[Themaintainers] Introductions: Don from GitHub

[Laura James]

Hi everyone,

Just to follow up on this thread, I'm Laura James and a new fellow at
the Software
Sustainability Institute <http://www.software.ac.uk> here in the UK
(actually at the inaugural event today!).

I organise the Festival of Maintenance
<https://festivalofmaintenance.org.uk>, to draw together learning and
experiences from maintainers in different areas and sectors. Personally I
come from a software and hardware engineering background and very keen to
see what these emergent fields can learn from other areas. This year we're
focussing on maintenance in complex and changing times and tickets are on
sale now <https://ti.to/festival-of-maintenance/2019-festival> (you can
also donate to support our work, if you can't attend) We hope to be able to
livestream but really need to secure a sponsor for that. I hope to connect
this sort of conversation in the UK with everyone else at MIII :)

I've also just started a new role at lowRISC <http://www.lowrisc.org>, an
open source system on a chip innovator, which enables open source silicon
through collaborative engineering of tools and designs. We both create new
IP and maintain designs (both our own and from elsewhere - such as in our
recent announcement
<https://opensource.googleblog.com/2019/05/google-fosters-open-source-hardware.html>).
Both open source software and hardware maintenance are a special interest
for me therefore.

Looking forward to continuing conversations about software and digital
maintenance!

Laura




On Wed, 10 Apr 2019 at 16:14, Don Goodman-Wilson <degoodmanwilson at github.com>
wrote:

> Howdy!
>
> I’m Don Goodman-Wilson, co-chair of the Software Track for The Maintainers
> III. I'm a recovering academic now working in the software industry at
> GitHub. One of my focus areas is discovering the best ways to support the
> maintainers of open source software (OSS). OSS provides the backbone for
> our digital lives (for better or worse), but such maintainers are
> increasingly finding themselves unsupported and under-appreciated. The
> result is that our digital infrastructure is in an incredibly delicate and
> precarious place, moreso than many realize.
>
> I discovered The Maintainers at APIdays in Paris last December, where
> Mehdi and Andrew held a day-long unconference on sustaining maintainers—and
> I realized pretty quickly that I had found my people. In the Maintainers, I
> feel like I’ve found kindred souls who understand not only the gravity of
> the situation, but the urgency to find solutions in partnership with
> practitioners who really understand the challenges.
>
> There are a lot of places where we could use your experience and
> expertise. Are there lessons from other disciplines that could be applied
> to software maintenance? What’s different about maintaining legacy software
> vs open source software?  Do you know of interesting case-studies we should
> be aware of? Do _you_ maintain software, and have a story to share? What
> existing institutions exist that could be extended to cover software, or
> that might have resources for software maintainers that we aren’t aware of?
> Does open source as a practice have the deck stacked against it, and maybe
> we need to fundamentally rethink the way we approach open, collaborative
> software creation for the public good?
>
> If all this is new to you, there are a lot of interesting resources out
> there:
> •
> https://github.blog/2019-01-17-lets-talk-about-open-source-sustainability/
> •
> https://medium.com/s/story/exploiting-developer-infrastructure-is-insanely-easy-9849937e81d4
> •
> https://words.steveklabnik.com/the-culture-war-at-the-heart-of-open-source
> • https://words.steveklabnik.com/what-comes-after-open-source
> (I’d love to read more if you know other recent takes on the current state
> of open source software!)
>
> Looking forward to seeing you at The Maintainers III!
>
> Don GOODMAN-WILSON
> Developer Advocate, EMEA
> GitHub
> 📮 degoodmanwilson at github.com
> [image: Twitter] DEGoodmanWilson <https://twitter.com/DEGoodmanWilson>
> 📆 calendly.com/degoodmanwilson/
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