FOSS and Crafts

Wm Salt Hale joins us to talk about his dissertation on resilience in FOSS communities (especially after crisis events), the kind of impacts founder decisions can have on long-term community development, especially as seen through reactions to software vulnerabilities and license decisions. Also! Salt mentions that we're keynoting at SeaGL this weekend! It's an online conference, so maybe we'll se...

Lightning round! Morgan and Christine blast through a bunch of snack-sized topics they're currently interested in, ranging from an actual FOSS video game made for the NES, to "Free Soft Wear" clothing, to compiler towers! above image from Morgan's blogpost on "free soft wear" Links: This episode's title was inspired by Ian Bicking's 2009 PyCon talk, "Topics of Interest&quo...

In Part 1 of Women and Wool Working in the Ancient Roman Empire , we discussed the practical matters of textile production in domestic and commercial contexts. In this second episode, we look at the performative ways that textile production was used to construct women's identities. This includes the incorporation of textile tools and production into rites of passage such as marriage, childbirth, a...

In the first of two episodes on Morgan's dissertation we introduce the topic of women and textile production in the Roman Empire. Scholars have often viewed the domestic and commercial divide in textile production along gendered lines, associating domestic production with women in the context of the ideal of feminine virtue and commercial production with men working in centralized production cente...

In this episode, we discuss "bikeshedding" (also known as the Law of Triviality ), the famous proposition that complex contributions and ideas (such as plans to build a nuclear power plant), often of high impact and importance, move forward with relatively little interference, whereas simple contributions and conversations (such as which color to paint a bikeshed) get caught up in commit...

Chris and Morgan reflect on one year of FOSS & Crafts, as well as announcing... FOSS & Crafts Studios! Links: FOSS & Crafts Studios on Patreon (still also the right place to support Chris Lemmer-Webber's FOSS work) Thank you to our guests: Nick and LP , Zack , Kate and Frankie , Sebastian , Bassam , Tristan , Sumana , Mallory , Vicky , Steve , Elana and Katie , and Steel . 3: Textile p...

Steel Wagstaff joins us to talk about their work at Pressbooks , a FOSS based book publishing suite particularly focused on Open Educational Resources (OER), as well as talking about OER generally, open access, and education as a fundamental human right! Pressbooks ( git repos ) Pressbooks Directory Steel Wagstaff's website , Twitter account 5Rs of open content UN Sustainable development goals [Ca...

On this episode, Chris talks about being nonbinary trans-femme and Morgan talks about being demisexual (and briefly about both being pansexual) and how they have both navigated these experiences in their lives and relationship. Links: There are a lot of resources on the internet about being transgender and nonbinary, and opinions about most of them tend to run strong. That said, Transgender Map ha...

Any skillset has basic foundational elements or building blocks. In this recording of Chris and Morgan's talk at ÖzgürKon , we discuss the way that access to those basic elements is limited in modern society. This can be seen in any number of fields from actual building blocks increasingly being sold in sets to make specific toys as opposed to generic buckets of blocks that allow kids to develop t...

Elana Hashman (Python Software Foundation Fellow and open source hacker) and Katie McLaughlin (Python Software Foundation Fellow and crafter) join us to talk about F(L)OSS meets embroidery and cross stitching (FOSS stitching?) including a significant conversation about FLOSS vs embroidery floss. Much is also conversed about ih , a project started by Katie with contributions from Elana, a python pr...

Steve is back, talking with Chris about viewing social systems through the lens of game design. How do game mechanics, uncertainty, and narrative map onto governance, society, and citizen participation? Thanks to Kate and Ricky for participating in a pre-show discussion which generated many of the ideas explored in this episode. Links: The first F&C Nerdout episode on "Fuzzy and crisp sys...

Remember how we've been saying the entire run of this show "Morgan's hard at work at finishing her PhD dissertation?" Well guess what! She finally got it handed in and defended it... Morgan is now officially Dr. Morgan Lemmer-Webber! (She still has to wrap up a few edits but hey it's official now!) Morgan walks us through her experiences of the graduate school process, from applying (and...

What story does an institution tell about itself? To whom does a governance structure and its leadership serve? To what degree are leaders within a governing institution subject or exempt to the rules of the governed? We use this framework to discuss the unexpected announcement of Richard Stallman's re-appointment to the FSF board, by the FSF board. Content warning: depression and sexual harassmen...

Morgan returns from handing in her dissertation! Very topically, Morgan and Chris talk about organizational systems which can help you stay on track... even when you're working from home or trying to finish your PhD during a global pandemic. Links: The Hipster PDA , including the original semi-satirical announcement post . Org Mode , the world's greatest organizational and outliner system (or so c...

Morgan is in the final crunch of finishing her dissertation draft, so Chris's brother Steve Webber joins us for a special "nerdout": analyzing the dual nature of fuzzy vs crisp systems! From physics to biology, from programming languages to human languages, the duality of fuzzy and crisp is everpresent. Yes, this really is what Chris and Steve sound like whenever they get together... Lin...

There's all sorts of reasons to pursue historical crafting techniques: for the experience of recreating them or learning new techniques, for education, or for entertainment and immersion. Morgan and Chris explore these paths under the terms "experiential historical crafts", "experimental archaeology", and "historical reenactment". What is important, useful, and fun ab...

We're joined by Vicky Steeves , a hyper-talented librarian specializing in data management, open and reproducible research, and the overlap between FOSS, free culture, and library sciences! We dive into all of that... plus a bit of crafting... and even... what's this? A discussion of what the FOSS world can learn from the world of game modding (and vice versa)! Links: ISAGE (Investigating & Ar...

Chris and Morgan, driving in the Covid-19 pandemic, reflect on lessons of hygiene and a separation of concerns from the past (seen through the retroactively surprising struggle for handwashing acceptance) while analyzing how to bring safety to today's computing security pandemic via object capability discipline. As said in the episode, there's a lot of research and evidence for the object capabili...

With computing technology becoming integrated with every aspect of our lives, many issues are simultaneously human rights issues and technical issues. Thus, how are organizations concerned with human rights and social justice engaging with technological authorship and policy-making? Mallory Knodel , presently Chief Technology Officer for the Center for Democracy and Technology , explains her work...

We're joined by Sumana Harihareswara , a FOSS advocate yes, but also a person of so many other talents! We talk about sketching, standup comedy, and maintainership for the long life of free software projects. (Did you know you can hire Sumana to help on your FOSS project maintainership btw? Sumana runs Changeset Consulting !) We also talk about representation in the FOSS community within the arts...

We're joined by our friend Tristan to talk about gardening experiences, from newbies (us) to the wise (Tristan and others who are not us). We (Morgan and Chris) have just started seriously gardening this year, and have learned a lot about what works and what doesn't. And it turns out that people who have been doing it for years (such as Tristan) still have a lot of successes but also a lot of fail...

Bassam Kurdali ( Fediverse , Twitter ) talks about using Blender (a free and open source software suite for making 3d artwork) for open movie projects such as Elephants Dream (the world's first open movie project, which Bassam directed!) and Wires for Empathy , as well as use in teaching it to college students studying animation. Links: Blender Urchin studios Chicken Chair (we need a better link f...

Morgan and Chris talk about the Scribble document authoring format, with Morgan talking about authoring her dissertation in it and Chris talking about writing an OpenDocument Format (sometimes shortened to "ODF" or "ODT") exporter. (That code is now a merge request which will hopefully become part of Scribble itself!) Links: The Digital Humanities Workshops episode... this is k...

Morgan and Chris discuss the Digital Humanities workshops they ran introducing non-programmers to Racket and Scribble . Links: The flier (post-LibrePlanet 2018 edition) Course material Building a Snowman with Racket How to Use Scribble to Write your Academic Papers: A Reference Tutorial

This week we are joined by Sebastian Lasse , author of the Redaktor ActivityPub powered CMS, and co-host of both ActivityPub Conference 2020 and ActivityPub Conference 2019 along with Morgan. Lots of retrospective, especially on the difference between APConf as an online conference in 2020 vs an in person conference in 2019. Links: ActivityPub Conference 2020 ActivityPub Conference videos The Runn...