On 10/02/16 22:33, Max Mehl wrote:
Hi Daniel,
# Daniel Pocock [10.02.2016 @ 21:12]:
14 February is typically a day when people are thinking about their spouse/family, depending upon where they are in life. I've noticed that when people retire from some free software communities or stop maintaining projects, they often cite "family reasons".
What does this mean in practice though?
It would be interesting to look at the relationship between free software, volunteering and the family. E.g. how does it compare to other forms of volunteering that impact family life?
Thanks for your input, Daniel. Sounds interesting, and it seems reasonable to have look into that.
Maybe FSFE could survey this issue and publicize some of the solutions on ILoveFS day 2017 (if this year is too soon)?
For this year this is far too short notice indeed. And I wouldn't even say that we should make this an ILoveFS only issue but build it on a broaded foundation.
E.g. at DebConf this year there were many families who attended. FOSDEM does a city-tour for spouses. Free software developers often don't receive cash for some of the voluntary things they do, but there may be other ways their work could be more formally recognized, allowing them to show some tangible benefit to family members.
As you noted, the first step has to be some kind of hard facts collection. Do you have some rough ideas how to do that? Ask a small peer group for their experiences in detail, or make a broader survey?
There seem to be a number of universities that have free software (or dare I say it, "open source") research groups looking at various metrics from the free software world. Maybe reaching out to some of them and suggest it is a worthwhile thing to study, see if any have an interest?
Other researchers (e.g. in social sciences, anthropology) may also be interested http://lwn.net/Articles/425897/
And do you, or anyone else, have other ideas how we could tackle this issue? What would FSFE be able to achieve? How could a solution for you personally look like?
FSF is updating their high-priority project list. I wrote a reply suggesting that the first group of things to address should be those products that make the home environment run smoothly[1]. Maybe that idea should be extended to include wider family. Many projects in this space seem to be constantly changing, that only causes irritation for people trying to share these solutions with other members of their home.
Another thing that comes to mind is further education or certifications. It is a lot easier for people to explain to their spouse that they have a goal, such as earning a masters degree or postgraduate diploma and they are doing a bit of free software work in their spare time as part of achieving that goal. This could be much easier to explain if the spouse has done something similar. Maybe it would be possible to build a public listing of courses or research opportunities that involve active free software participation in some way. People tend to be most successful in education when doing something they are intrinsically interested in. As an example, if they are already volunteering their time to work on something such as software packaging tools, that would be a strong hint that this is the area of computing that interests them most and they would be able to complete a postgraduate diploma in software engineering process and distribution practices, if they only knew where such opportunities existed.
Going back to the research idea, research could also involve a comparison against other hobbies, communities and volunteering. This might make it easier for us to identify ideas that could be extrapolated from other volunteer-based communities. For example, how do amateur sporting clubs or charities involve spouses or families of the people who participate?
Regards,
Daniel
1. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreplanet-discuss/2016-02/msg00075.html