Thanks for this excellent update!
There's one more thing that irks me here:
On 23/07/2014 13:36, [email protected] wrote:
<snips>
Being a volunteer at Mozilla means you freely donate your time, ideas,
heartbeats, etc. to help us accomplish our mission.
> You agree that you are here because you are passionate about the Web
and have no expectation of compensation.
There are two things which bother me about this sentence.
1) agreeing that you're passionate seems odd. Maybe just, "You are here
because you are passionate... and you agree that you have..." ?
2) for most of the 8+ years that I was involved as a volunteer (now
being paid staff and coming up on my 10th moziversary), I actually had
ample compensation. Some examples:
* The feeling of being involved with something bigger than just you, for
the Greater Good. Without trying to be soppy about it, that was and is a
big deal, and probably still is for lots of other people, too. There's
ample research that people being valued is significant in terms of
life/job/... satisfaction, and so I would consider it "compensation",
too. More concrete things:
* Lots of free-as-in-money practical engineering experience
* Lots of interaction with really really smart people
* Invitations to conferences, mozcamps and so on, in some cases with the
possibility of being reimbursed for expenses (for someone who's a
student, a free-as-in-money trip like this is significant, even if it
might pale in comparison to silicon valley salaries)
* resume-worthy things-to-have done. I got my first "proper" engineering
job interview essentially without the company having seen my CV, because
the lead dev heard that I'd contributed stuff to Firefox. That alone was
a big enough thing for them to at least want to talk.
While I understand that if you're new to the project and file one bug,
or write a single blog comment on hacks.m.o, you shouldn't be expecting
moco to hire you the next day, or for us to send you a 10,000$ check, it
seems equally wrong to say that it isn't right for volunteers to
expect/desire/appreciate a "thank you" of some kind after years of
giving their time, ideas, ...
I expect that what we're really trying to get at in the agreement is
"you don't get to sue us for financial compensation for putting in
time", and that makes perfect sense, but I wonder if we can be still
better about how we phrase this.
~ Gijs
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