Nadia Eghbal is back and this time she’s talking with us about her new book Working in Public. If you’re an old school listener you might remember the podcast we produced with Nadia and Mikeal Rogers called Request for Commits. If you weren’t listening then, or can’t remember…don’t worry…the back catalog of Request for Commits is still online and subscribe-able via all the podcast ways. That podcast is still getting listens to this very day!

Obviously we go way back with Nadia…and having a chance to now talk with her through all the details of her new book Working in Public, this was a milestone for this show and Jerod and I. We talked through the reasons she wrote the book in the first place, Nadia’s thoughts on the future of the internet and the connection of creators to the platforms they build their followings on, and we also talk about the health of projects and communities and the challenges we face internet-at-large as well as right here in our backyard in the open source community.

We’re rebroadcasting the finale episode of the beloved Request For Commits. But don’t worry, The Changelog will be back with new episodes next week. In this finale episode of Request For Commits, we regroup to discuss the podcast from its start to its finish, lessons learned, community impact, and where the conversations around open source sustainability are taking place, now and in the future. It’s the end of Request For Commits, but the conversations we’ve had will continue on The Changelog. We also have some guest-host appearances for Nadia and Mikeal planned in the near future on this podcast. So, stay tuned.

In this finale episode of Request For Commits – we regroup to discuss how we got here, lessons learned, community impact, and where the conversations around open source sustainability are taking place now and in the future. This might be the end of this podcast, but the conversation will continue on The Changelog. You should subscribe if you’re not already.

Lauren McCarthy joined Nadia and Mikeal to discuss her work on p5.js, contributions and culture, her before and after take on open source, her path to becoming a maintainer, how p5.js gets new contributors, how they keep them around, and why design isn’t better represented in open source.

Henry Zhu joined Nadia and Mikeal to discuss his work on Babel, how he became and accidental maintainer, why he thinks maintainers aren’t special, paid open source work, the Babel brand, and building community.

Daniel Bachhuber joined Nadia and Mikeal to discuss his work on wp-cli, the economics, origins, staying productive as a maintainer, fund raising, and the state of wp-cli today.

Danese Cooper joined Nadia and Mikeal to discuss the history of open source, how the term became a thing via Tim O’Reilly, feeling empowered as an open source contributor, companies’ relationship to open source, foundations and their role (or not) in governance and sustainability.

Christopher Hiller joined Nadia and Mikeal to discuss the ups and downs of maintaining Mocha - a JavaScript test framework that runs on Node.js and in the browser. Discussions included maintaining a popular project, getting funding, the challenges of having money, raising the profile of a project, focusing on the needs of a community, and managing burnout.

Ryan Bigg joined the show to talk about his open source work on the documentation of Ruby on Rails, fund raising, crowd sourcing, departure, handing off, not quitting, making the right decision, getting paid, sustaining, and more.

This is an anthology episode from OSCON 2017 featuring awesome conversations with Kelsey Hightower (OSCON Co-Chair and Developer Advocate at Google Cloud Platform), Safia Abdalla (Open Source Developer and Creator of Zarf), and Mike McQuaid and Nadia Eghbal (GitHub Open Source Programs).

Todd Gamblin – a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab – tells Nadia and Mikeal all about bringing open source to his peers in the national labs. They discuss what it’s like to open source a project inside the government, how Todd found contributors for Spack, why he got involved with NumFOCUS, and much more.

Evan You joined the show to talk about his work on Vue.js. We learn how Evan found users and got Vue.js off the ground, the details behind their crowdfunding on Patreon, whether or not crowdfunding is a viable method of sustaining open source, finding balance in life and work, and plans for funding beyond the Patreon campaign.

On Friday, June 2, 2017 – GitHub announced the details of their Open Source Survey – an open data set on the open source community for researchers and the curious. Frannie Zlotnick, Nadia Eghbal, and Mikeal Rogers joined the show to talk through the backstory and key insights of this open data project which sheds light on the broader open source community’s attitudes, experiences, and backgrounds of those who use, build, and maintain open source software.

In this special episode of Request For Commits we close out the first season with a look behind the scenes of the show. We talked about how the show was formed, who’s involved and why, how we approach producing this show, our theme music, as well as our plans and timing for season 2.

Brendan Eich, founder of Brave and creator of JavaScript, joined the show to talk about the history of the web, how it has been funded, and the backstory on the early browser wars and emerging monetization models. We also talked about why big problems are hard to solve for the Internet and the tradeoffs between centralization and distribution.

Charlotte Spencer joined the show to talk about making open source more approachable, Your First PR, helping people make their first open source contribution, attracting new contributors, and what projects can do to bring in, retain, and communicate with new people.

Heather Meeker joined the show to talk about open source licensing, why open source licenses are historically significant, how much developers really need to know, and how much developers think they know. We also talk about mixing commercial and open source licenses, and how lawyers keep up with an ever-changing landscape.

David Cramer (CEO of Sentry) and Isaac Schlueter (CEO of npm) joined the show to talk about building businesses in open source, why they decided to turn their side projects into full-time work, how they experimented with finding steady sources of revenue, raising venture capital, working with investors and with community, and different company approaches to developing open source projects.

On today’s show Nadia and Mikeal talk with Rod Vagg, Chief Node Officer at NodeSource, about liberal contribution agreements and the underlying mechanics of liberal contribution management, how to level up casual contributors, how projects transition into a liberal contribution mindset and whether there is a place for BDFLs in the future of project governance.

On today’s show Nadia and Mikeal talk with Max Ogden, creator of Dat, an open source, decentralized tool for distributing data sets. Max has also done a lot of work in the Node.js ecosystem, including helping start NodeSchool and publishing hundreds of modules to npm. He was also one of the first Code for America fellows.