Posts in thoughts

Contributing to open source: A short guide for organizations

Over the years I’ve had a recurring question from people who are in organizations both big and small: how can we participate in open source communities?

Whether it is because of altruism or strategic importance, many companies, research groups, non-profits, etc want to be involved in open source projects (particularly large and impactful ones like Jupyter), but getting involved can be an opaque and confusing process if you’re not already familiar with open source. Each community has its own nuances and social dynamics, and approaching from the outside can be a challenge.

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What would Rust-style governance look like in Jupyter?

As I’ve written about before, I like Rust’s governance structure. I mean, who can’t get behind a community that lists governance as a top-level page on its website?

Jupyter is currently in the middle of figuring out the next phase of its governance structure, and so I have been thinking about what this might look like. This post is a quick thought-experiment to explore what it’d mean to port over Rust’s governance directly into the Jupyter community.

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Three things I love about CircleCI

I recently had to beef up the continuous deployment of Jupyter Book, and used it as an opportunity to learn a bit more about CircleCI’s features. It turns out, they’re pretty cool! Here are a few of the things that I learned this time around.

For those who aren’t familiar with CircleCI, it is a service that runs Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) workflows for projects. This basically means that they manage many kinds of infrastructure that can launch jobs that run test suites, deploy applications, and test on many different environments.

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Open communities need to be partners, not sources of free labor

In the last couple of years, we’ve seen an increasing number of organizations start to spawn products that take a largely open stack (e.g., the SciPy ecosystem) and wrap it in a thin layer of proprietary/custom interface + infrastructure. On the face of it, this isn’t a problem - I really want people to be able to make money using the open source stack - however, there is a big caveat. When you look at the work that those organizations have done over time, you often see a pretty thin trail of contributions back to those open source projects.

I’d argue that using an open community’s software without contributing back is straight-up exploitative (legal, sure, but still exploitative), and we should think about ways to suppress this kind of behavior. This post is a collection of thoughts on that topic.

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How do projects signal how “open” they are?

How do open projects signal their “openness” to the outside community? This is a really hard question, particularly because nowadays “open” has become a buzzword that doesn’t just signal a project’s position to the community, but is also used as a marketing term to increase support, users, or resources.

I was thinking about this the other day, so decided to take to twitter:

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I like Rust’s governance structure

Recently I’ve been reading up on governance models for several large-ish open source projects. This is partially because I’m involved in a bunch of these projects myself, and partially because it’s fascinating to see distributed groups of people organizing themselves in effective (or not) ways on the internet.

Governance is tricky, because there is an inherent tension between:

Rust teams

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