New College, Oxford is of rather late foundation, hence the name. It was probably founded around the late 14th Century. It has, like other colleges, a large dining hall with big oak beams across the ceiling, yes? These might be two feet square, forty-five feet long.

Some five to ten years ago, I am told, some busy entomologist went up into the roof with a penknife and poked at the beams and found that they were filled with beetles. This was reported to the College Council, who met in some dismay, as where would they get beams of that caliber nowadays?

One of the Junior Fellows stuck his neck out and suggested that there might be on College lands some oak. These colleges are endowed with pieces of land scattered across the country. So they called in the College Forester, who of course had not been near the College itself for some years, and asked him about oaks.

And he pulled his forelock and said, “Well, sirs, we was wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.”

Upon further enquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetley, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for four hundred years. “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.”

A nice story. That’s the way to run a culture.

~Gregory Bateson

Like most great stories, this one is part truth and part fiction, and my favorite version (the one above) is from here.

My name is Kristen [redacted] from Memphis Tn, I have an iterative idea the Apple community could defiantly use. I dnt know how to contact someone official but I want to pitch my idea and the this could change the world of the GPS system ! Please contact me Kristen [email redacted] as soon as possible ….. serious enquiries only. Thank!

Sent from Garminfone by T-Mobile.

I’m guessing this is another equity-only gig.

• So crazy many indie game companies flourish here
• Huge names, too: WOTC, Nintendo, Privateer Press, Bungie are set up here
• Several larps were birthed here back in the 1980s!
• 1% of the year, my neighborhood is not much more than PAXville.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

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Abrupt Goodbye is a collaborative chatting game released by an indie game studio. The whole thing is browser based and all of the content is user generated. I think that it’s possibly a first foray into a entirely new type of game.

The premise is supplied: A blind man is waiting for a train, a woman approaches him and talks.

Abrupt Goodbye is cool for a number of reasons:

- It is infinitely replayable – each completed game extends the content of the game a little bit, so the next game is longer and more varied.

- It’s totally asynchronous, but puts two ‘sides’ against each other. Each side is several players working together without communicating.

- The system is set up to be self-improving – as you choose your conversational options, you vote for the most interesting ones. So there’s a constant positive reform going on there.

You can crowdsource communication the wrong way, (as with some blog comments), or you can do something really great with it, like Abrupt Goodbye. Go play, it rules.

Because code is replicable and useful, it helps a lot of people. Giving away closed source software would be one thing, but open source code is reusable by other projects, viewable by people learning how to code, and fundamentally supported by the community. Writing software is also potentially research: solving problems in new ways is one of the ways the state of software advances. There’s no limit to the number of people you’re helping: the developers of Apache webserver deserve thanks whenever a page on the internet is served. (To anyone who thinks OSS puts coders out of a job, think of all the jobs the Apache foundation has created.)

Because coding, project management, UI design, QA testing, and all the other skill that go into successful open source projects take years to learn, the volunteer hours put into those activities are a scarce and extremely valuable resource. Suppose your friend, a lawyer, was looking for a way to volunteer four hours a week. Your friend can’t decide whether it would be more helpful to bake rolls at a food kitchen or give pro bono legal advice to DV sufferers. Or maybe your teacher friend can’t decide whether to teach ESL or do laundry for a church. Sure, your friends might enjoy both gigs, and they’re all nice causes, but your friends have the opportunity to contribute skills which are much more scarce, and you’d probably recommend they do that.

That’s why if you have skills or money to contribute to an open source project, you should act without hesitation: it’s an unselfish endeavor that makes a big difference to a lot of people, and it’s a great way to volunteer. It helps a lot of people in a real way.

And it definitely, definitely counts as volunteering.

People who donate their time and effort to open source software projects don’t always look at it as volunteerism. It’s less institutional, it’s not usually through a church or school, and an open source developer is unlikely to be sent an appreciation card or invited to a brunch for their efforts. Because software lives behind the computer, it’s difficult to see how much work goes into it, and because it generally spreads on the internet it’s difficult to thank an open source developer in person.

Few open source projects interact in person with their users. This is a distinction AmeriCorps calls ‘indirect service’. It’s not seen as more noble per se, but it is considered important and some programs demand a certain amount of it. It really does seem like a purer form of volunteerism to interact directly with a population than to serve by handling paperwork or answering phones or doing data entry.

It’s definitely still volunteering.