Lighten the load on your maintainers.
Get the million little things done that stand between you and release, so those features sitting in git master can get to users who are waiting for them.
Set up first-timer guidance, select TODOs that can actually get done, and get the right sessions on the schedule and make them effective.
Prepare your project to apply for Google Summer of Code or Outreachy, and prepare for applicants to have an easier developer onboarding experience.
Triage, edit, and transfer bug reports, documentation, and TODO lists from your company's intranet to GitHub, GitLab, a wiki, etc.
Bring in new coders, writers, and other volunteers -- and grow the ones you already know.
Write and submit project plans and funding requests to get grants.
Assess what's slowing down new engineers in documents, tooling, and training -- and fix it.
Changeset provides short-term project management services to free and open source software projects. Need to expedite the releases of new versions of software, write developer onboarding and user documentation, triage and respond to bugs, clean out the code review queue, or prioritize tasks for upcoming work? Changeset Consulting lightens the load on your maintainers.
Founder and Principal: Sumana Harihareswara, an open source software contributor (GitHub) and project manager with over a decade of experience in the software industry. Her past leadership in nonprofit, academia, industry, and volunteer organizations earned her an Open Source Citizen Award in 2011. She lives in New York City.
Harihareswara frequently speaks and writes about open source and management; she was keynote speaker at Open Source Bridge in 2012, code4lib in 2014, and Wiki Conference USA in 2014.
She was most recently Senior Technical Writer and Engineering Community Manager at the Wikimedia Foundation. She has also managed projects at Collabora, GNOME, QuestionCopyright.org, Fog Creek Software, Behavior, and Salon.com. From mid-2014 to early 2015, Harihareswara served as a member of the board of directors of the Ada Initiative. She holds an MS in Technology Management from Columbia University and and a BA in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and participated in the Recurse Center in 2013 and 2014.
"As a project manager, she made it natural and easy for members of the project to do their part well."
Dan Conner, developer and Behavior contractor
"Whenever I wonder 'What has Sumana been up to lately', I see her working on some excellent new project, cleaning out a neglected backlog, organizing training materials, helping people start an event, documenting something undocumented, prodding WMF to get smarter -- in other words, she's been tirelessly, fearlessly, capably making things better for our dev community, which in turn benefits the quality of the software we build together."
Erik Möller, VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation (MediaWiki mailing list)
Pricing will vary per engagement; please contact Changeset for a free initial consultation and estimate. Changeset usually works remotely via email, IRC, VoIP, bugtrackers, wikis, and other tools you already use; in the rare cases where travel is necessary, it will be billed as an additional expense.
Hourly work is available at a per-hour rate. Most engagements will take 20 or more hours and cost substantially less than the same work would on a per-hour basis.
Essays, guides and other resources to help you manage your project.
How to get the best results from hackathons, sprint weeks, and all-hands meetings (see her previous hackathon prep tips).
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Follow these tips to get new contributors, and turn them into new maintainers.
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At Open Source Bridge 2014 (materials), Harihareswara demonstrated alternative command-line interpreters like bpython, some helpful debugging options, and how to use the codecs module.
Read lessons learned when Harihareswara successfully mentored an Outreachy intern (who continues to contribute to the project).
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Consider these factors to predict whether you can improve an open source/free culture community.
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