[TOS] Cultural Change Schedule

[Mel Chua]

On 02/10/2011 09:38 AM, tosmaillist.neophyte_rep at ordinaryamerican.net wrote:
> Just a note I should have added to other discussions earlier:
>
> As a retired worker bee at several large corporations, I continue to
> be amazed at the ambitiousness of your schedules.

Wow. Thanks for that insight - it's fascinating to see the timeline of 
that sort of process in other places.

I wonder if the FOSS change cycle can be seen as an accelerated version 
of this that can help prepare students for driving those bigger, longer 
change cycles in industry, the same way we assign 6-month 
start-to-finish software engineering projects to give students an 
overview of the lifecycle that takes years in industry.

I look at your email, Neophyte, and go "huh, different timeline... but 
similar sort of process and thinking to how I'd make a change in a FOSS 
community" - I (as a recent grad) could do this, I'd just need to know 
that I'm looking at a ~10-year rather than a ~2-year (2, 6-month cycles) 
time period in advance. (Red Hat is my first "real company"[0] - I was 
doing things in FOSS communities before that.) But I've seen and helped 
with and driven these *kinds* of change cycles before, so that sense of 
agency no longer seems unfamiliar to me.[1]

Or possibly more briefly stated: is FOSS participation a good way for 
people to learn how to hack the universe / change the world?

--Mel

[0] I used to be an engineer at One Laptop Per Child back when it was in 
Incredibly Chaotic Startup mode. When I started working in Fedora, with 
its 6-month release cycles and a feature freeze date 3-4 months in 
advance of the release, I went "whoa, so much advance *planning* and 
*foresight* and *organization*!" (So when I hear professors going "whoa, 
Fedora is so *spontaneous* and *opportunistic!*", I have to smile.)

[1] It used to. When I was 17, I was a do-what-you're-told student who, 
way deep down, believed that Disabled Minority Teenage Girls could be 
competent at skills they had been taught (a step up from many of my 
peers, I know) but ultimately couldn't move or shake anything - that the 
best I could hope for was to be a very good cog in a larger machine 
someone else was driving, that I had to ask permission from those who 
had power to Do Stuff, and that I myself didn't have that power. The 
next 5 years of my life... changed that completely, and swimming in the 
FOSS world was a nontrivial contributor to that shift.