[wsfii-discuss] Plug: Open Source Lab Rackathon

Wed Aug 9 19:48:49 UTC 2006

hi all; this is basically a fundraising plug / get the word out;
if this is distasteful, i apologise and advise you to stop reading :)

http://osuosl.org/contribute/rackathon

The Open Source Lab based out of Oregon State University is a lovely
organisation; they run and support services for scads of worthy and
high profile open source software projects on a not-for-profit,
from-each-according-to-their-abilities basis. They are fundraising to
support expanding their capacity - staff and systems wise - to meet
the increasing level of demand for what they are doing. 20 dollars
gets you Your Name On A Rack; "For every additional $20 we will
increase the font size of your name by 1pt (up to 48pt.)"

http://osuosl.org/contribute/rackathon 

Why is this relevant? :) I guess i'm thinking in the background about
lab-in-academic-environment support for open source and open data;
these guys have found a good middle ground where they get some
corporate sponsorship / support which they can direct towards doing
pro bono work for people with solid projects. I find them interesting
because they build bridges between 'academia' and 'hacker' behaviours,
and so it has a different flavour from internal-to-academia efforts
like http://www.opensource.ac.uk/ OSUOSL saved drupal from an infrastructure 
disaster - the drupal community started fundraising 3K to buy a box to
put in their colo facilities - they raised 10K within 2 days - i thought
that was amazing. 

If i really wanted to ramble on joining more dots, I'd talk about how
'easy' it looks to generate a seedpile of support from many people -
something that neither http://pledgebank.com/ or http://fundable.com/
quite 'has right'... converting money into some other kind of
value-carrying-abstraction. When I was in Portland for OSCON (which is
where i met the OSUOSL lads) I kept being given tokens as spare change
after a money exchange - either wooden nickels - or quarter-dollar
coins which magically became tokens - 'this cup of chai entitles you
to 20 minutes on the token-driven internet machine'. While you're in a
physical space in which the token operates - it loses value once you
leave the beer festival or the food co-op or wherever - then
'forgeability' becomes less of a problem ... perhaps i should be
thinking this through *without* a hangover and trying it on the mrsdev
list rather than here :)

cheers,

jo