Passionate Voices Episode 1: Sumana Harihareswara

♫ 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.