looking for collaborators for free s/w-based research for high school kids
Dear GNU folk, Last year I ran an experiment in paying students to work with research mentors on doing computational research deeply rooted in free software. A description of the Institute for Computing in Research is at: https://computinginresearch.org/ (note that it has a top level tab called "Software Freedom" :-) ) Last summer we raised funds, hired interns, and had them spend the summer using a pure free s/w environment to do research. The result was fantastic, so this year we significantly increased our scope (more interns, longer period) and adapted to the pandemic (thanks to Jitsi), and have had another wonderful summer. We are based in Santa Fe, NM, USA, and our mentors come from nearby research places like Los Alamos and the Santa Fe Institute, as well as local data science and IT companies. We would like to look at expanding into other cities, and we have a very careful blueprint of how to carry it out. We need an enthusiastic researcher or technologist who wants to do outreach with high school students and might be interested in this. Please contact me and we can get together to discuss how to make something like this happen.
does anyone here work with VR (virtual reality) ?
Dear gnu folk, I'd like to find someone who works with virtual reality. Ideally with a free software slant, but anything helps. The idea is a fund-raising opportinity for a free software endeavor. Let me know if you can think of anyone.
one-paragraph comments on s/w freedom being more important than tech niftiness
Dear GNU folk, Long ago I had a conversation with a fellow long-time GNU developer. We were talking about how we had come upon free software in the 1980s and early 1990s. We were discussing how sometimes we had felt exhilerated by, for example, the coming of gcc, or gcc-2, which were so technically excellent. And then we both commented that we had eventually reached the conclusion that the usefulness of gcc, or the linux kernel, or other great products, had come mostly because of the freedom that comes with s/w, rather than the fact that at the moment it is the coolest s/w around. Years latere we then noticed that, for example, gcc had played leapfrog with various proprietary compilers, passing in and out of the top performance slot (that's not true anymore). But sticking with depending on tools that offer freedom turns out to be both ethical and deeply strategic in the long run. I wonder if anyone here would care to send me examples of how they came to feel this viscerally, and what examples drove home for them that freedom is what gives you a deeper convenience than the occasional technical peak. If I get responses I will summarize it in a brief article and post it back here.
praising our moderators
Mike> [...] One again, I ask that people please assume that Mike> moderators are acting in good faith. I would like to say that Mike and others who have moderated have done a very generous and good job. Mike, I hope that you realize that most people feel that way (I'm a physicist, so I'll suggest that you model with ratios of "silent appreciateurs as a fraction of total" and so forth... there might even be universal dynamical systems behavior hiding here.) I think some appreciate your work even when they complain in frustration. Your analysis of what that strangely hostile person did also seems correct, and it's quite possible that removing him from the list would not solve the problem of his hangouts thing. That would mean we would have to wait for it to fade, as it already has at times. I'm also guessing that people on the list are reading the moderators' language vis-a-vis the current hot issues and making some bayesian guess which side they might fall on. Those that I think I've noticed are moderators seem to always behave well in their own postings, even if I might disagree with them on an issue or two (for example I lean toward enforcible codes of conduct). Folksinger Arlo Guthrie captured well the notion decades passing after a crisis in his introduction to "When a Soldier Makes it Home". It should be possible to watch this without proprietary s/w on your own computer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDAl7lGGtSo
feeling intimidated for endorsing the GNU social contract
Dear GNU maintainers, I wrote to endorse the GNU social contract and received an email which made me feel insulted and intimidated (this one said "F*** you", so not much risk of misinterpreting the language). I also got a sequence of replied from people telling me I was wrong to do so. These seem to be canned replies that are sent to other people who endorse it. They did not make me feel as intimidated, but it still seems like a strange campaign. I wrote the following to the list last week but it got rejected by moderation for being "off topic". Since this list seems to have a lot of traffic which is a soul-search on how we should interact, I think it must have been rejected by mistake by an overworked moderator, which is understandable. Here it is with my suggestion for the moderators. I also now realize that part of the response had to do with the bizarre "hangout" mailing list that was created to get some postings to many people on this list without going through this list. = = = A while ago there was a discussion of moderation on this mailing list, but I lost track of what was happening. A person responded to my endorsement of the social contract (which I had misspelled as social construct - ooops). This person wrote back to me and the list saying: > F*** you and your illconceived campaign to destroy GNU > And f*** that mailing list run by a theif and a bully [they had the full swear word in there; I replaced part of it with *s so that we don't vent it too much and end up in search results for hostility] I don't see clear information about moderation, and don't know right now how to write to the moderators directly (the page https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss doesn't give moderator addresses). I feel that this mailing list has people who get really hostile and insult people like me who have dedicated their lives to being GNU contributors (in my case since 1985). I will not get turned off of the good work for GNU by this specific insult targeted at me, but I can see that in the future I might get dispirited, and I know new people who have decided to not get in to the internals like this. I would like to remind everyone that Richard has said quite clearly that everyone who contributes to GNU should be treated as acting in good faith. I would suggest that the moderators of this list set something up to avoid the trolling. Even if they block such a response to the whole list, it still goes directly to the person posting. Some weird other addresses were also added. I won't post the person's name here, but moderators: if you want I can share the details with you directly. Email me directly if you would like to work on this and need my help. I would like to point out something rather nice that happened on the gnu-community-private list (I'm just quoting a snippet, and I replaced the person's name since that is a private list). Clearly this poster had a disagreement with others and questioned their good faith, but then realized that s/he should not have, and wrote a very nice email. The snippet: aPoster> It was wrong for me to ask people to leave this community. I aPoster> apologize, and take back my above suggestion. (my reply below: ) aPoster, it is nice to see that you have the character to post this kind of correction. I hope that when people back off from a hurried possibly hostile statement (although this one was much milder than a lot of what we see on this list) they will always know that the silent majority praises it. The first thing I did when I saw aPoster's adjustment was to go and re-read all of their previous emails to make sure that I had paid attention to their points.
gnu social construct 1.0 endorsement
I am the founder and co-maintainer of the GNU Scientific Library, and of Dominion, and I am GNU contributor since 1985. I endorse version 1.0 of the GNU Social Contract, available at <https://wiki.gnu.tools/gnu:social-contract>. Mark Galassi
