Shauna Gordon-McKeon

Interested in chatting about governance challenges faced by your open source project or open source as a whole? Join us for an informal discussion of topics such as defining your governance, resisting corporate influence, technical decision making, and whatever governance challenges have been on your mind.

This session offers rapid talks by and for researchers. These short talks will provide brief insights into free and open source software development, use, and communities, as well as questions we need to be asking ourselves as community members and researchers.

Other people: Matthew Gaughan adam hyde Anita Sarma Kaylea Champion

When most people hear the word “governance” they think of formal documents like bylaws and big questions like “who calls the shots?” While those elements can be important, governance is actually much more common than that. It’s part of any project’s everyday work - but, like many unacknowledged dependencies, many people only notice when there’s a critical bug. This talk will introduce a basic framework for thinking about governance as well as a few common governance models in open source. Then, we’ll talk about a few of those ‘critical bugs’ that projects face and how a governance lens can help us fix them. We’ll discuss: - maintainer burnout - growing new community leaders - roadmapping and other kinds of technical decision-making - formalizing and transitioning governance structures Audience members will walk away with a new appreciation for governance and a suite of tools, ideas, and resources that they can use to help their open source projects flourish.

Free software licenses constrain how software can be used, while providing no limits or guidance on how it can be built. As a result, a wide variety of governance structures are used in free software projects, from "one person, one vote" democracy to "benevolent dictator for life," and beyond.

This presentation provides a survey of existing governance structures used by free software projects such as Python, Debian, and others. Together, we'll explore how governance decisions have affected these projects over time, using the Common Pool Resource framework developed by Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom.

Throughout the history of mankind, new tools have transformed our lives, bringing political and social change hard on the heels of technological change. For technologists at the vanguard of these changes, there is a tendency towards optimism, toward innovation for innovation’s sake. “Move fast and break things," the motto goes. But what if our democracy is the thing that gets broken? This talk discusses the "digital revolution" and its impact on American political culture, with a specific focus on the influence of social media on news and the influence of automation on the economy.

Digital resources such as software programs can be easily copied and shared, but distribution is restrained by technical, legal, and cultural means. The free culture community is not the first to fight "artificial scarcity." What can we learn from other communities and movements?

This presentation will be a series of case studies covering a variety of other forms of artificial scarcity, including food waste, housing vacancy, and the destruction of excess retail merchandise. We'll focus on efforts to combat this scarcity, highlighting what's worked and drawing lessons from what hasn't.

By exploring the connections between free culture and other anti-scarcity movements, we'll find new approaches, new allies, and new opportunities to stand up for the public commons.

Many free software projects are interested in growing their user and contributor bases, but it can be hard to know where to start. This workshop will go over some key first steps to growing a friendly and diverse community, such as:

• Making sure your “Getting Started” materials, such as installation and contributor guides, are accurate and accessible
• Running quick user tests and processing the feedback
• Promoting your project through social media and in-person events

After an introductory presentation, the audience will break out into groups and work on activities designed to make taking these steps as easy as possible. Individuals will have the opportunity to try out multiple activities. Those who do not currently have a free software project to contribute to will be paired with those who do, and can learn these useful skills to apply in the future.

At the end of the workshop, there will be a wrap-up presentation which will also briefly cover a wide range of additional tools, tips, and resources for growing and diversifying your community.

The open science movement is a grassroots and growing effort to make science publicly accessible. While securing open access to published results is the most well known open science issue, activists are also working towards: breaking down the barriers between scientist and non-scientist through participatory research and citizen science; opening up the data and methods of published studies to allow reproducible results and meta-analysis; and highlighting the importance of contributions beyond patents and papers, such as the creation of free hardware and free software tools.

In this panel, activists at the intersection of open science and free software will discuss how the two movements can learn from each other and work together. How do free software and open science differ in their approaches to shared goals of communal knowledge? What technical barriers to open science exist, and how can free software advocates help? How can open science projects build free software communities?

Other people: Madeleine Ball Jeffrey Warren