Deb Nicholson

Deb Nicholson is a free software policy expert and a passionate community advocate. She is the Director of Community Operations at Software Freedom Conservancy where she supports the work of its member organizations and facilitates collaboration with the wider free software community. Formerly, she has served as the Community Outreach Director for the Open Invention Network, a shared defensive patent pool on a mission to protect free and open source software and the Membership Coordinator for the Free Software Foundation. She’s won the O’Reilly Open Source Award for her work with GNU MediaGoblin, a federated media-hosting service and OpenHatch, free software's welcoming committee. She is also a founding organizer of the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference, an annual event dedicated to surfacing new voices and welcoming new people to the free software community. She lives with her husband and her lucky black cat in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Accepted Talks:

Free Software/Utopia

Free software will not win by “merely” replacing proprietary software. We need to lead with a vision of how the world could be. A voluntary community, one where people participate by choice, does not have to replicate the power structures, gate-keeping or casual cruelty of the systems it seeks to replace. We could make free software the most empowering place to build software. Free software tools could enable new ways of crafting user experiences that proprietary software providers seem unwilling to offer. Free software could tranform the relationship between users and developers, so that users feel like partners instead of sales metrics. Free software communities should be seeking to outdo proprietary software’s methods and social norms in every possible way. This talk will focus on:

  • The people we’re building free software for
  • The people we’re building free software with
  • The people who aren’t here yet

We’ve made a great start by empowering many technical and semi-technical users, but we can’t stop there. (What kind of utopia only has coders in it?) Let’s build a kinder and more practical free software movement to empower all kinds of people!

FOSS Governance: The good, the bad and the ugly

There are lots of ideas out there about how to run a free and open source software project… but not all strategies were created equal. Sometimes governance “just happens” but more often than not, projects end up with some things that work and some that don’t. Transparency, clear expectations and compassion go a long way towards helping you find people who support your vision but can still bring new ideas to the table when it comes time to talk implementation. Your project’s governance should reflect your values and empower individuals to succeed within its structure. Specific topics that will be covered:

  • How to bring in people who share your vision
  • Why transparency matters
  • Sharing expectations early and often
  • Which legal decisions to sort out early

Maintaining and scaling your project is easier when you’ve laid a good foundation. The wider community is mature enough that we can learn from what’s already been done and set up new projects for success. This talk will cover some of the big red flags you’ll want to avoid as well as some of the structural details that will help avoid issues later on.