Speaker Series 2020

Sumana Harihareswara

FounderChangeset Consulting

What Would Open Source Look Like If It Were Healthy?

When I think about open source sustainability, I think about money, sure. But I also think about what configurations of funding would be more likely to keep legacy infrastructure ticking along AND provide R&D opportunities for innovators; what tooling we need; how a stronger ecology of consultancies would change the interactions among volunteers, companies, and other institutions; etc. I'll discuss what I've learned about healthy maintainership, and what a healthier future would look like for the open source industry.

Sumana Harihareswara is a project manager and programmer who has worked on PyPI, Zulip, Mailman, MediaWiki, HTTPS Everywhere, and several other open source projects. Most recently she has managed improvements to pip's dependency resolver and user experience, expedited the release of new versions of pipenv and autoconf, and written a somewhat frightening number of successful grant proposals to fund urgent work in critical open source projects. She earned an Open Source Citizen Award in 2011 and a Google Open Source Peer Bonus in 2018. She lives in New York City and founded Changeset Consulting in 2015.