Dr Laura James's writings

Being back in open source, work on funding it is especially interesting.  Nadia Eghbal writes about the different motivations of funders of open source - corporates, who want technical outputs and brand association, compared to individuals who value the work of others as an inspiration and as training material . Pia Mancini compares GitHub Sponsors to OpenCollective - a useful breakdown of different ways to go about supporting open source maintainers. André Staltz has made an analysis of what funding to a selection of open source projects looks like compared to a 'fair salary' for the maintainers involved, and an interesting critique of what parts of the FOSS ecosystem funding world are visible or not. I hadn't realised TideLift (an open source subscription platform) were VC backed - I wonder how they plan to generate the revenue/exit that will require. A reflection on the vogue for tidying, and Marie Kondo, and modern life : The idea that everything must be subj...

A great listen with many Festival of Maintenance friends - BBC Analysis looking at Maintenance .  We're being mis-sold a culture of innovation, and forgetting how essential looking after things is. Maybe we can have more positive framings - less make do and mend, more make the best of what we have - and make it better. Also check out this long but lovely piece from last year by Shannon Mattern (who is speaking at this year's Festival of Maintenance) - I love the themes of dust, and rust. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0005mrj Zeynep Tufekci on how we tell individual stories rather than social ones: In fact, the souring of Game of Thrones exposes a fundamental shortcoming of our storytelling culture in general: we don’t really know how to tell sociological stories. At its best, GOT was a beast as rare as a friendly dragon in King’s Landing: it was sociological and institutional storytelling in a medium dominated by the psychological and the individual. A new tool...