Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
Original language
English

WORKING IN PUBLIC

Nadia Eghbal

The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software

An inside look at modern open source software developers--and their influence on our online social world.

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. 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.

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.
Available products
Book

Published 2020-08-01 by Stripe Press

Comments

“Nadia writes from a unique perspective at the intersection of open source, economics, and poetry. This is the definitive book on the dynamics of online creative communities." --Nat Friedman, CEO of GitHub "In the age of information abundance, we're all maintainers now. Working in Public is an anthropological dive into the stories of real developers, providing us a lens of open source with which to ask new questions. Nadia presents us with a book not focused on just money, licenses, or code but for all of us who make, as creators of all kinds." --Henry Zhu, open source maintainer, Babel