Nadia Asparouhova
Writer and researcher on how people organise online; wrote Working in Public, on the maintenance of open-source software, and Antimemetics.
Nadia Asparouhova did not write this page. What is this?
It collects the places they publish and what they have said there, each linked to the source. They have no account here. Is this you? Claim it, correct it, or ask us to remove it from ppll.
Where they publish
Site nadia.xyz Her essays and notes. Has a feed.
Recent
- Does meditation experience improve success with the jhanas? 27 Jun 2024 Jhanas – a series of altered mental states that are accessed via concentration – are often described as an “advanced meditation practice,” a phrase that suggests that one must be a skilled meditator to access them: just…
- How to do the jhanas 13 Jun 2024 The jhanas are a series of eight (or nine) altered mental states, which progress from euphoria, to calm, to dissolution of reality – culminating in cessation, or loss of consciousness. They are induced via sustained con…
- Working notes for Summer of Protocols 27 May 2023 I participated in the Summer of Protocols research program this summer as a Core Researcher. It was an 18-week program, funded by the Ethereum Foundation, that aimed to catalyze a wider exploration of protocols and thei…
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- Explaining tech’s notion of talent scarcity 25 Apr 2023 TLDR: Most conversations about “top talent” assume Pareto distribution; however, a closer examination suggests that different corporate cultures benefit from different types of talent distribution (normal, Pareto, and a…
- Mapping digital worlds 17 Apr 2023 I gave a talk at The Stoa in February about “Mapping digital worlds to understand our present and future.” You can watch the video here; the following is a transcript of that talk.
- Early stage funding markets for science - an analysis 23 Jan 2023 In the summer of 2022, with support from Schmidt Futures, I took a closer look at several emerging science funding mechanisms – rapid grants, scout programs, and focused research organizations (FROs) – to understand how…
- Mapping out the tribes of climate 30 Nov 2022 Climate is a gravity well for talent, but why don’t other, equally impactful topics attract talent in the same way? Why isn’t everyone dropping everything to work on homelessness, or global poverty, or curing cancer? Wi…
- Cultivating agency 23 Aug 2022 I didn’t always know that I wanted to have kids. I wasn’t against it, necessarily – for awhile, there were just more reasons in the “why not” column than the “why”: uncertainty about whether I’d be a good parent, fear o…
- Idea machines 12 May 2022 Tech as a system of values, and not just an industry, is heavily driven by its subcultures and their ideologies. Where do these ideologies come from, and how do they influence what’s accomplished?
- Understanding science funding in tech, 2011-2021 2 Mar 2022 For those who sit between science and tech, it’s hard not to notice the proliferation of new initiatives launched in the last two years, aimed at making major improvements in the life sciences especially.
Link verified 20 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 12 beliefs, 1 changed mind — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
Individual and corporate sponsorship of open source are two different products: a company buys support and visibility, a person buys a relationship.
With companies, open source developers are selling a product. With individuals, they’re selling themselves.
The Twitch argument for GitHub Sponsors Said 24 May 2019
The thing open source can actually sell is not the code but access to its maintainers’ attention and expertise.
While everyone is focused on putting up tollbooths, opportunities to “price” maintainer attention, and access to maintainers, remain undervalued.
Making money with licenses Said 14 Mar 2019
A contribution is a cost to the maintainer, not a gift: it is taking part, not merely using the code, that consumes a project’s scarcest resource.
It’s only when users cross over to the production side (ex. report bugs, ask questions, submit patches) that they start to impose costs.
Making money with licenses Said 14 Mar 2019
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New licences are the wrong lever for paying maintainers: copyleft’s history shows terms companies ignore, and relicensing attempts get beaten back by their own communities.
As for my personal feelings on the matter, however, I’m skeptical that new licenses are the right approach on a systemic level, both in terms of feasibility, as well as where I think the world is going.
Making money with licenses Said 14 Mar 2019
Free riding is not open source’s problem: the users who only download the code impose no cost on anyone.
Most users don’t actually impose costs back to maintainers: they download the code and never interact with the project.
Making money with licenses Said 14 Mar 2019
Information once freely shared cannot be taken back, so charging for access to code is a pre-digital answer to a digital problem.
Information, once freely shared, is a Pandora’s box that cannot be closed again. It is very hard for me to imagine a world where we transition back to paying for access to information; these are pre-digital solutions to modern problems.
Making money with licenses Said 14 Mar 2019
A software foundation is little more than a tax status, and gets less public accountability than a company because everyone assumes its motives are good.
There is nothing about a foundation that is inherently good, neutral, or charitable, simply because they have a 501(c) status.
Governance without foundations Said 31 Oct 2018
A single foundation is structurally at odds with a project whose contributors are distributed, and is easier to capture than the project is.
Rather, I think that “the foundation”, as a single point of failure, is structurally at odds with the idea of “the project”, which is inherently distributed.
Governance without foundations Said 31 Oct 2018
A project that skips forming a foundation still has to formalise its governance, or it drifts into a tyranny of structurelessness.
On the other hand, by avoiding foundations, projects also avoid the question of how to formalize their governance, thus risking a “tyranny of structurelessness” that might range from projects living inside a company forever, to disorganized chaos that negatively impacts project velocity.
Governance without foundations Said 31 Oct 2018
The right to fork works as a standing threat rather than as an event; in mature open source, political forks are rare.
The right to fork is still critical as an implied threat to keep the system in check. But major political forks aren’t as common, and certainly not as top-of-mind, anymore.
Do financial incentives increase the threat of forks? Said 2 Jul 2018
Successful open source developers get hired away by companies, which quietens the very people best placed to argue for making a living from open source.
Successful open source developers get “acquihired” by a company who values their reputation and skills, which has the perverse effect of making them less noisy about how to make a living off of open source.
Who pays the toolmakers? Said 13 Jun 2018
Open source on GitHub creates enormous value that the platform hosting it captures none of, while its policies limit how maintainers may earn.
Open source projects on GitHub represent billions of dollars in value creation, but none of that is captured on GitHub.
Who pays the toolmakers? Said 13 Jun 2018
Beliefs others hold too
The thing open source can actually sell is not the code but access to its maintainers’ attention and expertise. 2 hold this
While everyone is focused on putting up tollbooths, opportunities to “price” maintainer attention, and access to maintainers, remain undervalued.
Making money with licenses Said 14 Mar 2019
A contribution is a cost to the maintainer, not a gift: it is taking part, not merely using the code, that consumes a project’s scarcest resource. 2 hold this
It’s only when users cross over to the production side (ex. report bugs, ask questions, submit patches) that they start to impose costs.
Making money with licenses Said 14 Mar 2019
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter, especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked article and a belief on korrents.com are left in their original language.