I accidentally became a FOSS maintainer and all I got was this lousy insight into librarianship
Keynote Theatre | Thu 22 Jan 10:45 a.m.–11:30 a.m.
Presented by
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Hugh Rundle
@hugh@ausglam.space
https://www.hughrundle.net
Hugh is a librarian and technologist. He accidentally became one of the maintainers of BookWyrm, deliberately founded newCardigan, and is a board member at The Commons Social Change Library. When not stanning for ISO8601, Hugh makes kimchi and techno music.
Hugh Rundle
@hugh@ausglam.space
https://www.hughrundle.net
Hugh is a librarian and technologist. He accidentally became one of the maintainers of BookWyrm, deliberately founded newCardigan, and is a board member at The Commons Social Change Library. When not stanning for ISO8601, Hugh makes kimchi and techno music.
Abstract
In my day job I am a librarian, managing scholarly discovery and other technical systems at an Australian university. In my non-work time I accidentally became a maintainer of BookWyrm – an open source distributed social reading application built with Django and the ActivityPub protocol.
In this talk I will outline how many of the challenges and questions faced by BookWyrm developers mirror those of the library world. Thinking about these challenges in the context of BookWyrm has given me a new perspective on ways they can be tackled in libraries, and a renewed belief in the future of librarianship and the skills and knowledge within the profession.
Volunteering on FOSS projects can allow domain experts like librarians to play and experiment with aspects of their profession that their day jobs may not allow for, enabling them to grow their skills and develop new insights.
All attendees will learn:
- how FOSS projects can give you space to learn more in your area of expertise outside the limitations of a corporate or institutional workplace
Librarians will learn:
- how they can make valuable contributions to FOSS projects of all kinds regardless of whether they know how to write code
- how getting involved in projects like BookWyrm can help to ground concepts like Linked Open Data, multiple ontologies and metadata normalisation
FOSS project maintainers will learn:
- how librarians can help you to organise and manage your project
Developers will learn:
- why you should engage with "Subject Matter Experts" as project team members to help you understand the how and why of workflows, not just "stakeholders" to tell you what features are needed
- why you should avoid ever working with bibliographic metadata
In my day job I am a librarian, managing scholarly discovery and other technical systems at an Australian university. In my non-work time I accidentally became a maintainer of BookWyrm – an open source distributed social reading application built with Django and the ActivityPub protocol.
In this talk I will outline how many of the challenges and questions faced by BookWyrm developers mirror those of the library world. Thinking about these challenges in the context of BookWyrm has given me a new perspective on ways they can be tackled in libraries, and a renewed belief in the future of librarianship and the skills and knowledge within the profession.
Volunteering on FOSS projects can allow domain experts like librarians to play and experiment with aspects of their profession that their day jobs may not allow for, enabling them to grow their skills and develop new insights.
All attendees will learn: - how FOSS projects can give you space to learn more in your area of expertise outside the limitations of a corporate or institutional workplace
Librarians will learn: - how they can make valuable contributions to FOSS projects of all kinds regardless of whether they know how to write code - how getting involved in projects like BookWyrm can help to ground concepts like Linked Open Data, multiple ontologies and metadata normalisation
FOSS project maintainers will learn: - how librarians can help you to organise and manage your project
Developers will learn: - why you should engage with "Subject Matter Experts" as project team members to help you understand the how and why of workflows, not just "stakeholders" to tell you what features are needed - why you should avoid ever working with bibliographic metadata