Nadia Eghbal

Nadia left her job in venture capital last May and started work on a thesis. What is not venture backable in tech right now, that tech absolutely cannot do without?

Projects that had present, not future, value. Were actively used by Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Netflix, even governments. Directly responsible for tech’s rapid rise, as Mark Suster once explained but they hadn’t captured the financial value they deserved.

Capturing of financial value for these projects is extremely important yet isn't realised and can have devastating effects. Remember heartbleed?

I encourage you to speak with a maintainer heart to heart of any moderately successful opensource project to tell it like it is. Here's a 4min clip from the PythonAU keynote delivered by Russell Keith Magee that does exactly that.

https://youtu.be/0t85TyH-h04

It's a never ending stream of notifications that contain abuse and demands for unpaid work with occasional moments of the highest of highs (ie someone sending you a thankyou postcard via snail mail or asking how they can help you out)

Open-source keeps burning out brilliant software engineers. For the longest time opensource has been talked about user freedoms but has been mums the word to "at what cost"? Production is still expensive and the cost is too high.

0) https://youtu.be/VS6IpvTWwkQ

1) https://www.fordfoundation.org/library/reports-and-studies/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/

2)…

Throw in Nadia Eghbal's Tyranny of Ideas (https://nadiaeghbal.com/ideas) and you'll realize it's not humans beefing, but ideas. Posting is praxis, and the internet is a series of tube battlegrounds for the best ideas.

I'm a multitour veteran of the scarred hellscape where modern and historic ideas struggle - 4chan, TEDx conferences, irc, VC conference rooms, local candidate door-knocking campaigns, reddit, and of course twitter. The brawling is better there than in academic journals and library shelves. Today I proudly do my duty fighting off the bad ideas with the Good Ones.

Jokes aside, this is a horribly lame and out of touch take, saying that people's righteous anger is in fact not because of their legit complaints about society, but because
they just want to argue. It's a both sides false equivalence, equal to PG implying he's better off being an "accidental centrist", whatever the hell that means.

I'm considering doing so as well (after having read https://nadiaeghbal.com/microgrants) with a small personal fund first, that I will consider to open to friends & family later. France context.

However I'm wondering about the efficiency, that will start as an experiment first.

Not many different targets than yours, but my hunch starts with funding & following up in their development _local_, identified young students projects/studies working on energy, water, food, environment & politics.

The benefit is that:

* they're already aware of the situation,
* they'll see support from people for that area specifically
(both financial and moral, and networking),
* they'll have far better energy & networking & ideas & initiative to spread this further,
* I can spread funding to more different people at first
(funding with a significant impact is easier to reach toward students).

Are you looking to do work or give money?

If the former, I recommend having a look at GitHub's open source guide (https://opensource.guide/how-to-contribute/) and then finding a project to start contributing too. The best is something you already use yourself and is in need in help, otherwise, I made a resource that you can use to find a good project to contribute to: https://www.sourcesort.com.

If you're looking to give money, you could try taking a look at OpenCollective[1] or GitHub's new sponsors tool[2].

if you want to learn more about the problems facing open source, Nadia Eghbal's work is pretty good: https://nadiaeghbal.com/research/

[1] - https://opencollective.com/

[2] - https://github.com/sponsors

I got into the program, like a week ago. Still learning the ropes, I'm having a great time with them so far. Their internal slack group is really fun and their team is also quite responsive when it comes to resolving your queries.

On a deeper level, I really appreciate the strategic approach they have chosen when it comes to supporting and nurturing the entrepreneurs that they have backed, where the default approach is not writing a check to make the problems go away. But, actually listening to the myriad problems that crop up over the course of your startups journey and actually making a concerted effort to solve said problems.

Related: https://nadiaeghbal.com/microgrants#designing-for-impact

FOSS is the start. Then comes governance, culture, etc.

Bryan Cantrill's "Power to Fork" thesis is relevant. http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2010/08/03/opensolaris-and-the-power-to-fork/

Sadly, I lived that experience on another FOSS project. Wish I had heard Cantrill before I committed to that effort.

I'm also deeply influenced by Pieter Hintjens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Hintjens#Bibliography Ditto Clay Shirky, eg Here Comes Everyone.

Nadia Eghbal's research is on my reading list. https://nadiaeghbal.com/oss/ Having just skim read, it looks very insightful, cogent.