A valley in the mountains is brightened by the sun as it peeks behind the clouds. Vast forests are warmly glowing in the fading sunlight. The image is subtitled, "I am the wilderness: On trust and community."

“I am the wilderness”: On trust & community

There are seven elements to trust. Each element is a resource for being honest, authentic, and genuine. You can remember these seven elements as an acronym: “BRAVING”.

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The hand of a person is visible as they are pointing at a whiteboard. The board has "Product roadmap" written on it, with big circles that represent each fiscal quarter of the year. A line from each circle connects to goals or ambitions for the product, like "Launch" or "publish iOS app". The image is subtitled, "Three product roadmap examples." This post is about product roadmaps.

Three great examples of open source product roadmaps

Recently, I came across three product roadmaps from Proton, the company behind several open source, privacy-centered products. They did a great job with creating transparent product roadmaps. Here is what they did and excerpts from their roadmaps.

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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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A banner image with a white background. Text shown: CHAOSS D.E.I. Review. Supported by the Ford Foundation.

CHAOSS DEI Review: Midyear reflection

In February 2021, the CHAOSS Project initiated a review of its diversity, equity, and inclusion practices. This post summarizes the progress made by the review team in 2022 and looks ahead to Justin’s aspirations for 2023.

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Three boys are smiling and gathered around together looking at a phone screen held in the hands of the boy in the middle of the group.

XPOST: Spurring new Digital Public Goods

On 27 September 2022, I authored an article on unicef.org highlighting my work with the UNICEF Venture Fund in providing mentoring to startup companies pursuing compliance with the Digital Public Goods Standard. Discover the UNICEF Technical Assistance programs and the Venture Fund mentoring strategy in the last year.

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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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Introducing the UNICEF Open Source Mentorship programme

2020/2021 in Open Source at UNICEF Innovation Fund

Open Source is a means to collaborate and solve common problems; during the COVID-19 pandemic, open data and tools proved useful in quickly tailoring and deploying life-saving services. How has the UNICEF Innovation Fund kept up with latest Open Source innovations? The UNICEF Innovation Fund invests exclusively in Open Source

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Committee risk: A governance challenge for Open Source

Community participation and engagement in corporate Open Source projects is valuable, yet difficult to foster. Many companies supporting popular Open Source projects develop diverse communities across different employers, nationalities, genders, educational backgrounds, and more. Increased diversity brings perspective about who finds a product useful. It also gives you the opportunity

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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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