Re: [Linux-aus] Proposal: LA cooperation with Community Code

[Mary Gardiner <mary-la@puzzling.org>]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2005, Andrew Cowie wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-11-03 at 22:02 +1100, Mary Gardiner wrote:
> > Is there any community feedback on this proposal 
> 
> [This is not meant to be abrupt, just concise]:
> 
> Is this about:
>         
>         "helping unemployed people on the dole learn to become
>         programmers so that they can be developers of open source
>         software"
>         
> or
> 
>         "helping unemployed open source hackers get money from the dole"

First of all, it's not restricted to programming. If we have
documentation mentors, or bug triage mentors, then we can work with
participants without requiring them to code. (It's not restricted to
unemployed people on Newstart either, but since Newstart is the reason
we need formal insurance arrangements I'll leave that alone from now
on.)

We've had people approach us from both camps: people already in FOSS who
want to count their work towards their mutual obligation, and people who
are unemployed who would be interested in work on FOSS if it counted
towards their mutual obligation.

In my opinion, we're more likely to do extensive work with the second
type, as the first will require less mentoring and are likely to use the
CC infrastructure just to get the formalities out of the way.

People in the second camp have generally already tried to explore the
"contributing to a community organisation" mutual obligation option, and
have had difficulty finding an appropriate organisation willing to do
the paperwork for them. Most have at least had some exposure to FOSS
though.

-Mary