Relational Tech · Shauna's Writing

About Relational Tech

Writing on relational technology — how better relationships build better open source communities. Essays, interviews, exercises, and guides on onboarding, governance, burnout, and contributor experience. Originally published at relational-tech.com.

November 4, 2025
Relational Tech

Getting to Know NF-Core (Open Source Project Tours)

Open Source Project Tours are recorded sessions where an open source maintainer functions as a tour guide to their project, showing me the lay of the land and answering my questions about how their design reflects the relationships and needs of contributors and users. You can watch the full tour here. I've also created five clips of this interview featuring discussions about open source project lifecycles, a custom bot that rolls out syntax updates to over a hundred repos, the importance of reaching out to a project before making big contributions, learning from BDFL burnout, and stickers.
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November 4, 2025
Relational Tech

How to Run a Whole Community Sprint

Most open source project sprints are focused on code contribution. While this makes some sense---open source software is, after all, *software*---it's also a little narrow-minded.
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September 15, 2025
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Governance Questionnaire

It can be helpful for communities to take stock of their existing governance now and again, especially if they're facing some kind of major challenge, opportunity, or transition.
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July 27, 2025
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Visibility Spectrum Exercise

Some work within a software project is celebrated. Designing and building a new project from scratch, or adding big features to an existing project, is enjoyable and often prestigious work.
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June 7, 2025
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FRAME-ing First Tasks

There are many ways for newcomers to participate in a project, from testing onboarding documentation to reviewing pull requests to showing up to community events. But it can be surprisingly difficult to find ways for newcomers to contribute code.
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April 18, 2025
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Context-Building Tasks

Many potential contributors have a desire to contribute but lack knowledge about the codebase and the community that would help them contribute effectively. Context-Building Tasks are tasks which do not require a lot of context, at least at the beginning, but encourage the contributor to learn more and more context as they continue with the task.
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March 12, 2025
Relational Tech

Six Ways to Onboard New Contributors

Onboarding new contributors is hard. There's so much they don't know. How is someone supposed to contribute when they don't know the codebase, the project infrastructure, community norms, or the specific people who can give them advice? Add in the fact that often new contributors have significant gaps in knowledge about the project's domain and/or the language(s) the project uses, and it's no wonder many new contributors get discouraged and give up.
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February 27, 2025
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Deciding How to Decide

When embarking on a governance transition, projects are often faced with an unexpected question.
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February 26, 2025
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Smoke Signals: How to Tell If You're Burning Out in Open Source

While maintaining an open source project can be fun and fulfilling, it can also be very draining. Many maintainers struggle to get the support they need.
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January 21, 2025
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"It all goes back to what's best for the community": An interview with Python's Carol Willing

Carol Willing was a crucial part of Python's governance transition from a BDFL model to a Steering Council. She served on the first Steering Council and has also been involved with Jupyter and its governance. This interview was recorded in January 2023, as part of a research project led by Seth Frey and funded by the NSF's DASS grant program. The interview has been lightly edited for readability and shared with Carol's consent.
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January 8, 2025
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On Being and Doing in Open Source

Back in the early 2010s, I ran a program called 'Open Source Comes to Campus'. We'd go to college campuses around the country and host day-long workshops introducing students to open source, teaching them social norms and tools like git, and encouraging them to make their first contribution.
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January 8, 2025
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Psychological Safety: An Exercise

In early 2024, PlasmaPy maintainer Nick Murphy asked me to help facilitate a workshop for their project. This "summer school" would bring together community members of all kinds, from undergraduates to faculty, from experienced open source contributors to people who barely knew what open source was.
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