A hand is extended, wearing a pink rubber glove. The hand is holding an unlabeled spray bottle aimed towards an unseen area off of screen. A subtitle appears in the open space next to the spray bottle: "Scrub gently: On data scrubbing in a community survey."

Scrub gently: On data scrubbing in a community survey.

Should we be too quick to discard negative, harmful responses in a community survey? This short review considers a time when an Open Source community is evaluating its community with a survey. What did we decide to do in the end?

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Six flowers of various stages in blooming are arranged in ascending order. The image is captioned, "sustainable investments."

4 metrics to measure sustainable open source investments.

“Sustainability” is almost a buzzword now. But how do you measure it in an open source ecosystem? This post shares four CHAOSS metrics to help shape the next year of open source data exploration in the UNICEF Open Source Mentorship program.

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Subtitled, "on Free Software, Red Hat, and Iran". The Azadi Tower in Tehran, Iran appears in the background.

On Free Software, Red Hat, and Iran

A story in which I visit the Fedora Council ticket tracker and advocate for Fedora contributors from Iran.

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"Open Source Dependencies" is written in big text against a blue background. Next to the next are tiles from the board game Scrabble, together writing: "In lifting others we rise."

What if Open Source dependencies weren’t software?

I often wonder how to best measure and communicate Open Source value. The collective focus of the industry goes into quantifying dependencies; that is, how one software relies on other software in order to complete its primary function. The vocabulary to measure dependency usually includes words like “imports,” “licenses,” “bugs

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Introducing the UNICEF Open Source Mentorship programme

Introducing UNICEF Open Source Mentorship

This post was co-published on the UNICEF Innovation Fund blog. 2020 saw the launch of a formalized Open Source Mentorship programme for the UNICEF Innovation Fund, built up on two years of work from RIT LibreCorps expertise and consulting. The Open Source Mentorship programme includes five modules about Open Source

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2021 OSI Board of Directors statement of intent

2021 OSI Board of Directors statement of intent

This first appeared on the Open Source Initiative Wiki. In light of the election update this year, I am republishing my statement of intent on my personal blog. No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive. Mahatma Gandhi I believe in the value of upholding the Open Source

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Three predictions for Free Software in the 2020s

Three predictions for Free Software in the 2020s

From January to May 2020, I completed an independent study at the Rochester Institute of Technology on Business and Legal Aspects of Free/Open Source Software. This was the final credit for my completion of the Free and Open Source Software and Free Culture minor. That semester, I traveled to different

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How Mozilla Open Source Archetypes influence UNICEF Open Source Mentorship

In May 2018, Mozilla and Open Tech Strategies released a 40-page report titled, “Open Source Archetypes“. This blog post is a recap of how this report influences the Open Source Mentorship programme I lead at the UNICEF Innovation Fund. I joined the UNICEF Innovation team in June 2020, although this

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RITlug/TeleIRC development update

Hacktoberfest 2020 with TeleIRC

October is here! If you contribute to Open Source projects, you might know that October is the month of Hacktoberfest. DigitalOcean teams up with different partners each year to send a t-shirt (or plant a tree on your behalf) for anyone who makes four GitHub Pull Requests in October. And

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RITlug/TeleIRC development update

What’s new in TeleIRC v2.0.0

TeleIRC v2.0.0 is the latest major release of our open source Telegram <=> IRC bridge. Download the latest release and read the release announcement for the full story. There are several new and noteworthy changes in TeleIRC v2.0.0. This post walks you through the major changes and differences for TeleIRC

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