Episode 74: Jory Burson of OpenJS on building sustainable open source communities

Guest Jory Burson Panelists Justin Dorfman | Alyssa Wright |
Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! On this
episode our special guest is Jory Burson, who is celebrating her
birthday with us today! She is the Community Director of OpenJS
Foundation, which is a non-profit foundation dedicated to serving
the open source JavaScript ecosystem. Today, we will learn all
about what Jory does as the Community Director at OpenJS, what the
OpenJS Foundation is, why it was formed, and what it formed to do.
Also, Jory tells us why she couldn’t imagine working on the web
without MDN (Mozilla Developer Network) Web Docs and what the
future holds for MDN. In addition, find out what Jory is most
excited about going forward at OpenJS. Download this episode now to
find out more! [00:01:20] Jory tells us about the OpenJS Foundation
and what she means by “home.” [00:03:01] We learn why OpenJS was
formed and what it formed to do. [00:06:25] Jory gives a brief
history of how she got involved into these dynasties, also the kind
of work she does at the Community Director at OpenJS. [00:10:37]
Richard asks Jory what she is doing to make sure the projects have
a longer life cycle and the work that they do is sustainable in the
long term. [00:13:46] Jory tells us what her role is with MDN and
she talks about how they restructured the organization. [00:17:27]
Justin asks Jory about the future of MDN. [00:19:37] Jory talks
about what they’re doing right now with working with MDN and other
people to build out a shared roadmap of priorities to make MDN more
useful and better than it is today. [00:22:40] Alyssa asks Jory
what the balance is and most powerful partnership between these
centralizing forces, these other entities, other projects, other
contributors that are more distributed, and how do we relate with
one another in powerful ways in order to sustain open source.
[00:25:33] Jory tells us what’s she most excited about going
forward at OpenJS. [00:27:19] Find out where you can follow Jory on
the internet. Quotes [00:08:24] “It just blew my mind that there
was that consensus of that population of people that’s that
subgroup of people was going to make a choice that affected
everybody.” [00:08:42] “And so at that point, from that point on, I
just became very obsessed with understanding how those decisions
got made and how people work together in a group to reach technical
decisions and sort of how to make the human interoperability
component of our technical interoperability discussions more
effective.” [00:10:52] “So first, let me say out loud, that I am
not convinced that the objective of any project should be to stick
around as long as possible.” [00:11:49] “I think the objective is
to help the project understand what is its scope, what is its end
game, and how can it effectively move through different life cycles
of startup phase, of growth phases, of the sustained phases, or
maintenance phases.” [00:12:55] “But instead, because it was a part
of the foundation, we were able to find and support new maintainers
who could and did have the energy to drive that forward and how
it’s really thriving.” [00:16:42] “And so, what we decided to do
was find a solution and that’s what we did, we found I think a
polyfill for MDN.” [00:20:24] “It’s interesting and kind of
unfortunate that this process of moving the content off of the Wiki
to GitHub has been a multi-year sort of project.” [00:24:51] “To
understand JavaScript you have to understand the whole universe is
maybe too much, so how can we and at what point is it appropriate
to break those layers down so people can like not have to recreate
the whole world.” Spotlight [00:28:28] Justin’s spotlight is
Buffer.com [00:28:47] Alyssa’s spotlights are a shout-out to Jory’s
birthday and the move to build things together to support the
ecosystems. [00:30:36] Richard’s spotlight is the Boston JavaScript
community of 2016, Jim Kang, Aria Stewart, Jory Burson, Boaz
Sender, Gregor Martynus, Ashley Williams, and everyone else.
[00:31:13] Jory’s spotlight is three people, Chris Mills at MDN,
Dom at W3C, and Michal at jQuery. Links Jory Burson's Twitter
(https://twitter.com/jorydotcom?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor)
Jory Burson's Website (https://joryburson.com/) Jory Burson's
Linkedin
(https://www.linkedin.com/public-profile/in/joryburson?challengeId=AQGHO9QkESxpZAAAAXfqwLI_nveaF9TBtXkMfUcXfvyIezD-8YEIrlSX8DlBbEzEc0tvXowHUeZSq0mS1HLMn2HX-44DAECFSw&submissionId=9a3e63c0-ca09-6816-b552-387434592917)
OpenJS Foundation (https://openjsf.org/) MDN Web Docs
(https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/) JavaScriptLandia
(https://javascript.plainenglish.io/what-is-javascriptlandia-9859367d2ec1)
Standards Working Groups
(https://www.ogc.org/projects/groups/swg#:~:text=Standards%20Working%20Groups%20(SWG)%20have,to%20an%20existing%20OGC%20standard.)
Buffer (https://buffer.com/) W3C (https://www.w3.org/) Credits
Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by
Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/)
Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound
(https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guest: Jory Burson.