WEBVTT 00:00:02.202 --> 00:00:06.112 ♫ dubstep music playing ♫ 00:00:35.252 --> 00:00:39.471 This was in the pale dublight by Sumana Harihareswara. 00:00:39.814 --> 00:00:42.838 Welcome to Passionate Voices, welcome Sumana! 00:00:42.964 --> 00:00:45.772 Hi there, Erik! How's it going today? 00:00:45.926 --> 00:00:47.052 Good, how are you? 00:00:47.145 --> 00:00:49.539 I'm good! It's good to see you! 00:00:49.711 --> 00:00:51.169 Good to see you too! 00:00:51.358 --> 00:00:52.926 So, for our viewers, a quick summary: 00:00:53.021 --> 00:00:57.374 Sumana is a technology manager, a writer, a coder, a community organizer. 00:00:57.481 --> 00:01:01.117 Born in New Jersey, moved through Pennsylvania, Missouri, 00:01:01.178 --> 00:01:06.325 northern California, before coming to New York, and also has been involved 00:01:06.365 --> 00:01:10.422 in open source for a long time. Sumana, what is your passion? 00:01:10.521 --> 00:01:13.935 I would say I have two main passions. 00:01:14.037 --> 00:01:18.689 One of them is making people laugh. Through stand-up comedy, through 00:01:18.787 --> 00:01:24.368 extremely silly web apps, my writing and things like that. 00:01:24.461 --> 00:01:27.438 The fanvid that you just saw, for instance. 00:01:27.565 --> 00:01:33.256 But the other passion, the one that I spend more time, and certainly have been 00:01:33.318 --> 00:01:37.511 spending a lot of my career on, is, I really care a lot about empowering people, 00:01:37.605 --> 00:01:43.194 especially marginalized and especially underprivileged peope, using technology. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And sometimes that means working on technology that does that 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 empowering, such as MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Sometimes it means teaching people how to be better users of technology 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 through making or leading trainings and tutoring people, mentoring people, and so on. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And sometimes it means helping get lots of different diverse people into 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the world of making technology, so we can all empower ourselves. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So, for instance I've been involved in a lot of diversity efforts on different 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 scales and at different parts of the "pipeline", involved in getting diverse 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 people of diverse demographics, talents, abilities and backgrounds into open 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 source software. So we can all make this software together, that we're all 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 using to improve our own lives. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 - So, Sumana, how did you get involved in open source in the first place? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 - My origin story is a guy named Seth Schoen. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Seth Schoen is a technologist, currently at the Electronic Freedom .. Frontier 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Foundation. Sorry. Like everybody else, I accidentally say freedom when I should 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 say Frontier. But, back in 1998, when we met, we were both undergraduates at 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the University of California at Berkeley. And I was hanging out with nerds. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 These were the kinds of geeks who made fun of me because I referred 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 to individual "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episodes by title instead 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 of stardate. So, clearly that made me a humanities person. [laughs] 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And I, through one of them, met this guy, who was introduced to me partly as: 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 "He's such a free software zealot, he won't use Windows at all." 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And that was Seth Schoen. And Seth introduced me to the 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 side of open source and free software that's about empowering ourselves 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and everybody, by making sure that everybody has control over the 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 software that we use and that in some sense controls us. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The connection between that and all these other values that I care a lot about, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 like everbody having a say, everybody having a fair chance. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And he introduced me, for instance, to Slashdot, which at the time was sort of 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the open source New York Times. And which incidentally is, through 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 a serious of links, the way that I met Leonard Richardson, who is now my 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 husband, actually, and who has been sort of my partner in a lot of these 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 endeavors for the past decade plus. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Seth was a fantastic mentor and guide. He was the kind of guy, and still is 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 absolutely the kind of guy, where, you ask him a question because you 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 don't have enough information. And it would never even cross his mind to think 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 of ridiculing you, or using this as an opportunity for a dominance display. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 He always thought really deeply about, "Hold on, what do you need to understand 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 here that you didn't understand, that caused you to ask that question", 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and then he would help you build your mental model. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And he was such a gentle teacher to me exactly when I needed it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And so to me that's what open source is. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 He was my role model, not just in terms of trying to live values like freedom, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and free speech, and empowering each other. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And it was very soon after that I switched to Linux, in the late 90s, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 which meant that I had to deal with hand configuring PPP and all the rest of it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But also, he was my guide and my role model in seeing what this world is and 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 ought to be, in terms of all of us sharing and teaching each other. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And I recently talked to someone else who said that his role model in getting into 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 open source had been Linus Torvalds. So he had learned to take people down. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 He had learned that the way to build yourself is by shouting and others 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and being quite rude and snarky to them, because then there will be people who 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 applaud you for that clever snarkiness. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And I'm very, very grateful that in 1998, that's not who I ran into. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 - And where do you think that comes from, that snarkiness that you sometimes find in 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 open source communities? Do you have a theory around, like, how these behaviors 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 develop and why people exhibit them? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 - I find that basically all the human communities that I've ever been 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 a part of include some elements of people being competitive, and of people 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 being nurturing and collaborative. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I think if I look in open source, I can find both of those things. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 If I look in the community of people who read and write romance novels -- 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I've recently started reading romance -- then I would also find that. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 If you look in sports, I mean, you'll find that anywhere. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And I think that the Linux kernel community bears very strongly the stamp 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 of the person who founded it, and who by norm -- conversations are normative. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Part of how we know what is okay to say, is we look at what other people are 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 saying, right? And we look at what people get praise or punishment for doing. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And I think that's part of what people see. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I think there's also, of course, as I say, pockets and corners, right? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 You look at the Python community and you look at how Guido van Rossum has 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 acted in his capacity as a leader for many, many years. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And overall you're going to see, there is some snark, there is humor. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 You watch his keynote from PyCon this year, PyCon North America in Montreal 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that just happended last month. And you hear laughter, but it's gentle laughter, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and it's often self-deprecating laughter. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 He talked, he spent a tremendous amount of his keynote talking about the reasons 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 on a genuine, legitimate, understandable psychological level, and sort of a 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 lifecycle level, why projects go unmaintained and fall into disrepair. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And so he approached that question not from, "Okay, now we need to punish those 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 people and I'm gonna make fun of those people" kind of a perspective. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But he said, "This is going to happen, this is a natural part of life. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Let us engage in useful conversation, so those tasks can then get taken up by 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the next generation." Which seems to me to be a much healthier approach. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And so I think there's some amount of top-down leadership and role models and 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 what not. I think there's also some element of, it is a simple fact that text online, because 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 it doesn't bear with it things like body language and oral tone, it is easy for us 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 as risk-averse creatures, as insecure people, to read even neutral words as 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 hostile. I ran into this many times myself as a community manager. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 People who do code review know it. People who are trying to give written 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 criticism even to people in a peer writing group or something like that know it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And we added emoticons to our lives partly in order to help compensate for this. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And I think in that environment, sometimes it's easy to just go with it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 To go with that current, and to go with that flow. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And say, well, if it's going to be read as hostile anyway -- perhaps this even 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 happens on a subconscious level -- then I may as well hone that. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And there are a lot of people -- I'm actually a little bit jealous 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 of the people who decided from a young age on the Internet that they would try 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 playing around with being known through different identities, and hide behind 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 pseudonyms, and hone their flaming skills and stuff like that. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Because it is a genuinely valuable skill to be able to be rude to somebody 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 else on the Internet in such a way that other people will applaud you and back 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 you up. I do not have that skill. And one reason why I don't have that skill is 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 because I never practiced it. Because from a very young age I decided, everything 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that I said on the public Internet, I was going to sign my entire name to. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And from a very young age I knew that was going to be an unusual and unique 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 calling card, and I would not be hide, I would never be able to say, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 "It was that other Sumana Harihareswara who said those terrible things." [laughs] 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So I ddn't learn that skill. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And that's one reason why there are kinds of leadership, that no one calls 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 leadership, generally, that I am not going to be able to do.