How to support
Creating and contributing something new is generally the most glorifying work, not maintenance, which is often a thankless job involving tedious and time-consuming work. 'Support' in the case of what I do would involve contributing to the maintenance that makes shared knowledge usable. There is plenty of work for people who do not write software. Repair a broken reference. Improve a description or translation. Add alt text to images. Identify an undocumented photograph. Add reliable sources and structured metadata. Check whether a publication is readable with assistive technology and create an accessible version where one is missing.
If you have material of historical or public interest, consider whether it can be contributed under an open licence. Include what you know about its origins. A photograph with no date, location, attribution or explanation leaves the next person with a considerable amount of detective work.
When using someone else’s work, follow its licensing conditions, preserve the credit and the information connecting it to its creators and communities.
A small brief about your project
I work across several projects and repositories. The connection between them is the maintenance required to keep knowledge available, verifiable, and intelligible. For example, my book chapter and Zenodo deposit ‘What AI Adoption Exposes About Media’s Existential Crisis' contains two versions. One preserves the original publication excerpt, including its covers and editorial credits. The other contains only the article and is better suited to screen readers and is more neurodiversity-friendly.
The social conditions of participation also require work. I co-created the Community Toolkit for Greater Diversity, co-authored a learning module titled ‘Making events safe and welcoming’ with Tanveer Hasan, and reviewed and edited other learning modules. These resources address exclusion and participation within open-knowledge communities. Contributor safety needs sustained attention too.
My approach to feminist research preservation is the same.I want a reader to be able to establish who produced the work, which version they are reading, where it was originally published, and how to cite it. These details help keep research connected to the people and conditions that produced it.
One FOSS maintainer lesson for your younger self
Record permissions, authorship, sources and changes while the information is still available. Design for provenance, accessibility, attribution, interoperability and maintenance from the beginning. Your memory is a poor substitute for documentation, particularly when somebody else has to take over. Make accessibility part of the work from the start. Retrofitting it creates avoidable work and leaves people excluded in the meantime.
Why do you do it? Why do you bother maintaining a FOSS project?
Because access to knowledge depends on work that is easily overlooked. I care about being able to check a claim and find the material behind it. A website can disappear and a dataset can lose its usefulness because its documentation is incomplete. A publication may be available in a file format that is no longer commonplace, making it unreadable. The references in an article can decay and lose verifiability. An old photo may be intact but no one knows who or what it depicts. Repairing these failures keeps claims verifiable, preserves historical context, and makes participation possible for more people.
There is also a question of power: whose knowledge becomes visible, who receives credit, and who decides how shared resources are used. In LLM Extractivism and the Politics of the Knowledge Commons, I argue for collective stewardship of shared knowledge resources and recognition of the labour that sustains them. Maintenance and continued availability of the sources of knowledge and information needs resources, recognition, and institutional support. Repairing a citation, for example, is a small contribution to that larger problem. It is also useful work in its own right.
If your repo had a theme song, what would it be?
People Have the Power — Patti Smith
Which file in your project would you most like to set on fire?
The PDF consisting entirely of scanned images, with no searchable text.
I would preserve the original, of course. But I would also like the folks publishing it to think about humans and bots* who need to search, select, and copy text and people who use screen readers.
*not LLM bots
What's your open-source villain origin story?
I started as a Wiki vandal more than 18 years ago, making humorous vandal edits to English Wikipedia pages.
Speaking of my non-vandal avatar, I learned at some point in those 18 years that putting something online as publicly available knowledge is necessary but that, by itself, offers very little assurance about its future. Some of these concerns run through my Wikimedia work and talks such as The Geopolitics of Knowledge: Who Shapes What We Know Online? and Free as in extraction: AI and the digital commons.
If you had to use one emoji to convey what it is like to be a FOSS maintainer, what would it be?
🏗️
