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| Publisher | Stripe Press |
| ISBN 13 | 9780578675862 |
| ISBN 10 | 578675862 |
| Book Description | An inside look at modern open source software developers--and their influence on our online social world. "Nadia is one of today's most nuanced thinkers about the depth and potential of online communities, and this book could not have come at a better time." --Devon Zuegel, director of product, communities at GitHub Open source software in which developers publish code that anyone can use has long served as a bellwether for other online behavior. In the late 1990s, it provided an optimistic model for public collaboration, but in the last 20 years it s shifted to solo operators who write and publish code that's consumed by millions. In Working in Public, Nadia Eghbal takes an inside look at modern open source software development, its evolution over the last two decades, and its ramifications for an internet reorienting itself around individual creators. Eghbal, who interviewed hundreds of developers while working to improve their experience at GitHub, argues that modern open source offers us a model through which to understand the challenges faced by online creators. She examines the trajectory of open source projects, including: -- the platform of GitHub, for hosting and development; -- the structures, roles, incentives, and relationships involved; -- the often-overlooked maintenance required of its creators; -- and the costs of production that endure through an application's lifetime. Eghbal also scrutinizes the role of platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, YouTube, and Instagram which reduce infrastructure and distribution costs for creators, but which massively increase the scope of interactions with their audience. Open source communities are increasingly centered around the work of individual developers rather than teams. Similarly, if creators, rather than discrete communities, are going to become the epicenter of our online social systems, we need to better understand how they work and we can do so by studying what happened to open source. |
| About the Author | Nadia Eghbal is a writer and researcher who explores how the internet enables individual creators. From 2015 to 2019, she focused on the production of open source software, working independently and at GitHub to improve the open source developer experience. She is the author of Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure, published by the Ford Foundation, in which she argued that open source code is a form of public infrastructure that requires maintenance. She lives in San Francisco. |
| Language | English |
| Author | Nadia Eghbal |
| Publication Date | 2020-08-04 |
| Number of Pages | 256 pages |
Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software
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