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June 25, 2010
Open Source and Volunteer Organizations
I just got back from YAPC::NA 2010. As usual, the presentations were great and the people were better.
At last year's YAPC, I had the good fortune to attend a talk by Karen Pauley entitled Remote Controlled Volunteers. It's not the kind of talk I would normally look for, but I thought I would check it out anyway.
Boy, was I glad I did. Karen (currently The Perl Foundation president) has a lot of experience dealing with volunteers. Her observations of the connections between the open source community and difference kinds of volunteer organizations were right on target. Since my wife does a lot of work with volunteer organizations, I wanted to show her Karen's slides. I was never able to find them.
When I got a chance to talk to Karen at this year's YAPC::NA, I told her (again) how much I had enjoyed the previous talk and how disappointed I was that I had never been able to show it to others. Fortunately, she had polished the talk some more and presented it again. The paper Understanding Volunteers is the essence of the talk I was looking for, and she gave me the link.
If you ever have a need to understand what drives a particular open source or volunteer group, this paper is a real help. Open source projects are as much (or more) about the people as about the technologies. Many of us technologists forget that. Karen obviously doesn't.