On Fri 06 Mar, Matt Davis wrote: > I've been advocating off-list that we do charge corporations more for > workshops than we charge universities, and I think this is another good > reason to do that. (While still asking our instructors to be > volunteers--the additional money would all go to SWC.)
I disagree with this model. As Ruth said, volunteering has negative effects. Volunteering is bad, for the same reason that unpaid internships are bad: access is limited to those who can afford the time to participate. Volunteering is socially exlusive. Overall I think this is ok, whilst we are empowering people and bootstrapping our community. However, there is a line where we have to consider the exlusive nature of the volunteering. This line is pretty fuzzy, but in my mind Monsanto is far on the other side of it. This is a situation in which it is insufficient to let instructors 'vote with their feet'. The organisation has to take a stance (and doing nothing is a stance). If this means that providing workshops to big corps is untenable then so be it. Universities already exploit their grad students. I don't want SWC to become the vehicle by which big corporations can exploit them as well. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
