures, as insecure
people, to read even neutral words as

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hostile. I ran into this many times myself
as a community manager.

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People who do code review know it.
People who are trying to give written

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criticism even to people in a peer writing
group or something like that know it.

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And we added emoticons to our lives partly
in order to help compensate for this.

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And I think in that environment, sometimes
it's easy to just go with it.

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To go with that current, and to go with
that flow.

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And say, well, if it's going to be read as
hostile anyway -- perhaps this even

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happens on a subconscious level --
then I may as well hone that.

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And there are a lot of people --
I'm actually a little bit jealous

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of the people who decided from a young
age on the Internet that they would try

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playing around with being known through
different identities, and hide behind

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pseudonyms, and hone their flaming skills
and stuff like that.

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Because it is a genuinely valuable skill
to be able to be rude to somebody

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else on the Internet in such a way that
other people will applaud you and back

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you up. I do not have that skill. And one
reason why I don't have that skill is

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because I never practiced it. Because from
a very young age I decided, everything

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that I said on the public Internet, I was
going to sign my entire name to.

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And from a very young age I knew that
was going to be an unusual and unique

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calling card, and I would not be hide,
I would never be able to say,

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"It was that other Sumana Harihareswara
who said those terrible things." [laughs]

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So I ddn't learn that skill.

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And that's one reason why there are 
kinds of leadership, that no one calls

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leadership, generally, that I am not 
going to be able to do.