I collected CDs in the 2000s and academic papers in the 2010s. In the mid-2010s, when I carried over my curation habit to open-source projects, I stumbled upon these 🕶️awesome lists while digging through GitHub repositories.

I loved the idea of using the keyword “awesome” to find amazing projects/tools. For example, awesome-shell, awesome-go, and awesome-robotics-libraries are my classic favorites. Similar to a playlist of survey papers, I enjoyed the feeling of getting to know a creator’s taste through exploring their awesome lists. So, I created a set of awesome lists to share my own positionings, such as:

• awesome-robotics-projects - A list of open-source, affordable, less-known, or visionary robotics projects.
• awesome-hri-papers-for-industry - HRI Papers for Industry
• awesome-robotics-companies

Then, I thought it might be beneficial to share my robotics learning materials:

• awesome-robotics-system-design - Stuff I read to learn about robotics system design
• awesome-robotics-problems - Awesome Robotics Problems … and Algorithms

Sharing learning materials motivated me to convert my research notes into awesome lists:

• awesome-end-user-programming - A list of my favorite end-user programming, crowdsourcing, programming languauges links
• awesome-hri-datasets - A curated list of publically available human-robot interaction datasets
• hri-literature-spreadsheets
• awesome-behavioral-change
• awesome-tech-education

Today, I come across numerous awesome lists, and I don’t believe that blindly creating a new awesome list is particularly helpful for the community. However, I still believe curation is a powerful way to share tastes, spark discussions, and find inspiration. I’d like to observe (or steer?!) how such activities evolve over time within the open-source community, whether they remain within the “awesome” framework or not.