Shauna's Writing

Asking a person a question you could Google is sometimes a bid for connection — and RTFM / LMGTFY are choices to refuse that.

When something looks like hypocrisy, ask whether it's actually symptomatic — a contradiction that's doing work from the inside.

I pulled this blog together with AI.

I have a habit of starting blogs, writing enthusiastically for a few years, and then letting them fade away.

Most open source project sprints are focused on code contribution.

Open Source Project Tours are recorded sessions where an open source maintainer functions as a tour guide to their project, showing me the lay of the land…

It can be helpful for communities to take stock of their existing governance now and again, especially if they're facing some kind of major challenge,…

Some work within a software project is celebrated.

There are many ways for newcomers to participate in a project, from testing onboarding documentation to reviewing pull requests to showing up to community…

Many potential contributors have a desire to contribute but lack knowledge about the codebase and the community that would help them contribute effectively

Onboarding new contributors is hard.

When embarking on a governance transition, projects are often faced with an unexpected question.

While maintaining an open source project can be fun and fulfilling, it can also be very draining.

Carol Willing was a crucial part of Python's governance transition from a BDFL model to a Steering Council.

In early 2024, PlasmaPy maintainer Nick Murphy asked me to help facilitate a workshop for their project.

Back in the early 2010s, I ran a program called 'Open Source Comes to Campus'.

"Move fast and break things" was the internal motto of Facebook up until 2014 they realized, a little belatedly, that perhaps a corporation with worldwide…

Imagine a child playing in a sandbox, dreaming up elaborate stories about the castles they've built with their sandbox toys.

People tend to think of laws as set in stone, but they're very changeable.

Information naturally flows from those who have more power to those who have less.

Introduction As we've discussed previously, all systems are built on abstractions, and all abstractions are at least a little bit…

Parsons is sending out its yearly community survey, and hosting two community roadmapping sessions.

Technologies are built with a model of the world in mind.

In my last post, I talked about how all systems have flaws, and how these flaws require interpretive labor to be patched or worked around.

a short primer of how APIs and HTTP requests work, along with a detailed walk-through of an actual API's documentation

As I've said a few times now, all models are wrong.

I've posted before about why it's important to delegate decisions to the people impacted by…

All models are wrong.

There's a saying: the map is not the territory.

On Trains My sister is interested in genealogy, and several years ago unearthed a gruesome family story: on June 11th, 1880, my…

Few people are happy with the US government these days.

Sometimes, you just want someone to tell you what to do.

"Nothing about us without us!"

authenticating with Parsons, in theory and practice

a gentle introduction to programming using Python

information that may be helpful when working with Parsons or other progressive tools

The following is from my response to a friend’s Facebook post about the value of postmodernism to engineers, and the role that education plays in…

Last week I gave two short talks as part of the IASC Knowledge Commons conference, one on our ability to contest rules in digital spaces, and another on…

One of my communities is choosing a new governance structure, and in preparation for our first conversation on the topic, I wrote up three governance case…

Facebook's 'Oversight Board' recently affirmed Facebook's choice to suspend then-President Donald Trump from its platform the day after the Capitol riots

There’s not enough disobedience online.

Note: I recently started writing a newsletter about the intersection of technology and governance,Hello, Governor!

It can be a struggle to hold groups accountable for misbehavior, even when the group is structured through legal forms, with public membership and clear…

... so I put some tech governance controversy on the platform you were using for your tech governance newsletter.

Below, I summarize the FTC complaint against Facebook, citing the relevant paragraphs so you can get more detail as needed.

Hello, and welcome to the very first edition of this newsletter!

It’s the last day of my mini-batch, although it’s not my last day at Recurse, since there’s an active alum community I’m eager to be a part of.

Today I finally tackled making a code madlibs program.

When we left off, I’d written some rather ugly code that gave us the basic features of a madlibs program without using any macros.

Building off of yesterday’s work, today my hope was to finish my humble text-focused Madlibs program, so that I could move onto code-focused Madlibs tomorrow.