Working in Public
Open source software has undergone a significant shift over the past 20 years. Today, often unseen solo operators maintain code used by millions. In Working in Public, Nadia Eghbal takes an inside look at modern open source software development and its evolution over the last two decades—and its ramifications for an internet reorienting itself around individual creators. She ex...
Open source software has undergone a significant shift over the past 20 years. Today, often unseen solo operators maintain code used by millions. In Working in Public, Nadia Eghbal takes an inside look at modern open source software development and its evolution over the last two decades—and its ramifications for an internet reorienting itself around individual creators. She examines GitHub as a platform; the structures, roles, incentives, and relationships of open source projects; and their heretofore unexplored maintenance, via the work that software requires of its creators and the costs of production that must be maintained. Open source offers us a model through which to understand the challenges faced by online creators on all platforms.
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 Foundati...
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, where she argued that open source code is a form of public infrastructure that requires maintenance.