Nivenly's First Fellow: Hazel Weakly
🎉 Hello and Welcome 🎉
Hello everyone! Nivenly’s Board of Directors and I have been working hard to lay the groundwork to support increased activity in the non-profit. As many know, we lost our founder (and my fiancée), Kris Nóva in August 2023. (Kris Nóva’s Memorial page.)
The creation of Nivenly Fellows is something that is important to all of us here at Nivenly, including Nóva herself prior to her passing. The primary goal of Nivenly Fellows is for Nivenly to raise up underrepresented minds in the tech industry who are doing brilliant work and who align with our goals to bring sustainability, autonomy, control, and cooperation to open source projects and communities.
Exciting! Who is Hazel Weakly?
Hazel is a charismatic technologist who builds out teams of humans and focuses on creating systems and tools that make life better for others. Taken directly from her bio:
Any sufficiently complex system is a sociotechnical one, and so any sufficiently effective solution must be holistic in its approach and not neglect the core idea that–at the end of the day–humans are the ones operating within these systems.
Hazel was one of the founding infrastructure engineers of Hachyderm and worked on the Great Twitter Migration (when our instance increased by ~30k users in a matter of weeks during Nov-Dec 2022). She gave a great talk at Monitorama PDX 2023 about it. (The full talk is here and is ~25 minutes with captions available.)
Hazel is currently a Director of the board for the Haskell Foundation and also created the first official GitHub action for the Haskell language. She is well known for writing deep, thoughtful blog posts about a variety of sociotechnological topics on her blog. Two posts we specifically want to draw attention to:
- Why I Do What I Do
A quick read about Hazel herself. (Read time: approx 5 min) - Home Baked Abstractions, Store Bought Implementations
A deep-dive about how to build abstractions. (Read time: approx 1 hr, post is ~14.5k words)
We’re excited to work with Hazel and build toward a better future for open source projects and their maintainers.
What will Hazel be working on with Nivenly?
As part of her fellowship, Hazel will focus on a few things:
- Creating a Project Pattern Engine
As a young Foundation, something that Nivenly does is use existing project and maintainer needs to create abstraction patterns for the larger organization. This is to provide foundational materials so that we can provide more and more support as we grow. - Extending Nivenly’s Network
As part of Nivenly becoming more active, Hazel and the board will be backfilling the board member roles due to Nóva’s passing, as well as finding other leaders and potential partners to collaborate with. The added support will allow Nivenly as an organization to better support members (of all member types) to build together. - Supporting the OSS Community
In all her works, Hazel will be supporting not only Nivenly’s OSS community, but also the general OSS community. The goal here is to steward positive feedback mechanisms that minimize frustration and help people be heard. In her words, “I want to build a world in which people build beautiful creations, see each other’s creations, and see each other deeply.”
What is a Project Pattern Engine?
As a young foundation, Pattern Engines are very important to us. A Pattern Engine is how we abstract individual projects to the scope of Nivenly as a organization for contributions, governance, and so forth. In Hazel’s case, she will be show-by-doing and building a project from scratch, to showcase contributions and participation.
As a reminder: you can contribute to Nivenly projects whether or not you are a member. You only need to be a Nivenly member if you want to participate in project governance.
What next?
We recommend following Hazel on Hachyderm and reading her blog to learn more about her and her projects. Hazel can be found online at:
- @hazelweakly
- @hazelweakly.me
- @hazelweakly
- @hazelweakly
- hazelweakly.me
- As well as @Hazel in Nivenly’s Discord
Our next blog post will be refocusing on Nivenly’s mission with a short explainer about membership and what it means to participate in governance. Deeper detail will also be being added to our documentation. To keep up with our updates, please follow Nivenly’s Hachyderm account. Nivenly can also be found at: