Hi everyone welcome to the A6 and Z podcast I'm sonel and I'm super excited to do one of our special book launch

episodes for the new book coming out just this week working in public the making and maintenance of

open source software by Nadia Iqbal and published by Strip Press.

The topic actually applies to all kinds of communities and groups coming together,

whether it's an open source project, an R&D initiative, a department in a

company, a club or a special interest group, even a group of friends and family, because

it's all about how people come together to coordinate and collaborate around some shared interest or activity,

whether participatory or not, whether code or content.

And so one theme we also pull the threads on in this episode is about how the learnings of open source communities do and don't apply to the passion economy and creator communities as well.

Nadia has long been immersed in studying the health of communities, including getting funding from the Ford Foundation to study open source, then worked at GitHub and developer experience, then did research at Protocol Labs, and is now focused on writer experience at Substock.

For longtime listeners of the A6 and Z podcast, I've actually had her on the show years ago,

along with Michael Rogers of Protocol Labs, then of the No Jazz Foundation, where we talked about the changing culture of open source.

You can find that episode on our site.

But in this wide-ranging hallway style episode, Naudi and I cover everything from types of communities, social networks, and the evolution of being online.

And ironically, while the book is called Working in Public, we also talk about the emergence of private spaces,

as well as the tragedy of big public commons and how to counter the

tragedy of commons which is why I believe everyone should read this book because

there's a dirt of literature out there for the era of unprecedented online collaboration creation and consumption that of but we begin by quickly defining open source in this context with a really useful taxonomy for categorizing communities.

You know, early on I was just like, I really hate this term and I just wish we could come with something else like public software or whatever.

I love that. I love it too. you can come come with something else like public software or whatever.

I love that.

I love it too.

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