What constitutes an "excellent open source history"? People that code often don't want to be bothered by organization and financial matters, and vice-versa, community work is still often disregarded as not truly open source work. Some people did sit down, did all the leg-work of getting funding for a study, did a study, published it (open source under CC-BY) - including a plan for the setup of the fund, cost analysis, how many people to employ and their pay (btw: roughly 10% of the budget, which seems reasonable at first glance), legal analysis of three funding models (1) and then someone with a random new internet account complains about their open source history (2) and their gender (3)
People with nice haircuts that produce nice looking documents and talk to the government for funding.
If the money funds technology that is still great!
But be very careful when a subculture becomes a platform for organizers who never did the actual work. Be it art or code or whatever.
The majority of people might have the best intentions.
The fear though is that we have here a nice breeding ground for sociopathic behavior in the open source space (for a narrow definition of sociopathic: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths).
The people behind this study are the open knowledge foundation germany - a foundation that exists since a decade, not just some random people that met and thought “oh cool, let’s rip off some government money.” The OKFN runs Jugend Hackt, the prototype fund and other projects. They’re doing actual work - the work that makes all the money come in that then gets distributed. The bookkeeping that’s required when you spend government money. You may not consider that “work”, but you’re wrong. I’d rather do five days of coding than one day of books.
> The bookkeeping that’s required when you spend government money.
Oh yeah. Acquiring government funding and the reporting for it is a big part of my day job. Coding still happens ... after midnight.
The funny thing is, I might even up as a beneficiary of this. And dump 50% of the money into technical work. The rest goes to the organizational overhead needed to get the funding in the first place. But the 50% technical work have to be the focus and acknowledged as the focus.
> The people behind this study are the open knowledge foundation germany - a foundation that exists since a decade, not just some random people that met and thought “oh cool, let’s rip off some government money.”
Looking at the teams-page of the OKF, that's a funny bunch. 90% did not work on open source prior to taking this gig (with just one or two shining counterexamples). And now they are doing it "for the love of it"?
It is okay to do open source as a normal dayjob. And teaching kids to code is important as well. I guess what pisses me off is the political class taking on roles of "thought leadership" in the "secret garden of the geeks" where entrance was once earned by hard, cold lines of code free of bugs.
> And dump 50% of the money into technical work. The rest goes to the organizational overhead needed to get the funding in the first place. But the 50% technical work have to be the focus and acknowledged as the focus.
You acknowledge that there's a lot of work involved in handling funding for an opens source project. And yet you seem to consider the that 50% of the work worthless, despite them enabling the 50% of the technical work. All my open source work is worthless in your eyes. I'll spend my christmas days fixing a mid five digit tax mistake that the technical people made on an open source project - because that work is boring and tech work is more important - and I get to ensure that the money doesn't go to the tax authorities. But my name doesn't appear in the commit log, so I'm not a contributor. I'm not even on the github org, nor visible in another place. In your eyes, that's worthless. In your eyes, I can't do it for the love of open source since I have no substantial code contributions in the past - and that's why no one takes those 50% off your hands, so you can focus 100% on the tech stuff.
Dude ... we basically have the same job.
I take the 50% off so other people do the technical work.
And without knowing specifics on what you do, if it is helping open source then I am grateful. In no way did I want to denigrate your work. And I understand where some frustration might come from if the effort is not properly acknowledged. Yet, there is nobility in knowing to have helped society in a quiet way.
Do you know the golden rule?
"The person with the gold makes the rules."
Things only become problematic when the organizational roles start to draw power from the golden rule and build a little political fiefdom to uphold their power according to their values and skills, say, lawyering. And given the different voices in this HN thread, I'm not the only one to have noticed such effects in some previously technical communities.
[sarcasm mode]
Let's see what happens once you become the person distributing the gold. Then it shouldn't be hard to extract some respect out of the grubby dirty hands of the code contributors.
Establishing a fund is not the same as regulating the beneficiary.
Compare for example with academia - universities in Europe are overwhelmingly government funded, yet they get a lot of freedom in what research they conduct.
The people listed in the study are all female and have also been involved in the application-oriented https://prototypefund.de .
The language used and the fact that the same persons are involved in two government funded funds strongly suggests that this is a diversity initiative in disguise.
The more I see of open source foundations and funds, the more I think that in many cases the prime beneficiaries are the organizers (though I don't have proof in this case and will not claim it).
> The language used and the fact that the same persons are involved in two government funded funds strongly suggests that this is a diversity initiative in disguise.
This initiative is form the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, a foundation that’s like a decade old. One of their projects is the prototype fund. Is it really surprising that the people involved in one initiative of the OKFN are involved in another of their initiatives, especially since it revolves broadly around the same topic - funding public interest software? Are you seriously suggesting that the OKFN is a front to distribute government money to a thinly veiled diversity initiative? Because the language used in your comment strongly suggest so. But I don’t have proof in this case, so I will not claim that this is what you’re doing.
I think the question here is about probabilities. What is the likelihood of particular gender ratios within particular fields?
If this were in the field of nursing which is dominated by women, I would be very surprised to see a group of (exclusively) men leading some advocacy/project.
Correct. The government has a spending target, let's say 56% of GDP (that is taxes, how much you can borrow from creditors, and how much money printing you can afford).
Then they divide that money in categories, and it turns out IT industrial policy got allocated that much money, which they divide into projects.
In this project, they build a comittee, which decides the best is to subsidise cool sounding initiatives by well connected, politically correct groups.
Top to bottom government spending that goes wasted in politically connected groups that give nothing back to society.
