Sumana Harihareswara

Sumana Harihareswara is an open-source software contributor (GitHub) and project manager with over a decade of experience in the software industry. Her past leadership in nonprofit, academia, industry, and volunteer organizations earned her an Open Source Citizen Award in 2011 and the Google Open Source Peer Bonus in 2018. She lives in New York City and founded Changeset in 2015.

Harihareswara frequently speaks and writes about open source and management; she was keynote speaker at Open Source Bridge in 2012, code4lib in 2014, LibrePlanet in 2017, and SeaGL in 2022.

Prior to founding Changeset, Harihareswara was Senior Technical Writer and Engineering Community Manager at the Wikimedia Foundation. She has also managed projects at Collabora, GNOME, QuestionCopyright.org,Fog Creek Software (now Glitch), Behavior, and Salon.com. Harihareswara served on the board of directors of the Ada Initiative and the Global BIPOC advisory board for MetaFilter, and was a Visiting Scholar at the Secure Systems Lab at New York University. She currently serves as chair of the Otherwise Award Motherboard.

She holds an MS in Technology Management from Columbia University and a BA in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. She was a member of the Python Packaging Authority and is a member of the Python Software Foundation's Packaging Working Group and Project Funding Working Group, and is a certified Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry instructor. She participated in the Recurse Center in 2013 and 2014.